Now I've got something to say

I haven’t written a post in months because I haven’t had much to say. That changed last week. Suddenly I got my voice back.



I’ve been playing around with an idea I call “direct journalism.” Put simply, it’s the idea of journalists connecting directly with their audiences by giving mini-lectures on the topics they research.

This came about through the difficulty I’ve encountered trying to sell my feature stories to newspapers and magazines in the current journalism market. Few publications have budgets for freelancers. Great stories are going untold.

The saying “necessity is the mother of invention” should be modified to “desperation is the mother of invention.” I felt a driving urge to deliver my story to an audience. Standing up and telling a room full of people seemed the only avenue to do so (aside from giving the story away for free on a blog – something I’m not willing to do. I spent a lot of time and money researching my information, and I’m yet to see an internet-based model that will allow me to recoup the required amount – but that’s another story).

Last week I organized the first Direct Journalism Talk at Betahaus in Kreuzberg, Berlin. I asked photographer Marco Baringer, a recent acquaintance, to join me. He spoke about his recent visit to Malawi to document the lives of school students there, showing a slideshow of his beautiful pictures. Then I got up and explained my story, which delves into the shadowy history of the font Times New Roman. It was a very old-fashioned town hall-style presentation, and we got a very positive response from everyone who attended.

I’ll probably organize more such talks in the future, and see if I can somehow bring the whole concept to the web.

Arvo Pärt in concert

I had tried to stir up excitement amongst my Berlin circle about the Arvo Pärt concert at the Berliner Philharmonie, but perhaps I hadn’t tried hard enough. In the end only two people joined me – Nate and Kelly, two young installation artists from the west coast of America.

“What Radiohead does for rock music, Pärt does for classical,” I enthused over and over (although I had used the same line to describe Johann Johannsson, so perhaps it had lost its effect). All we listen to in this town is dirty squelchy electro-techno. Last week I had treated my body to the softening effect of a sauna, and I felt it was time to give my ears a similar treatment.

The ticket price might have put some people off – 22 euros. But I figured that money is just time I haven’t worked yet, so I put into practice my ‘money is illusory’ mantra, and it worked. While waiting in line at the box office, a gentleman came up and gave me a free ticket. “My friend is sick tonight,” he explained, refusing any payment. The three of us split the cost of the other two seats, so it cost us just teens of euros to see a priceless concert. “In L.A, this kind of thing would be unaffordable,” Nate told me.

I had anticipated that the whole experience would be like a psychedelic trip. The trip began as we entered the concert hall. The Berliner Philharmonie, designed by Hans Scharoum in the 1960s, is a vortex of stairs and levels. I must have quick-stepped up and down every stairway and platform as I raced to find my seat before the lights dimmed. The construction is the physical realization of MC Escher’s design ‘Relativity’ (there I go recycling lines again – I used that description once in a story about the Linnahall in Tallinn, but here it’s even more appropriate). Once seated, I had a short conversation with the folk who had given me the ticket. The kind lady next to me let me share her program and also slipped me some peppermints. “That’s the composer sitting over there,” she pointed out, and there he was, Arvo Pärt in the sixth row in a concert tuxedo, looking like a revolutionary leader with his wiry grey beard. Out of costume, he could pass as a village fisherman. I kept glancing at him throughout the concert. He sat with his hand resting at the side of his face, his fingers quivering as the orchestra cried and roared.

The mood became electric as the performers filed in – first the Ensemble Resonanz, then the Rias Kammerchor – and suddenly I became extremely nervous that I would disrupt the concert with some out-of-turn behaviour or noise, an errant clap. I was in a foreign environment, and I did not know the rules of conduct.

The conductor strode to his podium, long grey hair and a sharp etched face. Tõnu Kaljuste, another Estonian, an expert at Pärt compositions. I watched as he lifted his fingers and called the concert to order. It was almost as if he plucked the very notes from the score and held them mid-air like a spiderweb. The tangible energy of the whole glorious room was in his fingers, and he grabbed it and whipped it into a tornado of sound. I felt as if I were floating on a current of emotion, swooping and diving, thoughts and colours exploding around me. Kaljuste the conductor, looking like a Lord of the Rings wizard, more Sauruman than Gandalf. He led the orchestra with electricity coming from his fingers. He drew the breath from our lungs with the pull of his hands. In the split second silence before the crescendo, he took in a sharp suck of air, an audible inhalation that invited the players to explode in sound.

The first two pieces, ‘Orient and Occident’ and ‘Berliner Messe,’ were dark and surreal. The refrains collapsed and cascaded on each other. I tried to hear something of Estonia in the sound, and perhaps I could discern the dark misty marshlands and the everlasting twilight of midsummer.

The applause was cacophonic, especially when old Pärt descended to the stage. How often does anyone get to experience a night like this – the composer of modern masterpieces in the hall to hear his music and take a bow?

In the pause we joined the crush at the bar, chattering madly about our experiences. Nate and Kelly are no strangers to modern classical. Kelly actually studied piano and music theory, and she rattled off a string of recommendations. “George Crumb wrote a whole series of pieces based on astrology,” she said, “He also wrote a set based on dogs. At the end of the recording, some woman yells out `Fido!´”

As we returned from the intermission, I overheard two fellows speaking Estonian, and I couldn’t help myself. Perhaps it was a subconscious reason I went there, to get the opportunity to show off my partial understanding of an obscure language. “Kas teie olete Eestlased?” I asked, and they confirmed it. “See on vaga hea muusik,” I said, and they agreed.

As we reached the doors of the concert hall, a surly usher informed us that we were too late. The performance had resumed. The seating arrangement is so intimate that late arrivals cannot be permitted. I thought it an appropriate moment to show off my Estonian swearing proficiency in front of these chaps. “Kurat!” I said sharply. Rather than impressed, the two Eesti men looked shocked and offended. I suddenly realized that swearing is a very uncultured thing to do in a concert house, no matter what language you do it in. They kept their distance after that.

Thankfully we were able to steal back to our seats during a lull in the music. The orchestra and choir had taken up a rousing score by Erkki-Sven Tüür, another Estonian composer (it seems to be a requirement for Estonian composers to have umlauts in their name). Tüür is younger and more bombastic than Pärt. His scores ‘Action Passion Illusion’ and ‘Requiem’ could be soundtracks to psychological horror films or epic screenplays of clashing armies and colliding galaxies.

The highlight was the concert pianist, a bespectacled hunchback who stood over the opened lid of the grand piano and pummelled the strings with mallets, brushes, picks, and his bare hands. He looked like a mad scientist bent over his machines. Kelly tells me this abstract treatment of a piano is typical of 20th century classical.

I sat mesmerized for several minutes at the conclusion of the concert, and was one of the last to leave that beautiful multi-layered concert hall.

Later, on the walk back to the bus stop, we were treated to a spectacular light show on the inner-roof of the Neue Nationalgalerie, where tickerboard artist Jenny Holzer has installed a constellation of moving words and letters. We looked around for a spätkauf at which to buy a cheap beer so we could sit and enjoy the wet-but-warm evening air, but with no luck. “I don’t think we’re going to find cheap beer here. We’re in fancyland now,” I said as we looked around at the streetscape and skyline, Potsdamer Platz shining brightly to the east, and behind us the gold-layered confusion of the Berliner Philharmonie.

Impersonating the Impersonators

A few weeks ago my brother Josh and I organized an event here in Berlin. We called it 'The Museum Of Capitalism - Reactions to the Crash'. We invited people to fill a gallery space with art about economics. It was also a launch party for The Yes Men, political satirists who impersonate corporate spokesmen.

Last weekend (Sun Feb 15) The Yes Men won a major prize at the Berlinale Film Festival. Unfortunately The Yes Men weren't in town to accept the award. Instead, they asked me and two other friends to go along and accept the trophy - not just in their place, but actually pretending to be them. It's only fair, after all, the Yes Men pretend to be other people all the time. Here's what went down:

Facewhat?

Decay - Stories from a nation in decline

In December 2008, I travelled to the United States to conduct interviews for freelance feature stories.
The trip was an unexpected return to a country I had no desire to revisit. Yet despite my preconceived ideas about America, I met many people along the way who are working to reshape their country.
Among them, dumpster diving hipsters in Boston, roadkill collecting hobos in Asheville, and entrepreneurial young artists in New York.
I have filed a series of stories about my experiences on a new blog. It's called 'Decay', and you can find it by clicking here.

The opera ghost

I’m currently staying in Estonia - the building, not just the country. My current address is the Estonian National Opera House, a grand building which is officially called “Estonia”. The top floor of this beautiful theater is used as a hotel for visiting performers*. My fellow guests include a choreographer from Brazil and two Russian ballet dancers. At night I walk around the empty corridors of the opera house, exploring passageways above and under the stage. Most rooms are equipped with a piano, and when I think no-one is around I sit down and practice my jaunty honky-tonk tunes (though once after belting out an entire set, I emerged to find a cleaning lady on a cigarette break listening in).
During the day the building is pulsing with theatrical life. I pass fat baritones and lithe ballet dancers in the stairways. In the cafeteria today I sat at a table next to the opera company’s prima donna, who sung lines from Tosca while eating her lunch. My accommodation here is the result of my current occupation – professional aerial acrobat (I am as surprised as anyone by this turn of events). I was invited to perform a tissu routine in a production by the Estonian National Opera Company. The opera is called Armastuse Valem (The Formula of Love), a tragic romance set to a beautiful modern classical score and sung in Estonian. My part is frightfully important. At the end of the opera, the two central characters die a Romeo and Juliet-style tragedy. Their souls ascend to heaven. I am one of these souls, ascending on my tissu. Me and my tissu partner perform a three minute routine that involves a few spectacular falls and lots of artistic poses, then we tumble to the floor, thus bringing the opera to an end. We are the final figures seen on stage – if we mess up, nobody claps.
Our first rehearsal, I was certain, would also be our last. We were clumsy, all hands-and-feet, legs bent and toes unpointed. We raced to catch the musical cues, failed to grab hands at the apex of the piece, and I burnt a hole in my costume – the friction between the lycra and my tissu as I made the final rapid descent simply disintegrated a panel of fabric. Our act looked just like that costume – full of holes. The ruse is over, I thought. Finally I have been exposed as the fraud I am. Circus performer? This whole aerial acrobatic charade was just supposed to be a bit of fun, yet another of my purposefully obscure pursuits.
Yet the opera people didn’t seem to notice our shortcomings. That first rehearsal took place on stage in the opera house as the choir company waited in the wings. By the time we hit the floor, they had broken out in applause. Here I realized the obscurity of tissu in Estonia has two benefits: I’m the only man practicing this activity – when the director put out a call for an aerial acrobat, I was the sole candidate; and since most folk haven’t seen tissu before, my faults, those rough edges, go mostly unnoticed. In this performance, I also benefit from the gracefulness of Eylica, my tissu partner, who has enough artistic beauty to compensate for my crude muscular style.
Thursday, our first performance. We start in position half way up the tissu, hidden behind a giant screen. As the leading man sings his denouement, the screen lifts up to reveal me dangling like a string puppet, head bowed as if dead. Against the black backdrop, our black tissues are almost invisible. Our costumes are starting white, and from the stalls it appears as if we are flying. As the spotlight hits me, I come alive, gazing around and moving my hands and feet. I represent the soul of the main character, and on the tissu next to me is Eylica, representing his lover. As I see Eylica emerge from the cocoon of her tissu, I tumble out in a backwards star fall, then we simultaneously rotate our legs into a side hang that we call a “nine”, for reasons long forgotten. We catch hands and push away in a gentle spin. Still twirling, I move into a crucifix position, held only by a basic foot hold the pressure of my neck against the tissu. It’s called a neck lock, but in reality there is no lock. Should my head slip slightly, I would plunge six meters to the stage (and even our crash mats would do little to ease the damage). With my hands outstretched, I look, and I am, ready for death.

From there we swing up into the starting position for the big windmill fall – the fantastic spinning fall that always elicits a gasp from the audience. We wrap our legs and waists, then pause with limps outstretched waiting for the orchestra to reach a crescendo, then we tumble down. At the bottom we hang limp as the stage hands silently hoist our tissues higher. To the audience it appears as if we are magically floating up. Once back at a height of around five meters we wrap for the final fall, my favourite, a straight plunge to the ground stopped only by a tight handhold. It looks as if I am simply dropping from the sky. And that is the end of the opera. The stage lights come up and we take our bows – and only then do we see the audience and the splendour of the old opera house rising three balconies to a chandelier. We are in the front line with the principal cast and must take several bows before the curtains fall. I’m certain we spend more time on stage bowing than we do on the tissu performing. The curtains close, and all the cast congratulate each other. Eylica and I discuss our performance. My fraud remains undiscovered.

Saturday night, the cast party. Champagne and vodka are flowing. Everyone is well lubricated when the choir director takes a seat behind the grand piano and strikes up a tune. A sing-along caries on for the next three hours – the most incredible sing-along imaginable, as the opera company automatically breaks into three- and four-part harmonies. The sound of their combined voices is thunderous in the small backstage room. The ballet dancers start rollicking around the floor. One young dancer takes the head choreographer for a spin. “This counts as an audition for my next part,” I hear him tell her as they twirl past. Later, as I wander off through the backstage halls, I come across an older man and woman from the choir. The woman, slightly older and clearly drunk, has the man by the lapels and is holding him fiercely. “No!” I hear him protest, “I have a wife!” I walk past with a smirk on my face. Once again I am reminded of the strange directions my life has turned, and of the interesting things I have borne witness to.

*By the way, guest apartments at the opera house can be rented out by anyone when they're not being used by visiting cast members. It certainly beats staying in a normal hotel. Get in touch with the building administrator via the Estonian National Opera company website.

The Sexy Way Of Princess

What is The Sexy Way Of Princess? Who is this Princess, and what is her Sexy Way? These questions have been heavy on my mind ever since I moved to my new WG on Karl-Marx-Str. The shop across the road from our apartment has blessed itself with this curious name, and its massive fluorescent yellow sign shines into our living room at all hours, forcing me and my four mitbewohnerin to contemplate the lustful mannerisms of a female member of an unnamed royal family.
Tomorrow night you are all invited to come and gaze upon this mysteriously worded sign from the balcony of our WG. We are having a WG party here in Neukölln, but be warned, we are located deep south in 'real' Neukölln, not the trendy northern 'almost Kreuzberg' Diet Neukölln. Be prepared for lots of tacky signage, internet cafes, bakeries, mobile phone shops and men wearing grey hooded sweatshirts under black leather jackets.
The party is to celebrate the arrival of our new sofa and to help decorate our living room. Please bring something interesting for us to put up on the wall. And some drinks for yourself.
Please note this is a YOUTUBE FREE party. There will be no Youtubing allowed under any circumstances.

WHAT: Joel's 'Sexy Way Of Princess' house party.
WHERE: Karl-Marx-Str, Neukölln.
DIRECTIONS: We are about 50 meters south of the Karl-Marx-Str U-bahn stop on the U7 line.
WHEN: Tomorrow, Saturday Nov 8, after 21.00. BRING: Some drinks for yourself, some friends, and something interesting to help us decorate our living room.

End of the Easyjet generation

This week I travelled from Berlin to Tallinn with Easyjet - the last time I will ever use that route. It's not that Easyjet's service is appalling, but rather, the airline has decided to axe the Berlin-Tallinn connection. No other airline offers a direct connection between these two cities. For me to shuttle between my two home towns will now require a flight to Riga then a five hour bus ride. Tallinn feels as if it has been cast off the edge of the world.
Tallinn isn't the only city to be ostracized by the airline. A quick scan of online news reports reveals that Easyjet has quietly canned dozens of connections, a sign that our era of cheap travel is coming to an end.
Is this a bad thing? For me, yes. I can no longer juggle my life between Berlin and Estonia. I'll have to restrict myself to one or two trips yearly. For Tallinn, it means a vital artistic artery has been severed - many musicians, event organizers, DJs and creative people used this route; it helped keep culture in Tallinn cooking. No doubt the city will feel artistically colder this winter.
But if I step back a bit, I have to admit that end of the Easyjet generation is necessary. Cheap airlines are responsible for blanching the European cultural landscape with a garishly British hue - most cities in Eastern Europe look frighteningly alike, thanks to the tourist onslaught caused by budget travel. Those hordes of drunk British bachelors have trampled over every old town they have come across, frightening the locals off tourism altogether. Environmentally, we have blasted ourselves carbon craters, not just footprints, by jetting across Europe without a thought.
Hopefully the decline of cheap travel will mean a return to local flavour. It will put some spice back into travel and make remote cities even more enticing.
I say this all theoretically. If someone were to re-open the Tallinn-Berlin connection, I'd be the first on board. Someone? Please? I have to get home somehow... where ever home is these days.

Queueing at the banks

I just went to to the bank to withdraw all my money to help worsen the economic crisis, in the hope of collapsing our greedy capitalist economy completely in order to bring about the people's glorious revolution.
Unfortunately my hopes have been dashed on three fronts: I don't have any money to withdraw; the people seem unaware that the hour to rise is nigh; and any replacement economic system will undoubtedly be more unjust to the average man than the current regime.

Welcome to the New.S.S.R

From B EAST magazine

When it comes to product homogenization, the West is proving that an open market is just as likely to standardize our buying options as a closed market, writes B EAST editor Joel Alas.

“In Soviet times, everybody’s apartment looked the same,” my Eastern friends would tell me, often and ruefully. “There were four kinds of wallpaper to chose from. Everyone had the same couch, the same tea set, the same lamps.”

These comments sprang to mind when, while inspecting rooms to rent in Berlin, I began to experience a spot of déjà vu. Why did every other bedroom come furnished with the same bed, the same shelves and drawers, and the same paper-and-wireframe lamp? Why were the kitchen utensils in every apartment identical?

Turn over a mug or spoon in any modern Western kitchen to discover why. There, imprinted on the bottom, you’re likely to see a manufacturer’s stamp that has become as ubiquitous as the CCCP product mark (see image left) was during the Soviet era: Ikea.

The proliferation of cheap Swedish furniture illustrates how, despite the promises of free market diversity, capitalism is just as likely to reduce our buying options as Communism was. And identical product stamps on household items are just the beginning of the many parallels between old East and new West. In many spheres – media, industry, politics, architecture – the similarities between then and now force us to question which side truly won the Cold War.

Bland brands

Consider for a minute not just the Ikea kitchen equipment, but the food being eaten from it. The groceries we buy and the stores we buy them from increasingly resemble a single-source economy. A large proportion of supermarket items are produced by a small number of monolithic manufacturers. No matter where you buy your shampoo, toothpaste, washing liquid or cleaning products, they are likely to have originated in a factory owned by Unilever, Colgate Palmolive or Procter & Gamble. Nestle is more than just a cereal and chocolate company – it is the world’s largest food producer, making everything from dog food to cosmetics. The extent to which these companies dominate our kitchen pantries is disguised by packaging, branding and faux-variety. But imagine a supermarket where all items were branded with a single emblem representing the parent company. It might start to resemble the monotone aisles of an old Soviet supply store.

Market concentration goes a step further when you consider where the majority of Westerns obtain their goods. One of every three British retail pounds is spent in a Tesco store, while in America one in five consumer dollars goes through Walmart’s cash registers. European chains hold a similar fix on their local markets. When it comes to commodity homogenization and a restriction of retail options, capitalism is proving just as effective as Communism ever was. The primary difference is that the West’s market constriction is being invited and embraced by citizens.

No Izvestia in Pravda, no Pravda in Izvestia (No News in the Truth, no Truth in the News)

“We had two television channels to chose from,” Easterners would tell me, “And two newspapers, both of them full of the same lies.”

Today’s media market masquerades as a smorgasbord of opinion. Cable television networks carry enough channels to give a home television viewer a thumb injury. Newsstands are crowded with newspaper and magazine titles. But these countless information sources are largely all telling us the same thing. A tiny conglomerate of companies owns those thousands of television channels, and our news is fed from an ever-shrinking number of newsrooms. What is most disturbing about giant media companies such as News Corporation, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom and Bertelsmann is that citizens seem indifferent to their mergers and expansions. In Soviet times, people screamed for a more diverse information spectrum. Today the West seems headed effectively for a two channel, two newspaper market, with the implied consent of citizens, through their continued readership and re-election of governments that support weak media regulation.

And as to content, few able-minded citizens of either old East and new West believe (or believed) that their news is accurate or unbiased. The politics is spin-doctored, the information skewed, and investigative journalism has been replaced by light-hearted banter. The only difference is in the labelling – Communist media published “propaganda”, today’s Western media disseminates “infotainment”. The end result is the same – a population lulled into complacency.

Even the Internet, that supposed open forum of billions of voices, presents a uniform message. Wikipedia is the only source of information for many, even though most users realize its reliability is questionable at best. Online news sites are disappointingly shallow. Thanks to rapid news feeds, once a statement is made online, it echoes across millions of mirror sites and becomes accepted fact before anyone has had a chance to check or refute it, and corrections to online news are non-existent. Ownership of the Internet's biggest and most influential sites increasingly resembles the media sphere, dominated by just a handful of companies – Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

One must ask whether our current information and media landscape is truly any more plural, honest or trustworthy than the centrally-controlled propaganda systems of Soviet times.

Pre-fab slabs

The view from my apartment in Kreuzberg, Berlin, is blighted by the existence of monstrous concrete housing projects across the road. “I can’t believe they had such ugly architecture in the GDR,” an international visitor told me once.

“Don’t blame the Soviets for that – we’re in old West Berlin,” I explained, “And that was built in the 80s.”

Recent arrivals to Berlin often have difficultly understanding which side of the wall they are on, for hideous concrete apartment towers are just as prevalent in the West as the East. It’s hard to tell which side of the wall suffered most from architectural crimes – Kreuzberg, Schöneberg and Charlottenberg today are looking downright dowdy with their proliferation of ‘70s era apartment stacks. While East Berlin was blighted by mass housing projects at Marzhan-Hellersdorf, at least it also has the grand Stalinist avenue of Karl-Marx-Allee to admire.

Architecture in the West today is just as bland as its Eastern precursor. In fact, today’s urban design seems to owe a lot to Soviet central planning. Prefabricated slabs of concrete remains the preferred material of use. Boxy, monotonous and anonymous designs continue to sprout like fungi in cities everywhere, even as the West titters and shakes its head at the mistakes of Soviet designers. Wait ten years until the paint starts to fade and the rendering flakes off, and the ironic similarity between Eastern mass housing projects and Western mass profit projects becomes apparent.

Big Brother, watch me please!

What of politics and civil liberties? Would any well-educated voter in either today or in Communist times truly believe they have any choice or influence through the electoral system? Communism offered one party, while elections in most countries today are contests between two parties with barely a shade of political difference between them. In both systems, the corruption within politics is (or was) understood and accepted as a fact of life.

Westerners often pall at Soviet methods of population control through surveillance and policing (although Milan Kundera ironically suggested the secret police should be thanked for so thoroughly documenting the lives of dissident writers and artists). Are the wire-tapping, home-searching, detention-without-charge measures introduced in the U.S. during the Bush administration any less draconian than the Stasi?

If anything, the West is desperate to be placed under observation. Through social networking websites, we invite anyone (including, according to Facebook’s terms of use, the C.I.A) to scrutinize our photos, our diary entries, and our network of friends. Through Facebook’s disturbing new mobile phone tracking service we allow our associates to monitor our physical movements. We place ourselves under surveillance, and smile into the camera while doing so. George Orwell’s predictions were wrong on two counts: The date was forty years too early; and he assumed the observation of the population would be imposed unwillingly.

Ikea = No sex

From products to politics, today’s West increasingly resembles the old East. At least in Soviet times people had a system to revolt against. Those opposed to mass produced merchandise, media and architecture today must turn to sexual politics to force a change. “I don’t sleep with anyone who has Ikea furniture,” a girl in a bar told me recently. Perhaps that might be enough to start a revolution.

Tissu in the trees

Photographer Joerg Modrow snapped these pics of me practicing tissu in a tree at the recent Fusion festival in Germany. Read about the festival here at the B EAST magazine website.

On the first of each month

On the first of each month, the city is redressed like a set change in a play. Fresh posters are pasted over the faded and tattered advertisements which tired eyes have grown immune to. Rents are due and leases are expiring. The streets become temporary storage platforms for all kinds of furniture in transit. You could believe that the city lived out on the footpath, on the first of each month.

I live near Kotbusser Tor in Kreuzberg. “This area is the poorest square kilometer in all of Germany, and the most dangerous,” my new housemate told me with a hint of pride. The vista afforded from the U-bahn station is of slack-eyed drug pushers and the homeless with their dogs squabbling beneath a backdrop of rotting concrete housing projects.

Walk a block south for more uplifting scenery. Pass the Turkish children playing on the footpath, the street vendors shouting vegetable prices. Pause on the bridge and refresh your eyes on the views of the Landwehrkanal, where swans neck and fight and scramble out of the path of oncoming barges, where trees drape long green curtains across the riverbank, where cosmopolitan diners sit at the water’s edge.

I live halfway between these two extremes – the ugly train station and the calm canal. Mine is a confused street that can’t decide if it wants to bustle or bust. Shops thrive and fold at an alarming rate. It’s been just four weeks since my arrival, and already a small café-bar has thrown open its doors, while a kebab shop and a mobile phone dealer have papered up their windows, a small office appeared out of nowhere from behind graffitied steel shutters, and a dusty old bar has had its fixtures torn out in preparation for a revival. Most heartbreaking of all is the South American bead-and-trinket merchant who spends all day hunched and smoking outside his empty shop, watching each passing pedestrian with desperate eyes. I look away when I approach – I’m afraid I might take pity on the bloke and end up walking home with an armful of ugly bulbous necklaces.

My bathroom window offers a sweeping view of the courtyard of the building, and perched on the toilet seat I watch a microcosm of inner-city life. An obese woman lives on the ground floor of my building. I see her struggle up the five-step half-staircase to her door and I wonder, cause or effect? A cat on the third floor arches its body precariously out the window to steal a glimpse of the goings-on below. An old man several apartments across mimics the cat’s pose. Perhaps they should be introduced. Down in the grassy courtyard, several round-figured matrons swathed in black headscarves hold congress while their infants scramble around their legs. Young folk trek in and out all day and night, depositing and retrieving their bicycles in the communal racks. I watch this all from the toilet seat in our poorly-lit bathroom wonder if they all enjoy an equally entertaining view of me. Probably. But as my friend Eleanor explained, putting yourself momentarily on display is all part of high density living. “Sometimes you show a bit of flesh, sometimes you see a bit of flesh. It’s all give and take.”

The Queen of the building is a grey-haired South American immigrant who keeps a shop by the main door. She sits outside day and night, presiding over the comings and goings. “Don’t ever tell her anything about your personal life,” my housemate cautioned, “If you do, the whole building will know about it.” A terrible gossip, an incorrigible match-maker, a meddlesome old witch. Her shop is stocked with alcohol and little else. She makes her money by keeping the tenants well oiled. Purchase a beer from her and you are guaranteed a week of smiles and hellos each time you pass through the front door. Dare to return home with a bottle from elsewhere and she'll fix you with a gaze that could burn through your skin. Once I returned with an entire case of beer from a supermarket in preparation for a day in the park. It cost me a week of wrath and scorn at the door.

Like a blind man recovering sight, my perspective of the city is developing as my German vocabulary grows. Coversations overhead on the U-bahn, once indecipherable babble, bloom to life as I decipher words. The dishevelled young girl who hobbles through the carriages isn’t begging for money, she’s pleading for something to eat or drink. It’s a city of hard luck. Perhaps there are some things I’d rather not understand. Standing in the carriage, a shaggy-haired boy reads sheet music as if it were a magazine. He smiles at the cresendos. There’s a misguided poster on the wall for a language school offering “Deutsch für auslander”. Who exactly are they advertising to? Down the train, noisy nasal Australians accents shriek on about their boozy evening excursion. I change carriages at the next station.

Everything goes

“It’s a place where everything goes,” a friend told me, describing the atmosphere of a certain Berlin bar, and at first I thought he had confused the cliché. But after two months in this city, I realize that he meant what he said. There’s a difference between a place where anything could go, and a place where everything actually does go. ‘Anything goes’ is license, ‘everything goes’ is it’s realization.
It is most immediately visible in fashion. There is no single fashion trend. Every imaginable clothing style is on display all at once, in a confusing mishmash of glam, trash, retro, futro. The hideous fluoros of the 90s combine with the plastic neons of the 80s, while 70s cool and 60s mod style get equal representation – often all thrown together on the same walking mannequin. Scan the dancefloor at a nightclub and you’ll get a history lesson and a glimpse of the future all at once.
“Our concept of time is getting shorter and shorter,” explained Ben, a recent acquaintance. “The cycles of repetition are shrinking. We are already replicating the styles of 2000 – that was just eight years ago. Soon we will be repeating what was hip just one year ago. Where does it end? What does the present look like? I don’t know anymore. And what is the future? In our minds we still have a obsolete vision of robot men and flying cars. That’s an image of the future from thirty years ago or more. We haven’t even updated or formulated our own picture of what the world will look like in twenty, thirty or fifty years.”
Ben’s bedrooom was a reflection of this ideology. His own artwork, canvases of multi-layered one-inch lines by their thousands, shared his wall with record sleeves that, five years ago, would have been considered embarrassing to display. He played music through an I-pod, amplified through a boxy tape deck. A flip-through selection booklet of Pantone colours was fanned out on the floor showing nothing but shades of grey. He used old punk t-shirts as pillow cases, and under his bed lived an army of sneakers representing the past two decades.
Pinned to the wall, his mantra, and perhaps the mantra of everyone today – “I don’t know”.

Backgammon with Gogol Bordello

Sunday nights at Dr Pong

Weekends, Yola and I wander across Prenzlauer Berg to Dr Pong, our favourite Sunday night bar. Each night in every bar and club is different, they shed their customers like old clothes and shuck on new outfits for the following evening.

It’s hard to find Dr Pong unless you’re with a local. The shopfront windows are covered in opaque plastic. You’d think it was abandoned until you shoulder the heavy door open, and even then you might confuse it for a premise undergoing renovation. The walls are bare, the floor concrete, the lighting stark fluorescents. A clutter of chairs sulk at the edges of the room with beer crates for company. In the center of the room is Dr Pong’s altar, a wide blue ping-pong table.

Head into the backroom and you’ll find a motley collection of drinkers chilling on ratty old couches sipping cheap beer. The music is as varied as the clientele – reggae one night, electronica and pop the next. Last time we visited we were treated to David Bowie. He’s been stuck in my head ever since (“Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?”).

Epic table tennis games are always in progress. Hard-core players bring their own bats which they carry in special cases and wipe clean after each match. The rest of us can hire bats from the bar. When enough people have arrived, it’s time for the community game to begin.

It starts when a player bangs the table with his bat (I’m not sure how the authority of this player is asserted. It’s an unspoken right of the alpha ping-ponger. Whoever dominates the table takes charge of the night). Everybody rises from their chairs, resting their beer bottles against the wall to protect them from the madness that is about to ensue. We form a big circle around the table and begin to rotate slowly, knocking one hit to the player at other end of the table. Miss a shot and you’re out of the rotation. Hold your nerve, and you might make it all the way to the final few rounds.

The fun really begins when the circle has whittled down to five, then four, then three players. The pace becomes frantic as they sprint around the table, desperate to make their shot. Their bodies are at savage angles to the floor, their shoes squeaking loudly as they run. It reminds me of that Gary Larsson ‘Far Side’ frame – “The fear of being chased by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor”. Sometimes one of the players does slip and flies off into the chairs, and we’re all glad we stashed our beer bottles against the wall. When it’s down to two players, they finish off the game as normal. Then the alpha player bangs the table, and it all starts again.

Similar community games can be played on Wednesdays at Café Morgenrot, a cheap and friendly drinking spot for an eclectic crowd of activists, queers, unionists, musicians and the mentally unstable. Morgenrot’s ping-pong has a psychedelic twist – it’s played under black lights, normally to a soundtrack of old soul music or skater punk, depending on who is working the CD player.

Enjoy ten seconds of poor-quality images from Morgenrot’s basement… starting now:

Berlin picnic

Street Spirit

Urban discourse on my walk home this morning:

“Kein Kameras im dem Kiez” – No Cameras in the Community: A soon-to-open shop in Prenzlauer Berg heavily vandalized because of two security cameras installed above its door. Looking around, I notice there are very few cameras at all in the city. Compare this to London, a city that proves the only prediction Orwell misjudged was the date.

“Berlin Raucher Rally!” – Smokers Rally: A public demonstration against the anti-smoking laws hardly seems necessary. The laws are proudly flouted in every bar and club in the city. One of my favourite drinking spots, Morgenrot in Prenzlauer Berg, has erected a tiny shrine with skull-and-crossbones imagery – “In Memorandum – The Public Smoker”. The irony is that Morgenrot’s backroom is still one of the smokiest in the city.

“Flughafen für Superreiche? Nein!” – An airport for the super rich? No!: Campaigners against the recommissioning of Berlin’s central Tempelhof Airport are drawing heavily on the city’s working class sympathies. The airport, they argue, would only be affordable to VIPs, a notion against the city’s flattened concept of privilege and entitlement. They seem to forget, though, that with oil supply due to dry up in the next few decades, any form of air travel will only be accessible to the super rich, no matter what airport they fly from. I’ll probably be making my trip home on a ship. If I ever leave, that is. I can’t imagine returning to any apathetic city where citizens take such little action against the elements of their society they oppose.

I am more me

Interview yesterday with Peter Moren, singer from the band Peter, Bjorn and John. We spoke about the difficulties of whistling live on stage (the band has a looped recording for when his mouth gets dry while whistling “Young Folk”), the danger of playing harmonica while bearded, and his appreciation of good old Brisbane band The Go-Betweens.

His solo concert was pleasant, though not the greatest singer-songwriter performance I’ve attended. But he got me at the end by pulling out a song with some piercingly insightful lyrics:

So the question is; have I felt more alive than now?
I must happily disagree.
I laugh more often, I cry more often,
I am more me.

It sums up how I’m feeling right now, living in this welcoming city that has a comfortable subculture for everybody to sink into. I’ve never felt so content in my own skin.

"This isn't a party"

Apartment inspections in Berlin are starting to feel like casting calls. University semester resumes next week, and the city is crawling with young people searching for a cheap room in a funky corner of town.

Nine o'clock on Tuesday, I arrive at a Kreutzberg apartment as arranged. It's nicely positioned at the eastern end, equidistant between the hotspots of Oranienstraße and Warschauer Straße, a bargain at 200 euros a month. The listing had been online for less than 24 hours.

I walked into the apartment to find it choked with people. Fifteen or so folk stood milling around chatting gingerly, sipping beer and wine.

"Sorry to interrupt your party - I've come to look at the room," I said to somebody.

"This isn’t a party,” they responded, “We’re all here for the room.”

The two residents were flittering around madly, shaking hands and asking questions. Everyone seemed to have a ten second window to make an impression before the hosts hurried along. The doorbell kept ringing as more hopefuls arrived.

At least these hosts had the decency to give us all a beer while we endured the experience. At a previous inspection, two overly efficient teenage boys had handed out printed questionnaires on A5 paper, which they then stacked twenty deep artment , wh on a table for later reading. I wrote "Don’t bother" on mine and walked out.

While the others posed in the kitchen trying to impress the hosts with their forced friendliness, I excused myself and wandered off into another part of the house where I had spotted a piano. I sat down and played three or four songs in my jaunty six-fingered honkytonk style, enjoying the weight of the keys under my fingers, drowning out the sounds of fakers fighting for attention. When I had satisfied myself, I returned to the kitchen, said goodbye and left.

If I wasn't going to get a room out of the visit, I might as well get a few minutes of musical enjoyment instead.

"I’m getting a tan from your sunshine"

Yola closed the front door behind her with a curious look on her face. "You know, it's so weird. I normally never notice these things, but… Come outside and have a look," she said. I put down my coffee, shucked on my boots and followed her into the street. "There!"

It took a few seconds to register what she was pointing at. The Prenzlauer Berg street looked the same as it always did – bicycles chained to every imaginable protrusion, grafitti crowding the facades, dog-walkers and pram-pushers strolling with scarves tied tight against the afternoon chill. "Look closer!" Yola insisted.

Parked directly in front of her building was a huge brown campervan. It looked like a giant beetle, with a roof curved in the style of '60s caravans. The numberplate, like all European numberplates, bore the blue-and-gold twelve-star symbol of the European Union, and the three-letter code indicating the country of origin. This is what Yola was pointing at. The letters 'EST'.

The side door of the campervan was latched open, somebody rummaging around inside. I rapped on the window, readying for a stilted conversation in my broken and half-forgotten Estonian (My brain has an unfortunate glitch – it can only handle one foreign language at a time. Now that I have started learning German, my Estonian is slowly being erased. The other day I struggled counting to twenty in Eesti – my head replaced half the numbers with German numerals).

I should have guessed that the currents of life would swirl in such a direction as to reconnect me with Philipe. When his head appeared at the door of the van, I wondered why I hadn't foreseen it. Ever since I met him across the counter of his funky second-hand store in Tallinn, Philipe has appeared at key moments, like a sage, to deliver phrases of reflection and inspiration. He is toweringly tall, with long dark hair and startling, captivating eyes. They stare wide and deep into your subconscious, and you feel yourself drawn into them as if hypnotized. He carries the air of a mystic, aided by his Arabian features – though he is of Swiss origin. He speaks slowly and sincerely, as if he is gently divulging a secret knowledge of the world.

Philipe stepped out of his van and embraced me silently for a long time. I thought for a moment he may be crying, for his hug had the pull of a desperate person who finds an friend in dark moment of isolation. But when we separated I saw he was smiling broadly. "I thought I would find you here," he said.

---

Philipe left Estonia after his shop on Lai street in the Old Town was forced to close due to greedy rent increases. I don't think Tallinn will recover from losing the little oasis of creativity that was Lai 10. He and his girlfriend Kati had an eye for cool. They would hunt out the best second-hand items from markets across the country and sell them for a modest profit. I still have a leather jacket picked from the racks. Behind the shop was a backroom with couches and a record player where friends would gather until late in the evening. The ceiling was lined with fake red leather, bought from a car outfitting workshop for a bargain. The room was illuminated by dozens of old lamps, casting shadows across the carpets and grandma wallpaper. Bands would use the low-roofed shop cellar as a rehearsal space. The start-stop noises of amateur jam sessions – whiny electric guitar riffs, uncertain plodding bass notes, the over-enthusiastic crash of over-played drums – were constantly vibrating up through the floor.

Philipe and Kati ran the shop for several years, weathering fluctuating income and shoplifting. He told me once about observing a pilfering in progress. "I saw a hand come through the door and lift a jacket off the rack. I jumped up and ran to the door and kicked it closed and slammed the hand in the door. Then I threw the door open and kicked the shopstealer in the arm. When I looked up there were two huge angry looking Russian guys standing outside. There was a moment when I looked at them, and they looked at me, and we all realized that they could kick my ass if they wanted. I grabbed the jacket back and shut the door and locked it."

I ingratiated myself into their circle of friends by dropping by one day with a bag of coffee. In that way, Lai 10 became my second living room, a little haven in the Old Town where a conversation, a beer, good music and advice on upcoming concerts were always at hand.

One day I walked in to see the racks empty. The shop had become a victim to Tallinn's runaway real estate boom. The landlord had received an offer from an upmarket baby clothes retailer to occupy the shop at higher rent. "Who wants to buy expensive baby clothes in the Old Town?" someone asked. No one, as it turned out. The baby outfitter went bust after a month. Philipe and Kati's eviction had been entirely unnecessary.

Philipe left Estonia shortly after. I remember sitting with him by the river in Tartu having epic discussions about his plans to visit an anarchic commune in Romania, and to build a bar constructed entirely of old beer crates on a beach on the Black Sea coast. But Philipe is born to wander, and I knew I would eventually find him again in some corner of the planet. Little wonder that I found him living here in Berlin, the giant refugee camp for Europe’s alternative and artistically-minded.

---

At this moment, Philipe was helping a friend move house. Men with large vehicles are always in demand. I chipped in for half an hour, carting boxes down several flights of stairs. “I’m getting a divorce,” told his friend, who happened to live across the road from Yola’s building where I was staying. “I tried living with my wife and child, but we only lasted two weeks.”

Philipe was full of energy, looking wilder than normal. “I came straight from a club,” he said. I checked my phone. It was 3pm. “I was at the Golden Gate club. It was wild. Everyone partying their asses off. Every city needs a club like this. It’s a place where everything goes.” I thought he’d confused the saying, but later it occurred to me that perhaps he meant what he said. After all, there’s a difference between the possibility afforded by the concept of a place where anything could go, and the reality of a place where everything actually does go.

“Now I’m going to a squat down on Kanstanian Allee. There’s a course on lockpicking. My friend learnt how to do this. She opened the lock to the roof of her building in Friedrichshain. Now we can climb up and walk around on the roofs. There are hundreds of meters of beautiful old roofs to look at. It’s amazing up there.”

He promised to take me along to look at the roofs before he departed, cumbersomely maneuvering his huge campervan out of its parking place. He took off with a flash of his huge smile and a wave.

Every time I meet Philipe, I wonder if it will be the last.

---

“How do these things happen to you? You have such amazing luck,” Yola said after he left. Since my enthusiastic arrival she has been rediscovering her own city, her creative impulses firing. “I’m getting a tan from your sunshine,” she said with a laugh.

An artist in Neukölln

My phone was out of credit, so I called Klaus from a Turkish telephone cafe. There's hundreds of them around Hermannplatz. It pulses with a multicultural buzz. Friction causes heat, after all. Throw enough cultures in one suburb, they’re bound to rub against each other and create energy.
I was slightly surprised when Klaus threw open the door. From his voice, I was expecting somebody younger. Klaus was in his fifties, stout, short, with a thick face that looked moulded from clay. Or perhaps that's how I remember him because his apartment was full of grotesque clay sculptures, all twisted and abstract representations of the same face - his own– invariably. There were canvases, too, huge frames leaning unmounted against the walls, stacked five or six deep, occupying nearly every free space in sight.

He invited me in and began flustering about his phone, explaining why some calls and messages had gone astray. “These mobile phones, I can’t use them. How do I read my messages?" he asked, and thrust me his phone. I confessed I was somewhat of a Luddite. "I've only owned one kind of phone in my life, and I can't use others. I can't even use an Ipod," I told him apologetically, handing his handset back.
His apartment was huge, three or four big bright rooms on the first floor overlooking a busy side-street. It was messy without being dirty, cluttered with half-finished sculptures, blocks of clay, boxes of photographs, a guitar sitting on a chair, a piano wasting as a bookshelf.
As we talked, Klaus invited me to look through a shoebox of pictures of his artwork and the models that inspired them. I saw immediately that he had a taste for youngish women, none exceptionally beautiful, but all intelligent-looking. The kind of plain and pleasant girls you might meet at a bookstore. Some were posed topless, though this seemed to be an entirely unnecessary removal of clothing, as Klaus's paintings were exclusively of faces. Huge abstract faces, painted with thickly with hundreds of brush strokes, stared in on the room like a crowd.
“Why do you paint only faces?” I asked him. He considered for a minute.
“I guess it’s easy for me. It's the simplest thing to paint," he replied. I suppose I was hoping for a more meaningful answer, but then again perhaps we all take the path of least resistance - in art, in life.
He spoke a lot but listened little. Twice he asked what I was doing in Berlin. His hands were constantly moving, and his eyes jumped around the room.
“My mother is from Riga,” he told me, when I spoke of my Estonian roots. “Never been there. It’s so far away. I’ve been to Australia. I travelled through Asia to get there, through all the 'stans. I got to Bali and sailed on a yacht to Darwin. At first they wouldn't let me in, but eventually they gave me a transit visa. I fell in love there. And in New Zealand. I went to Samoa, I had a girlfriend there.” He seemed to fall in love quite easily. "But let me show you the room.”
The room for rent was in another apartment several blocks away, one Klaus kept as his painting studio. He was offering it up for several months as he had decided to focus on clay sculpture, something he preferred to do in his home.
I went on foot while Klaus balanced comedically on a bicycle, an umbrella held aloft against the mild drizzle. Once his handlebars hit a protruding rubbish bin, and I had to stop him from collapsing sideways.
“This area is changing,” he told me as he cycled slowly. "It used to be full of Arabs, but now more young people like you are moving here. In the south of Neukölln, some streets are run by the gangs. You can't walk without getting challenged."
His studio was up four flights of stairs. Unlike his apartment, this set of rooms was messy and dirty. The floor was a virtual canvas, splashed with colour, though the walls were sad and bare. In the small kitchen sat a single stove, a box of onions, an upturned crate used as a table, and a tiny fridge crowned with empty beer bottles. The room for rent was big and bright, with a double mattress on the floor. A real artist's squat.
“Turn the radio on, would you?” he said, pointing at a small boom box, and we attempted to continue our conversation over the drone of the transmission.
“Who else lives here?”
“A man. He's about 30. I think I have to have a talk to him today. I don't like how he keeps the apartment." The apartment seemed to keep itself in its current shape, I thought. There wasn't much anyone could do with it except exist. No doubt he would have taken unkindly to any redecoration, given that it was his studio space. I peeked quickly in the other fellow's room - Doc Marten's by the bed, several action film DVDs piled near a TV on the floor, a Misfits album on a shelf. I'm a misfit with Misfits fans.
“What do you think of it?” Klaus asked me finally. He was attacking a lump of clay on the window sill as we spoke, gouging at it with a knife, forming it into another of his twisted faces.
“It’s nice,” I said, and I meant it. It seemed a genuinely interesting space, not necessarily comfortable.
“I know it’s nice. I know it's fucking nice, but what do you think of it? We have to fucking talk about it.” I couldn't understand his sudden rash of irritation.
“I don’t think it's for me. I like to live with people, people I can interact and talk to. This place feels a bit isolated. It's probably good to work in, but not for me to live in."
I would have taken it to, that shabby room with its paint-crusted floor. Except that I'm more concerned about who I live with rather than where.

I am a donut

I land on Yola's doorstep at 6am, grey and creased from the overnight bus ride. Yola arrives one minute later, fresh as the morning air. “I've been out all night dancing to The Cure and Joy Division at Lido. I haven’t gone there since I was sixteen! And look!” She holds her hand aloft - her little finger is mummified in layers of sticking plaster, “I cut my finger when I was dancing. It bled all down my dress!" Her blue-and-white striped cotton dress looks like a child's painting smock, smeared with red. She lets out a laugh. “What a night!”

"I need a bicycle, where can I buy one?" I ask Yola as we drink coffee in the diluted afternoon light, which bounces off the sides of the Prenzlauer Berg buildings and into her kitchen window.
“You should buy one for 160 euros," she says, with German matter-of-factness, "That way you know it won't break."
“I don't even have 16 euros right now.”
“Oh, I know! There's a bicycle out on the street. It has been there for months. Whoever owned it must have moved away."
We step outside for an afternoon walk. She shows me the bike – one of hundreds chained to posts and trees up and down the street. Berlin is a giant bicycle parking lot. My machine covered in dirt, the back tire is flat. A thick metal U-bolt holds it to a post.
"No problem, we can just go to a bike shop and hire a metal cutter. They rent them by the hour," she tells me. "Or perhaps this man has one." A tradesman has his panel van parked at the curb, its rear doors open as he arranges his equipment. Yola has a bright conversation with the tradesman, a round-faced fellow who pulls a circular saw out of his van in a flash. Yola claps her hands as the U-bolt falls open in a shower of sparks. She races inside to fetch a bottle of wine as a reward.

Down at the bike shop, it’s as busy as an airport check-in counter at Christmas. There’s to be a transport strike tomorrow, the repairman tells me when it's finally my turn. Everyone is getting their bikes fixed to ride to work. They're booked up a week ahead for repairs, but he lends me a box of tools and lets me change the inner-tubes out on the street.
The sun takes me by surprise. It must be 20 degrees outside. I haven't worn a t-shirt out for over six months. They say sunlight makes you sneeze, but for me it causes involuntary smiling. I’m smiling so much, I make other people laugh when they see my face.

The telephone answers after the first ring. I'm still chopping garlic for dinner - my little gesture of gratitude to Yola for giving me temporary refuge. I put down the knife as the girl answers "Hallo?"
“Hallo, sprechen sie English?”
“Yah, ein bisschen.” Good start.
“I'm calling about the room… is it still available?"
“Yah, but first I must ask, how long will you take it for? Because we only like to rent it for six months at a time."
“I’m not planning in leaving soon,” I tell her. “Six months sounds fine to me.”

Part Two, in which locals complain about those scary foreigners

Our first guest at the hostel was an unkempt-looking Dutch boy who arrived late on a Tuesday night and promptly joined us at a nearby bar for a beer. He was en route to an unusual destination.
“I’m going to visit a friend in jail,” he told us. “I knew him in Holland. He’s a good guy who did some bad things.”
We migrated to Zavood, Tartu’s infamous student dive bar, where it took the Dutchman about 15 minutes to catch the eye of a petite blond girl. We gave him his key and a mud-map of directions home, then left him to his fate.
The next morning, when he had failed to show up, I told Colin we should quit this business. “Our first customer, and we lost him! He didn’t even sleep in the bed.”
He finally returned late in the afternoon, smelling like he needed a shower, and stayed for two more days. He was even polite enough to pay for the night he didn’t stay.

Winter is here, but barely. A dusting of snow covers the rooftops every few days, then melts away to miserable pools of brownish water in the gutters. The Emajogi river has frozen and thawed at least ten times since our arrival.
The ravages of global warming might mar the landscape, but they haven’t hurt our business. We hosted two Belgian film students who travelled here in the hope of creating a documentary about ice fishing on Lake Peipsi. For the first time in living memory, the mighty lake has refused to solidify.
The Belgians spent a week camped lakeside at a village of old Russian fisherman whose livelihoods depend on the ice. Old men whose small wooden cabins contain shrines to Lenin, virtual museums of Soviet kitsch. With no ice to fish upon, the men spent their time guzzling vodka and carousing loudly, much to the Belgians’ dismay.
They retreated to our hostel to wait for the freeze. After a week they gave up and went home, ignoring my suggestion that they had perhaps stumbled upon a better documentary topic than their original synopsis.

Are you local?

Our arrival in Tartu has sent a shiver of fear around town. Our neighbours were the first to voice their concern, calling to the city council to complain about the “foreigners” who would soon be terrorizing the staircase.
Our building hosts a strange assortment of businesses: A hairdresser, attended by one of our guests, who had to direct the non-English speaking barber using hand signals; a statistics collection agency; the consulate of the Russian Federation, which on Sunday acted as the diaspora voting station for the Russian presidential “election”, attracting a stream of babushkas and mustachioed old men; above us, a handful of student apartments; bellow us, the office of the Estonian church newspaper. It is these clergy-journalists who seem most afraid of the riff-raff we host. They were concerned (we heard, through the local gossip chain) that foreigners might soon be breaking into their office to steal their computers.
When we were visited by a journalist from Postimees (the national daily newspaper), Colin and I were quizzed about the moral fibre of the ne’er-do-well backpackers we intended to attract. “Do they have any money? Do they all take drugs? Will they all play guitars on the street?” the reporter asked us.
The result of the interview was this story (click to read it), which was overwhelmingly positive, pointing out the benefits of Tartu being on the backpacker route, and calling for a bit of tolerance toward these scruffy young travellers (photo on the left courtesy of Postimees).

Colin contracts backpackitis

A cautious cousin of mine recently travelled Europe staying exclusively in hotel suites. “You never know who you could meet in a backpacker hostel,” she reasoned. “Exactly,” I retorted, “That’s what makes them so interesting.”
Aside from the evils of communal living, there are of course health concerns that might deter wary folk from hitting the backpack trail. Alongside bed bugs, tinea and pregnancy, there is another disturbing condition you may contract while backpacking.
I hereby announce to the medical community the discovery of “backpackitis”, a disease recently observed on a Canadian traveller in Estonia. For the sake of anonymity, let’s call him “Colin”.
Colin has spent the last two years travelling Europe with a pack strapped to his back, thus qualifying him as a “backpacker” (carrying objects on your back is an essential part of this form of travel).
The repeated strain of the pack against Colin’s right shoulder blade led to the development of a large puss-filled aberration which could otherwise be described as the world’s largest pimple. After its initial appearance as a small lump, the pimple swelled to nearly the size of an Australian 50 cent piece within several weeks. It developed several separate heads and began to push painfully against nerves.
Home remedies failed to relieve the pain. An attempt to pop the mammoth pimple with a sterilized pin failed, as the tensile strength of its surface resisted penetration. Finally Colin was forced to present to the emergency room of the Tartu hospital, where the doctors were anticipating his attendance. “We heard about you. You’re the foreigner with the huge pimple on his back,” the triage nurse told him. Tartu is a small town, after all.
He was taken immediately into an operating room and anesthetised. Colin was denied the pleasure of watching his enormous pustule explode under the scalpel. Each time he turned to observe the doctors at work he was reprimanded. “Don’t watch, it’s too disgusting,” they told him. He returned with a hole in his shoulder about the size of a pen tube across, five or six millimetres deep, from which puss and blood continued to ooze for several days.
The wound became a point of intense amusement at the hostel at which he resided. Other guests gathered around to stare into his cavity, shrieking in disgust. Despite being warned of the potential harm caused by backpackitis, many travellers continue to trek the globe using this dangerous and unpredictable form of travel.
Stay on the safe side. Keep away from backpackers and hostels. Except ours, of course, it’s fine.

Part 1, in which Colin schemes to open the hostel

It was about seven weeks ago that we concocted the notion of opening the hostel. Tallinn was frosted over with a layer of snow, a late November dump that persisted for a week or two before being washed away by dull December rain.

Colin was noodling away on his laptop, as he does all too frequently. That’s one bad habit he has picked up from Estonians. I have considered writing to Wikipedia asking them to block his access for his own health and my sanity. Usually he Googles useless pieces of information to pepper our conversation. Occasionally, however, his interweb access has purpose.

Since we met some eighteen months ago, Colin and I have been idly plotting to open a bar of our own, something every drinker dreams of at one point in their life after realizing how much cash they pour into bar tills. We progressed a little further than the average dreaming drinker. We found a few potential locations, but problems arose each time we began negotiating to lease them. One basement seemed ideal, but consultations with a few wizened locals revealed it had a history of flooding each spring thaw. The building’s project manager insisted such a problem did not exist, but we erred on the side of caution, not wishing to see our furniture and bottles floating around in three foot of water come March.

After that disappointing setback our search became a little less vigorous. Occasionally Colin would trawl through online property sites searching for suitable locations. His head would bob above his laptop lid. “Hey Joel, there’s a store on Pikk .. oh, it’s 90,000 a month….” His head would droop again. The search would continue.

Colin was at it again that snowy day when, for some reason, he decided to enter “Tartu” into the search engine instead of “Tallinn”. Tartu is a city I’ve always had a soft spot for. It’s such a vibrant little town. In the daytime the streets are full of university students striding off to class. At night they come out in droves to party in the town’s many bars.

The property search engine spat out a few results, among them a large apartment in the center of town at a relatively low price. Colin’s brain started to whirl. The apartment certainly wouldn’t work as a bar, but maybe… His next search was on Hostel Bookers, the main website backpackers use to plot their travel. It retuned exactly what he expected – Tartu had only two or three accommodation options, none of them typical backpacker-style hostels that young travelers expect when traipsing across Europe. His head bobbed up. “Hey Joel….”

Seven weeks later and here we are, lounging on beanbags in the common room of our new hostel. We’ve called it Hostel Terviseks. Terviseks means “cheers” in Estonian, quite appropriate as it’s the first and only word a lot of foreigners learn, and something that is said frequently in this lively town.

I’ve now moved to Tartu semi-permanently. I don’t plan on settling here, but for the mean time I’ll be enjoying the student lifestyle in this chilled out town. Feel free to drop by anytime. There’s a beanbag waiting for you.

The Navigator

I used to tell travelling companions that if I were a superhero, I would be called “The Navigator” (You have to say it in a low gravely voice to get the proper effect). My superpowers are an uncanny ability to find my way through the unfamiliar streets of an exotic foreign city. Lost tourists staring hopelessly at their upside-down map would gasp in surprise and joy when I appeared to direct them out of shadowy backstreets. “Who are you? Why are you helping us?” they would ask. “They call me The Navigator,” I would answer, and disappear with a sweep of my cape.

My self-adopted secret identity was born one drizzly March evening several years ago in München (the German city you anglicisers might know as Munich). As a cadet reporter for The Courier-Mail I had been dispatched to Europe to compile a travel story, flying courtesy of the good folk at Thai Airways and Contiki Tours (I am contractually obliged to mention the trip’s sponsors each time I mention it in print). It was the fourth night of a twelve-day express circuit of Western Europe, the kind of trip that allows unadventurous suburbanites to travel without the discomforts of discovery, and return home satisfied in the knowledge that they had “done Europe”. Contiki achieves its comparatively low prices by housing its guests in large hotels on the fringes of cities, then bussing them into the town centre for sight-seeing day trips. The downside of this out-of-town accommodation model became apparent that evening in München.

There we were, our misfit coachload, heading from our outskirts hotel into town, all eager to sample the famous beers of the city, presumably served in chunky glass steins by buxom red-cheeked women in a noisy beer house with long wooden tables. Just as the coach parked, our chirpy tour guide informed us that we would have until 8pm to eat, drink and return. “Of course, you can stay in town later if you find your own way back to the hotel”. Eight o’clock ticked by, and needless to say we were all well involved in a hearty drinking session at a suitably cliché beer house, mindless of the fact that our hotel-bound tour bus was departing to the city limits without us.

As we stumbled out of the beer house onto the cobbled München street, we became aware of our predicament. We had little idea where our hotel was or how to get there. What were we to do? I looked around at our pathetic group of twenty or so drunken tourists and realized that someone had to lead the flock to safety. The Navigator in me was born not out of desire but necessity, for without me that miserable lot would have frozen to death. Or, in a more likely scenario, they would have hailed a taxi driver, who would no doubt have taken them on a circuitous route and charged them an excessive amount of deutschmarks (this was after the introduction of the euro, but I prefer to use the old currency names. They sound more old-timey and make me sound more distinguished).

I led them to the nearest metro station and, despite my unfamiliarity with the city and my inability to read German, I managed to locate the appropriate line of transportation, the connecting bus, and the route home. I shepherded my straggling flock onto the last service of the night and delivered them safely to the hotel, where our chipper tour guide wasn’t waiting up late gnawing her nails in concern for our welfare. Contiki has a policy of leaving no-shows behind, and I have a sneaking suspicion the ol’ München beer hall visit is a strategy to half the tour group to lighten the coach load and save on fuel a policy its diligent customers appreciate for helping keep tours on schedule (sponsor’s alteration). There in the hotel lobby they lifted me to their shoulders and chanted my new superhero name in admiration and appreciation. Or perhaps that was the hotel security guard carrying me on his shoulder to my room. I’d had a few.

That’s all a very long-winded introduction to the real guts of my story. You see, I used to call myself The Navigator. That was until I hit Prague. That wonderful slacker city with its mess of streets and numbered suburbs had me licked. Or perhaps it was the cheap pilsners and the constant waft of jazz cigarettes. I’d had a few.

What was I doing in Prague? Well, that requires a little more backstory….

After eighteen months working at a certain Baltic newspaper, I realized I was wasting my time. I’d slaved away at a redesign of the ageing tabloid, which looks about as professional as a high school student newspaper. That’s not fair, actually. I used to run a student newspaper and it looked far more reputable than this old rag.

I had spent countless hours of my own time overhauling the thing, making it look something akin to an upmarket British tabloid. The redesign was ready to go to production when the owner of the paper, a Latvian banker who fancies himself a Baltic Rupert Murdoch, decided he liked things just the way they were. “Our readers are old, so our paper should look old too,” was one of his gems of wisdom.

I considered attempting to use logic to convince him of his stupidity, but then realized that I would only be helping an undeserving businessman succeed. I quit the paper, followed closely by the editor, who had also fought for the redesign. I hereby offer an insightful observation from the ever-prescient Scott Adams that aptly illustrates the scenario (replace the word “circuit” with “newspaper”):

The result of that decision was that I became unemployed for the first time since the age of fourteen, when I talked my way into a job as a projectionist at the Caloundra cinemas. Somehow, though, I just can’t seem to stay idle. I picked up a bit of work on a magazine called B EAST, a fashion and culture quarterly that focuses exclusively on eastern Europe. I had always admired its edgy style and attitude, and was a convert to the magazine’s mantra that eastern Europe was a far more exciting and inspiring place than the stale old nations of western Europe, bloated by their riches and lazily resting on their expired reputations.

At first I was only supposed to write a feature story on my adventures in St Petersburg, but I ended up editing the entire issue. When time came to lay out the pages and send the magazine off to the printer, I headed down to Prague to meet with the designer and go through the page proofs.

Where ever I travel, I have little concern for a city’s historic sights or famous landmarks. Observing history obstructs your view of the present. I’d much rather discovery a city’s living culture and experience how its people live here and now, something that is only possible by meeting the locals and sharing their lifestyle. In every city there are people willing to open up their homes and lives to like-minded strangers. You just have to find them.

I found Jakub and Lucettia through a friend from Tallinn. We arranged to meet at an art gallery opening where money was being raised for one of the landlocked Asian nations (Nepal? Tibet? Bhutan?). The art on sale was average, but the people were interesting. Prague's art scene seems more earthy and threadbare than in other pretentious cities. It was all jeans, sneakers and old t-shirts, wine from plastic cups. We sat outside in the cold and sipped tea.

"I love listening to you all speak Czech," I said to Lucettia quietly as a conversation rumbled away around the table. "It sounds like a friendlier, happier version of Russian." She places a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh.

Lucettia works in Czech's booming film industry as a second assistant director. She just finished shooting a video with Prince, who shut down Prague's famous Charles Bridge for several days for filming. Before that came Rihanna, who shot a clip in a Prague nightclub. She tells me stories of working with Terry Gilliam on "The Brothers Grimm" (although surprisingly she hadn't seen the brilliant documentary "Lost in La Mancha", a must-see for any fan of this eccentric director). But she grew tired of working with celebrities, and subsequently turned down work on the "Chronicles of Narnia" sequels now in production. She now focuses on music videos and advertisements.

"Last month I was in Austria for a Canadian beer commercial. It was in the mount-ayns for the snow. But then the director wanted a spring background. Twenty men spent a day sweeping the snow off the mount-ayn," she tells me.

Prague has an indifferent attitude to its status as the Hollywood of Europe. It treats its famous visitors with slight contempt, especially when they close off city streets and landmarks.

Czech anyway has its own proud history of local cinema, as I found out on a visit to one of Prague's not-so-clandestine "coffee houses" (the Amsterdam kind of coffee house, where anything but coffee is on the menu). I accompanied Jakub to the coffee house as he met with the establishment's owner, for whom he had recently acted as wedding photographer. In the wedding snaps she laughs at the camera, a joint in one hand and a drink in the other. Her wedding dress is a white gown adorned with hundreds of orange ping-pong balls.

The bar is hazy with smoke. Everyone in the room is either rolling, passing or smoking a joint. Amsterdam, now in the clutches of a conservative resurgence, is beginning to reel in its liberal attitudes. Prague, however, is gladly accepting the crown as Europe's new capital of chill. There's little that isn't legal, and anything that is illegal is ignored or tolerated. This is the country once known as Bohemia, after all.

Increasing the coffee shop's trippy atmosphere is a large screen playing old Czech movies. There's one by Karel Zeman, a legendary director who combined animation, puppetry and live action to create a stunning style of special effects as long ago as the 1950s. In one, colonialists battle dinosaurs with cannons and bayonets. In another, travellers venture under the ocean on seahorses. The images are a mesmerizing pastiche of colour and artistry. Fans of Michel Gondry should find Zeman's films fascinating. I've got a copy of the films, which I'll gladly send to anyone interested.

Jakub is equally fascinating. A paramedic and a photographer, he combines both profession and passion by taking pictures as he works. In one series I find particularly fascinating, he photographs street posters that layer and peel away, revealing random and unintended compositions. Eyes from one poster peer through a tear of another, words collide, juxtapositions emerge.

Lucettia rags on Jakub for always being late. "He is always sitting at the piano, playing when we should be getting ready." It must be the most pleasant of all inconveniences, I tell her. Jakub's self-taught honky-tonk style of performing is the kind of playing I try to emulate when I bang away at chords, six fingers on the keys instead of ten. His music rings around their chilly wooden apartment, deep from within his grandmother's ancient upright piano. "She brought it from Ukraine when they came here," he tells me. The skeleton of another piano sits in the corner of another room - an old grand piano, perched upended against a wall, its curved body now home to a bookshelf instead of strings.

With Lucettia and Jakub I experience Prague’s bubbling art scene. They are forever purveying photographic exhibitions, some in large galleries, others in the basements of arty cafes or on the walls of restaurants. Jakub hopes to exhibit his work one day, but for now seems content to keep his work private. “Is not so important for me for everyone to look,” he says humbly.

Leaving Prague by train I experienced one of the final, and now non-existent, divisions between west and east Europe. Crossing the Czech-German border, customs guards went through the carriage inspecting passports and cursorily searching luggage. Now, only weeks later, that controlled border crossing no longer exists. Czech, along with most other eastern European nations (including Estonia) has become part of the EU Schengen zone, which means you can pass from the top to the bottom and west to east of Europe without presenting your passport. Previously the new EU nations were still obliged to maintain controlled borders. I didn’t mind the mild inconvenience of being one of the final travellers to be scrutinized and questioned in this quaint and extinct tradition as the train sailed through the castle-studded hills of central Europe.

More fun with languages

I’m sick of talking about language. Every day I seem to find myself in at least three conversations with locals or foreigners about the Estonian tongue – its quirks and difficulties, interaction with Russian speakers, the Tolkien connection…
“It’s more fun with languages!” I often cry sarcastically as people around me begin analysing humorous Estonian words and phrases. Yes, the word for ‘cheers’ sounds like ‘terrible sex’. Yes, there is a celebrity named Tiit Sukk. Yes, the word night – “öö” – sounds like someone vomiting.
But when the grand old Australian Broadcasting Corporation asked me to put aside my aversion to discussing languages and record a set piece about the Estonian tongue, how could I say no?
I recently recorded a radio documentary piece for a show called “Lingua Franca” on Radio National – you know, the ABC’s talk radio station that old people listen to? It’s a very old-worldy radio show, one droning voice for fifteen minutes. The telephone line connection wasn’t brilliant either. But if you listen for long enough, you will get to hear me recite the first line of the Estonian national anthem, which is surely worth the wait.
The piece aired at the prime hour of 3.45pm on Saturday November 24 – just as the nation was heading to the polls to elect Kevin Rudd as prime minister. But I’m sure the ratings will show that the voters of Australia put aside their thoughts about the future of our nation and chose instead to tune into my controversial think-piece on Esto-Russian interaction. In fact, my impassioned delivery may have helped swing preferences in several marginal seats...
Listen here: ABC Radio National

Devil's haircut

Here’s me doing my best Darth Maul impression (although I’m supposed to look like a lizard). I’m made up for a circus performance – a corporate gig for a company’s product launch. Yes, I have sold out. Dodgy video courtesy of my brother Chris.

“There’s a lot of hate here, for such a beautiful city.” – My brother, after being yelled at in the street by a man who mistook him for a Russian, and then tried to shake his hand after discovering he wasn’t.

The politics of chocolate

I can finally start eating chocolate again.

For over a year now I’ve been boycotting Kalev chocolate for political reasons. The company is owned by Oliver Kruuda, a man I consider to be thoroughly unscrupulous. He benefits hugely from his donations the populist Centre party, which loyaly does all it can to find legal loopholes to help his projects proceed, and are only too willing to give his companies huge government contracts. He bulldozes protected forests to improve his view and laughs off the fines. He’s part of Estonia’s untouchable elite, a man who does anything he likes and gets away with it.

I couldn’t stand the thought of my hard-earned kroon going into his pockets. Unfortunately he owns Kalev chocolate. Kalev isn’t just Estonia’s favourite sweet, it also carries a fair bit of sentimentality. Kalevipoeg is a national folk hero, a mythical god-like figure who trounced his enemies (although everyone seems to overlook the part of the myth where Kalev raped a few island women en route to Finland). Eating Kalev chocolate is almost part of culture.

My boycott has been quite difficult. I don’t eat much chocolate, but when I have the urge, it’s nearly impossible to find other brands. There’s Fazer from Finland, but I’m labeled unpatriotic if I’m seen with a Fazer product. Kruuda also owns Tere Piim, one of the main milk producers, and Just Magazine, the weekly glossy gossip rag. It’s been a tough year without cocoa, a limited supply of dairy, and no salacious photographs of Estonian celebrities at their cocktail parties.

But some good news just popped up on the business news wire. Kruuda is offloading his shares in Kalev and Tere. I officially announce my boycott to be over.

Although I still can’t bring myself to read Just Magazine. I’ll have to survive on Kroonika alone.

From the other side of the border

I packed two bottles of Vana Tallinn liquor for my trip to St Petersburg. One was for the hosts who had invited me to sleep on their floor. The other was to offer as an appeasement for the police, border guards or other members of Russian officialdom who were bound to hassle, arrest, fine or rob me. That’s how it works in Russia, doesn’t it?

But propaganda, I discovered, works both ways. Russia isn’t nearly as scary a place as Estonians seem to think it is. And Russians have a very twisted view of Estonia and its history. Yet the similarities between the young people of both countries override any of the differences that might exist.

Meeting the community

“I hope they’re home,” I said to my friend Colin as he pressed the buzzer. We stood outside a sturdy peach-colored apartment building, far cheerier than the average Soviet housing block. The architecture was rather mixed in Narvskaya, a near-city suburb that denotes the end of the Czarist-era St Petersburg and the start of Stalinist city planning.

The buzzer box responded with a shriek. Through the intercom came the sound of a man imitating a chicken. “Privet?” I responded cautiously. The door clicked open, we trod up the flights of stairs.

Dima was waiting for us at the door. Small, wiry, a messed mop of hair, lively eyes that pierced a pair of glasses. His smile revealed a top gum void of teeth, aside from one sharpened and silver-capped canine. He let out another chicken squawk as he showed us through the apartment, sparsely furnitured. Well, no furniture at all, actually, aside from a few rugs and cushions on the floor.

“We are a kind of community,” Dima explained as he took us on a walk through the neighborhood. “What brings you together?” I asked. “Freedom. Free-thinking. Music,” he replied.

We had found Dima and his community on Hospitality Club, a website where people offer to host weary travelers. Colin and I had couchsurfed this way through Estonia, but were wary of using the system in Russia after being warned of the arduous guest registration system. Police, we were told, constantly stop tourists to check their registration card.

Dima smiled a toothless grin when I told him of my concerns about Russian officialdom. “When you become worried about a problem, that is when it occurs,” he said sagely. “Police only stop you if you think they will.” He was right. We stopped thinking about police, and they somehow disappeared for the rest of our trip.

On a bus traveling into the town center, Dima pointed out various large and deteriorating buildings he had marked as potential squats. He was looking for a home for the community, one where they could host music and art events and workshops for meditation. Capitalists were eyeing off the same buildings as potential office renovation sites.
“This is what the businessmen have done in Moscow, taken all the buildings away from the people. But in St Petersburg the people are resisting. This is one of the few cities in the world that is saying ‘no’, and is trying to preserve itself,” he said.

We stopped on a pretty canal bridge to meet Andrei and Sasha, two of Dima’s housemates, both consummate fire twirlers. They led us to a secluded park a stone throw from Nevsky Prospect. We chilled on the grass as Andrei practiced his tai chi-like stretches. Dima let out the occasional chicken shriek. I couldn’t help but think how similar these boys were to my hippie friends back in Tallinn. They discuss escaping to the woods to visit a dacha, hunt for mushrooms and take a sauna. I could have been overhearing a conversation between Estonian young people.
“How many people are there in Russia like you, with your mindset,” I ask Dima. “Thousands, hundreds of thousands,” he said with glowing eyes.

The Fascism question

Back at the apartment, the doorbell never seemed to stop ringing. Every few minutes we were introduced to a new arrival. They sat on the floor to share vodka, sipping from a tea cup while crunching on raw cloves of garlic.

It took several hours, but finally the conversation turned to Estonia and the Bronze Soldier riots.
“My uncle was there, he said it was very scary, the Estonian police were crazy,” said one boy with relatives in Tallinn. “ I think Estonia is a very fascist country.”
There it was, that word. Fascism. So often repeated by Russian politicians and press. Does anyone even know what it means anymore? But say it often enough, and the young people will start to repeat it.
“When I visited Estonia, I could see that all the people there hated Russians,” the same boy went on, “But Russia did so many good things for Estonia. It built the factories and the roads. Before the war, Estonia was nothing, a poor country, and Russia helped it. Why do they hate us?”
“Estonia wasn’t poor,” I told him. “It was very prosperous. Before the war, Estonia was richer than Finland.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he replied with conviction.
“Yes, it was,” I insisted, but I see a look of disbelief stretch across his face. It’s not his fault he thinks this way. If this is what they’re taught in school, it’s no wonder there’s so much animosity between the two countries.
Another boy told us of his difficulties in trying to get a visa to visit Estonia to visit relatives.
“If I go to the Finnish embassy, they give me a visa no problems. When I go to the Estonian embassy, they ask all difficult questions. ‘What color is your relative’s hair?’. The Estonian government is crazy.”
They’re not crazy, I said, they’re just scared and cautious.
“Why are they scared of me? I have done nothing to them. I just want to visit.”
He told how he is looking forward to Estonia joining the Schengen visa zone, which will ironically make it easier for Russians to enter. I can’t help but think of the benefits of greater interaction between the young people of both countries. A bit of mutual understanding could go a long way.

The Nashi question

There was one thing I was burning to ask about before we left. I’d noticed a security pass hanging on hook in the apartment. On it was a photo of Sasha, and across the top in bold letters was printed “Nashi”. I was puzzled. What was a freethinking fire twirling bohemian like Sasha doing at an event hosted by the belligerent nationalistic youth movement Nashi -a group that has been compared to the Hitler Youth?
Dima explained with a smile as we packed our bags to leave. “He’s not with them, he’s …with us. He only worked at one of their meetings as a cook.”
I’m suddenly relieved, and ask what he thinks of Nashi.

“They are zombies. They are brainwashed to think the same way. It’s a way to get a job, to get money, to rise into politics quickly,” Dima says, and tells us about how the community used to share a building with an organization that received government funds to research how to use music and videos to spread modern propaganda messages.
“Will it work, this brainwashing?” I ask.
Dima shakes his head. “It won’t work. When people have low self-esteem, when they are angry, it hooks them. If you keep your heart and mind open, there is nothing to hook.”

We crossed back into Estonia, minus our bottles of Vana Tallinn. There’d been no officials to bribe, despite the horror stories so often repeated. Both bottles of liquor went to our hosts. Russia isn’t such a scary place, we discovered. And hopefully our friends learned the same thing about Estonia.

Photo left: Andrei and his one thousand paper cranes. Through broken German, Russian, English and sign language, he told me how he was inspired to fold the origami birds after reading about Sadako, the girl from Hiroshima who made 1000 cranes in the hope that it would cure her leukemia.

"I disapprove of what you say, but...."

My housemate left a note on the kitchen bench this morning: "You shouldn't have written what you wrote."
She was referring to a story I wrote on controversial Russian-Estonian relations. It was published simultaneously in The Baltic Times and Eesti Ekspress, the well respected and widely read weekly Estonian newspaper.
It concerned the deportation of eleven young Russian people who had travelled to Estonia to hold a silent protest over the removal of the Bronze Soldier (Google 'Estonia and riots' if you don't know what occurred).
My story questioned whether the Estonian Government was following its democratic values of free speech, or whether it was silencing those who spoke out against its decisions. (Read the story in full bellow).
As I left for work, I scribbled a reply to my housemate's note: "Thank you! You have a right to disagree with me. That's exactly the point of what I wrote."

Is Estonia silencing its opponents? - By Joel Alas, TALLINN

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” – Evelyn Beatrice Hall, paraphrasing Voltaire (1906).

From the outset, it should be said that this article does not seek to support any group or cause, save for the right for all people to speak their mind.

It’s a glorious day in early June. A young man stands in a park in central Tallinn cloaked in a soldier’s cape and cap. He says nothing and does nothing but stand, and when police officers come to detain him, he obliges their orders without fuss.

According the Estonian Government, this young man - and ten others who have followed in his footsteps – poses a threat to the security of the state. His actions are considered detrimental to public order. He is deported to his homeland, Russia, and is forbidden from re-entering the European Union for ten years.

Like everything involving Estonian-Russian relations, the situation is complex and controversial. It’s impossible to hold a rational discussion on the topic without invoking passion and patriotism on either side of the debate. But stripped of the emotion, the real question of the situation is this: Is Estonia upholding its values of democracy and free speech? Or is it stifling the discussion of certain topics when it comes from the mouths of certain people?

The young man in question is no ordinary Russian citizen. He’s the member of a Nashi (“Ours” in Russian), a radical political youth movement that pledges allegiance to Vladimir Putin and his increasingly belligerent administration.

The park in question is no ordinary location. It’s Tonismagi, the scene of violent riots in late April following the removal of the Bronze Soldier, the Soviet wartime monument.
Dressed in army garb, the Nashi activist’s silent vigil was an attempt to replicate the pose of the Red Army statue, which now stands in a cemetery on the outskirts of town.

Eleven such activists – some of them teenagers – have held silent protests at the same spot since June. Some managed to stand for several minutes before attracting police attention, others weren’t able to get to the park – caught by police in the side streets as they donned their costumes.

Police handed the activists to the Citizenship and Migration Board, which found they had violated the terms of their tourist visas by taking part in a political protest. Their subsequent deportation carries a 10-year re-entry ban that will apply to wider Europe when Estonia joins the Schengen visa zone in a few months.

Foreign Minister Urmas Paet justified the deportations, saying that Estonia had a right and obligation to assure public order and prevent provocations.

“Taking into consideration the seriousness of the events, which took place in April, the demonstrations held in Tonismagi are considered as provocative undertakings which violated public order and instigated hatred among nations,” Paet told The Baltic Times.

“According to the Estonian Constitution everyone has the right to spread ideas, opinions and convictions. This right may only be restricted when detrimental to public order. According to the law it is also prohibited and punishable to instigate hatred and violence.”

Are these protesters inciting hatred and violating public order? Or are they simply standing in a park to mark their opposition to a government decision? Paet asserts that their actions could have led to further unrest, yet this remains a debatable point.

It is true that the activists violated the terms of their tourist visas, but in order to voice their opinion they had no choice. According Estonia’s Public Meeting Act, only citizens and permanent residents have the right to hold a demonstration. The right to hold protests – even legal peaceful ones – is not extended to foreigners. Non-citizens are allowed to take part in public meetings organized by Estonian citizens, but have no opportunity to apply to hold their own protest.

This puts Estonia out of line with several treaties to which it is a signatory, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights. Both extend the right to hold peaceful demonstrations to all people, not just citizens.

Human Rights Watch, a respected international lobby group, said states should only limit the right to freedom of speech in extreme circumstances.

"Nashi and its agenda may be anathema to the Estonian government and offensive to many people in Estonia, but the government can’t expel people solely for publicly expressing their views," said Rachel Denber, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Europe and Central Asia.

"In line with human rights law, a person should not be expelled simply for the expression and exercise of a protected right. If there are other grounds – for example, criminal acts – then that may be valid, but not for simply participating in a protest.

"Under Estonia´s human rights obligations, the right to protest must be enjoyed by all within the jurisdiction, including residents and visitors. If non-residents and visitors want to hold a protest, it would be appropriate to have regulations governing how they can apply, and what restrictions might apply."

An entirely different point of view is offered by Merle Haruoja, who operates the Estonian Institute for Human Rights. EIHR´s office is a small room in the National Library building which overlooks Tonismagi, the epicenter of the riots. Documents on Haruoja´s desk flap in the breeze that flows through a missing window pane. It was smashed by a flying stone during the riots and is yet to be fixed.

"I was here, I saw what happened," Haruoja say passionately, "I am an Estonian, I am a mother, I am a grandmother. I am worried about these Russian young people. They have been brainwashed."

From a strictly legal point of view, Haruoja agrees that all people have the right to voice their opinion. But in this circumstance, she believes the right course has been followed. "I have no problem with the legality of it, because they have an avenue to appeal the decision. They have international human rights courts they can appeal to. But as a person, I feel we have a responsibility to help these young people because they have been brainwashed. They are not told the truth about history."

Unequal treatment

Consider another recent situation - the Tallinn Pride gay parade. On Aug. 11, a large number of foreigners joined almost 400 Estonians on a colourful demonstration through Tallinn’s Old Town. What, in effect, is the difference between gay rights activists and Russian political activists?

Lisette Kampus, organizer of the Tallinn Pride parade, said the application of different standards to different people raised questions about Estonia´s democratic standards.

"You can imagine the reaction from the rest of the world if the same thing happened to people who come to our parade," Kampus said. "I don´t necessarily support those Nashi people, but I also didn´t agree with the idea of removing the statue – I think they missed the oportunity to do it fifteen years ago."

The Foreign Ministry said there was a legal difference between the gay marchers, who were taking part in a legally authorized public meeting, and Nashi members, who were not. But, as previously stated in this article, Russian Nashi activists have no legal avenue to apply to hold a demonstration.

Consider another scenario - how would Estonia react if the situation were reversed? Or if an Estonian young person were deported from another European nation for holding a silent protest?

Several Estonian citizens pointed out that Russia regularly surpresses protests within its territories. It should be then questioned whether Estonia should copy Russia’s human rights practices or set its own benchmark.

In the course of writing this article, The Baltic Times purposely avoided contacting Nashi or any other Russian activist group to avoid suggestions of undue influence.

Comments: Guestbook

Driver blind to road rules

Aside from riots, Estonia only makes world news with its 'quirky' stories. Every newspaper requires its daily injection of weird news from unheard-of places, and Estonia can always be counted on to deliver them. For all my attempts to produce serious think-pieces about society and geopolitical issues, people only seem interested in things that make them chuckle for a few seconds before heading off to work.
Here's this week's installation of "Only in Estonia":

Blind man caught drunk driving again

By Joel Alas, TALLINN

Tartu’s blind driver can’t see a problem with getting behind the wheel. For the second time in a week, Estonian police have caught the same blind man attempting to drive.

Just as amazing as his audacity is the revelation that the man, a 20-year old identified by police only as Kristjan, is the owner of the vehicle.

Kristjan was stopped at 5:20 a.m. on Aug. 11 as he attempted to drive through the town of Torvandi, near Tartu in southern Estonia. He was accompanied by three friends who were apparently directing his actions.

His actions were reminiscent of a scene from the 1992 film “Scent of a Woman”, in which Al Pacino’s blind character purchases and drives a Ferrari with the help of a young assistant. But unlike Pacino’s character, Kristjan was unable to talk his way out of punishment.

Police first noticed the vehicle because it was swerving across the road. A subsequent alcohol breath test found that Kristjan was drunk.

The same man was stopped in the early hours of Aug. 5 in Tartu, driving while drunk under the direction of an equally inebriated teenage passenger. He was issued a misdemeanour charge.

This time though, police intend to keep him off the road by requesting that a court impose the maximum sentence of 30 days in prison.

They will also apply to the court to confiscate his vehicle, an Audi 80. However police were unsure how or why he purchased a car in the first place.

Pärast Pidu Peo Pärast

Moo Who?

I've started filming a few mini docos using my little digital camera. Here's the first one - it's about the Juu Jaab music festival on Muhu island.
Comments: Guestbook

What's up with the name? See this old post: Joel Alas

A hitchhiker's guide to Saaremaa

“WHEN we saw your tent, we thought – ‘somebody very poor must live there’.” A tent like ours could only attract such disparaging comments in a place like Estonia. In a country that has raced to embrace all things new and shiny, the beauty of things odd and old is sadly overlooked.
That’s how I came to find the tent languishing in the dusty back corridors of a second hand center in Tallinn. Its previous owner had no doubt abandoned it in favor of one of those sleek and streamlined plastic tents, the kind that unfurl with a snap of the wrist and pop into place with a single peg.
This was no such space-aged camping facility. It failed every test of convenience. I was even unsure of its ability to resist the weather. It was an ancient house frame tent made of sun-worn canvas. Its roof was a faded green color, its sides bright stripes of orange, pink and white. Its flaps were held together not with zippers, but large wooden knobs. It looked like something from a comic book. I bought it on the spot for 150 kroons. Its destination – Saaremaa, Hiiumaa and Muhu, the largest of Estonia’s many mystical islands. Of course, island hospitality would see to it that we would only need the tent for three of nine nights. We would sleep in beds, on floors, in abandoned houses and in straw-soften attics most of the time. But when it was needed, the old tent stood the test.

I KEEP talking in the plural here – the “we” I refer to is me and Colin. Colin’s somewhat of a celebrity around Tallinn, thanks to his unmistakable crown of frizzy black hair. His ‘fro attracts attention wherever he goes. It certainly helped while hitchhiking around the islands – drivers slowed down just to gawk. We’re a decent match of traveling partners. Only a wry and dry Australian like me can absorb his thick Canadian sarcasm. I had enough of a grasp on the Estonian language to talk our way around the islands. He had enough outdoors know-how to ensure we don’t die in the process.
We jumped a ride out of Tallinn the day before Jaanipaev. Our driver insisted we set of early to avoid the midsummer traffic and steal a berth on the ferry. I don’t know how long we waited at the ferry dock – I was asleep in the back of the car the whole time. When I awoke we were already flying through the green country lanes of Saaremaa, and I felt energized by the memory of the place.
Saaremaa for me has always been the most special corner of Estonia. On the surface it seems dull and rural – green pastures, ramshackle houses, dirt roads and dubious sanitation. But it slowly traps you with its charms – its quirky residents, its old traditions, its idyllic tranquility and its dark legends. The island is so heavy with mysticism, it should have sunk by now.
I first came here one year ago to celebrate Jaanipaev with Keito and Tuuli, two friends I met in Tartu. Keito had just inherited a run-down old property from a dowager aunt, and the pair decided to eschew the bohemian art scene of Tartu in favor of a rural existence in the village of Leisi. The property hadn’t been occupied for years when they arrived. The door groaned open, the house gasped out a breath of musty air. The yard was a jungle of weeds, the well pump rusty and arthritic. It’s a very different house this summer. Keito and Tuuli have spent a year clearing the yards. They’ve knocked own a few walls, cleaned out the sheds, trimmed back the grass and fixed up the sauna. A year of island living seems to have done wonders for their wellbeing, too. I briefly contemplated following their footsteps.
We prepared for midsummer by gathering birch branches from the forest to make sauna switches. “They’re only good until Jaanipaev, then the leaves start to fall off,” Tuuli told us, “Lots of things in nature change after the longest day of the year.” The farmers, too, were preparing for a change in season. Our idle hands were quickly put to work by a nearby farmer, who had us lifting hay bales from his fields and into his lofts, and rewarded us with a hearty lunch of pork and potatoes.
Keito is one who shares our appreciation for rustic objects. He operates a bicycle workshop in one room of his shed, fixing up the Soviet-era rattlers that locals use to trundle around the village. They’re not bicycles, Keito insists, but “united pieces of bicycles”, built from the remnants of old frames and wheels. He lent us a pair of united pieces of bicycles and we set off the day after Jaanipaev with our backpacks strapped to their rickety skeletons. From Leisi it’s a short ride to Triigi, and from Triigi it’s a short ferry trip to Hiiumaa, Saaremaa’s northern neighbor. I wondered who else would use this ferry, a slow old boat that connects two thinly populated islands in the chilly north of the Baltic Sea. In this crowded corner of the planet, this forgotten ferry boat is a picture of isolation.

THIS is a public notice of thanks to the Finnish owners of a half-constructed summer house in the south of Hiiumaa – thanks for abandoning your property and leaving it as a shelter for wayward cyclists. We know you’re Finnish because of the lettering on the box of matches we borrowed from your house. We had to break into your house to get the matches, but don’t worry, we closed the window and set the latch so you’ll never know. In future, it would be nice if you left a couple of mattresses out for temporary squatters like us, but don’t worry, the ground was comfortable enough for one night. Please don’t return to your charming little cottage. The locals don’t seem to want you here, judging by all the anti-Finn attitude we encountered. And we might need to visit it again, because we were completely won over by Hiiumaa. If Saaremaa is one step back from everyday life, then Hiiumaa is two steps backward – a further degree of tranquility.
A herd of seafaring cows farewelled us at the ferry dock. They were wandering out to sea across the shallow waters, as island cows are wont to do. We chatted briefly with a few locals about the remoteness of the place. We reloaded our united pieces of bicycles and trundled on. We had a festival to get to.

THE main reason for our trip to the islands was Juu Jaab, the best kept secret on Estonia’s summer festival calendar. The festival has been running for eleven years now, but it doesn’t seem to have changed much in that time. Juu Jaab is three days of jazz, folk, funk, and world music on a paddock on Muhu island. It’s the best three days of partying across the whole summer, but don’t tell anyone or else it might get too popular.
Our little tent finally got put to work. We erected it with pride, flapping its bright colorful canvas open like a flag. It took some strategizing to keep it standing. We had to cut sticks into poles and whittle branches into pegs. We’d barely thrown the tarp over the top when the first drops of an impending storm began to fall. All through that first night, I was sure the tent would be blown away in the wind. It howled with the ferocity of a tropical storm, yet our ancient canvas shelter held fast.
In the camping ground at Juu Jaab we met Karl-Erik, another collector with an appreciation for retro. His object of pride wasn’t a tent but a car – a beautifully restored old Moskvitch 400. I thought Soviet car factories were only capable of pumping out boxy Ladas, but here was an elegant roadster that seemed like a set piece from a 1930s gangster film. When the Soviets took over East Germany, they laid claim to the Opel factory and began producing identical vehicles, Karl-Erik explained. It’s possible to find the dilapidated shells of Moskvitch 400s across the former socialist republics, but most require a fair amount of restoration. Both Karl-Erik’s car and our tent attracted plenty of attention. “Muy historico,” I heard one Spanish-speaking admirer exclaim to his wife as they gazed at its funky circus-colored canvas. Our campsite neighbors were sheltering in a slick plastic apparatus, and looked at us with some pity. “When we saw your tent, we thought – ‘somebody very poor must live there’,” one of the campers told us. We knew better. The battered old thing stood strong for three days, and barely a single mosquito or rain drop invaded its sides. The tent is scheduled for reappearance at the upcoming Viljandi Folk Festival. Drop by if you see it and say hello. This country is short of folk who admire a bit of Soviet retro.

Return to Oz

... For those who don't know, I've made an emergency dash back to Australia to take care of an emergency. A good friend of mine, the musician Ryan Toohey, was involved in a serious car accident. I'll be back in Eestimaa in early June.

Statistics turn Estonia into Elbonia

Last week Statistics Estonia released worrying figures about the level of pollution in Estonia. According to the colourfully-worded press release, the quantity of hazardous wastes produced in Estonia each year could cover the entire nation with a layer of 8cm of sludge.

With an 8cm coating of mud across the country, Estonia would start to resemble Elbonia, the fictional country invented by Dilbert writer Scott Adams to represent all 3^rd world countries. In the comic strip, the Elbonians wallow in mud up to their waists, enduring the exploitation of Dilbert’s evil corporation.

Unfortunately, the statisticians overstated things a bit. They put out a correction last week. “The metaphor used was wrong. The right figure is 0.008cm,” a sheepish Statistics Estonia admitted.

Only 0.008cm of mud? Why, with all the constant rain, poor guttering and careless littering, that’s practically what Estonia looks like anyway.

Estonia already suffers enough from being mistook for Elbonia (which some people do believe is a real country – see this disturbing thread of conversation, or this funny “travel diary”). Thanks to Statistics Estonia for furthering the confusion.

Comments: Guestbook

A night at the Valli Baar

It’s Thursday night and the Valli Baar is throbbing with its infamous atmosphere. Smoke thickens the air, the bar is alive with talk and laughter. Old men perch on stools sipping vodka, two musicians howl out folk songs in the corner.
There’s nothing fancy or pretentious about the Valli Baar. It’s a dive and proud of it. Little has been done to alter the look of the place since it opened circa 1969.
If the Tallinn Cultural Heritage Department has its way, nothing will be done to change it. The city has placed the bar under a heritage protection order. According to the city, the working class bar is as important as the Old Town’s church towers and cobbled streets.
Cultural Heritage Department head Boris Dubovik says the bar should be preserved because of its iconic style. “This is the last bar in the Old City with 1960s design. All other bars from this period have been rebuilt in a modern style,” he told The Baltic Times. “I am afraid that if there is money, they will rebuild this bar.”
Without such a protection order, it would only be a matter of time before the bar was gentrified with a flash interior and fancy light fittings. After all, it occupies a prime piece of Old Town real estate, sharing an intersection with two high class hotels, a racy nightclub and a cinema.
There’s no doubt about it, the Valli Baar is only suited to a certain type of drinker. I’ve brought dozens of visitors to the bar. Some have revelled in the rudimentary atmosphere, others have left without even finishing their drinks.
I’ve returned to the bar this Thursday to see what the locals think about their bar being protected.
“This bar has always been the same, it will always be the same,” says one cheery regular. He’s in his mid 30s, making him one of the youngest men at the bar.
He buys me and my friend a drink each - a milli mallikas (jellyfish), the house speciality. It’s a firey shot of tequila, sambuca and Tabasco sauce. It’s like an electric shock. We play a competition to see who can wait the longest before reaching for a sip of beer to cool our burning mouths.
The barman comes around with a tray of vodka glasses, handing them out complements of the house. We’re not sure of the occasion, but we slug the drink back anyway.
Two men in the corner are pumping out a soundtrack. One’s round and jolly, working the bellows of an accordion while his fingers walk up and down the keys. The guitar player is red-faced and straining, stretched with emotion as he sings. They’re playing old Estonian and Russian sing-a-longs, and the bar is singing along.
They throw the occasional translated foreign song in the mix – tonight it’s a version of the old Salvation Army rally song – “Cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women,” they sing in Estonian, “They’ll drive you crazy, they’ll drive you insane.”
There’s plenty of cigarettes and whiskey here, but the Valli Baar is missing one ingredient in the Salvation Army’s triumvirate of vice. Aside from my friend Aljona, the bar is void of women.
It’s not that sort of bar. The men don’t come here to chase skirts – they leave that to the teenagers at Club Hollywood across the road. No, they’re here to reminisce, associate and commiserate with their fellow men.
“When we first got married my wife wouldn’t let me come to this bar,” one local tells me. “Now, she just looks at me when I come home. She says ‘I know where you’ve been’.”
No doubt there’s changes ahead for the Valli Baar – the pending smoking law changes will hit hard. But at least something has been done to ensure these kind of priceless pieces of culture are preserved.

Life returns

Tissu

My first gig as a professional circus performer was on last Friday night. Performed a rocked-out tissu routine in a packed nightclub. Made a few mistakes, but they were too drunk to notice. Unfortunately security wouldn't allow my friend to film the show, but here's a training video of the same routine. It is supposed to be performed to the Muse song 'Newborn'. I hang around at the bottom until the heavy guitar part kicks in (you can't hear the song on this video, though. Just try humming it, I'm sure you all know the words).

The last of the ice fishermen

The river was slushy when I stepped out onto it. Large cracks were appearing in the softening ice, water had already pooled across it at some junctures.
Sunset on Sunday, Pirita River is crowded with ice fishermen in dark hooded jackets. They perch on small stools in front of small holes, jacking tiny fishing rods up and down at intervals like they suffer from nervous twitches, the lot of them. They barely catch anything, but since when was catching fish the purpose of fishing?
I ask one, in broken Eesti, if I can take his photograph. He shrugs a yes and keeps munching on his cigarette end as I snap away. The slushy ice seeps into my soft fabric shoes. I didn’t bother wearing my leather boots today – the snow has already all but melted away.
Winter is coming to a shrill end. Temperatures are back above 0. This may be the last weekend they can enjoy ice fishing for the year. The ice looks dangerous to me, but what do I know?
They closed the ice roads last weekend. Two roads were marked out across the frozen sea to allow locals to drive out to the islands. There’s only a few rules when driving on ice – keep your seatbelt off, and don’t drive at 50km. At that speed, rumour has it, a motor vehicle sends dangerous vibrations through the ice at a frequency that can cause the concrete surface to rupture.
I never got to drive on the ice, though. The roads were only open for three weeks this winter. I’ll have to come back next year.

Naistepaev

The Soviets weren't evil 100% of the time. One nice left-over from those communist days is Naistepaev, Women's Day. The Soviets were big on female equality, at least on one day of the year. Women's Day was a big event then, and still is today - unlike in Australia where it gets cursory attention. Flower kiosks do a roaring trade, the whole city is flooded with colour and smiles.

Slovakia: Snow's great, shame about the food

It’s a worrying indicator of culinary quality when Estonians begin complaining about bland food. Estonians, of all people, mass consumers of potatoes and pork, the land that spice forgot. But here in Slovakia the cuisine is even more tasteless, at least, according to one bus load of Estonians who were forced to stomach it for a week.
The irony of the situation was lost on everyone except me, the sole Australian on board the bus. I found Slovakian food to be quite bearable, but only because my palate had been numbed after a year on an Estonian diet. More sour cream and dill, anyone?

But the purpose of our trip to Slovakia wasn’t food. It was snow. Or more accurately, it was mountains. Estonia has plenty of the former and none of the latter. To enjoy the qualities of both snow and mountains combined, Baltic residents are increasingly taking the long drive south to more geographically diverse locations.
Slovakia is by far the most popular ski holiday destination for Estonians. While Finland is closer, Slovakia is cheaper. Much cheaper. So cheap that even Estonians can feel like the privileged holders of a valuable currency, for a change. After years of enduring smug British travellers throwing kroons about like confetti, Estonians can finally enjoy a similar experience. One Eesti kroon is worth about two Slovakian koruna. A pint of beer across the bar, for instance, costs 30 koruna – that’s 15 Eesti kroon, a cheap lager in anyone’s language.
Somehow I didn’t manage to save any money, though. When drinking cheap alcohol, a strange levelling mechanism comes into play. Because it costs less to drink, I feel liberated to drink more. At the end of the night, I am far more drunk, yet still just as broke. There’s an economic thesis buried in that concept, I’m sure.
The drinking started very early on in the trip. At about 7am, to be precise. That’s the hour that our chartered bus pulled out of Tallinn. Our crossing of the city limits was celebrated by the opening of a beer can somewhere in the back rows of the bus, and from that moment our coach became a bar on wheels.
Alcohol is highly necessary when attempting to endure such a monotonous journey. The countrysides of Latvia and Lithuania are passably pretty, but Poland is an industrial wasteland with not a redeeming feature in sight. Our tour leader played some B-grade DVDs to break the boredom. I managed to read two novels and angle myself into a decent sleeping position (I snored loudly, my unhappy fellow travellers told me later).

But the scenery changed the moment we crossed the Polska-Slovensko border. Clearly the cartographers drew a line where the grey swap of Poland ended and the mountains of Slovakia commenced. “You can keep that,” the Slovakians must have shouted to the cabbage-munching Poles as they slammed down the border gate.
Slovakia is stunningly beautiful. The mountains rise swiftly, nestling tiny villages in their folds. Each turn of the road revealed yet another hilltop village with a church tower in the center. The nation’s emergence from Soviet poverty is still a work in progress. The main highway is nothing more than a narrow road that detours through the main streets of the villages, yet the construction of bridges and bypasses is visibly underway.
We arrived at our hotel, the oddly-named Hotel Jamaica, a four-level concrete block that exists as a museum of Soviet-era hospitality. Nothing has been altered in the hotel for thirty years, it seems. The funky bulbous glass light fittings aren’t retro, they’re original. Same goes for the beds and the bathrooms. It was comfortable, all the same. We weren’t expecting five-star.
The hotel became our home and our prison. Located on a hilltop overlooking a beautiful lake, it was certainly a picturesque setting, but at the same time a horribly isolated one. The nearest town was an expensive cab ride away, so our only option for an après ski beverage was the hotel bar. Our nights were mostly spent crowded around the hotel’s ping-pong table, queuing for the sole internet-connected computer or surfing between Slovakia’s three television channels (the rooms were fitted with colour TVs, I noted with quiet surprise).
The hotel restaurant was our only option for food. In any monopoly, quality is the first element to be sacrificed. Or in this case, flavour. My fellow Estonians weren’t subtle with their complaints about the food. We ate every breakfast and dinner at that restaurant for a week, yet I can’t distinguish one meal from the other. I am fairly certain that the strange soft-textured sausages that I passed over at breakfast one morning found their way into the soup that same night. Another evening, our soup was stocked with a fine sprinkling of noodles and a slither or two of carrot. “I think they only used one carrot and one packet of noodles between all thirty of us,” my fellow traveller Leis suggested. Some folk resorted to assembling sandwiches in their rooms. I happily ate the leftovers my tablemates left untouched.
The Hotel Jamaica did have one redeeming feature, an expansive sauna and hot tub room. The sauna, of course, was not hot enough for the Estonians (is any sauna ever hot enough for these people?), but I found it to be steamy enough. Better still, the sauna room was equipped with a window big enough to climb through to enjoy a roll through a pile of snow, followed by a mad dash back to the hot tub.

But enough about the hotel, the food and the bus ride. They were mere distractions on our quest for “powder” – that illusive blanket of fresh soft snow that every skier hopes to carve a track through. We were all concerned about the snow quality, given the unusually warm winter. The slopes of Slovakia were green and bare in early January, but thankfully they were coated in snow by the time we arrived.
For a full six days, Slovakia offered up its best skiing conditions. The days were sunny and warm, blue skies above and soft snow bellow. I remember laughing to myself as a slid across a hillside, my jacket open to the sunshine, a vista of mountain ranges spread before my eyes. These were moments of pure snowboarding perfection.
Each day our bus delivered us to a different ski resort. Slovakia seems to have hundreds of ski spots. Many of them are quite small, with only one or two chairlifts, several tows and half a dozen different runs. They might have become boring, but thankfully we visited new mountains each day.
Our best day was had at Kubinska Hola, a relatively small ski field, but one with a very enjoyable long and wide run. Jasna also provided a great day on the mountain. Jasna is by far Slovakia’s biggest ski field, with a north and south face to explore. It can get quite crowded, though, and the lines at the chairlifts were as long as Disneyworld queues. A few of us ventured off-piste in search of adventure. We found a little too much adventure when the inexperienced among us (okay, me) became buried in the meter-deep powder and had to be dragged out by a passing skier.

On the whole, Slovakian mountains seem better suited to intermediate and beginners. Experts might become a little bored, given that the mountains aren’t huge and have a limited number of runs. Snowboarders will also feel out of place. Whereas ski fields in New Zealand, Australia, the US and Canada have a 50-50 split of both skiers and snowboarders, European mountains are dominated by pole-pushers. Slovakia, in particular, caters nearly exclusively for skier. At one mountain rental shop, I found only two snowboards for hire in the entire store.
Like the rest of Slovakia, the mountains are cheap. Day passes cost between 500 and 700 koruna, or 250 to 350 Eesti kroon. Food and drink on the mountains came at a bargain price (though, of course, the Estonians complained about the bland food on the mountain, too). The price of renting gear was about the same as the lift passes.
If I was to return to Slovakia, I would probably opt out of the tour package and organize it myself. I would find a cheap hotel or apartment in the town of Ruzomberok, which seems to be Slovakia’s central ski town, from where it is easy to catch buses to numerous ski slopes. But I don’t think I’ll return to Slovakia, as nice as it was. The mountains of Georgia sound much more exciting, and even cheaper than Slovakia. The food, at least, can’t possibly be worse.

Comments: Guestbook

February too cold to March

First, they complained that the winter wasn’t cold enough. Now it’s too cold for them to get out of bed and wave a flag.
Saturday was Estonia’s Independence Day. A big deal in a country that fought for fifty years to be free. For sixteen years they have celebrated Independence Day by holding a military march in Vabaduse Valjak, Freedom Square.
There I was, all ready to drag myself out of bed through the chilly dawn to help my adopted country give a big finger to the Soviets.
Except this year, the commander of the military decided to cancel the parade. It’s too cold, he says.
Too cold? It’s only -17C. Ever since I have arrived, these Estonians have been boasting about enduring winter chills of -35C. For them, -17C should be t-shirt weather. And if the army can’t march in cold weather, what do they do during a war? Too cold to fight, sorry. We’ll be at home sipping vodka.
I attempted to celebrate, but this year nobody seemed in the mood. Strange reaction from a nation that is usually so patriotic it hurts.
(The photo is of some little girl named Olga. She was the only person I could find waving a flag at Freedom Square – which is the big empty space behind her. I hope Olga’s mother doesn’t think I’m creepy for posting her picture on the web).

Ice sculptures in Tallinn

Architecture in Tallinn

I’ve been interviewing a lot of white-haired old men lately. Old men really have a lot of interesting things to say. Last month it was Juri Arrak, Estonia’s most famous artist. More recently I sat down with Raine Karp, the nation’s most loved and hated architect. The Estonian equivalent of Harry Seidler, if you like.

Karp designed some of Tallinn’s most contentious buildings during the Soviet time, such as the Linnahall (which I wrote about before – see the blog entry bellow). He used a lot of limestone and concrete, so his buildings at first view look monstrous, grey and foreboding. But spend a few months living around these buildings and you’ll see a more human side to them. As one friend explained, “They are the only thing that is uniquely Estonian. Every other kind of building design has been borrowed from somewhere else.”

Karp agreed to meet me at his home studio. I took along my cousin Johanna – an architecture student - to help translate.

I was interested in how much of his work was controlled by Communist headquarters. Surprisingly, he told me that architects enjoyed complete artistic freedom under Communism. In fact, he believes architecture is more stifled under capitalism.

“Creativity was easier then than it is now,” he told me, “Today, money talks. In Soviet time, there was no money, and the land belonged to the government. Now, land owners are very hard people. Back then we had no materials or building quality, but creativity was much freer then, and there was actually less bureaucracy. It seems crazy to say it today, but it was.”

You can read the complete story here.

Walking with sticks-on-feet

Cross-country skiing – it’s all the pain, suffering and humiliation of downhill skiing, minus the conveniences of chairlifts and gravity.
My cousin Johanna dragged me out of bed early on Saturday to go skiing. With no mountains to speak of, Estonians compensate by building innumerable ski tracks through the forests. It’s all very beautiful and serene, with snow covered pine trees and the quiet shush of snow. The serenity is broken, however, by the huffing and cursing of an incompetent Australian stuck on the trail with no concept of how to move forward.
To me, cross-country skiing is like walking with big sticks on your feet. I see little point to the exercise, however I am willing to give it a second go.I sucked at ice skating on my first attempt (I was afraid I would fall over and someone would slice off my splayed fingers with the blade of their skate) but I seem to have improved since. Soon I’m off to Slovakia for a week of snowboarding. My winter sports skills are slowly building.

Vote 1 Leather

Election time in Estonia. The town is flooded with corny political advertising posters.
Here's my favourite. That's all leather, baby, right down to the boots. He's even wearing a thick gold chain.
The slogan, roughly translated, reads "You can trust me". As if anyone could ever fail to trust a man in leather and bling.

Comments: Guestbook