Russian Carrots

by Rachel Kruft Welton

Tallinn, if people can place it on a map at all, has a reputation as a great place to go for a stag weekend. Finns and Britons alike descend on the numerous bars and restaurants in the city centre to quaff astounding amounts of the local beer before staggering drunkenly through the historic streets. Arriving in Estonia’s capital city with small children in tow gives a very different perspective on the city. Serious drinking is out, for a start, but there are plenty of other things to do instead.

Tallinn boasts a dozen hostels and many more hotels. Many are conveniently situated close to the Old Town. Even those further out have accessible transport links into the city centre. Prices range from around £12.50 for a basic backpackers’ hostel, right up into the hundreds of pounds for the most exclusive hotels. As we were working on a budget, we decided to stay with friends. Katharina and Erko’s place is a community house. People come and go, everyone chips in, guests stay for days, weeks or months as they wish and the door is rarely locked. Every evening there is a big meal and people come from all over the neighbourhood to help eat it. There's a pot for donations and somehow it all seems to work out. Certainly it is a friendly and welcoming place to stay - a bit like a hostel, but with regulars.

Our bedroom was in the attic, where half the floor was boarded. There were a dozen mattresses for the endless stream of visitors and couchsurfers. The light came in through the planking on the gable end, so I imagine it is bitter in winter. Fortunately, we had nothing but sunshine, which was handy for trying to get the enormous loads of washing dry.

Granted, it still needed some work doing to it. There were some missing floorboards and the walls needed plastering. One wall was coated in 1930s newspapers, yellowed with age. I wonder who stuck up that small bit of insulation 80 years ago. The infrastructure is a little dodgy in places. An old man tapped on the window behind me, and motioned for me to open it. When I did, the window fell off its frame and bashed him on the head.

We set up camp in the attic, with a German and a pair of Aussies. In the main room, after the big meal, they set up a screen on one wall and projected the film Best in Show onto it. The audience sat on lined up sofas and the kids rolled on bean bags at the front. Jürgen, the tortured Finnish poet, got very drunk, and spent the night snoring loudly on one of the sofas.

The day dawned bright and sunny. The house was its usual hive of activity. My children wrote songs and put little dance routines to them. Some of them were quite entertaining. I guess they'd been seeing too many street performers because I glanced out of the window to see them dancing on the street corner with a small pot for money in front of them. What was even worse was that some passer-by had given them 10 EEK (about 60p) for their performance.

The main centre was 30 minutes walk away from the commune. It is quite a pleasant walk - wooden houses and quiet suburbs, as well as nice parks and green spaces. Tallinn doesn't feel crowded until you get to the tourist areas. In the centre there are half a dozen old streets criss-crossing, with several squares opening out. The medieval town wall runs round most of the city, still, tall and solid looking.

The tourist map mentioned some cool places to go, so we used it as a guide. The secret tunnels stretching under the city required a tour, so we promised to come back later. They run underneath a 500 year old round fortification tower known as Kiek in de Kök. This is not as painful as it sounds, translating as ‘Peep in the Kitchen’. It is named because the guards had a birds’ eye view into the kitchens of the nearby houses.

The Danish King's Garden, next on our tourist map, was just a few stone walled raised beds. The walk along the wooden walkway turned out to be a climb up some steps onto the city wall and a view of the town blocked by the trees in the Danish King's Garden. I can't believe we paid £2 each for that.

A picturesque alley took us down into the old city centre, where the stores were cashing in on their Hanseatic heritage. Wenches in costume manned the stalls selling everything from mulled wine to Baltic knitted socks.

Opposite the pink parliament building is a stunning Russian church. The ostentatious minarets blossom amidst brightly gilded panels depicting saints. Estonia gained independence from the former USSR in 1991. Since then it has slowly been finding its cultural feet and attempting to throw off the occupation years. Throughout the Baltic States, I found the Russian legacy was, at best, tolerated and, at worst, despised. Estonians do not define themselves as part of the former USSR. They had their own culture and identity before occupation in 1944, and they keep it still, despite attempts to eradicate non-Soviet ways of life.

The ornate church in the centre of Tallinn is a reminder of the past, but in many ways incongruous. Displaced Russians form their own community within Tallinn and there is less integration than you might think. The Russians speak Russian and the Estonians speak Estonian, despite only recently having the language reintroduced into schools as an official subject. Indeed, the transition to teaching subjects in Estonian rather than Russian is still underway. As recently as 2007, students could only study subjects such as geography or music in Russian, not in their native language.

We stopped for some pizza in a small shady courtyard, with pigeons that cleared any unattended plates. We had been recommended the Russian Market, as an insight into the Russian way of life. It took us a while to trudge up there, and it was disappointing. It was a bit of a car boot sale, but without the cars or any hope of finding treasure. Second-hand clothes jostled with unappealing dusty bottles of toiletries. Some old women had stalls selling home-grown produce - a pile of cucumbers, a couple of jars of pickles, or a hand-embroidered cushion cover, for example. I bought a bundle of home-grown Russian carrots as a token gesture.

Tallinn boasts an Olympic-sized swimming pool, just out of the town centre. The whole complex has fabulous facilities - sunbeds, gyms, saunas, water slides, jacuzzis and beauty treatments. My kids and I tried out the ‘black out, super scary’ slide, the ‘toss you round all over the place’ slide and the ‘send water up your nose’ slide. I swam a dozen lengths of the 50m pool before deciding it was just too big. I needed a sauna to get over it.

There was one last place to visit. About half an hour outside Tallinn is a well-hidden waterfall on the River Jägala. The Baltics are amazingly flat. I think the highest peak is just about 320m. The road map I was using marked any hill over 90m tall, which just goes to show. Most rivers flow so slowly across these slopeless plains, that many national parks are lakes and wetlands.

Consequently, it is amazing that the River Jägala actually has an 8m drop in its limestone bed. The water thunders down, brown and churned, with white, foamy spray. You can see rainbows in the spray, which is kind of cool. The kids ran about trying to catch the spray.

The waterfall is not signposted, and maybe half a dozen other people had managed to find it while we were there. Given its secluded spot, we wondered how many other English people have seen it.

We finished our stay by cooking an enormous stir fry for the commune. They said ‘cook for 20’ but I think there must have been more. Great urns of rice and vegetables disappeared rapidly. Those Russian carrots came in handy after all.

First published in VISA 88 (Dec 2009)