Month: April 2007

Just back in England after a trip by train to Tallinn via Berlin and Warsaw. Faultless journey at every point, until now. National Rail have decided that we have no business travelling when they don’t want us to, and have shut the railway between Three Bridges and Brighton. So my welcome home is a 45 minute bus ride with loads of luggage and two exhausted kids.

Britain’s railways: the envy of the world (except every other country in Europe).

So, a few days in Tallinn with Daryl’s stag party, and I’m not sure what to make of it really. The Old Town has lovely architecture and has been well restored. Particularly worth visiting is Toompea – the historic fortress hill at the centre of the city – with its two viewing platforms looking out over the lower town.

Overall, though, I didn’t find Tallinn as appealing as Rīga, perhaps because Tallinn’s centre of business activity has moved outside the old town, leaving the old town as a fairly quiet place of restaurants, cafes and souvenir shops. In Rīga, the main business of the city still seems to take place in and around the old city centre. This means that Tallinn is a bit EveryHansa while Rīga has more of a spirit of its own.

Another factor may be that the Latvian language, though very different to Polish, is still marginally more familiar-looking than Estonian. I find it quite discomforting to be in a country where I don’t speak a word of the language and can’t even recognise words on signs.

Of course, experiencing a city with eight other blokes is different from wandering round on your own (though I did a bit of that). We had the main formal dinner of the trip at Karl Friedrich, a “pepper restaurant”, on the Town Hall Square. I assume that pepper is their main ingredient, although in the set menu we enjoyed there was not that much of it: smoked salmon (far too salty); pork (with chopped red peppers, in a perfect delicate cream sauce), and finally some sort of ice-cream that was more vanilla than pepper. The interior was very elegant and comfortable but the music (including a rasping cover of Atomic) didn’t really go with the setting.

Otherwise, we did some usual stag weekend things: shot guns with the friendly and amusing Mr Death Shooting Academy, played poker (very successfully from my point of view), and had a cultural walking tour in the freezing cold wind.

One last thought on Latvia. I wasn’t there for long, but in all that time I saw 1 (one) sign in Cyrillic, a modern sign on some sort of educational institution next to the hotel. Given that the USSR annexed the country for 50 years from 1939, and Latvia had been under Russian imperial control from 1720 to 1918, I was amazed that there weren’t any inscriptions, old signs or public pieces of writing in Russian, particularly since (as mentioned in an earlier post) Latvian is still a minority first language in Rīga. There was one in German – which must have dated from before 1700 – but nothing in Russian. I wonder how prevalent Russian was pre-1991, and how quickly the language moved over to Latvian primacy. I remember reading that there was a controversial law mandating Latvian-language signage a few years back, but as far as I’m aware that didn’t mandate the removal of Russian signs.

Into Tallinn by coach, and there was some fantastic domestic architecture on the way in. A couple of great modern houses, one with a glass front wall with bookshelves, so the view from the street was the stairs up and the pages of the books. I’ll have one like that please (I may try and get back there for a photo while I’m here). For anyone else visiting Tallinn, the area I’m talking about is on Vabaduse pst., out of town from number 113 or so.

The centre of Tallinn, at least the part I’ve seen so far, is a bit less impressive. More ringroadery than I saw in Riga, but that’s just the very first impression.

Arrived in the hotel – the very Soviet-looking Reval Park – to find that there had been a problem at the tour operator’s end and they’d upgraded me to a big corner room in the very swish and capitalist Radisson SAS overlooking the old town. If you are ever staying there, I heartily recommend room 922.

Onto a coach again for the journey from Rīga to Tallinn, this time by daylight so I can see a bit more of the countryside. It’s a great trip – seeing the towns and villages you pass through is one of the few benefits of coach travel – along the Via Baltica, the EU-funded road that runs from the Lithuanian/Polish border up to Tallinn. It’s two-lanes all the way, which makes the modern coaches swerve around quite a lot as they overtake Soviet-era trucks.

Scenery description after the jump.

Continue reading “Rīga to Tallinn”

The Guardian’s commitment to the environment has always stopped short of its Saturday Travel section (“Inside: Fly to China!, next week: Fly to the Pacific!”) but it now appears that its commitment to social justice and income equality stops there too.

An unwelcome recent arrival in the travel section is something called the “Business Travellers’ Diary”, written by one Max Levene. Mr Levene describes himself as a management consultant, and he’s either a very good one or has a private income, because every column so far (here’s one example) has reeked of luxury and smugness. Five star hotels, exclusive membership clubs, and of course all those thousands of miles farting CO2 into the atmosphere, lovingly detailed at the head of the column every week like a cross between Mr. Potter and Bridget Jones. Before writing this I spent twenty minutes trying to work out whether it was actually very convincing satire.

I don’t mind wealth porn existing, I just want it to stay where it belongs: in the pages of Hello magazine and the FT’s How to Spend It section – though given the profile of FT readers, perhaps the latter is more a wealth Kama Sutra. And yes, I know I could just turn the page and move on, but there’s something disheartening about this appearing in the Guardian without acknowledgement of how out of touch with most people’s reality it is, or the massive dissonance between this and the paper’s wider political positions.

I don’t object to Mr Levene having such a wonderful life, though I do object to his flying so much. I just don’t feel the need to hear about it, or for it to be held up as the sort of thing one should aspire to. We may be heading back to the Gilded Age in this country, and I don’t do too badly myself, thanks, but at least the Carnegies and Rockefellers took the train from time to time.

My favourite crass advice (source):

Downsizing? Cutting costs? Don’t be fooled, flying economy is a catastrophe. Fly business in Europe; and try to fly first for long haul.

Thanks, Max, I’m sure I can find that extra two grand or so just lying around behind the sofa.

A short stay in Rīga on my way to Tallinn, at the historic and central Metropole, across the road from the train and coach station.

On first sight, I’m really liking Rīga. It feels quite Scandinavian, even though the Latvians are Slavs. The old city centre has been thoroughly pedestrianised and is a great place for strolling around. Some spectacular mediaeval buildings, and a hideous Soviet monstrosity that now houses the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia.

A few random thoughts and things I’ve picked up:

• Latvian is a very odd looking language: I’ve not seen diacritics on ‘K’s before. Just because I worked out how to do it on Unicode, the sort of letters I’m talking about are the long ‘A’s and other vowels like in Rīga, the softened consonants like ḷ, ṇ and ḳ. I like that, it gives a script character.
• Fewer than half the population of the large cities are ethnically Latvian
• Because of that last, you hear a lot of Russian around on the streets, which is pretty much the only reminder of the fact that this used to be part of the Soviet Union (well, that and a grotesque monument to the Red Riflemen – some sort of pro-Communist militia – by the Town Hall)
• Latvia’s article on Wikipedia has a (short) Scottish language edition
• When Latvia was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, the leader of the time (one of the many Central/East European inter-war strongmen) didn’t even issue a diplomatic protest
• Rīga has loads of excellent cafés and some very plush-looking shops

I had dinner at a restaurant called Nostalǵija (those accents again) on Kaḷḳu iela, which served up a beer, a pot of tea (because I couldn’t pronounce the word for kasza correctly) and a local speciality which was essentially meat pierogi in rosół with mushrooms. Very tasty and an absolute steal at under a tenner.