Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

I can tell its going to be a good Christmas this year because first of all; being in a country where you don’t under stand a word around you makes you sort of immune the Christmas Craze which tries to grab at you back ready in mid-November back in Denmark. As in so many other many ways the Estonians are very pragmatic when it comes to celebrating jõulud! In the start of December you could still see people beginning to decorate Tallinn with lights and Christmas stuff, something that would have been finished weeks ago in Denmark. Often when it’s finally Christmas Eve in Denmark, yours Christmas spirit is already used up and diluted beyond its prime.

Secondly, for the first time in five years I have no exams in December or January. Hallelujah, it’s almost surreal! Nothing can distract me from building up and nurture that jolly Christmas spirit.

Thirdly, Tallinn is an excellent place to wrap that jolly Christmas spirit up into a good old fashioned Christmas mood, which everybody secretly longs for, and many people tries to kick-start with their rampart shopping sprees. The Old Town itself sets a picturesque frame for a romantic and nostalgic Christmas, far removed from the flashy consumerism, which seems to be a large part of the soul of Christmas back in the Kingdom. The snow is of course always whither on the neighbours lawn, but Christmas just seems less hysterical and more dignified here. Of course there are the throngs of Christmas tourists and the Town Hall Square marked here in Tallinn, but even their many eager herds cannot such up that Harry Potter atmosphere which saturates Old Town.

And of course fourthly and not to forget, I’m looking very much forward to get home to Kasper, my family and my friends.

Merry X-mas everybody

Slide Shows

My father used to have, or still has, an old fashioned slide projector for analogue photos dating back from the 70’s I think. As a kid I used to love sitting in the darkness before his big collapsible screen, watching pictures sliding by to the hypnotic buzzing sound of the machine and the regular whirring and clicking sound of its mechanics. The slide projector was only brought out on special occasions, often around Christmas. Usually our family would watch brightly lit photos from the previous holidays - each a postcard from last summer, which reanimated warm and vividly coloured memories. Sometimes we would also watch the almost unreal photos of my parents, taken when they were younger, before my sister and I arrived. These persons I had never met, but they seemed to echo my parents in unbelievable ways. Memories of the world that had existed before I had, and memories, which were mine and not mine.

I’m still very fond of thinking back to these occasions, these memories of past memories

But alas, nowadays nobody uses such equipment. A modern video projector or LCD-screen is simply not as cosy as an old-fashioned slide projector. There is something sterile and soulless in modern digital photos. They do not portray something analogue to a memory, but only a digital version, a fragmented version. Once again progress has ripped the soul out of an utility, drowned it in efficient design and killed its potential for nostalgia.

But here are some pictures from my recent vacations in Vilnius and St Petersburg anyways. One of them is, and one of them was in Eastern Europe. Both are interesting cities but also extremely different from each other. I won’t go into much detail because a picture tells more than a thousand words, as you know!

From Vilnius

Party mood after some very silly mojitos in a Coyote Ugly rip-off bar.

Street life in Vilnius on a rainy Sunday.

Caught in the KGB-dungeon in Vilnius. A quite scary place.

Even the designated guide can be in need of advice where to go? Praise the Lonely Planet.

From St. Petersburg

The Church on Spilled Blood, build where Tsar Alexander II was blown to smithereens in 1881 by Peoples Will terrorists. A study in ornamental opulence and gold, now you know why Russians are so fond of gold and bling bling.

Inside the Church on Spilled Blood. You can tell I really liked it!

The Stroganov family palace. Here the family chef invented Beef Stroganof!

The Peter and Paul Fortress with the golden spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral. This is where St Petersburg was founded, 304 years ago.

The final resting place for the last Tsarina Dagmar, a former Danish princess, within the Peter and Paul Cathedral. To here she was moved in 2006 from Denmark and and reburied.

Me, Kasper and Jessica. I went to summer school with Jessica in Shanghai and met her 3 months later by chance in Peter and Paul Fortress in Russia. What a small world!

The fabulous Winter Palace in the sunset. A true Kodak Moment. Its bling bling exterior and interior now houses parts of the world known Hermitage Museum.

Dvortsovaya Square seen from the Winter Palace with the yellow Staff Headquarters its double Arc of Triumph the background.

An amazing hallway in the Winter Palace with incredible paintings from the bible in the ceiling.

The beautiful and grand Jordan or Ambassador Stairway in baroque style within the Winter Palace.

Autumn blues

Today the network of the embassy crashed, which means that there is no intra- or internet or emails. The embassy is almost hermetically cut off. No work can be done, as the churning streams of information comes to a sudden halt, except clearing out old emails. Not even the usual overspringshandlinger (a Danish word for an action you do to avoid doing something else) can be done. Usually I will almost autistically tjeck out the news sites, my email, my facebook etc. Now all I can do is to rotate on my chair, make tea and look out of the window into the rainy and gloomy lead-coloured sky, which seems to hover just above the autumn treetops of Hirve Park.

I begin to contemplate on how dependent Western societies are on information technologies nowadays. I can’t imagine how my work could have been done just 15 years ago without the easiness of contacting and coordination people and doing information searching through the wires. Now we take this infrastructure for granted, as a part of everyday life. It’s a cliché, but its also true and it’s a bit scary. Especially when one is living in Estonia which last spring experienced the most severe example of cyber warfare yet encountered by any country. But no need to get heavy just because the sky is the colour of lead!

Autumn seems to be speedier in Estonia than in Denmark. Every day the trees outside the office windows are dressed in a bit more yellow and orange. Or perhaps I only fool myself into thinking it’s speedier because it’s an overspringshandling which I would not be able to do in the study hall at the university - contemplating on the colour of the foliage. Every day more leaves are lying on the lawn and less is hanging on the threes. And every day Andrus, the caretaker, can start scooping up the leaves again, like another Sisyphus. And every morning it’s definitely just a bit harder to get up and out of the bed. Every day, as the day shortens itself with a just few minutes, sleeping time lengthens a bit more. Lately the bathroom has turned into a serious bottleneck in the apartment, because all three of us wait until the last possible minute to get up and take a shower. We keep getting later and later at work. It’s heavy.

Work wise some of the early enthusiasm has also faded a bit as autumn blues and the hum drum of routines kick in. The tasks are still interesting most of the time, but the glossiness of being an intern at an embassy is certainly a bit worn by now. Or perhaps it is the 37-hour working week, which is beginning to catch up with the happy student?

Luckily it’s Friday today and I have the next week off. My parents are coming tomorrow, and I will go to Sct. Petersburg on Wednesday and meet with Kasper. It’s going to be nice. And what do you know? The Internet is working again. Huzzah.

Trip to Osmussaar

The embassy staff went on a teambuilding trip on the 14th of September. Instead of the traditional go-to-a-cabin-and-drink-and-eat-for-a-weekend it was decided that we should go on a one day trekking excursion to the remote island of Osmussaar, which lies one and a half hours drive and 45 minutes sailing from Tallinn.

The only way to get from the mainland to Osmussaar is to charter a boat. The embassy had chartered a small fishing boat, which seemed barely able to traverse the waves we encountered en route. The skipper was not impressed by the size of the waves and hardly found them worth mentioning, even though people were being thrown back and forth in the little cabin. In any case I puked my guts out on the way back and forth.

After surviving the first leg of the journey and kissing ground after the landfall, we were faced with the big question of where to go. For such a small island of six square kilometres and two inhabitants Osmussaar had surprisingly many roads and signposts, pointing in every direction. After a bit of parley we toddled along one of the gravel roads between juniper shrubberies, succulent weeds and heather. Here and there bogs and small lakes reflected the crystal blue September-sky. The landscape had a harsh quality to it which the advancing autumn did nothing to soften. We were not alone, that was clear. Everywhere there were small piles of poo of a size which I was sure no rabbit could produce. And yes, soon we started to encounter sheep which blocked the trail in front of us until they chickened out and bounced away, bleating stupidly. Some of the rams had some really nasty horns.

Soon we encountered a small ruined church, hidden among the ground hugging trees, which had served the 140 Swedish-Estonians living on Osmussaar before they fled during the Second World War. The church had been hit by bombs during the war. The tower was now the only part left which kept the surrounding graves company.

According to one legend Odin, the chief god of the Vikings, is buried here, hence its Swedish name Odensholm. But the only thing which seems to be buried here besides Swedish farmers are rusty Soviet war machines and bunkers en masse. Beneath the heather and shrubbery, brown and bend metal was betraying the calmness and pristineness of the island. Ventilationshafts and half flooded entrances led down into the dark concrete burrows of long gone Soviet soldiers.

After an hours worth of trekking we came to the home of the sole inhabitant of Osmussaar. An old man and woman greeted us in front of their tiny house. The lived of the sheep and by seeing after the land for the state. Their home was surrounded my small half-buried building which included their sauna, cold cellar and outdoor toilet. They also had a satellite dish which I suspect might be their only entertainment during wintertime. In front of the house lay an old torpedo. Anybody who has seen “Dr. Strangelove” will understand this picture.

The old man took us to a nearby platform of a never completed soviet long-range canon. Operational, it was supposed to be able to reach targets 36 kilometres away. The Russians had used the scorched earth tactics and blown the canon up when they deserted Osmussaar in the face of the advancing German army. Now all that remained was half broken concrete and a vast hole filled with intricate but corroded metal constructs.

In the end we reached the lighthouse at the opposite tip of the island from where we had landed. The coast was much more dramatic here than on the other side, rising straight from the sea. Here we stopped and ate before we turned home. All in all a very enjoyable day, except for the puking.

Dinner Guests

This Friday afternoon the working routines were briefly disrupted at the embassy when four dinner guests arrived. Or to put it more correctly, they were “guests” in the sense that they were not supposed to be there, and “dinner” in the sense that they were to be boiled and eaten that evening. For some reason a delivery service delivered four big, blue and lively lobsters at the Danish embassy instead of the German embassy, much to the bewilderment of the chef, who seemed quite sad when the mistake was discovered. So for an hour or so the lobsters scrabbled around in their white Styrofoam box in the stairwell, ignorant of their faith and objects of a mixture of amusement and pity by the rest of the employees.

Architecture in Helsinki

After invitation from the TDA (Tallinn Diplomatic Association) my Danish roommate Laura and my Norwegian roommate Hanne and yours truly decided to go on the announced daytrip to Helsinki, Tallinn’s sister capital on the other side of the Gulf of Finland on Sunday the 24th of August.

We left from Tallinn harbour in the morning, just making it aboard a few minutes before the ferry left. I quickly turned seasick and was much relived when we reached Helsinki one and a half hours later.

After a bus trip around the city, which was very touristy and not very interesting, we were dropped of at the Helsingin tuomiokirkko also known as Helsinki Cathedral. A beautiful and simple cathedral in a neo-classical style by the one side of Senate Square and the end of a very steep stairway.

The hilly and watery terrain and the ether of decay and time’s toll, which old military installations always emanates, made the Suomenlinna naval fortress the highlight of the trip. The fortress lies as a collection of mounds, fortresses and houses on a small archipelago outside Helsinki. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site, and intact because the Finish general who were supposed to make use of it had simply chickened out and not resisted the invading Russians. Bad luck for the city of Helsinki then, good luck for the city now.

On the way back to Helsinki it began pouring down and we spend the last hour in the city in the guts of Stockmann department store, waiting to dry.

On my way back aboard the return ferry named “Galaxy” I was almost tipped over by a stampede of rude elderly people pulling their monthly ration of tax-free liquors and cigarettes after them in small scotch patterned trolleys. They were a species of elderly people which I was already acquainted with from my childhood near the Danish/German border trade area.

The “Galaxy” lived up to my expectations; a floating commune of hotels, malls and entertainment parlours complete with karaoke and piano bars and cowboy themed restaurants. A ship which could be found sailing anywhere in Europe or the rest of the world for that matter. A shining star of globalised bad taste in “travelling”. All in all, the “Galaxy” seemed to appeal to the type of people which did not have the means or the courage or the energy to do something truly exiting, but instead dosed themselves numb on pastel colours and rampart consumerism. At least the views were fine on the observation decks.

And then of course there was the buffet.

The buffet at Galaxy was truly galactic in its proportions, complete with an orbiting fringe of pensioners slowly circling and sampling the dishes as they went along in the queue. After having engorged myself completely on three plates of entrées and one plate of main courses I was ogling quite warily at the cluster of slowly melting desserts, not quite sure I was up for another round. But I was very impressed and proud when Laura and Hanne threw all inhibitions aside and shamelessly grabbed the big plates and filled them with as much dessert as they would hold, ignoring the clever comments from grannies and fellow travellers alike.

All in all a good day.

The Estonian Experience

And so it became that I started a blog as a part of my new strategy to strengthen my online presence. Actually I’m personally against involvements in online communities such as blogs, My Space and Face Book because they are too time consuming. I mean, if there is not enough time to have a life in the real world, there is certainly no time for a virtual life.

But I give in because this blog will be an opportunity for me to stay in touch with old friends at home and new friends in Tallinn. It also seems suitable that I start my new blog now after this eventful summer which has seen a lot of changes for me personally with the movement from Århus to Copenhagen, the journey to China, and now the stay in Estonia for the next six months working as an intern at the Royal Danish Embassy.

Tallinn is fantastic, but my first impression was a mixed experience. When I landed in the airport last Tuesday with a jetlag from China it was very cold and windy, and I had been told that Estonian summers were hot and sunny. The two interns, Rosa and Rune, whose positions we were taking over picked me and my fellow intern Laura up in one of the embassy’s cars and drove us to our new apartment. Build in the Soviet era, the drap functionalism and worn down interior and exterior of this concrete silo will warm the hearth and moist the eye of any remaining fans of communism. But it’s situated a five minutes walk from the embassy and ten minutes from the centre of Tallinn. Sweet.

But as I said, Tallinn is fantastic. This city centre is an almost intact hanseatic merchant town from the middle ages, complete with a city wall, picturesque gothic towers, red tile roofs, steep and twisting alleyways with cobbled stone pavings which is lined with cosy and cheap bars, cafes and restaurants. Denmark may be called a fairytale country, but enchanting Tallinn is the real fairytale city. It feels centuries older than Copenhagen. The tourist economy is evident everywhere, but because of the Estonian Statue Crisis and the rising prices there are not so many tourists as there used to be. A good thing for me and a very bad thing for Tallinn and Estonia.

The embassy is still in holiday mode, so half of my colleagues including the ambassador are still on leave. But the rest of the employees seems nice, and the work interesting, although it’s all very new. The expat diplomat network also seems very good; I have already met people from the Norwegian, Swedish, British, French, Italian, American, and Russian embassies. So until now the Estonian Experience has been great!

Sunset and cocktails at Radisson hotel