Coffee Helps

In the space of 24 little hours, I have had no less than 5 friends sending me a link to an online job advertisement. This is unprecedented.

So, I’ve taken a little look at it, and I suppose it’s alright. The position is described as “caretaker”, which is not really the sort of career I had in mind. However, the caretaker has to keep a blog and photo diary, so I guess that makes it a little more suitable for me.

Should I be the successful applicant, I will be handed a list of duties, which will include things like this:

- swimming

- snorkelling

- sailing

- diving

- sightseeing

- exploring uninhabited islands

Oh, and I should probably have mentioned that the caretaker in question will be required to live on and take care of an island at the Great Barrier Reef. For a salary of £70,000. Whilst living rent-free in a three-bedroom villa complete with swimming pool.

The successful applicant will go and explore all the neighbouring islands, and write about what they see and do. They will do all the things that someone on a dream holiday in paradise would do, and write about those, too, with a view to kick-starting the tousism industry there. They will feed the tropical fish and keep an eye on the island from their hammock. And they will be paid £70,000 to do so.

I had plans to spend the next year or so writing articles for €10 each, but I suppose I could put that off for a while and settle for this instead, if you insist. Sometimes one has to make sacrifices for the sake of earning a few crusts.

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“Tere! Do you speak English? Err… kas sa räägid inglise keelt?” I ask the cheerful looking receptionist. “Hmm,” she replies, “Very leetle beet!”. Her cheerfulness does not seem to have diminished, which is encouraging, as this is not going to be easy at all.

I have come to the Nomme Ujula leisure centre, having decided to take up swimming again. It is a bit far away, but much, much cheaper than the local pool (even taking into account the bus fare there and back!). Unfortunately, the further you go from the city centre, the less chance you have of finding any information in English. I am, of course, prepared for this, and have pre-learned all the appropriate phrases and questions.

Yeah, right.

When a conversation pretty much immediately launches into one party miming the front crawl in a crowded reception area, you realise why it would have been a good idea to take five minutes to look up the word for “swim”. Still, I keep a smile on my face, and the Cheerful Receptionist seems to enjoy my performance. She exchanges my money for a locker key, and tries to give me directions and turnstile instructions without actually speaking. This is not quite as straightforward as miming “I would like to swim, please”, and after a brief fight with the turnstile (and the embarrassment of having to be rescued as I look helplessly at the corridor of doors with detailed signs in Estonian) I find myself in the changing room, surrounded by naked women.

This is something of a culture shock. I had been prepared for it, but not at all prepared for it, if you know what I mean. I come from a place where nudity is next to prostitution. On the beach, you get changed awkwardly underneath your blanket-sized beach towel, careful not to expose any flesh. Of course, that’s if you’re an exhibitionist. If you care about modesty and decency, you’ll go to the public toilets and get changed in a stinky cubicle, where there’s absolutely no chance of anybody seeing anything. It goes without saying that at the swimming pool, you get changed in a cubicle.

Things are a bit different in a country where people grow up spending rather a lot of time naked in the sauna with friends and family. I gulp nervously as I look around, trying to figure out where to go and what I am supposed to do. Women of all shapes and sizes are briskly stripping off all around me and wandering about all over the place. There are boobs and bums everywhere. It is at this point that I realise the impossibility of my “that’s fine, but I’ll just get changed in private and no one will see me naked” plan. There is, quite simply, Nowhere To Hide.

Slightly bewildered and feeling very foreign, I turn to a friendly looking girl and ask if she can help me. She speaks fluent English, and also still has all her clothes on, both of which are quite reassuring to me at this particular moment. Chatty and smiley, she explains the process and then leaves me to deal internally with my horror at what she has just said.

In Estonia, you not only have to strip off in one big room with everyone else, you then have to walk (naked) into the shower room and wash yourself thoroughly (they even provide soap in dispensers!). Then, and only then, are you allowed to put on your swimsuit. This is all very hygenic, and certainly makes a lot more sense than expecting to get clean by standing underneath the shower for five seconds in your swimsuit, but it is something of a shock to my system.

Not one person even glances at me as I undress and go to the showers, trying to appear as if I walk around naked in public every day. In fact, I’m fairly certain that if I’d attempted to conceal my body and shower in my swimsuit, I would have earned some very disgusted and disapproving looks for being so unhygenic. It is all very casual and natural and, well, actually, a lot more comfortable. You’re not worrying about your towel slipping and someone seeing you naked, because everyone’s naked anyway. One girl is actually – and I have to do a double and then triple take to confirm this – shaving her pubic hair. Seriously! There is “being comfortable with nudity” and then there is “shaving your pubic hair in the communal showers”.

And nobody is staring at anybody else. Well, apart from me. I am staring at everyone, because I have just made a startling discovery. Having never really seen naked women before, other than on TV and in beauty magazines, I was under the impression that other women have flat tummies, toned skin, and pert breasts.

I have just discovered that the majority of women, underneath it all, look just like me. Even the slim ones have bellies. Everyone has wobbly bits and skin flaws. No one – no one! – in that changing room has a perfectly toned body with a perfectly flat tummy and perfectly smooth skin. This is genuinely surprising news to me.

So there you have it. My entire perspective and body image, completely changed – from one visit to a Tallinn swimming pool. Certainly the most productive swimming session I’ve ever had!

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This is a Christmas card sent to me by Kat the Cat.

To be slightly more accurate, it is a card that came in a package from my mum, with an accompanying note explaining that “she was sick that day, which is how we managed to get away with it”. I must say that I just love how incredibly pissed off she looks about the whole situation.

Is it pathetic to miss a cat as much as I miss Kat?

We had our tense moments, Kat and I. We wound each other up, we fell out quite regularly, we injured each other on several occasions… but she was my best friend, you know. Sniffle. I remember the time she went missing, not long after I’d moved house, and The Neighbours eventually found her in their back yard, captured her, and danced gleefully down my garden path in the early hours of the morning to return her to her joyful owner (that’s me). I remember all the times she got stuck on the conservatory roof and I nearly broke my arm when I inevitably fell off a wall in the rescue attempt. I remember the familiar tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of her collar bell as she trotted up the stairs every night when all the lights were out. Then a pause and a thump as she jumped up on to the bed, circled me a few times, and lay down suddenly in the crook of my knees, satisfied that everything was as it should be and she could go to sleep.

She used to get really annoyed and jealous if I was reading a book, and would repeatedly try to position herself between the book and my face until I gave up and cuddled her instead. Slightly more inconvenient were her favourite hobbies of chasing my fingers as I typed on my laptop, and of edging closer and closer to said laptop until she’d managed to sneakily lie down on the keyboard, because she liked the warmth.

Still. She seems to have settled down nicely with The Parents, although there have been a few disagreements, and last month I did find myself starting an email to my mother with the words “I’m so sorry that my cat broke your ribs”. Kat has personality, you see.

I miss my sassy cat.

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So, we’re nine days into ’09. Let’s take a look at what I’ve done so far, lest the entire month slide past only for me to exclaim in dismay “Hang on – have I even been outside yet?!”.

2009: Activities so far

* Coughing. Of the loud, hacking, my-lungs-are-going-to-come-out-of-my-mouth-soon variety.

* Sneezing. Aren’t sneezes strange? I always sneeze at least twice. My dad usually manages about ten once he gets going. Would my eyes really pop out if I kept them open while sneezing? I scoff at such an idea, but I’m a little scared to try holding them open.

* Snow-watching. The snowflakes in Estonia are the biggest, fluffiest snowflakes I have ever seen. I do not know why it is that they should be different from Irish snowflakes, but they are. It is like a bunch of angels are having a rather undignified pillow fight on one of their clouds, and feathers are flying everywhere. Not only are they big and fluffy, but if you examine them close up, they are picture-perfect crystals! This delights me. Snowflakes always just looked like white blobs to me. I could never understand why, in pictures, they were shown as those pretty, hexagonal, symmetrical crystals. They are beautiful.

* Walking on water. It’s very cold here, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that before. Entire lakes are freezing over, now. I really was very amused by all the local women taking shortcuts across the frozen surface, shopping bags in hand. They’re very resourceful, the Estonians.

* Working. My brain seems to be getting back into gear, and for this I am thankful. So far this year, I have written articles about  white elephants, Kings of Siam, casinos, and a stickman who comes to life and brutally murders everyone. You can’t say that my job is dull.

* Enjoying an extremely nice lunch at Novell, the funky restaurant down the road. I’ve wanted to go in for ages, but thought it would be crazily expensive. It’s all ultra-modern prints and bright colours and cool lighting, and I’m always a bit envious of the well-dressed business people drinking coffee or cocktails at the tables by the window, comfortably lounging back on piles of silk cushions. Anyway, Santa left some money in my bank account to make up for not visiting me at all this year, so finally I had an excuse to treat myself. And guess what? It wasn’t expensive after all!  And both my meal and Riho’s were exceptionally good, so I guess we’ll have to go back. Am trying to come up with ways of becoming a food critic in order to eat out for free.

* Discovering, to my great delight, baked beans in a local supermarket. I had given up on finding baked beans, so I really am overjoyed. I had Cheesy Beanos (that’s beans mixed with cheese – a Glasgow student favourite) on toast with HP sauce, and it was wonderful. As are the Tayto cheese and onion crisps mum sent me in the post…

* Reading. So far I’ve finished The Time Traveller’s Wife, two entire school series by Enid Blyton, Jingo (Terry Pratchett), and the original Adrian Mole. I am currently halfway through Adrian Mole: the Cappuccino Years, and have a Bill Bryson lined up for after that. Yay for my rediscovered love of books!

* Looking for a short housesitting assignment in a sunny place, in the hope of getting a bit of sunshine for a couple of weeks and therefore preserving my sanity.

* Watching the second season of 24. I’m not much of a casual TV watcher: I tend to find a show that I like and then watch it all the way through from the first episode, and I don’t think it’s good for me. In the past year, I’ve watched every season of Lost, The Office, Hustle, and season one of 24. With the exception of The Office, these have all contributed to the fact that I am now incredibly suspicious of everyone and everything, jump uncontrollably when I hear a loud noise, and apparently scream things like “I swear I don’t know any of them! I don’t know the prisoners!” in my troubled sleep.

And there was me thinking I’d been sitting around doing nothing…

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Our nearest library has quite a good selection of books in English, which is great.

Not so great is the rather odd and dated system they have in place for members who are not officially resident in Estonia. If you have an ID card, it’s just a matter of getting your books swiped and going on your merry way. If not, it’s back to about 1980.

First of all, because you’re not an official resident and therefore likely to just disappear with a dozen or so books, with no way of being tracked down, you have to pay a deposit for every book you take out. Of course, if the deposit were a small, insignificant amount it wouldn’t really be a deterrent to theft, since getting a book worth €16 for 50 cents is still a pretty good deal. So on the inside of each book’s cover is a “price”, which isn’t too far off the cost of actually buying the book – the difference being that if you return your books like a good citizen, you’ll get all your money back.

It’s not a bad idea, I suppose. It’s not actually costing you anything, but my problem is that I don’t generally have money to spare. If my cash is having a nice little holiday at the library, it’s rather difficult for me to spend it on necessities like food and espressos.

The other major annoyance is that the unfortunate non-residents, because they have to hand over money for their books, can’t be dealt with on the modern, efficient, oh-so-simple computer system. Upon being approached by an alien such as myself, the staff become flustered and confused, talking in whispers and looking up the rule book to check how to deal with me, eventually returning with a book of loan forms. It takes a long time to fill one of these in. Name, address, phone number, book title, author, code on back of book, loan “price”… and for some inexplicable reason, a seperate form needs to be filled in for every single book, rather than just filling in my personal details once and then listing all the books I want to borrow. As you can imagine, this was quite a distressing discovery to make when I’d just come to the counter with half a dozen books.

Mind you, the woman whose job it was to laboriously fill out all the forms didn’t look too delighted either.

Thankfully, I have only had to go through this process a few times, and am now in the happy position of being able to go to the library with someone who does have an ID card and will borrow the books on my behalf, thus cutting down the waiting time from about 20 minutes to 10 seconds. It’s not even that I really minded waiting for so long; it’s just that I felt awfully conspicuous and guilty standing there with a queue of Estonians behind me as the staff fly around in a confused panic and an unfortunate lady has to fill out millions of forms all because I am so foreign and untrustworthy. I found myself glancing around apologetically, as if I’d made a public nuisance of myself just for wanting something to read. I am relieved to have found a solution.

Probably not as relieved as the librarians, though.

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There was a Braille convention of some description in the nearby shopping mall the other day.

This in itself was not a particularly odd thing. It was a local event as part of “Braille 200″ – the worldwide celebration of the bicentennial of Louis Braille’s birth. However, I must admit to being completely bewildered by the large sign that was strung up overhead. “Braille 200″, it said. And underneath, presumably the same thing was carefully printed in Braille.

Is this or is this not a little bizarre, given that the sign was about 20 feet in the air? How, exactly, would a blind person be expected to know it was even there, let alone read it? No one else seems to be as agitated by this kind of thing as I am on a regular basis. It’s like having a tannoy announcement for deaf people.

I watched, intrigued, hanging over the railing on the second floor as events unfolded downstairs. There was a full brass band playing cheerful tunes, and a strange assortment of activities. As well as the usual desks with leaflets and information, there were fun things going on. A young blind girl was playing a game of draughts with a friend, while a group of teenagers were engrossed in chess. Professional-looking individuals were giving massages to weary shoppers. Someone else was demonstrating computer software. A guide dog lay quietly at his owner’s feet. Just another day in the Viru Centre!

I think that this sort of thing is great, and I’ve been thinking, ever since I saw it, about what it must be like to be blind. I cross the road (I’m getting a lot braver about that these days) and wonder how scary it would be to do so with my eyes closed. I get lost and disoriented as usual in a perfectly familiar area, and imagine how I’d cope if I couldn’t even see which direction I was facing. I remember seeing a blind man trying to find his way into a restaurant when I was in Lyon – I was at the other side of the road, waiting to cross, and I watched as his cane failed to alert him of a few small tables on the street as he rounded the corner. The people at the tables made no move to help him. They just looked at him in annoyance as he bumped into them and stopped, confused, trying to figure out what had happened. It then took him a while to find the entrance to the restaurant, and still longer to navigate the steps. At that point a member of staff rushed out, took his arm, and guided him in, to his obvious relief.

I don’t know how I’d ever cope in such a situation. He must have felt confused and maybe frightened or embarrassed. I think about how lost and confused and slightly scared I’ve been at times in the big cities I’ve visited, and it’s impossible to imagine myself finding my way around without my eyesight! And yet here at this convention were blind people proving that a great life can be had with a bit of adjustment. I wouldn’t have dreamt that a sightless person could play board games, for example. I didn’t realise how straightforward it is for them to use computers. There are lots of practical, everyday things that I would have said were impossible for the blind – and yet here was a crowd of people proving me wrong, and smiling and dancing as they did so!

Like I said, I just like stumbling across things like that. It’s a glimpse into a different kind of life, and that’s always going to be a good thing!

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Yesterday, we thought it might be nice to go and walk around a big lake. You know, as you do.

It was only -4°C in Tallinn town centre as we sauntered over to the trolley bus stop, sweating uncomfortably in such unexpectedly high temperatures. (Seriously. There’s a display board outside the shopping centre next door, which has a digital display showing the time and temperature, and I realised to my horror the other day that I had, in fact, just glanced at it saying “It’s not cold at all, today. Ah-ha! It’s only minus two.”)

Are you aware of trolley buses? We didn’t have such things, where I come from. They’re great fun, they really are. They’re basically oversized dodgems posing as public transport. Instead of having them run on tram tracks, there’s a large network of wires strung up overhead, and each bus has a kind of handle thing emerging from the roof, which touches said wires and provides the power. Obviously there aren’t twenty other trolley buses purposely trying to bump into you, and none of the drivers are small children being aided by responsible fathers. But the similarities are there, nonetheless.

Anyhoo, we got off the trolley bus somewhere near the aforementioned big lake, and noted that the temperature had apparently dropped about thirty degrees in the twenty minutes that we’d been travelling. My Silly Hat is no longer sufficient. Living in Tallinn is like living in a very large chest freezer. I have begun work on a Scarf Hat.

For now, though, I have to make do with tucking the pompoms of my Silly Hat as far into my ridiculously heavy coat as I can, thus pulling the Silly Hat down over my ears, whilst turning my collar as far up as it will go, thrusting my poor, frostbitten fingers deep into my pockets, and exclaiming “Bloody hell!” at regular intervals. It was in this manner that I arrived at the Big Lake, just as the sun was setting.

It all looked very pretty and scenic. There were reeds and bulrushes and that sort of thing growing at the edges, the setting sun casting long shadows from them across the surface of the water. There was a little beach at the water’s edge, with lots of playground games, a picnic area, and so on. Lots of people were milling around – a sweet young family were waving sparklers left over from New Year’s Eve, and others were simply out for a nice stroll. A little old lady was taking a shortcut across the lake with her grocery shooping bags in hand.

This last one was admittedly rather strange, and as we drew closer to the lake, we saw dozens of people walking cheerfully across the surface of the water. Local people were using it as a shortcut. A group of teenagers appeared to be having a picnic in the middle of it. Not to be outdone by these crazy Estonians and their strange ways, I approached the water’s edge and tentatively set foot on the surface. I took a small step… then another… and behold! I was walking on water without any difficulty whatsoever – with the exception of, perhaps, balance.

My list of lifetime achievements is just growing by the day…

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Being ill all over the holidays has not exactly been a pleasant experience, but it has given me the opportunity to become reacquainted with one of my first loves. Not Mark Owen, but reading.

As a child, I was not at all cool. I could quite happily spend all day in my room with a book, which for some reason seems to be laughable to the majority of children. I’ve never understood this. Of course I loved being out and about with my friends, playing games and climbing trees and everything, but I never understood it when I was called boring for wanting to spend a lot of time reading, too. When I opened a book, I was instantly pulled into another world – a world of excitement, midnight feasts, mysteries, smugglers, circus life, secret caves, and every sort of adventure imaginable. I could not for the life of me see how or why this was “boring”!

As a teenager, there was less time for reading as I got to grips with exams and essays and coursework – but I’d still choose a good book over hanging around at the park with a bottle of cheap cider. And at university, as an English Studies student taking courses such as “The Romantic Period” and “The History of the Novel”, I found myself reading more than I’d ever read before! It really broadened my tastes, and I found myself with several books on the go at once, from Trainspotting to The Faerie Queene, from The Great Gatsby to To The Lighthouse. The “novel” course introduced me to what quickly became one of my all-time favourites, Tristram Shandy – I was (and remain) a big fan of literary “jokes”, and I loved the fact that in Tristram’s life story, his long-winded style and desire to explain everything most exactly and increase the reader’s enjoyment meant that he didn’t even get around to his own birth until Volume III. It appeals to my sense of humour. (I suppose I probably also identify with it, given that I’ll often start a blog post and not get around to the main point – introduced in the first sentence – until the very end… ahem.)

But then real life began, and reading became a longed-for pleasure. When there were jobs to go to, and meals to cook, and friends to visit, and responsibilities to remember, and houses to keep clean, and chores to do… maybe I’d get to read for half an hour before going to sleep, but I’ve never been that sort of reader. I like to lose myself in the world about which I’m reading; to go there for hours on end and not emerge until the story is over. It’s just not the same when you’re only getting it in small chunks. My brain doesn’t work like that.

This summer, then, the amount of time I spent on long plane/train/bus journeys allowed me to fit in a few books. I rediscovered my love of reading with a copy of The Hobbit given to me by someone I met at a hostel in Hungary. I did a book swap in Amsterdam and found myself re-reading L’Étranger (in French, too!) with great delight and admittedly a bit of a headache and frequent references to the vocabulary list at the back. I stayed with a Terry Pratchett fan in Sweden, and found myself submerged in the fantastic Discworld series for the very first time.

Then I joined the library here in Tallinn, and am continuing my love affair with Pratchett. And being ill has given me the perfect excuse to do nothing but curl up with a book every day! Riho has been most helpful in getting his hands on reading material for me, including – to my joy – a selection of Enid Blyton books. I have once again been engrossed in schoolgirl tales from Malory Towers and St. Clare’s, and although I’m now a little disturbed at how genuinely cruel the girls often were in the name of “sitting on” someone who wasn’t “playing the game” in order to turn them into “a good sport”, I’ve loved every minute of it. I was also given a copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife, which has been swiftly added to that all-time favourites list of mine, as I couldn’t put it down until I’d finished it and am probably going to read it again very soon.

And of course, there are blogs. My current favourite is Katyboo, whose daily posts read like an ongoing Bridget Jones’ Diary, if Bridget were married with three kids and gradually losing patience with the world in general. She is wonderfully honest and hilariously harrassed. I recommend this blog for daily laughs!

And now I’m going back to St. Clare’s for a little while. I’m starting to feel better, so I won’t have much more guilt-free reading time left after today, I fear. Soon, it’ll be back to “I should be doing something constructive and productive”, and the books will be set aside to gather dust as I glance longingly at them whilst trying to write articles about an increasingly bizarre selection of topics and force myself to clean the apartment. Sigh. Being ill has its good points…

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The other night, I climbed to the top of a very steep hell.

That was meant to be “hill”, but I mistyped it entirely by accident and have decided to leave it like that. This is because when temperatures are sub-zero, and you’ve got the cold, and you’re all fevery and wobbly and sniffly, and it’s difficult to breathe without coughing, then climbing up a very long and steep hill really is a bit hellish.

Anyway, I made it to the top in a semi-alive condition, and joined the crowd of revellers on the Patkuli viewing platform. This is one of several lookout points on Toompea Hill, home of the cathedral, government buildings and castle, and you can see all over the city from the viewing platforms. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but I knew fireworks were involved, and I had to see what the Estonians’ New Year celebrations were like – death or no death.

More and more people gathered on the platform as midnight approached, and I was quite proud of our “front row” vantage point at the railings. Unfortunately, this did not last, thanks to a startling invasion of Germans who elbowed their way to the front with breathtaking audacity, stepping cooly in front of us as if we were invisible. I stared indignantly – although somewhat ineffectually – at the backs of their heads, but became distracted when, during the countdown to midnight, they broke into a spontaneous chorus of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”. I suspect that they got the dates slightly mixed up.

A loud cheer erupted as the church bells chimed and 2009 got underway. As champagne corks flew dangerously close to my frostbitten ear, I realised why we were all gathered here at the top of Mount Hypothermia. Past the old town walls and towers in the foreground of the scenic view beneath us were the thousands of twinkling lights of the city, stretching all the way along the dark, silent coastline. And, as the new year began, everyone had their own private fireworks display in their back yard.

It really was quite spectacular. Flashes of brightly-coloured light tore through the dark sky for miles and miles, as far as the eye could see (although my eyes possibly did not see as far as most, owing to the fact that I had some champagne in one and a bit of stray cork in the other). From huge, brilliant, public displays to tiny private ones: the whole sky was illuminated in all directions. The church bells chimed, the ships in the harbour below blared their horns. It was pretty amazing, I have to tell you.

Then some eejit started letting off fireworks on the crowded platform and we ducked and got the hell out of there.

These people are a bit crazy. There were rockets going off quite merrily in the tiny Old Town streets, where there is, quite simply, Nowhere To Run. We cut through the Town Hall Square and discovered that people were cheerfully releasing shrieking fireworks all over the place, which zoomed scarily around all the Christmas Market cabins and scared the living daylights out of me as I tried to escape. No one else seemed unduly alarmed or even particularly aware that their lives were in danger.

“Look,” said Riho has we exited the Old Town through the Viru Gate, “there’s another one.”

I looked, and observed a happy party animal drunkenly lighting some kind of box that he’d placed in the middle of the street. Hurriedly, I skipped on and stood at a safe distance to watch them go off. The first one probably did some serious coronary damage to a middle-aged man who was innocently walking past just as it squealed into the air. The seond one was admittedly very nice. The third one then shot horizontally across the ground, which was a little unexpected. I watched in horror as the runaway squib hurtled along a crowded street, and was just marvelling that it hadn’t killed anyone when I saw that a similar flash of light was now coming straight at me. I saw it as if in slow motion, and possibly made my dive behnd the gate tower in the same manner, yelling “Noooooooo!” in a deep, eerie, slowed-down voice like in scary films when the hero’s wife is being shot and he’s diving to save her. I was merely trying to save myself. Riho, on the other hand, laughed at me the whole way home.

So that was New Year’s Eve in Estonia. Pretty lights in the sky, Germans singing Merry Christmas, and not enough concern about the dangers of champagne and squibs in crowded places, if you ask me. But all good fun!

Plus I got to phone The Parents when I got back, and say “I’m calling from next year” in a mysterious and spooky voice.

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