It’s good to be back in Tallinn.
The absence of blog posts this week is an indication of how exhausted I’ve been – finally being able to lie down in a comfortable bed, cook healthy meals in a familiar kitchen, and lounge around in pyjamas all day reading and chatting and sleeping has been a real luxury. It’s also caused my body to groan “Finally!” and give up. Little things like blogging, working, and actually going outside have fallen (temporarily) by the wayside in favour of letting myself rest and recover from the most manic and unsettled few months of my entire life.
Monday was a longggggg day, with possibly the most bizarre flight I’ve ever had, even by Ryanair’s standards. The main problem was that the pilot really didn’t seem to be concentrating or – to be honest – to know how to fly a plane. Not that I’m judging, because I suspect that I wouldn’t have been able to fly it much better myself, but you tend to take these things for granted, don’t you? And for a start, he was convinced it was October. He kept telling us that it was. I’m pretty sure it’s September, but I don’t know what end of me is up any more, so I could be wrong. Anyway, after a very up and down sort of flight (I mean that very literally) during which my right ear had become more and more fuzzy (of hearing, I mean – i don’t mean to suggest that it suddenly sprouted a lot of hair or anything), he announced that we were coming in to land in Lithuania (it was Latvia, actually, but hey – they’re right next to each other), local time was 3pm (even though it was 2pm) and the weather was, once again, fairly typical late October sunshine. At this point I can only presume that he pressed a large button saying STOP, as opposed to performing any kind of complicated and expert landing procedure, for the plane didn’t so much “land” as simply fall out of the sky, end up on the runway (possibly by sheer happy accident), bounce a few times and skid to a halt in front of the terminal.
“Oooooh!” squeaked several women as we did the bouncing thing. Then they broke into spontaneous applause. I mean, WHAT? What the hell were they applauding? The fact that the plane didn’t technically go on fire or shatter into pieces? It’s not like it was the most graceful and delicate flight and landing anyone had ever experienced. Or maybe it was, and that’s a sign of the way things are in Latvia, I dunno.
Anyway. The day was greatly improved by the absolutely AMAZING bus from Riga to Tallinn – I was dreading 6 hours of bus, but this one had comfy seats, leg room, a coffee bar, WiFi, and a little TV screen with the politest bus host I have ever seen. He spoke in Latvian for about 10 minutes, then repeated his speech in Estonian, and just as he was kindly starting his English version I was thinking to myself “The only shame is that my battery’s going to go done in my laptop in about 2 hours – what would make this perfect would be if someone would invent a way of putting electric sockets on to buses!”. And little TV host man, so very politely, says “Internet access is free for your unlimited use, to while away the time or catch up with some emails, so if you want to power up, please do make use of the power sockets located between the seats”. Super-impressed, I was. And the toilet was not just a toilet, it was “a comfortable space for you to refresh yourself in privacy”, and the seats didn’t just recline to make you more comfortable, they allowed you to “curl up and doze off peacefully with the soothing sound of the road beneath you”.
I seriously love Estonia.
Filed under: blogging, bus, Estonia, flying, happy, time out, tiredness, travel | 4 Comments »
