Summer time capital in the winter

Parnu, Estonia

8th November 2006

This morning I saw Egle for this first time since I was here in June. Norris, Egle and I had breakfast in a café near her home and we had a nice chat over some omelettes.

There were some magazines in the café and in one of them they had photos and profiles of Estonia’s 2 black citizens. It’s incredible, just for being black and Estonian gets them into a bunch of local papers and grants them some celebrity.

Life can be so much more interesting and surreal in a small country. Every country needs politicians, TV show presenters and guests, Olympic champions, ect… but if you’re from a country of 30 million people, you have 1/30th the chance of being any of these as you would if you were from a country of 1 million people.

After breakfast, they drove me over to the bus station. I was going to Parnu for the day. Norris warned me that if they don’t understand me when I’m trying to buy my ticket, I should just say “Parnu” over and over until they take my money from me. The woman at the station looked like a 60-year-old Russian grandma and I thought to myself, fuck, I can’t say “bilyet na Parnu pazhalsta” properly. I went up and just asked in normal English and she understood me perfectly. I’ve learned in this trip, assume everyone speaks English and you’ll probably be right 80% of the time.

After that I went into a Kiosk and there was a fast moving queue with lots of people who looked like they were in a rush. I needed to buy a 99EEK phone card for my phone and like all men, I hate holding up a queue. I said “Palun Mulle uheksakummend uheksah krooni diil karte” in comprehendible-enough Estonian that, amazingly enough, I got what I wanted. I felt like I climbed another little language mountain.

My bus came shortly after. The 2-hour bus ride down to Parnu was quiet relaxing. Parnu is a small town which has a summer time population 10x that of the winter population. There wasn’t as much to do there as say, Tallinn, but there was enough to keep me busy all afternoon.

I looked at a few museums, I saw a decapitated statue of Lenin covered in garbage bags, I walked around the streets looking at all the architecture and I strolled along the beach and sat for a while watching the sun go down. Hopefully I can go back in the summer with some friends, I’m sure it would be a wonderful place to be when the weather is warm.

Later on in the evening I was waiting in the bus station when Norris rang me up. I answered my phone and talked to him in English, instantly everyone in the bus station turned around and looked at me like I was an alien from Mars. I guess there might not be many tourist in Parnu in November but I’m surprised at how many people thought it was so special to have an English-speaker waiting for a bus that they would look at me in such a way.

I was planning on going to Narva tomorrow but I changed my mind. I waited an extra 45 minutes in the cold for my bus in back to Tallinn and I saw 3 guys shouting at a woman in a Kiosk in Russian when I got back. I thought to myself that I wasn’t in the mood for stepping outside of my comfort zone just to say I had been to Estonia’s roughest city and looked into the Russian Federation.