Travel Diary, Episode 6: Playing in the Sun

I've been having great difficulty doing my homework lately, due to the fact that the time of night I usually set aside for homework doing has been taken up with playing outside in the sun.

This whole northern European summer thing is doing my head in a little. At 7pm when, under normal circumstances, I'd be starting to make dinner, I think: "My goodness it's a lovely afternoon for a bike ride - what am I doing inside?" And, without hesitation, I've changed into my exercise gear and pointed the bike towards the river or the 'leisure park'.

Tartu has a 'leisure park'. It's a big outdoor thingy with a flat track for inline-skating (and, I assume, bikes - at least, no one has shouted at me to get off it when I ride around on my bike), a BMX track, an outdoor gym with all sorts of constraptions like chin up bars and parallel bars, a cross-country skiing what-not and an eight kilometer track for running and nordic walking (which can be shortened to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 kilometers, depending on where you turn - but sadly the turns aren't signposted, so you have no idea which shortcut you might be taking).

I found it on my second day here but didn't really get to play with it until Sunday. I wanted to go back on Monday, but my legs were busy whingeing about going for a 5km bike ride the day after a 13+km walk, so I thought I'd better listen to them and take a day off. Yesterday I rode down and hit the running trail before spending some time playing with the gym thingies. I probably would have gone back today if I hadn't promised myself at least one afternoon spent looking at museums and gardens.

Even then, at 7pm - when I was heading home - I had to remind myself that I had things to do tonight and shouldn't immediately go out and play. I probably shouldn't go to the park tomorrow, seeing as I have a lot of errands to do before I leave on Friday, but I secretly hope I'll be reckless enough to go there anyway.

I get to this point when I'm on holidays where I lapse into a bit of a funk. A sort of a "what's the point of all this anyway? Why am I wasting my life? What am I 'here' for anyway?" kind of thing that tends to plague me about two weeks into any given adventure. I think it's because I'm not exactly satisfied with my "normal" life, so part of me is always looking to see if this place or that place could be an alternative.

I was born and raised in Townsville, and I've lived there for the vast majority of my life, but I've never really wanted to grow old and die there. I want to be somewhere else for a while. And then, maybe, somewhere else again for a while after that. Then I hope to eventually find the place where I do want to grow old and die. When I think about Townsville, I think: "This place is okay for a holding pattern, but it's not really where I want to be." And yet, I suspect that I'll probably maintain my holding pattern for a few decades if I'm not careful.

So, when I'm travelling, a part of me is scoping the place out - asking "is this the place I want to be?" The answer is usually "no", which leads to a bit of self loathing. If I don't want to be where I am, and I don't want to be here either, then what the Heck do I want and why am I so gorram hard to please?

I think Tartu might be hitting a bit of a "maybe" point with me, though. Or, at least, I find that going outside to play in the sun is chasing the funk away. Part of me is saying: "Yes, fine, but what will you do here? You can't afford to be an unemployed student, and you love being a librarian but wouldn't have good enough language skills to hold a similar position here..." The rest of me is saying: "Hey! Park!"

I'm sure it's just a summer thing. I expect if I was still here when it was dark between 4pm and 10am and cold and miserable for the few hours of daylight, I'd rethink basing my optimism for a town on its outdoor persuits. They do have an indoor pool, though, and an ice-skating rink, so maybe in winter I could keep chasing away the blues with physical activities. Plus, there's a fencing club here, so I'd be able to keep that up...

Meanwhile, I brought along the chapter of my textbook that I was supposed to have been working on for the past few weeks, and I have so far failed to devote more than a couple of hours to it. I've managed to write a few blog posts, though, which just goes to prove that I am a bad student.

Travel Diary, Episode 5: Come Back Again

Three years ago, when I first visited Tallinn, I was absolutely fascinated by the Old Town - the historic buildings and streets in the city center. It just seemed full of interesting buildings, interesting shops, interesting restaurants and interesting people trying to sell you interesting things.

This year I found it incredibly tedious. Sure, the buildings were still interesting, but a bit "old hat". The shops were all full of the same trash, the restaurants were all overpriced and the people were cashing in on the throngs of tourists who were everywhere. Maybe I was just tired. Maybe I was over tourists, and being a tourist. All I know is that the place did not re-acquaint well. Have you ever bumped into someone you used to like, only to realise you can't work out what you saw in them? It was like that.

Tartu was always someplace I meant to revisit, just to see some of the museums I missed on the first time. Oddly, since coming here I haven't visited any museums apart from the ones on my class excursions. I suppose I'll have to work on it quickly, as I'm only here for a few more days. I've just been spending my afternoons riding around the river on my bicycle or shopping for CDs I can't listen to and DVDs I can't watch (my apartment doesn't have a DVD player, and my computer doesn't have a disc drive).

And books. I have bought far too many books - but I console myself with the fact that they are all cool. Well, one of them is just practical, but the others are cool. I have Estonian versions of Tarzan novels, Pippi Longstockings, Mary Poppins and The Hunger Games. Yes, they are all translations of books in English, but that's the point - I'll be able to use the English books to have a fighting chance of reading the Estonian. It worked really well for The Reader (which was in German, but I'm hoping the principle will hold).

The find of the century, though, was a beautiful hard-cover side-by-side Estonian translation of The Hunting of the Snark. Have you ever wondered how the last stanza of the Snark would sound in Estonian? Of course you have. Well, here it is:

Ta vaevu üht sõna seal ütlema hakkas
kesk naeru ja täis meelehead,
kui pehmelt ja äkitselt olemast lakkas--
Snark oligi Kõmak, kas tead.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Oh, by the way, I bought a bicycle. It was a second hand thing I bought from a bike shop aways up the road from the university. My primary reason for buying the bike was that it was the cheapest one with a hand-operated break for the rear wheel (all of the others had back-pedal breaks, which I'm sure, in this hilly city, would lead to my certain death), and I'm absolutely in love with it. It's such a neat little bike, and it has no problems with handling a wide variety of roads and footpaths - and dirt tracks and even sand. I have no idea what it is, because there's nothing written on the bike except for the number 73 (I suspect it used to be a rental), and a badge I haven't been able to identify yet. I haven't given up, though. I'm a librarian. I have powers.

I said that to one of my classmates today, and he decided to challenge me by asking me what it means if his ring finger aches. A quick check on PubMed suggested referred pain from lung or breast cancer. He didn't seem convinced with either option. I told him that's what you get from asking a librarian a medical question. I went to Viljandi on the weekend. It was high on my list of things to revisit, and it was close enough to manage. Viljandi is where I suspect I want to put my maze complex when I'm rich and eccentric, so I wanted to see if it still felt like somewhere I could live for a few years.

I quite like Viljandi. Tartu seems like a place where people work, Viljandi seems like a place where people live. It has a larger proportion of people who smile when they pass you in the street. They never seem to smile at the cash registers of the supermarkets, though. Check-out chicks always seem to regard you with a look of mistrust. It's like they've been told there will be a test today, and you could very well be the person testing them.

The last time I was in Viljandi I heard you could run around the lake, so I thought I'd try walking the track on the weekend. If you are ever thinking of walking the track around Lake Viljandi, I recommend that you do take insect repellent, and you don't take your camera. You see the lake about three times in the walk. It's about 13 kilometers long, and for most of it you're just staring at trees, weeds or highway. Seriously, you spend more time in view of the highways in and our of Viljandi than you do in sight of the lake. It was exhausting, and not pretty enough to warrant that kind of effort. I was feeling a bit annoyed with Viljandi, to be frank.

But... but later that evening, just to stretch my legs, I went for a walk to a park down the end of the street where I was staying, and discovered another lake and a winding little valley that had a dam designed to be used as a swimming pool. A beautiful valley I wasn't expecting to see, with a swimming pool in the middle of it. That's Viljandi for you.

I had intended to try someplace over the other side of town this time, but in the end I went back to Hotel Endla. I stayed there the last time I was in Viljandi because it was conveniently close to the bus station and I had misread the price schedule for Estonian guesthouses. I thought I was getting a hotel that was one step down from the most expensive, but I was actually getting one that was one step up from the least expensive.

It worked out quite well, though, because the cafe was cheap, the room was comfortable, the bus station was conveniently close and the neighbourhood was a pretty place for a stroll. It was also really easy to walk to the major sights of the town. I settled on going back there this year for those reasons - and, you know what? The cafe was still cheap, the room was still reasonably comfortable, the bus station was still conveniently close and the neighbourhood seemed a bit more fixed-up than last time, so that worked out well.

I didn't have to share the hotel with a bus load of Finish Mormon missionaries this time, which was a bit of a plus. Missionaries are okay in small doses, but on mass they become quite cumbersome.

I did have to share the town with a rock festival, though. Just my luck, I missed out on the folk festival by a couple of weeks and arrived just in time to have the streets flooded with drunken hooligans. Actually, drunken hooligans are kind of normal in Estonia, but this was a concentration of drunken hooligans with lots of tattoos and the kind of gormless anger that only heavy rock can soothe...

I wouldn't have minded so much if they hadn't taken over the castle ruins for the festival. The bridge and the ruins were things I wanted to take some photos of, this trip, and they were both roped off with yellow hazard tape. Stupid "Rockramp". Why couldn't they have their acts in pubs, like proper rock?

For that matter, why can't Estonian men drink in pubs, like normal drunkards? I'm a bit over the amount of men you see rolling around the streets with open containers of alcohol at ten o'clock in the morning. Civilised people don't do this, Estonia. Just because you can buy alcohol at any given shop and at any time of the day doesn't mean you should, and it certainly doesn't mean you should start drinking it straight away. People keep telling me Estonia has more in common with Sweden and Germany than Russia, and shouldn't be thought of as a Post-Soviet country... but, you know what? If you want to stop being seen as a Post-Soviet country, you should stop drinking like one.

Travel dairy, Episode 4: Cheap as Chips

So, this exists:

It's a single, large pickled cucumber in a can. It was in the minibar in my hotel in Berlin.

Well, it claims it's a large pickled cucumber in a can. I wasn't going to open it to find out, because then I'd have to figure out what to do with a large pickled cucumber I didn't feel like eating (plus, I'd have to buy it).

It was actually quite reasonably priced for a large pickled cucumber in a hotel minibar. Mind you, I've never seen a canned pickled cucumber on offer in a minibar before, so I can't really compare prices on that one. The rest of the stuff seemed reasonably priced, though, and the cucumber did not seem outrageously expensive...

I was expecting the contents of the minibar to be pretty expensive, as minibars usually are, but the various snacks (mostly nuts and chocolate, no other pickled things) seemed cheap to me. Then I saw what the prices were like in the shops, and I realised the minibar was still a rip-off, just not compared to the price of food in Australia.

My word, the food here is cheap. Most meals I buy cost less than half of what I'd pay back home. The other day I bought a sandwich, a cake and a drink - and I got change from a five Euro note. I think it all cost about the equivalent of $4.50 Australian. I found a bakery (well, more of a patisserie) in Tartu today that sells coffee for 40c a cup. Sure, it's just filtered coffee that you pour into a paper cup, but it's actually better than any of the other sources of coffee I've found in this town. For about the equivalent of $1.50 Australian I bought a danish and a coffee, and both were good.

I hear the wages here are pretty terrible and the cost of things like shoes is ridiculous, but I eating here is incredibly affordable. It's not just the stuff that people make in bakeries and cafes, either - I bought a packet of eight Snickers bars for less than a Euro in a shop in Binz. They were only snack-sized Snickers, but that's usually all I can eat in a chocolate bar, anyway, and it still cost less than one full-sized chocolate bar would cost back home.

I've figured out that if I could manage to get paid my normal wage in my country and live here it would be pretty sweet.

Literally, I expect. The cakes are good, cheap and convenient, and I'm definitely not sticking to my "low gluten" diet.

I'm also not eating red meat, for some reason. I go into a restaurant thinking "a nice juicy steak would be nice" and end up ordering fish, or something. I don't know why. I haven't noticed any discernible difference as a result, but something tells me I probably won't notice any difference in what I am and am not eating as long as a major component of my diet is cake...

Travel Diary, Episode 3: Follow the Sun

I seem to have sent the sun ahead of me. Everywhere I go people have been saying: "It was really cold and rainy for the last few days, but the weather has been great since yesterday. They say it will get bad again in a couple of days, so you're really here at the right time..."

It's probably churlish of me to complain about sunny, warm weather wherever I go, but I had been told to expect it would be unseasonably cold and I had prepared accordingly. I have plenty of clothes for cold weather, not so much for hot weather. I've been carting this stupid jacket around with me from pillar to post, and it has been an average of 32 degrees wherever I go.

It was stinking hot on Rügen, and my "luxury" hotel room had two big windows facing the afternoon sun, no airconditioning, no fans, and nothing on the bed apart from duvets. I cannot understand Europeans. Duvets are not a year-round bedding option if you don't have airconditioning. That's why God invented sheets and light bedspreads.

Okay, maybe they actually evolved over several generations of textile production, but I'm pretty sure God inspired their evolution.

So far, I have not slept in a single bed that had anything to offer apart from a bottom sheet and a duvet (and some really uncomfortable pillows). Even if, for some unfathomable reason, the people in this continent were unable to understand that you could put two sheets on the bed, rather than just one, surely they have some awareness of the fact that duvet covers could be used separately from the duvets, and things would be much cooler that way...

Speaking of God, hotels and Rügen, I have to have to dedicate a "thank God!" moment in this episode.

I was under the impression that my hotel was in Sellinn, so the plan was to take the train into Bergen auf Rügen, then catch a couple of busses into Sellinn and try to find my hotel from that point. As the train was going through Rügen it ran beside a few roads for a while, and the thought occurred to me that, if I was ever going to try driving in Europe, this would be a good place to do it. Country roads, and all that...

So, in Bergen auf Rügen I made some enquiries about hiring a car and was directed to the Europcar in the town. The kind man behind the counter didn't have any cars available, but managed to find one for me anyway.

I had a brief moment of freaking out on the way to Sellinn. I had turned up a sidestreet I wasn't sure about, I was driving a manual for the first time in years, I was on the "wrong" side of the road in a place that turned out to be quite busy after all and I hadn't eaten anything for several hours. Oh, and it's been so long since I had driven a manual that I didn't know you push the gearstick down to get into reverse in modern cars.

Thankfully, another nice man (a passing Belgian) stopped and helped me figure it out. He also gave me an apple, for which I was incredibly grateful. It's a lesson I seem to keep learning over and over again - if you have the choice to "eat now" or "eat later", you should eat now. Later always ends up being much later that you expected.

When I got to Sellinn, I couldn't find the street I was after on the map. That's because my hotel wasn't in Sellinn. It was in Göhren. A nice lady gave me a map to take with me and showed me how to get to the town where my hotel was actually located...

Except the booking was wrong. When I got there, it turned out that my travel agent had managed to book me in for the three nights previous, and now the hotel was completely booked up and I had no where to go. The nice man behind the counter phoned around a few places and, on his fifth try, managed to get me into the last available room in another hotel. That would be the "luxury" suite, which was considerably more expensive than I had hoped.

This actually worked out quite well, though, because I decided to only book in for two nights and spend my third night at a hotel back in Bergen on Rügen, in a place near the train station. This meant that I had a car to get to all of the places I particularly wanted to see (and could take my time without worrying about bus or train timetables), and I could get the car back the afternoon before I left, rather than trying to negotiate my way through the town at some ungodly hour of the morning.

So thank God for looking out for me on this one. Between a spur of the moment decision to hire a car and a bunch of really nice people, I managed to have a good time instead of a series of disasters.

It turns out I didn't miss much by not staying in Sellinn. I saw everything I wanted to see in a morning. Göhren had even less to offer. I have no idea why there were so many people there. I didn't even take a good look at Binz, although I've been told it was one of the more popular sea-side resort towns. Considering how many people were in Sellin and Göhren, I can't fathom what Binz would have been like.

Sassnitz, on the other hand, was fantastic. I spent most of one day there, and probably could have stayed a little longer. It had a rather crappy beach, but you could walk straight from the town into the national park, and the parts of town I saw where so very... "porty". It's like what you imagine a European fishing port/sea-side holiday village might be. And there was this really funky pedestrain suspension bridge connecting the town proper with the harbour. Very cool.

And the national park was fantastic. I could definitely spend more time there, but I had to visit Hitler's holiday camp before heading back to my stinking hot hotel.

Prora was interesting. I don't really know what's there apart from one of the ugliest non-Soviet buildings I've ever seen and a really nice beach with a brick wall inexplicably in the middle of it... It was fairly late when I got there, and I particularly wanted to see the building. The Hitler connection didn't interest me so much as the sheer magnitude of the thing. I had seen pictures of this massive structure, and found the concept of such a huge, ugly "holiday village" incredibly fascinating. In the end, though, it was just another ugly building.

The beach was really nice (much nicer than the one at Sassnitz), but it was clothing optional, and I felt I would be out of place if I stayed around for too long without at least taking off my shoes. I like to opt for clothing, myself - everything I take off is just something I have to put somewhere or carry around with me, and then I just have to put it on again later... Much more convenient to just stay fully clothed in the first place - but it does make you look a tad over dressed when everyone else is either wearing a skimpy pair of togs or nothing at all, while you are wearing long pants, a long-sleeved shirt and shoes and socks...

Would I visit Rügen again? Maybe, but probably not at this time of year. There are just so many people, and it's quite warm, really. Too warm. Well, hot. It's hot.

Travel Diary, Episode 2 - There's a Bear in There...

I can see why members of my family have a habit of moving to Berlin "for a few months" and staying there for the next four or five years. It seems like a very livable city. Funky, yet sophisticated. On one side of the massive park you have the hippies, on the other side you have the yuppies. Somewhere around there you also have normal people, and they all seem to be mixing quite happily.

I love a town that can be easily navigated by rail, and between the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn I managed to get to nearly everywhere I had a mind to go. I wasn't there for long, though. Next time I'll have to actually visit Berlin, rather that just stop over for a few days.

But, fortunately, some good little holiday fairy wispered the words "bike tour" in my ear, and I managed to see most of the big sights in my first day.

I can thoroughly recommend Fat Tire Bike Tours as having a nice mix of toodling around the city and getting a bit of a history lesson (plus, they take you to a beer garden in the middle of the park for lunch - so very German).

My tourguide was a Kiwi, and I quite enjoyed his sense of humour. His face wasn't bad, either. My heart will always belong to Peter-From-NYCe-Wheels, but Francis from Fat Tire Bike Tours can turn my head whenever he likes.

There are a lot of bears in Berlin. Fibreglass ones. They mass produced them at some point and every other business seems to have a luridly painted fibreglass bear out the front. This, in spite of the fact that I couldn't find a European bear in the zoo. Asiatic bears and polar bears, yes, but your typical this-may-kill-you-if-you-get-lost-in-these-woods bear? No. Maybe it was there somewhere and I just missed it.

For some reason, zoos and gardens are always on my list of must-see places when I visit somewhere. I'll also try to see a museum or a gallery if I have time, but if I don't, then it's the gardens at the top of my list and zoos somewhere around second. I don't know why, because I'm actually a little bored with zoos.

"Oh, yeah. It's a lemur. Again. And, look - there's another elephant..."

I was a little weirded out by the way the Berlin zoo put animals from different parts of the world in the same enclosures. I can understand putting ostriches in with African ungulates, but emus? And why were there kangaroos right next to capybaras? There didn't seem to be much logic to the layout - which is probably why I couldn't find any European bears.

However, it must be said that the park next to the zoo - the massive park in the middle of town - totally rocks. The Tiergarten is massive, and so very woodsy and parksy. I didn't see any animals (apart from a dead mouse) in the "animal garden", though, which seemed a bit of a shame. It did have naked people in it, but that's Germany for you. For some reason, if you give them a patch of grass or sand and some sun, they feel compelled to expose as much skin as possible. Between sun exposure and smoking, it's a wonder Germany isn't a cancer factory.

Fortunately there seems to be some sort of pattern to this and you won't see naked people at every park or beach. You will probably see boobs, though. Mostly on the women, but no guarantees...

Travel Diary, Episode 1 - Off to a Flying Start

So, I really hate flying. This is something I know, and have known for some time - yet unfortunately travelling to Europe kind of involves a couple of rather long flights. Seven hours from Australia to Singapore, and twelve hours from Singapore to Helsinki (then two hours to Berlin, but more on that later).

Both flights involve rather large planes, which I hate especially. I actually don't mind flying in the small planes (like Dash 8s), but the big ones just make me feel stiff, sore, headachey and nauseated.

I managed to survive the flight to Singapore without too much incident. It was a day-time thing and I was sitting somewhere where I could easily get up and stretch every half-hour or so. It all started to head down-hill after I hit Singapore.

I had a four-hour wait for my next flight, hanging around the airport trying to keep myself conscious. This was made somewhat difficult by the soothing music they were piping through the airport. Some kind of tinkling piano thing that seemed far too soporific for the occasion. I ended up pacing back and forth through the airport and climbing up and down the stairs several times while humming ABBA's On And On And On in my head in order to keep myself awake.

I'm reasonably certain the security personnel thought I was nuts.

Then the next flight came into action, and whatever was stopping me from getting travel sick on the first flight completely wore off. You know what the trouble is with throwing up two hours into a twelve hour flight? You still have to stay on the plane for the next ten hours.

Oh, and I actually threw up twice. The first time it was whatever I'd eaten during the day (most recently, and least digested: rice), the second time it was the water I had taken to settle my stomache and rinse out my mouth after the first time. That lead to about eight hours of not eating or drinking anything at all until I thought it was safe to try a small bit of water again.

Suffice to say I was feeling seriously dehydrated by the time I got to Helsinki...

About that. I had a six hour stop over in Helsinki because I was booked on a Finnair Flight that must route through Henlsinki come hell or high water, but when I was getting off the plane in Singapore (after my first flight), I noticed a shorter flight direct to Frankfurt was leaving in a couple of hours. Why, oh why couldn't my travel agent get me onto that one? Especially since I'd asked for the most direct flight with the least amount of time involved?

I did get to spend four hours trying to find bland food and water in Helsinki (and saw a few sights and a market while I was at it)... aber, Mensch! Es war sehr ermüdend.

And, of course, it was at this point that I realised I had booked myself on a series of bus tours. The one thing that makes me more nauseated than flying is travelling in the back of a bus. This could be a huge exercise in "my goodness, Sharon is an idiot".

Trippin'

"So, I expect you'll have some stories to tell."
"Not really, I'm going to be too busy getting from one place to the next to do anything too interesting."
"Yeah, but you're the kind of person who would find something."
"What?"
"I can see you deciding to say 'Oh, what's down this path?' and go off the beaten track, or something."
"Oh.  Okay..."

I'm never quite sure how to take it when someone points out I have a reputation for being, well, chaotic.  I don't think I deserve it.

Okay, sure, there was that one time when I accidentally went for a two-hour bushwalk in a national park near a town I wasn't even intending to visit, and as a result I missed a party where I was supposed to be reciting "To A Haggis" to a haggis*...  But in my defence I had mixed up my dates, and the craft fair I went to see wasn't on that weekend, so I had to do something to make up for the fact that I had driven halfway across the state for nothing.

And, well, yes, maybe I have (on more than one occasion) climbed up some mountain just because I drove past a sign saying "Mountain Such-And-Such Turn off in 500m".  They were always little mountains and I always stayed on the well marked tracks.  And maybe I once decided to buy a $1000 print and have it shipped back home just because I visited a gallery on a runners' high**.  These things happen to everybody.

Or, at least, they should.  I don't regard myself as being particularly reckless or unpredictable.  I just see interesting things and go for a closer look.  What do other people do?  See interesting things and sit quietly?  What's the point of that?

I think I'm one step above boring.  I keep myself amused, that's all.  And yet, every now and then someone makes a comment that makes me think everyone must see me as the town eccentric, or something.  Like that time when someone introduced me to a visitor as "our local eccentric".

Anyway, I'm leaving the country this weekend.  My big European holiday is upon me, and I'll be spending a couple of Saturdays on a plane (travelling from Australia to Europe is weird, time wise),  and hitting Helsinki and Germany for a bit before taking a language course in Estonia.  Then there are a couple of bus tours through Switzerland and Italia before chilling out in The Eastern Empire*** for a few days.

Far too much movement to get into too much trouble.


*It's traditional to recite Burns' poem "To A Haggis" whenever serving haggis at parties.  I wonder if there are other foodstuffs that also require poetry.

**Yeah... don't do that.  Sure, I still love looking at the print ("Jam I" by Karen Wood), but I still regret spending that much money on something I wouldn't have bought if I'd gone to the gallery before going up the mountain rather than after.

***Austria.  The "real" name of the country is Österreich, which means "Eastern Empire" - which sounds totally cool, so I'm going to call it that from now on.