FIrst Post --- Alive and Well

Well, no going back now. I'm on the ground here in Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia. (It's here; don't worry, I didn't know where it was either http://maps.google.com/maps?q=tallinn&rls=com.microsoft:en-ca:IE-SearchBox&oe=UTF-8&rlz=1I7ACAW_enCA353CA353&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl )

Anyway, as you can imagine, there was no direct flight from St. John's to Tallinn, so it was an adventure just to get here. I flew first to Toronto, leaving St. John's at 3:30 Sunday afternoon. Drank some Johnny Walker Black (which for some reason is cheaper than beer at Pearson Airport's international bar) and caught an overnight to Iceland. After a quick chat with the lady next to me at the bar, raven haired and downing shiraz like it was the day before the grape apocalypse, I had a new friend, at least until Reykjavik. We emotionally pressured the girl with the seat next to me into switching, and off we went. It soon turned out that the two girls next to us were fellow Canadian adventurers, both of them having just graduated from Guelph. We had all planned to sleep on the overnight flight, however ....



Instead we drank. Mostly we drank Gull, a bizarre choice for name inspiration, but a fine Icelandic beer with a light taste that was like a slightly-sweeter Molson Canadian. We also drank Polar Beer, which naturally has a polar bear on the label. I happened to see an ad for this beer in the absurdly profane Icelandic english-language weekly that they distributed at the airport, and it featured a drawing of a polar bear clubbing a seal, with the tagline "This is how we go clubbing in Iceland". I leave it for others to decide if there is irony in this or not.



After passing through security again, and getting the first stamp on my virginal passport, I checked out the self-proclaimed "Best Airport in Europe" in Reykjavik. It was all hardwood, but even duty free is no deal at Icelandic prices. You must need a second job to drink there, and then when would you have time for drinking? Some things I just don't understand. Another unsettling element was the absolute silence in the security line. I don't even mean church silence, I'm talking military silence. Standing in a line of about one hundred people-- families, young couples, even gaggles of teenage girls, -- all obeying some omnipresent silencing impetus. Genuine weirdness. A little boy made some noise, protesting something to his mother as she took something from his hands to put in the grey plastic x-ray trays, and I instinctively feared for his life. He seemed, however, to survive this violation of the unspoken covenant-of-silence intact, and on we went to Finland.



Helsinki is a legitimate big city. It's really an amalgamam of three cities, in a mini-GTA sort of situation. My cab driver was an unemployed English teacher from Seattle, who sold advanced solar-power generators on the side. He had lived in sixteen countries and travelled to forty, but now he had married a Fin and has stayed there for more than a year, with the simple justification of "I'm tired." All the travel had done strange things to his accent; instead of sounding American, he sounded more like someone from the future, struggling with our primitive dialect. Anyway, forty-five minutes and twenty seven Euro later, we were at the dockyard, to catch the boat to Tallinn. I'll pick the story up there tomorrow.