Tallinn Travel Story by Vijai Maheshwari

Tallinn, the capital of vibrant Estonia, must be the smallest big city in Europe. With just over half a million inhabitants and a location so obscure it makes Helsinki seem the center of the world, it still buzzes with a cosmopolitan vibe which outshines larger cities like Hamburg or Warsaw. The Dalai Lama has chanted for peace under a tent in the Old Town; Lennox Lewis came through with his entourage for a victory bash after knocking down Mike Tyson last year; and Chinese premier Ziang Zemin spent a few days here while traveling through Europe; and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church visited this spring. Estonia even hosted the infamous Eurovision Song Contest in 2002, the first former Communist nation to do so. And this May, 2004, it joined the European Union, along with the other Baltic States.

The city’s main medieavel square is wired on Wi-Fi, so that you can surf the net on your laptop while sipping coffee under the 16th century Town Hall. And while independence from the Soviet Union is just a little more than a decade old, the styles and English accents of the country’s trendy youth are more Camden Town than Bucharest or Minsk. Even though it joins Europe only next year, in May 2004, it is already more self-confident and modern than many cities in Spain or Greece. And though nudged up against the frigid Baltic Sea, which freezes up during cold winters, it has attracted its fair share of migrants from warmer climes. Its Russian community is also sharing the spoils of success: Estonia’s young Russians speak three to four languages, English, Estonian & either German or Swedish, and are turning into well-educated, middle-class Europeans. Plush Russian restaurants like Troika in the Old Town are popular with the Estonian community, who still have a fondness for vodka & blini with caviar.

Its ultra-trendy restaurant, Pegasus, with its spiral steel staircases, red plastic floats reminiscent of Phillipe Starck, and nouvelle samosa snacks is part-owned by Michael Bhoola, a Londoner who spent his summers in the Naipaulesque, muggy milieu of apartheid Durban in the 80s. “We’d wake up at five am, have a leisurely swim, then sit down for a traditional Indian breakfast prepared by our grandma, and then go back to swimming. It was too hot to do anything else,” he recalls during a late night at his chic bar. Yet he seems strangely content in the Northern European icebox of Estonia. So content in fact that he convinced his younger brother to move here from London after he finished university and help him run a radio station, Energy FM, which he bought recently. “Life is just so easy here. And the winters give you a lot of space and time to think.” Michael is not the only Indian expatriate here. Daryl Hydes, an Anglo-Indian from London opened an industrial bar, Café VS, in a former Communist bookshop--The Fighting Word--which serves a mean chikken tikka and salmon tandoori. Although he winters in Goa, he relishes his Estonian life with his live-in girlfriend and son. “I got everything here. Why do I need to go back to London and just spend money.” Daryl and Michael are complimented by a quirky range of expatriates who have been drawn to Tallinn’s special Baltic/Scandinavian vibe and … its gorgeous women, said to be among the most beautiful in the world.

A pixie-like, shaven-headed Japanese writer lives in the medieavel Old Town writing harlequin romances about tall blond girls for a hungry audience in his native Japan. A former London DJ, Rhythm Doctor, has married a local fashion designer and helps bring cutting edge electronic acts to tiny, music-savvy Estonia. Basement Jaxx played a gig here in 1996, long before they hit the charts in the UK. New York’s body & soul legend, Jo Clauselle has been here numerous times; and so have other famous DJs like Ronny Size, Little Louie Vega, Junkie XL from Holland, King Brit, Frankie Knuckles and Finland’s Jimi Tenor. Plans are underway to bring the reigning king of Norweigan angst-rock, Erlend Oye, to Tallinn in the near future. Meanwhile, its proximity to Russia, and large Russian population, keeps Estonia plugged to Russian cultural trends: Leningrad, Zemphyra, and other big Russian acts are always passing through.

This influx of expats and craving for progressive dance music isn’t limited to Estonia after all: Most cities in emerging Europe, including Istanbul, boast a similar potpourri of expatriate haunts and high-octane nightclubs. What makes Tallinn unique in comparison to its neighbors is that its influences are more Scandinavian--and even Russian--than American or big-brand Western European. The trendy designer boutique, Nu Nordic--with its Replay-like jeans, minimalistic silverware & web design books--on the edge of the city’s Vabaduse Square sums up the reigning zeitgeist: Tallinn is more an outpost of Scandinavia than an East Bloc capital on a spending spree. While both Warsaw and Prague equate Westernization with Blues joints, Sports bars with large-screened TVs tuned to basketball & American football, and New York pizzerias, Estonians prefer bright-lit fish restaurants with umber-colored walls and cocktail lounges with red velvet sofas and caiparinhas. They also dissed rock n’ roll quite early in the 90s, grooving to house and drum n’ bass long before those sounds were mainstream in Europe. Tallinn has just one rock n’ roll venue, the Guitar Safari, which is popular among Finnish tourists coming over for the night on a drinking binge (Helsinki is just an hour and a half away from Tallinn by fast boat; and only 19 minutes by helicopter); the locals prefer the sleek, loungy vibes of Café Moscow, with its glamorous waitresses in red baby doll dresses, and parabolic designer ceramic bowls.

This Estonian preference for clean airy spaces over crowded, smokey dives, is also evident in its architecture. While the city’s celebrated Old Town, with its narrow, gabled houses, cobblestoned streets, and vaulted stone basements is a mecca for tourists who are suckers for ‘old europe,’ most of the interesting design and construction is taking places on the edges of town. Walk through the maze of construction around downtown’s Viru Hotel (built for the 1980 Moscow Olympics and influenced heavily by Oscar Niemeyer’s modern Bauhaus aesthetic) to Maakri Street, and you might think you’re in Holland’s architectural mecca of Rotterdam. Glass buildings, including the Radisson SAS Hotel, tower above simple wooden houses, while ribbed chrome pillars mark the edges of a vast underground parking lot. The new Uhisbank skyscraper has a lopped triangular roof reminiscent of New York’s Citicorp building, while the white, blue and black colors of the Radisson’s façade evoke the country’s simple tricolor. Down Maakri Street are designer boutiques and upscale restaurants catering to the city’s growing professional class. Even the local strip club, Soho, has large plate glass windows and sleek, straight-backed leather sofas. Further from town, along the Baltic Sea near Pirita, are black slate houses with Frank Lloyd Wright open plan living rooms, which blend in with the dark fir trees of the surrounding woods.

This Nu Nordic style of architecture, with its emphasis on light and straight lines, a post-millenial Bauhaus, has become a national aesthetic. The new Occuption Museum, which opened in March 2003, documents the country’s troubled history, both its annexation to the Soviet Union after the World War II, and its Nazi rule from 1940-41, during which most of its Jews were massacred. It is a sad and desperate tale, a scar on the Estonian psyche, especially the mass deportation of more than 60,000 of its citizens to the Gulag during Stalin’s reign. For all the pathos though, the memorial itself resembles more the atrium of a designer hotel than a monument to the horrors of Communism and Fascism. The building is built entirely of glass, and is supported by funnel-shaped chrome columns which give its interior a light, airy feel. It even has a stylish bar, which would not be out of place in the VIP lounge of a trendy nightclub. “Its crazy, you don’t mix lounge style with a sober museum dedicated to the evils of the past,” fumes a local diplomat.

Yet, it is this hyper-modern aspiration in Estonia which some visitors find offputting. They complain that the Estonians are cold and reserved, and admit that they miss the grungy ambience of other Eastern European capitals. “Even Amsterdam has divey bars with greasy counters and cobwebs in the toilets. Its part of their charm. Here everything looks like an airport lounge,” grumbles a Dutch expat. For Poland or Slovakia, it might be enough to get a pat on the back from Uncle Sam, and a visit from George Bush. The Estonians instead don’t give two hoots for Washington or Paris--they’d rather be in the pages of ID Magazine or Wallpaper. Or Russian glossies now as Moscow becomes more trendy in their minds.

As a frequent visitor to Estonia, and a former resident for over two years as a Financial Times correspondent to the Baltic States, I dig the ultra-chic surfaces of the emerging Nordic nation. Born in 1969, I came of age in the 80s, when the glamour of jet set travel and playboy lifestyle was under attack by the grittier, angrier aesthetic of punk and indie rock. Abandoned industrial spaces, mullet hair cuts, slashed black, and purple eyeliner, were far trendier than the self-indulgent Hugh Heffner fantasies of the innocent 60s. The glamorous capitals of the high life were also beginning to fray and tear at the edges: large swathes of New York, Paris, London and other big metropolises were now more reminiscent of parts of Mumbai or some other third world city than the rich West.

Against this backdrop, Tallinn is a 3D, post-millenial version of a postcard from a holiday resort in the 60s, so brilliantly captured in the photographs of London photographer Martin Parr. The men who roam the designer flats with their gorgeous ‘furniture’ of kept women in the Charlton Heston classic, Soylent Green, would not feel out of place in Tallinn’s hedonistic cocktail lounges and nightclubs. The women are still blond and gorgeous in tight jeans and big buckle belts; and the tough men with bags of white in their wallets and tales of adventures in far flung lands still bang the best women. There’s an element of yuppiedom in this description, which goes against my left-leaning university inclinations, but usually one is having too much fun to spoil the trip with some politically correct ruminations. Parties aside, what makes Tallinn so endearing is its innocent love of money and business. While most New Yorkers are slaves to their jobs despite their ‘artistic’ dreams, Estonians are entrepreneurs first and foremost. Almost everyone I know there has set up their own company, is in the process, or has already gone through the cycle and experienced bankruptcy. One doesn’t have to get an expensive MBA these days: Just hang around the bars and cafes of Tallinn and you’ll learn more about real business than you would studying Adam Smith. During my three week holiday there in August, I seriuosly discussed setting up three companies just for the sheer hell of it: One to make T-shirts and sell them in Amsterdam; another, a minor record label; and the third, an after-hours nightclub. The T-shirt business might actually take off, if the fashion designer can get over the loss of his gorgeous girlfriend to a rich Italian furniture dealer from Bologna.

For those with a distaste for REM’s bright, shiny people, Tallinn does have a seamier, wilder, less self-conscious side. I spent the night of my 34th birthday singing Russian karaoke in a tiny, all-night bar called Hieroluxx, with zebra-striped couches and women in beehive hairdos. Vodka shots were 50 cents and a serving of Russian dumplings or pelmeni is just one euro. Then there are the artist clubs Levis Valjak, where students and those shut out from the go-go business values of the country stagger around its medieavel cellar and sing Estonian folk songs. Also, visitors must remember one thing: Although Estonians dress like Swedes and might be as reserved and humorless at times as the Germans, they do have a Russian soul. Once enough vodka has been imbibed, even the uber Tallinn icebabes in their Prada jeans and Wella-conditioned hair might burst into a Russian song, or squat on a sidestreet at dawn for a swig from a bottle. It’s a side of Estonia that most tourists will never experience. Yet knowing that it exists, and that it is waiting to emerge from the cold, modern surfaces of the slick city, are enough to give the evening its special kick.