Riga & Tallinn

Hello subscribers!

Came back on Wednesday from my first bit of travelling since Switzerland a year ago. This time it was a combined trip to Riga and Tallinn in Latvia and Estonia, respectively. I’ve just uploaded a brand-new blog post about this trip illustrated with 15 equally brand-new photos. Do go and take a look!

It was the first time I’ve used an airport and boarded a plane since January 2020. It was a somewhat strange feeling to do so in the current pandemic, but Air Baltic, who took me and my wife to Riga, were very diligent in checking every passenger’s required online pre-registration for entering Latvia as well as vaccination certificates (or new negative test results, I presume).

In Riga, rules were pretty strictly followed too, e.g. mask wearing indoors except when sitting at a restaurant or bar table, and you were only allowed entrance on presenting a vaccination certificate or fresh negative test result too.

That changed dramatically once we got to Tallinn – where nobody, other than us and the odd other foreigner, ever wore a mask, not on public transport, nor anywhere indoors, where I saw lots of unmasked people hugging and shaking hands. Nobody ever asked for vaccination certificates or test results anywhere. It looked like the pandemic had never reached Estonia! But of course it has, and I am in no way surprised that Estonia’s corona figures on the Johns Hopkins uni website are currently going up again.

The day after our return we took another Covid test, just to be sure, and fortunately it came back negative. We’re both fully vaccinated, but I’ve read that even then you can still carry and spread the virus (if at a reduced likelihood of 30% or so). So we thought the test was the right thing to do for peace of mind after having come back from those very lax conditions in Tallinn.

Unfortunately my wife had to carry on working remotely on her laptop for the first couple of days of the trip due to the session extension of the organization she works for, so I had to do a few DT things on my own, but by Saturday she was able to join me for everything again.

In terms of DT the main things were a guided tour of the KGB cells in Riga, which were just days away from opening to the public for the first time when we were last in Riga back in 2014. So finally we were able to see these. In Tallinn, on my own at first, I inspected the changes at Maarjamäe – with its by now crumbling Soviet-era monument and the brand-new and gleaming Monument to the Victims of Communism that was erected right next to the old memorial in 2018. Also at Maarjamäe I finally got to visit the Estonian modern history museum, which was good. The jumble of communism-era statues and busts that had been dumped in the museum’s backyard have meanwhile been properly re-erected and now come with explanatory plaques. Otherwise the tone and emphasis in Estonia is generally decidedly anti-Soviet and anti-communist. Understandable, given the long occupation and suppression of freedom of the Baltic states by the USSR, but sometimes it feels a bit heavy-handed and over the top.

This also applied to the No.1 new reason I had for travelling to Tallinn: the recently opened-up part of the former prison of Patarei with its cells and topical (temporary) exhibition, which I was alerted to by the site’s management just before the start of the pandemic. Tallinn, and visiting Patarei, was one of the many travel plans that fell through due to the pandemic in 2020. So I’m glad it was finally possible to visit the place. The featured photo above is one of the nearly 200 shots I took at Patarei – it was an extremely photogenic place. As it was rather popular and the most crowded of all the museums I went to on this trip it wasn’t always easy to get shots without other people in the frame, so that prolonged things further.

On Sunday it was my birthday and we kept the DT angle to a minimum, simply getting a bus all the way to the TV tower. It is a Soviet-era structure and played an important role in Estonia’s gaining independence at the time of the failed putsch in Moscow in August 1991.

The rest of the Sunday and following Monday we kept completely DT-free and instead explored Tallinn’s marvellous Old Town, visited some art galleries, and enjoyed the unbelievably world-class Estonian craft beer scene (I’d go as far as claiming: currently possibly the best in the world). Sunday evening we also went for a fabulous gourmet dinner of six courses at a posh, but still informal, restaurant serving spectacular “New Nordic” cuisine. Generally we had very good food on this trip, both local and Caucasian – the latter is always a must-do when in a former Soviet country, where you can sometimes find even better Georgian food than in Georgia itself! That was certainly the case for the last place we went to back in Riga before the trip came to an end. Best khachapuri ever and outstanding amber qvevri wine!

In Riga we added some DT elements again. I had seen from the bus that we took to Tallinn that the Riga Ghetto Museum had a new large open-air artefact on display, namely a deportation-train rail car, so I was keen to go back there for a closer look. Once there we also found that several substantial new indoor exhibitions have meanwhile been added too. So that was a fruitful return visit.

I will certainly have plenty of work ahead of me now, updating my main website and adding all-new chapters and photo galleries. The latest blog post is only a taster.

But first I have to get ready for our next planned trip, starting on Thursday. We’ll go by train to Warsaw, have a couple of days in that wonderful city, then get another train to Lublin on Sunday – so I will probably not be able to send out a newsletter next Sunday again! I’ll also still be on the road the Sunday after that, but hopefully I can slot in a shorty then.

In terms of DT, the main things on the itinerary are a visit to the brand-new memorial at Sobibor, hopefully revisiting Majdanek, and also ticking off Izbica, Trawniki and Zamość, all that by hire car from Lublin (I hope my damaged finger won’t hinder my driving), and in Warsaw the Citadel and maybe revisiting Pawiak prison are potential dark destinations. Then we’ll move on to Berlin where we will visit the new “Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung” (‘Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation’). After that we’ll get a train to Hamburg and another one onwards to visit my family in the countryside, so no DT for a few days then. Afterwards we have allocated a few days to Hamburg, the city where I was born and where I spent most of the first half of my life. We passed through Hamburg several times on trips to Germany over the past decade or so, but never really spent much time there. So on this occasion we’ll allow ourselves three days of reconnecting with this wonderful city – and also meet up with some old friends. As I always say, you can’t do 100% DT only, it needs balance. That’s why I mention all these things here.

This has become a rather long Newsletter again – partly to make up for the absence of one last Sunday and probably also next Sunday. But with this I shall come to a close and give my poor left hand a break again. The finger that was operated on all those weeks ago is unfortunately not really getting back to normal. In fact at times it’s rather regressing and getting even stiffer, especially in the mornings. But I can live with it. And the last hope that it may eventually fully recover again hasn’t quite died yet. Touch wood.

So much for now.

Have a good (two) week(s) – and stay safe (i.e. don’t do corona-wise as the Estonians are doing!) …

Best

Peter