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Tallin – Day 1

After just a handful of hours of poor sleep the alarm went off. It was 4.45 a.m. Freezing cold, dark and there was a Welshman asleep on my couch. I forced myself out of bed and into the bathroom. A few minutes later I was feeling slightly more awake and getting my head together for the journey to the former Soviet country of Estonia.

Slammer's driving reflected the mental alertness of any early morning traveller. I did try to tell him the flight wouldn't wait and that the speed limit was 40 mph not 14 mph. As we neared the airport it transpired that the car park booked was a 45 minute bus journey away! We dumped the Slammermobile in Brum Airport and found the others.

Czech airlines took us first to Prague then on to Tallinn. Andy quickly showed his grasp of the local exchange rate and advised everyone that 10000 EEKs (Estonian Kronas) would be more than enough. This was based on two things: - his calculation that this equated to about £200 and that we honestly thought that beer was 25p a pint.

Guess what?

Yep, neither were true.

My first good deed was to return someone's credit card. Nice of them to leave it in the cash point with a valid pin number but I'm just too honest for my own good.

Taxis to the hotel were taken.

The Metropol was a decent sized hotel just outside the old town. Clean and unfussy if not somewhat basic. But hey, we only needed beds.

We ventured into the town to find somewhere to eat and drink. A nice little fish restaurant gave us the first taste of local cuisine. And beer. Everyone seemed pleased with their choice save for Slammer who insisted the portions were too small. Least he got what he ordered (for the first and last time).

On into town and some more pubs were notched up. We had our first Finnish encounter in little boozer. Some bloke from Helsinki took a liking to me and told me all about his job as a Finnish fire fighter, his use of the local whore houses and his apparent interest in the progress of a certain Mr Forssell. There were a couple of problems with this bloke: 1) – he wouldn't fuck off and 2) he was so pissed it was a bit hard to understand him. Hence my first "lost in translation" error. As far as I'm concerned, it's easy to mistake "fuck" for "work" when you're dealing with someone who is clearly off his skull and foreign. It's not my fault I got a bit shirty when he asked if my fellow travellers were my work buddies.

To make amends the Finnish firefighter took us to another bar. Things got a bit weird when we clocked that we were being clocked by dodgy Russian sorts (especially those with several very attractive ladies in their company) who only seemed to have one topic of conversation. I can understand "English" in any language. Southy went to use the gents and came back insisting we left there and then. We got good at making a sharp exit.

Southy reported that our drunken tour guide was talking to some more dodgy blokes who were stashed in the back.

Full of local produce we did what all Englishmen do in frozen countries – we had a snowball fight then proceeded to slide our way about the town on the frozen cobbles.

We sought safety in the obligatory Irish bar and settled in for the night. Southy and Slammer got chatting to some local ladies (probably on a divorcee night out). The rest of us mercats later spotted the drunken Finn. We became practised in the art of flight.

We had been up for a fair few hours and agreed to call it a night on the grounds that we would make a day of it the next day. However, Ian insisted that Slammer and Southy go back into the bar to impress the fish wives with their British charms. Slammer's decision to stay out would cost him dearly the next day.



posted by kwacky at 2:45 pm