EVS in Estonia

I really wanted to write this article for a long time already to show you what we are doing several times a week. We do guided tours for cruise ships, and take them around the old town.

The cruises have a really big impact on Tallinn’s city. Usually our tourist groups are from 20 to 40 people maximum but as the demand is enourmous (2600 tourists in one boat like the Costa Mediterranea which you can see in the video), most of the time, we take bigger groups and sometimes our company is even obliged to refuse some people. We regularly have some groups of 46 tourists, and it is not easy to guide them for four hours or more.

Amélie does visits in french, for me it is more in spanish or in english. But spanish groups have become my speciality for a lot of estonian guides speak english better than spanish.

We all have the same route and sometimes it creates traffic jams in the little medieval town of Tallinn. One hour later, the old town is completely deserted, but visitors usually ask if “It is always overcrowded like this?”

In reality, Estonia is not really a country of mass tourism, as one could imagine watching the video. On the contrary, the country is full of natural landscapes, forests, rural areas and small peacefull villages, but unfortunately most of the tourists have no time to see this aspect of the country. All of the estonian tourism is for the moment concentrated in its capital, Tallinn and especially in the old town.

Last week, Jonathan had been invited to play at a concert, given in one of the prestigious places in the old town. The queen of england, Chirac, George Bush have all entered this building, which in medieval times, when Tallinn belonged to the Hanseatic league housed the St Maurice guild of merchants (also nicknamed guild of black-heads).

the idea was to help out and play a little of tin whistle, as a transition between the different scenes of the concert. What made it even more special was that the singers were….. babies ! Yes, 8 month old babies which were helped by their parents to do something on stage dressed up in ladybug costumes or wearing strange hats. Who would want to go to that ? Well, all the families of course, which were ready to pay 80 Kroons to enter and stand for 2 hours. There were about 400 people !

The time on stage being very limited for these small children (the oldest were 3 years old), there were many transitions, and each time the tin whistle played ! It was not always easy to improvise something in the spirit of the event, but it was good fun, especially for Amélie, who was enjoying the scene in the crowd.

Below is a picture of the famous entrance of the “Mustpeada maja”.

It is not secret, we have come back to Estonia to enjoy another summer, but the idea is to work this time ! When we were volunteers, things seemed more or less easy and planned. Now, we are seeing another part about living in Estonia.

We have thought at first that we might have enough work as guides for one travel company which we had already been in contact with in France. Soon after we came, we discovered that they only needed us a few times a month. Not only could we but we needed to find more work as well. So we did ! We printed out a few CV’s, took our courage in both hands and knocked on doors, trying to convince secretaries (in estonian) to see a director of some sort and finally made good contacts. They are just starting to pay now and we hope we will continue to receive offers from the companies we have met with. We have to thank once again our friends which have done their best to find us contacts (the son of the cousin of the sister who used to work there), they have given us hope when we were a little lost. Now, our schedules are filling up a bit : apart from our regular tours with cruises, we receive random offers like transfers from the airport to the hotel, and we also found more unformal visits like the funky bike tour we had done last summer. Amelie works on Saturdays at the museum of Rebala Heritage Reserve and we will try bringing tourists there on a half day tour from Tallinn.

Let’s hope our projects work, at least we are discovering how it is to be freelance guides, and we have learned a lot about Estonia’s history particularly about Tallinn’s old town. We tried our first visit with a group of volunteers in both spanish and english. For us, it was good practice and they said they liked it as well.

Welcome to Tallinn ! We are just getting used to our new life here. First of all, we are no longer volunteers, but we are so full of projects that it seems we are doing another EVS. Remember, we even had a on-arrival training ! Since then, we have been hanging around, with volunteers, some that we knew already before, and were happy to see again, others that have just come to Estonia and with whom we are glad to show different aspects about living here.

We have a good group of friends : Cecile from France, Luis from Spain… sorry Basque country, Zsofia from Hungary, Julia from Germany, Oleksi from Ukrain, the list is long and if I forget someone they might be offended. Let me just tell you about Thomas, our “ambassadeur de l’amour” who came to visit recently and reminded us how nice it was in the good old days when we were volunteers. Only four months ago, but I guess we have to get used to it, we are now “ex”volunteers, the old, the wise, though for us it feels almost the same. Almost is the word, for we miss our fields and the tranquility of the countryside. Like real estonians living in Tallinn, we crave for an escape out of town and all the excuses are good, a rehearsal for choir, church on sunday, to see our friends from Jõelähtme. For those who have followed our blog for some time and have a good memory, we even saw Leelo, the lady who had a cow. She is much better now (not the cow, may it rest in peace) and she was so happy to see us again that we left her with two kilos of potatoes.

We have found a place for traditional dances, a few streets away from us, and some of the musicians are the same as the ones we had in our village. Even in cities, you can find traditions alive, one just needs to look a little.

The video below is a show given in the old town, a nice little concert we enjoyed listening to. Hope you will too !

Last weekend, we decided to take advantage of being in Tallinn to visit the Kunsti Museum better known as “KUMU”. The building itself is one of the most interesting architechturally speaking, among the city’s modern constructions. A part of it is below ground, but the entrance has a sharp end stiking out in the air. Suprisingly, even in the rooms below the surface, there is a lot of natural light. A perfect showcase for estonian’s modern art, which has followed its own development, marked by soviet times. Whereas some artists tried to copy western ones as a form of protestation, other artists, seperated (physicaly and idiologicaly) with the occidental representations of modern art, found their own original definition. Though we’re not art gallery fanatics, ethnologically, it was interesting to explore how estonian artists have found means of expression throughout the years. There were also some more classic paintings, with portaits of young ladies by the river, peasants ploughing fields, but these too differed from the ones we knew, for the dresses they wore and the sceneries, reminded us the costumes we saw and the landscapes which we passed on our trips around Estonia (I tried to show this quickly in the movie clip). It was not the best museum ever, but we certainly had a nice time and appreciated it better I think, after having spent some time here, knowing a bit more about the history and the people.

With the coming of winter and Amélie’s birthday last week, we thought it would be the perfect time to get what we had been looking at since we arrived here : some warm woolen estonian sweaters. We took advantage of our day off to go shopping in Tallinn and found these nice ones, with grey and white traditional designs.
Now, we will be ready for the cold weather (lets hope) and can show off our new estonian style in Jõelähtme !

As French citizens, we received an invitation to the French Ambassy reception on the 14th of July in the Kadriorg gardens, in Tallinn. We tried to dress as best as we could with our volunteer clothes, but many people wore very fancy dresses. It was very agreable afternoon and the white tables decorated with blue white and red flowers (colour of the French flag but the blue flower used was the estonian national flower) were very good looking in these Versailles-looking gardens.

I shook the hands of a few people thinking they might be the embassador before finally meeting him and his wife. It was the first time I have seen an ambassador be so natural and speaking to people on the same level. During that evening we enjoyed a good 15 minute conversation with him, listening to his interesting stories and telling him a little more about our volunteering. He seemed glad to see two young French people volunteering, and said he might stop by on his way maybe some time this summer. A prestigeous visitor to our museum !

Unfortunately they had not planned to have so many people at their reception and most of them had not called before. Therefore, the four cheese plates disapeared in an instant with all those French people craving for good cheese ! We enjoyed the company at our table and the band singing a few French classics.

Tallinn’s zoo is one of estonian’s favourite weekend day trip, especially for families. It’s perfect on a sunny day. Ours was pouring with rain. The reason why we absolutely wanted to go was that we had promised to one of our estonian friends which we had met during our archeological work.

She was helping in a protection program trying to preserve the european mink from the spread of the american specie which is larger and more ferocious. It is hard to believe when you see these small creatures but Mari, our friend, describe them as “evil” though she still liked them a lot. These minks are now only found on the island of Hiumaa, on the west part of Estonia. The project had originally been supported by the European Union, but after some time, the subsidies ended and they are now trying to continue this program with much less financial support.

Though it was our first time in the zoo, we ended up helping our friend taking care of the minks, filling the tanks with water. We hoped some of them would come and play with the water hose as Mari told us they might, but it was too cold for them outside I guess. We only saw one playing in its water tank and it was incredible how much it seemed at ease in this element.

We spent a nice time with Mari talking, and she showed us around the zoo.

Last weekend, we spent some time in Tallinn, to discover a new part of town which we didn’t know yet.
The first was Kadriorg the estonian Versailles, a Palace built between 1718 and 1736, by the italian architect Niccolo Michetti, For the Tzar Petter the Great as a summer residence For him and his wife Catherine. We wandered through the gardens and made our way to the sea, to the Pirita district. This area of town is the place where all the inhabitants of Tallinn go to to have a little swim on a sunny day like last saturday. It almost looked, in certain aspects, like the mediterranean sea, with people sunbathing in swimsuits or playing beach soccer. As for us, there was a little too much wind and we prefered to have a dip in a Spa Hotel, with a swimming pool, Sauna, Hammam, everything to put back in shape two tired volunteers… a great restaurant after that helped finish a great day in the city !

Last Weekend, The Vabaohumuseum, which is an open Air museum near Tallinn, was celebrating it’s 5Oth anniversary and had invited artists and craftsmen to come for a market, with foods, music, dances, the eternal swing, and many people in costumes from all over Estoniia. We even saw some Setu people which is a minority living in the very south of Estonia and have a peculiar dress, with a silver plate and necklaces in front. These people are still very attached to traditions and have managed to keep their dialect, and style of life.
We had hardly found our way to this place, in the middle of the woods, that I was pulled by the hand and encouraged to dance. Hopefully, we had practiced our dancing in Joelahtme before !

We wandered around the different stalls and couldn’t resist bying ourselves some delicious foods (see picture) :
- some honey from a lady who had a very small production
- some smoked salmon
- smoked Herring Filets
- Finally ! a good looking farm made cheese (with taste, at last !)
- last but not least, a very long ………………. MOOSE dried sausage. strange idea, but very tasty !

Then we had to go check out an exibit about our reserve (yes yes !) SOme people had taken pictures of our unique landscapes and portraits of the local inhabitants. The exibit was pretty well done and we thought we might try to borrow it from them once it was over… (you can see it in the video).

This past week, the Old town of Tallinn has been having all kinds of shows, music conserts, dances… we were able to see some of the begining of the festivities which started by a school dancing contest. Though some of the dances had ridiculous music, it didn’t seem easy to do all the moves the children were doing. We couldn’t help filming it so we could share it with you. have fun !

This last Saturday,
We took advantage of the weekend to go to Tallinn to listen to a Jazz concert. There is a Jazz festival going on at the moment, until april 28 with artists from all over the world.
We decided to go listen to Tõnu Naissoo and Novella Hanson for two reasons : first, it was free, second, they were estonian and we were curious to see how it would sound in this language.

The result was very good. both artists used the concerthall as best as they could. it was in a very big church and the pianist played a few jazz tunes on the church organ (interesting !) and the singer played with the echo of her own voice…

For those who have video, here is an extract from the concert :

We managed to catch a bus, going along the highway to Tallinn. Not an easy thing to do here for the buses stop randomly it seems. However we did a good job for we stoped exactly where we had hoped : a small market in Tallinn in a street, far from any tourist attraction and filled with russian speeking people. we got in and it was as if we had taken a trip back into the past. people were selling odd goods, from old clothes to honey, eggs and tools. Some even had old soviet medals on the side for sale. We stayed there an hour or so, looking through the different stands with meat, fish, vegetables being watched as much as we watched them. We had the impression of having the priveledge of entering a place no foreigner usualy sees. There was even a whole part of the market dedicated to potatos (some with strange names such as Van Gogh for instance).

We spent most of the day walking through the streets of Tallinn. We ate in a small restaurant in the center, and enjoyed the sunny weather.

Here are some pictures we took in Tallinn…

For anyone who would like to have a virtual walk in the Estonian Capital Tallinn, it’s now possible ! Click on the picture, then select “virtual tour”, and you will can move the little men on the map. Click also on the pictures (up and on the right from the border to have some panoramic views of different places in the city. Don’t miss the webcam which is well done too. It is the best we can do to show you how it is like! And for those who weren’t still satisfied, there also are 150 pictures of the city online.

Here is a satellite view from here we are located. You can click on to see the map more detailed and zoom in on the parts that interest you the most for example the old town of Tallinn.

Here is a little movie to present the capital of Estonia : Tallinn which is located on the coast of the Gulf of Finland. It will enable you to have some pictures in mind of this european capital that we know too little in spite of the efforts made there to promote it especially international-wide. With its 450 000 inhabitants, Tallinn is the main harbour of the country too.
Plunge a few moments in its historical neighbourood which is included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, and look up to its more modern buildings. Also a few insights of local customs, of way of life, of gastronomy, etc… So, doesn’t it enamor you?