IN THE MORNING we had to leave Stockholm and go back to Estonia. It was me, Petra, our kids, and my mother and father. But everyone was tardy. Petra wanted some money from me, but all the coins I gave her were in some other currency. There was even that Danish 1 krone coin, the one with a hole in the middle of it. The children wouldn’t stop playing with the other kids in the courtyard. My mother started to make sandwiches. “But there’s a huge buffet on the ship!” I said. She kept cutting away there in the hotel kitchen, slicing up sandwich bread. My father meantime was upstairs lounging on the couch and watching MSNBC, his suitcase mostly unpacked. I quickly thrust some of my belongings into a bag as he just lay sprawled there, his hands behind his head. “You know, you should really get yourself some new pants. And a new jacket,” he said. “Look at me,” he gestured to his black Lacoste Polo shirt, “I still look cool, but you don’t.” “We don’t have time for this fashion shit, we’re going to be late!” Somehow I got them all into the transport van that would take us to the harbor. It was a balmy day in Stockholm, but with a slight maritime breeze that made the palm trees sway ever so slightly, or at least appear as if they were, and the Kungsholmen orange groves looked especially juicy with fruit. The van was overcrowded with travelers, and somewhere along Norr Mälarstrand a young man in a Hawaiian shirt disembarked and said he would walk the rest of the way. Somehow we made it, and with time to spare, and the white ship buoyed us in its sanctuary. Stockholm was more tropical than I remembered it being, with lush gardens and parrots singing from the verandas. It was all so different. It was fever hot.

BALTI JAAMA TURG, or Baltic Station Market, is a microcosm of the changes in the capital. It used to be this sprawling, post-apocalyptic, no-man’s-land of vene (Russian) putkas (booths) selling World War II leftovers (helmets, posters, pins), and big mama sellers weighing out kilos of potatoes and onions with a scale and making calculations with an abacus and a rickety giant calculator that even a blind man could figure out. “Kakzkyen krooni, palun.” And then they just razed it and built this monster thing. I call it Scandinavian, because I feel most of Estonia’s consumer culture is Scandinavian. It reminds me very much of Copenhagen, even more than Stockholm. There is that emphasis on everything being colorful, precise, well organized, and child friendly. We are Legoland people now, leading our Legoland lives. Indeed, Balti Jaama Turg is where the newly monied families of Kalamaja come to push their higher-end baby strollers and buy Italian and Middle Eastern produce. Some of the old sellers are still there, selling mounds of gooseberries, lingonberries, and chanterelles when they are in season. Some people lament that loss of the grungy post-Soviet ghetto element, but, you know, I was there, and I pushed a baby carriage through it in a whiteout snowstorm. Good riddance.

ZA TALLINNA, ZA RODINU. I saw a Soviet World War II propaganda film once, where the soldiers were singing, “Za Stalina, za rodinu,” (“for Stalin and the motherland!” in Russian) and so I think of this song when I come to Tallinn, mostly because as soon as I disembark at the train station, I am greeted by little clumps of ancient babushkas chittering away like city pigeons in Russian, the language of Tallinn’s sizeable linguistic minority. Tallinn is not essentially a Russian place though, so much of it is Scandinavian cookie cute commercial culture (the advertisement for the bakery Gustav painted on the trams, for instance, or even just the muted colors of the buildings, nothing loud anywhere, no neon orange or yellow, everything pastel this and creamy that, so mild and so restrained). There is this cartoonlike, childlike quality to the urban culture, it’s as if I am living in a life-size Christmas story of sorts, complete with the picture perfect Christmas fair in the Town Hall Square, or the indigent man mumbling to himself and sipping happily from a can of beer on the side of the road. There is also that brisk sea air chill, which you miss when you live inland, but which is unmistakable. I’m happy I have known this place and for such a long time. There are few other places I have known as long, and with such repeated interaction. Even cities I have spent a lot of time in, like San Francisco, those visits are in and out in a flash, I see some trolleys rolling by, have a look at the Golden Gate, visit the Haight maybe, get lost in the Presidio, and then it’s done. Or Reykjavik. I take the bus from Keflavik, check into the hotel, buy food from the Bonus supermarket, have a swim at Sundhöllin, interview Kári Stefánsson, buy some autographed Sjón books at Hús máls og menningar, and it’s over. It’s not like Tallinn and me. We go way back. We’ve got stories.