TWENTY-THREE was a productive year. I wrote two or three books, if you count the material generated for this site as future book material. There were diverse stories, some of them articles, others observations, others dream fiction. The top five most-read stories of the whole year were:
“Memoirs of an Invisible Man,” published 19 August 2023. This piece was published in the magazine Edasiunder a different title. This article reveals some of my American influences, in which the Estonian countryside takes on a Great Depression-era, Dust Bowl flavor. People seem to like these articles about cultural differences, for whatever reason, and I have been too happy to write them, in fact, I seem to specialize in them. This one seemed to really hit the mark.
“Principios de Declaración by Tomás del Real,” published 12 July 2023. Nothing like some web traffic generated off the back of a popular folk singer. This was my attempt to do a quick, magazine-style review of del Real’s newest album. I don’t feel I did the record full justice, but I got it up and posted in time for the maestro’s 30th birthday. People seem eager to read about Tomás. Another story I wrote about South American musicians in Viljandi, that featured interviews with Tomás, as well as Pepi Prieto and Lee Taul from Araukaaria, was among the top 10 most-read stories.
“My Love, She Speaks Like Silence,” published 28 December 2022. This story raised quite a few eyebrows. Who was she? I actually managed to write several stories this year about an unnamed muse, who remained anonymous to everyone, including herself most likely (hopefully). The title of this one derives from a Bob Dylan lyric from the song “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” I am not capable of writing like this on demand. I have to feel it, and I cannot make myself feel things. I have to feel them naturally. And as long as nobody gets hurt in the process, then, well, why not? I only know that some people wish I could write this way about them.
“Za Tallina, Za Rodinu,” published 26 September 2023. This reflection on Estonians and Russians in Tallinn was actually requested by Edasi, and I wrote it in Estonian, and later translated it into my native language. Most of it was written during coffee breaks during the Tallinn Digital Summit. All of the photos are mine. It’s been a black-and-white kind of year.
“Art Nouveau,” published 1 August 2023. After the Viljandi Folk Music Festival, I was exhausted and went to Tartu for a few days. I stayed in a friend’s apartment. It happened to be during a film festival, and so I could hear the 1995 movie Heat playing loudly through the windows. I took an herbal sleeping aid, and then the events recounted in this story more or less transpired. I was terrified when I woke up. The next morning I went over to Kohvipaus and typed up this story, which is probably among the weirdest I have ever produced.
What I like about dream fiction is that I am not responsible for the content. I am merely the messenger. And I plan to write many more stories in ’24.
THE CAR DROPPED ME OFF just outside the city limits and screeched off into the polar night. It was near some home improvement stores and car dealers’ lots. The terrain was familiar, that long highway that stretched out past Karula and those dark forests all the way to Tallinn, but the area had been developed in my time away. It seemed that Swedish brands had moved in. There was a Spotify office, a Volvo dealer, and even a Marabou chocolate distributor now. A new shopping center had been built beside the other new one. I went in. In its central atrium, there stood a Christmas tree festooned with gold and tinsel, and little plastic mechanical elves and reindeer danced robotically to Andy Williams’ hit “Happy Holiday/The Holiday Season.”
I rode the escalator up to the second floor. Most of the shops were already closed, but there was a burger and fries fast food restaurant that was still open. A few local women tended to the fries, which sat in small cardboard containers glowing beneath a warm orange light. The burgers, fresh off the griddle, were dressed quickly in silver packaging and lined up to cool on a rack, like tiny astronauts. I placed an order for fries and waited for my number to be called. But when I looked back, all the lights had been turned off, and there were no burgers left.
Then a young woman came out holding my fries and she told me they had shut for the night. Her light hair was cut in bangs, or a fringe as they say, and she had two braids. She was an Estonian, for sure. She had light blue eyes. She said, “Soon I am going to go and live in a commune on the North Coast. There will be good people there, spiritual people. Would you be willing and come to live with me in the woods?” She handed me the fries and I thought it over. Why did I keep running into women like this? A commune on the North Coast? An ashram in India? I didn’t know what to make of it, but decided to tell her yes. When an Estonian fry cook with golden braids asks you to go live with her in a commune on the North Coast, you say yes.
I THINK EVERY ITALIAN FAMILY has at least one good Uncle Frank story. This is for the simple reason that there are so many Uncle Franks. Frank, or Francesco, continues to be one of the most popular Italian names, and even in the 2020s, it ranks second only behind Leonardo among newborn Italians.
My grandfather’s name was Frank, and so to all of his nieces and nephews, the children of the famous Uncle Vinny, he was their Uncle Frank. My mother’s brother is also called Frank. Believe me, we have a lot of Uncle Frank stories concerning this particular Uncle Frank. The funny thing is that all of those Uncle Franks also had their own Uncle Franks. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope or prism; you point it at one Uncle Frank and then suddenly there are hundreds of them reflected in tiny pixels, a fantastic mosaic of Franks for the eyes.
This is not to be confused with Cousin Frank. Cousin Franks, sometimes nicknamed Frankie, are a different phenomenon. Thanks to Italian naming traditions, I have at least two Cousin Frankies that I know of, and there may be more. Years ago, when I briefly toyed with the idea of compiling a family biography, I began collecting stories. I knew that I had a Cousin Frankie who was in a rock band. Because of his dark and mysterious looks, he had at least for some time been nicknamed Cochise, after the Apache Indian guerrilla.
There was another cousin that I had heard of, however, who had ventured to the South Pole. And then there was a cousin who was running a pizza restaurant out in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The book project was going well, and I imagined all of these as three separate profile pieces. The rock musician, the Polar explorer, the pizza guy. After some investigation, however, it turned out that all of these cousins were the same person, Frankie Abbatecola, one of Uncle Vinny’s legions of grandchildren. Had I written the book, most of it would have been about the same person. This energetic Cousin Frankie is a Mötley Crüe devotee not much older than me, who slings pizza dough during the day, wakes up the neighbors with his electric at night and yes, even once made it to Antarctica, or at least some place where there happened to be lots of penguins. Today, Frankie runs a busy, buzzing pizza restaurant in Massachusetts called “I Love Frankies.”
Whenever anyone questions my Italian identity, I just tell them about I Love Frankies.
“That’s my Cousin Frankie’s place,” I say. They seem satisfied by this information.
***
BUT THIS STORY is not about Cousin Frankie. This story is about Uncle Frank, and a certain Uncle Frank who happened to be the older brother of my grandfather Jerry’s mother Rosaria. I suppose to me, he would be a great great uncle, the sibling of my great grandmother Rose. His real name was Francesco Petrellis, and he was born on that mountain top in Calabria in the village of San Giorgio Albanese overlooking the Ionian Sea, the same place I spent the night watching Godzilla dubbed into Italian. His birth year was 1889. It was a long time ago. At that time, America had not even yet formed itself on the lips of my predecessors. It’s interesting to imagine that if I rewound the clock back a century, most of my family was not even speaking English to each other. They were Italians, born and bred into the soil.
Uncle Frank emigrated to the United States with his family in 1900. It seems his father, whose name was Carmine, and who came from an old Greek family in San Giorgio Albanese, had already crossed the mighty Atlantic before, but this time decided to make the move with his whole family. There was Francesco, Rosaria, Maria Theresa, and their youngest sister Rosina.
It’s hard for me to imagine what the lives of this immigrant family was like because Carmine, the father, was illiterate, and when they later purchased a house in the town of Huntington on Long Island in the 1920s, where I was born decades later, it was Carmine’s much younger wife, Anna, who signed the contract, because her husband didn’t even know how to write. By that time, they had come to call themselves Peters, instead of Petrellis, to make their American life more manageable. This was a fundamental aspect of American identity. Even if you were not born in America, and obviously were not an American, you could give yourself an American name. Petrellis became Peters. For some of the Abbatecolas, their unwieldy name was shortened to Abbott to make it easier for bank tellers and telemarketers. It was a cosmetic change though. You can change your name, but that doesn’t change who you really are.
As such, the newly minted American “Frank Peters,” known to anyone within his circle of family and friends still as “Francesco Petrellis” was a loyal citizen of the United States to whoever wanted to know, but spoke Italian as a native tongue. He married, perchance, a Hungarian immigrant named Ethel, who was from a village called Nyírbátor near the Romanian border. I know much of this information because in 1920, she applied for a passport to visit Czechoslovakia. What I find fascinating about this is that she had never had a passport before then. In the early 1900s you could sail from country to country and settle with no documentation.
It seems that Uncle Frank and my grandfather Jerry had something of a rapport. Perhaps because Jerry did not get on so well with his own father, Salvatore, which was understandable considering that he had once left him bound in a basement cellar. According to my grandmother Margaret, they would go and visit Uncle Frank and share some coffee together.
Jerry had met my grandmother Margaret, who was not Italian, while working for a construction company in Virginia. They were introduced by friends and married impulsively after knowing each other for just a few weeks. Margaret at that time was working as a school teacher. Her grandfather was a German architect, but most of her ancestors were British settlers who had crossed the sea centuries before the Italians. One can only imagine this young Virginian school teacher being introduced to the enigmatic Uncle Frank, with his fedora hat and thick Italian accent, and his equally mysterious Hungarian wife Ethel. He told the government whenever they asked him that he did odd jobs for a living. But according to various family members, Uncle Frank really made his living as a chauffeur for underworld figures. My father claims it was to Vito Genovese himself, “Don Vitone,” the founder of the Genovese crime syndicate who dominated the American mafia for most of the 20th century. Others claim that he drove around another mobster called Capone.
Whether true or not, Uncle Frank was well paid for whatever kind of work he was doing in his career of odd jobs. One day in early 1965, when he was already an old man, Uncle Frank paid his nephew Jerry a visit and gave him a $500 bill. This banknote, which is no longer in circulation, featured President William McKinley on the front. My uncle still recalls the scene of the old man in his fedora sitting in the family kitchen and handing his nephew the money. But Uncle Frank actually visited all of his relatives and similarly gave each one of them a $500 bill. This became the Uncle Frank Story, the old relative who showed up, handing out $500 left and right. He then departed the United States, ceased being Frank Peters, and resumed being Francesco Petrellis and died several months later in San Giorgio Albanese, his home village. After he died, my grandfather Jerry went over to his uncle’s house. Frank’s wife had died the previous year and the house was empty. To his surprise, he discovered bags of money, hidden in various places. There were several purses full of banknotes that had been stuffed in the oven.
***
WHEN I RETURNED to New York after my adventure in Southern Italy I showed the photos of San Giorgio Albanese to my Virginian grandmother, who was 91 years old then, and still quite lucid, though slowly fading mentally. Grandma was in every way of a different breed than my grandfather. Her body was trim and lean, and she had her own kind of measured or balanced energy that she carried with her. Like most women in my family who had lived to an advanced age, she seemed almost preternaturally perceptive, and could listen and understand many things, without revealing any of her thoughts or opinions. It was all there, hidden behind the eyes.
This same Virginia school teacher had fallen in with some Calabrian construction worker in the South. To a woman like her, he must have been dark and exotic, and, well, it must have been a passionate relationship. You just don’t marry someone after two weeks if it isn’t a scorcher. Often when I think of this story now, I consider how I got married in more or less the same way. There is a wild streak in the family, but it’s hard to pinpoint its origin. Surely, some of it is rooted in the rugged mountains of Calabria. Yet maybe some of it comes from the swamps of Virginia.
At my parents’ house that Christmas, everyone had gathered around to see the images from my great Italian adventure, and my mother’s brother Frank even thanked me for at last re-establishing contact with our Italian cousins. “It was good of you to do that,” he said. My father’s mother had looked at the photos with some interest, but said little. Once she went back to her home, where she lived a solitary life watching CNN, listening to the radio, and playing her piano, she somehow discovered an old photo that had once been sent to Jerry from a relative.
The photo showed a man in a coffin, covered with bouquets of flowers. The photo read, in Italian, “On the 9th day of June 1965, in San Giorgio, died Petrellis Francesco.” The photo had been taken by A. Triolo, also of San Giorgio, and the photo was signed by Cosmo Petrellis.
This family curiosity had traveled across the Atlantic and across decades of forgotten memories, only to find its way into my hands, hands that had recently returned to that same village. In thinking about Uncle Frank with his fedora hat and bags full of mob money, I felt that I had understood something that perhaps only another Italian could understand. That whoever we were, and wherever we lived, and whatever names we called ourselves, we were still this illusory thing. Italians were just another unexplained meteorological phenomenon, like those tall waterspout tornadoes rising up like the mighty staff of Poseidon from the depths of the Ionian Sea. We came and we left, we appeared, vanished, and reappeared. One day, we might show up at your door in a crisp gray suit and fedora with a bag full of $500 bank notes. The next day we were gone. And weeks later, we might turn up in the old village, to greet our many relatives.
Just as I had done weeks before in San Giorgio.
Uncle Frank was Frank Peters to the US government and Francesco Petrellis to the Italian one. His odd jobs were driving bigshot mobsters around. But Italians belonged to other kinds of systems. Governments didn’t mean as much as family. The mafia was just another kind of human organization, as legitimate or illegitimate as the local police. Laws were distant, arbitrary, written by strangers. Politics, like in the mafia, was personal, dangerous, and corrupt.
And time, as I have said, was just imaginary. Everybody knew that it didn’t really exist.
WHERE DID SHE GO? I haven’t seen her in ages. And the last time I saw her, it was through the branches of a Christmas tree. It must have been recently then, but I still can’t remember. I decided though that I wouldn’t chase after her. I am tired of chasing after other people. Like Mr. Ray Davies sang back in 1965, “I’m so tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for you.”
But I am still waiting for her and looking for her. Three or five times a day I think I see her going into Viru or coming out of Uku. There’s a hundred Estonian girls who look just like her from behind, but when they turn around, it’s just not her. It just isn’t. Oh, they look fine in their striped shawls and long black coats, and with their dark potato brown hair, but they aren’t her. That shine she has in her eyes, it’s not in theirs. They lack some precious unnamed element.
One time I did see her again, but it was in a dream. She was wearing a yellow dress and a silver crown. I don’t know what those symbols mean. There was fire all around her in the dream, as if she was standing on the sun, or beside a volcano. She looked at me and then that was it. That was the last time I saw her, wearing a silver crown in a dream. I am sure I will see her again, but I am a little worried that if I do, it won’t really be her anymore. Maybe she has changed.
‘BELOVED CHEF DEAD,’ so read the headline of the local newspaper that morning. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it, because Smith was depicted there in a photo to accompany the article. He was wearing a khaki cotton suit, and had on a flat cap. Smith was sitting in the photo, but leaning forward, as if he was game for whatever life had on offer. He had a broad smile. He looked like an African prince on his way to study economics at Oxford. Oh, yeah, our Smith was a handsome fella if there ever was one. He drove the girls crazy. But now he was dead. The article said he had been electrocuted during a hairstyling incident. The police were investigating. I just couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t. Now it was him? When would it be me?
For a while, Smith had been running a restaurant and catering business in the Old Town. I walked by the place reading the paper, and then went down the hill to the new hotel and spa. For a long time, they had talked about building a hotel and spa in town, but nothing had come of it. Perhaps it had been worth the wait. It was vast and mostly open air, like the famed Blue Lagoon on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. In the distance, I noticed large white and brown objects floating in its frothy hot spring-fed pools. Soon, one of these objects drifted closer, and a large white seal turned belly up in the waters near the white stone steps. The seal looked quite content to swim like that, and from my position, I could also see a large rocky island in the center of the swimming area. “That’s a nature preserve for the animals,” someone told me. “We’re not allowed to swim out there.”
Intrigued, I took a walk along the waterfront. Little cafés had opened up to serve the guests. You know what I am talking about, street food joints, with little round tables shielded with umbrellas from a non-existent Estonian sun. It was actually partly sunny or partly cloudy on that day, and there was a light breeze. I looked over the barrier into the pools and saw a few black bears swimming by. At one café table, Erland was seated, freshly returned from Sweden. His hair was still long, down to his shoulders. I walked over and took a seat next to Erland.
“Did you hear about Smith?” I asked him.
“No, what about him?” he said. “I haven’t seen him since I got back to town.”
“He’s dead.”
“What? But how is that even possible? Did someone murder him?”
I shook my head. “He was accidentally electrocuted at the hair salon.”
“That’s too bad. It does seem like everyone is dying these days. First Agostinho, now Smith. Hopefully we’re not next.”
“Yes, hopefully,” I said.
Our drinks arrived and we sipped them. In the meantime, Erland’s infant son had climbed up on the table and then accidentally slipped onto the ground. He was there on the concrete sobbing in a pool of tears. I went over and picked the child up, but he seemed uninjured and I handed the tot over to Erland. Smith’s widow Külliki came to the café, with their daughter Stina. They were both dressed in light-colored dresses. Neither seemed particularly upset.
“Is it really true,” I shouted out to Külliki. “Is Smith really dead?”
She nodded, but in a nonchalant way. She was picking flower petals and admiring the spa.
“These things just happen,” Külliki said, picking at her flower. “These things just happen.”
IT WASN’T THAT LATE, but I was exhausted. It had been a long day, and between the minus temperatures and heavy meal at the German beer house, I was ready for sleep. I went into the rental apartment and made my bed on the pull-out couch. I even turned my phone off, so that I could sleep peacefully. I thought I was asleep, actually, until I heard several people enter the main room of the apartment. “Who’s there?” I called out. “Identify yourselves.” No answer came, but I could hear them all talking to each other. “Who’s there? Who’s there? Who’s there?” I cried. About 25 people then came into the room and sat around me Indian style in the dark. They said they were my readers and that they wanted to know about my new book.
It was an interesting crew of attendees. Sting, for example, was sitting in the front row, looking like he did around the time that he played a bell boy in Quadrophenia. He told me not to let anyone else know about his secret visit to Tartu. Then another familiar personage stood up among the readers and identified himself. “My name is Keanu,” said the dark-haired man. “I am probably best known as the bassist for Dogstar.” “That’s not true,” I said. “You are best known as Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan of Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure. And what about The Matrix?” “But Dogstar is my true passion!” commanded Keanu Reeves. “Tell us all about your new book!”
I was in my pajamas, so this was kind of an uncomfortable meeting with readers. Later, we went out to tour the city, making stops at the City Theatre and the Botanical Gardens. Much of it was organized byDavča, a bow-tied Czech entrepreneur, former executive at Maersk, and major figure in Baltic Sea trade. A young woman who bore a passing resemblance to the singer Nicki Minaj came along, and would not let me resist her sexual advances. “Please, please, can I be with you!” She wouldn’t leave me alone. “Fine,” I said, “let’s do it right here.” We went into an alleyway, where I began to lick her rather large brown breasts. This went on for some time until Davča popped his head into the alleyway and said, “Hey, you two, no more time for breasts! Keanu, Sting, and the others are waiting!” It was time to go visit the Christmas Fair.
I DIDN’T REALIZE that there was a cluster of houses in a hollow across from Kassitoome in Tartu. How I had never walked into this secret hideaway neighborhood was a mystery to me. That it had been repossessed by hipsters and eco-hippies was not surprising. I suppose it had once been a little industrial alley of shoemakers and blacksmiths in the old days, but now there were little red brick bungalows and wobbly lean-to wooden huts serving up tropical smoothies and chickpea-flour wraps. Men with well-groomed beards recounted their adventures in climbing Nepalese mountains, or picking avocados in the Southern Hemisphere, or how they got the first of a whole series of tribal tattoos, while their dreadlock-headed consorts flagrantly nursed their babes in plain view and talked about vaccines and Chinese astrology.
At the end of this alley, there was a tall building that opened up on the other side onto Jakobi Street. This served as a newer part of the University of Tartu Museum, but there was some office space upstairs. I walked into the lobby, and took the elevator up, hoping to come out on Jakobi Street on the other side. But instead, the great glass elevator only went higher and higher until it reached the very top floor. It continued to rise, and I could feel the elevator itself begin to come apart. I panicked and held onto a bar, in case the floor collapsed out from beneath me. Then I kicked the door to the elevator apart, as hard as I could. At last, the glass shattered, and a man in a suit came running from the desk of the museum and helped me out. He looked a bit like Steve Carell in his role as “Michael” in The Office. “Michael” apologized for the inconvenience, but I didn’t care. I was just happy to get out of that Tartu death trap alive.
THE LAST TIME I saw Dulcinea, it was December. It had been snowing for weeks, and even when the sky was clear, it seemed like thousands of little perfect snowflakes continued to flutter down and dance along the breeze. At night, it was the same, and I wondered if it was just the wind passing around the snow, or if it was fresh snowfall. It was cold at night, deathly cold, but I decided to go for one long walk by the lake. I needed to think about a few things.
I was over by the abandoned factory when she jumped me. When she leaped on top of me, I slid and fell. I had never been stabbed in the heart before, especially by a beautiful blonde girl with an icicle, but the icy blade found its mark. I let her cut me, and the steam of my suffering rose up into the air like ghosts. She said a few things, but I could only understand a few of them. She kept talking about how our age difference made her uncomfortable. “Such a big age difference! Such a big age difference!” I reminded her that Donald Trump’s wife was 25 years younger than him. We had a far lesser gap between us both. This didn’t seem to soften her blows. There were more. “Don’t ever write to me again!” “With you, I don’t feel like I’m free!”
I just lied back and took it, like a man, I suppose. I felt like I was having the very life pulled from my body. I curled up with my knees to my chest and I faced the forest. I remember staring at those birch trees, all covered in snow and ice. Dulcinea finally took from me what she had come for and ran off toward town. When I reached up and felt my chest, all I could feel was a bloody wound on the left. My heart was gone. She had cut out my heart! She had cut it free from my body with an icicle and ran with it into the snow. There I was, bleeding out in some kind of agony. This was really the last time. The last time I would cross paths with Dulcinea. I summoned all my strength and stood with my half-frozen aching heartless body. Then I stumbled towards the lake. The way was black and ran by the woods. I kept walking.
I TOOK THE TRAIN into New York. For whatever reason, the dog came with me, and I was carrying a small bag full of some clothes and a change of shoes. These I left somewhere at a playground near The Cube at Astor Place. Then I walked over to the old building on Grammercy Park and took the elevator to the top floor. I was led into the recording studio by the British girl. She said her name was Florence. She was of diminutive size and had straw-coloured hair, and features that immediately identified her as being of or from the Isles.
Something in the eyes, the lips.
The recording studio consisted of a large bed with a white blanket. It was here that we made love. I was surprised that I even could make love, especially to some random British stranger. But her eyes did light up during the lovemaking process. Behind the bed, there was a window that opened up into another room. It looked like it was someone else’s apartment, but also that it hadn’t been touched for a long time. There was dust on all the furniture. “Aren’t you worried they will walk in on us?” I asked Florence. “Please be quiet, love,” she said. “Just keep going.”
When it was over, she got up and put her clothes on. She packed her bag and got ready to leave. The producer and the sound engineer came in. The sound engineer was a Mexican with long hair tucked beneath a baseball cap, and he appeared to be crying. “Hidalgo,” said the producer, “stop your moping!” The Mexican wiped a tear from his eyes. I said, “You’re in love with her aren’t you?” Hidalgo only nodded. I felt bad, and couldn’t remember how I even knew Florence, or how we had wound up in bed. I thought we were supposed to be making music!
The producer looked like Hugh Grant, but like Hugh Grant looks these days, old and gray. “Excuse our Hidalgo,” the producer said. “He is a Latin man, as you can see. He has emotional tendencies.” The producer was dressed in a gray suit and his salt-and-pepper hair was cut short. “Hidalgo gets too attached.” I didn’t feel particularly attached. As I watched Florence prepare to go out, applying her makeup in the mirror, I felt a kind of sadness if not total disgust. “What? What is it with you?” she said in that rather inflected London accent of hers.
After she left, I took the elevator down. I went back to the playground by The Cube on Astor Place. Could you believe that my dog was still waiting for me? Some characters who looked like the musicians from Parliament Funkadelic were tossing around a frisbee, and the dog would sometimes go and fetch it. They were good guys, and my bag was still sitting there, untouched. New York had become a much safer place. It was safe at least for dogs and bags.
MY BROTHER came to visit me in Estonia. He hadn’t been here in 20 years and was amazed by how much things had changed. “It used to look like Gorky Park,” he said. “Now it looks like this!” To tell you the truth, I had been away just before he came, and took a ship from Stockholm back to Tallinn to meet him. Somewhere near one of the Åland Islands, though, I dropped my keys in the sea. They just tumbled out of my pocket. Even though the water was shallow there, and I could see the white rocks just below the water’s surface, I was unable to retrieve the keys and the ship sailed on. Which meant that when he showed up off the flight from New York, we had to take a rickety Bolt rickshaw down to the Baltic Station Market.
He didn’t seem to mind though. It looked as if he hadn’t changed since he got out of work in Midtown Manhattan. He was impressed by the new market, and the different kinds of exotic foods one could buy there. In fact, he spent the whole evening going from one stall to another. “You can get a slice of Sicilian over there,” I told him. “There’s a South African eatery here too. And whatever you do, you are not to miss out on the legendary and delicious VLND Burger!”
He tried them all and even had some ice cream, but then the jet lag set in and I suggested we take another Bolt rickshaw up a few streets into Kalamaja and then Viljandi beyond. But then I remembered the Omniva smart hotel. All you had to do was enter in the access code, and one of the doors in the parcel machine would open up and convert into a budget hotel room. There was even a bunk bed. My brother climbed to the top bunk and was soon fast asleep. His jacket was tucked beneath his arms as he snored in the top bunk of an Omniva parcel machine smart hotel room. To my amazement, there were no food stains on his crisp white business shirt.
north! 