I ARRIVED TO TALLINN and was again surprised (pleasantly) by the way the port area has developed. It looks like a real city. When I came here the first time in ’02, none of this was here. Now Rotermanni kvartal is as bourgeois as it gets. Why not shop for a new suit while listening to gurgling electronic music and sipping on a smoothie, or noshing on some fresh sourdough bread from RØST while imbibing a warm cappuccino with coconut milk? Everyone in the window advertisements is lean, beautiful, effortlessly wealthy, and has lots of sex, most likely in fine hotels or in the back of sports cars. If that’s not what life is about, then what is?
But despite all the trimmings of the nordic nouveau riche, one cannot escape the cold sea wind or the gray sky. Sometimes the sun does come out though. It is odd that we are supposedly considered under threat from the Russian Federation, as if they were going to lob missiles into the nearby H&M. You would like to think that all of these things would protect you, but they don’t. It did make me think though what an angry, regressive energy is Putinism. How could anyone long for a day when half of Europe was under surveillance and home arrest? Age is a factor. He’s a post-1989 headcase and never really adjusted. He wants it back.
And the reason I am bringing this up is that so much has changed in Tallinn, and in Estonia, since that time that the country is due a narrative revision. A rewriting of the story. The Soviet period is slipping away into the past. It’s like watching those last pieces of the Titanic slip into the ocean. How can you define the story of a country by referencing something that doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore? This place is Hanseatic materialism redux. I continuously feel like I am in a mini-Stockholm or some other such northerly place where men in glasses who part their hair on the side sit around doing business deals with a stiff upper lip while wearing scarves inside, and weary eyed women walk their small dogs in the morning, bearing a cup of coffee before them as if it was a flashlight or rosary beads and looking as if they don’t have time for anyone or anything and whatever you have to say to them, they really don’t care.
north! 
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