I’m up early…to have some time to think and be before my kids wake up and I’m in “go” mode. We arrived in Tallinn, Estonia late Sunday night, and it is now Tuesday morning. I couldn’t find a cafe open yet, so I’m sitting in a park in front of a section of the medieval fortified town wall. An elderly man just paused as he walked past, and said something in Estonian. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t speak...” “Office,” he said and gestured like Vanna White. “Yes!” I replied and echoed his gesture. “It’s the perfect office!” He laughed, nodded, and walked away. It was my first non-commercial interaction with an Estonian and it was delightful.
I have seen photos of an artist and his family (Renoir? Cezanne?) packing up their entire home and traveling to the south of France for the summer. It seems that everything was brought: clothes, kitchen supplies, household objects. They prepared their home to leave, took most of their belongings with them, and moved into their summer premises for a good chunk of the year.
That is what I have felt like in the last two weeks. Knowing that we would be gone for all of July and August, I washed and packed all of the clothes that we needed, and then put the rest in storage. (I have a few big closets as well as a clean, dry storage space under the building. I put most of our doo-dads into boxes to clear off spaces and squirreled them away. I cleaned the places you usually don’t bother to. Took all of the magnets and the things they were holding off of the refrigerator. Used up as much food as I could and gave the rest of the perishables to the cleaning lady.
Because while we are gone, several groups of people will be renting the apartment. This is how I finance our trips, and I get much satisfaction at planning them so that we don’t spend any more on accommodation and travel than I am earning from AirBnb.
At the same time, I took as much freelance work as was offered in the weeks before we left. Although I can work while I’m away (after writing this, I have to come up with a catchy name for a skincare company’s Christmas advent calendar) I am going to minimize it to specific times. While we are traveling through the Baltics and Poland, I won’t do much. Then we are in Berlin for a week, and I will dedicate some of that time to work.
So the last couple of weeks have been busy. Tibor had his Bac Francais - the exam taken at the end of the penultimate year of high school. (All other subjects of the Bac will be at the end of next year.) And just after, he had his wisdom teeth out. (Which is proving a problem, because it’s just been a week and one of the teeth is bleeding a little and I wasn’t able to find a dentist who could see us in Tallinn yesterday. He can’t open his mouth wide and is afraid of infection.)
But finally, Sunday afternoon I left the last notes for renters, briefed the cleaning lady who is ensuring the rental transitions, and did a final sweep of the apartment. And we were off.
We arrived in Tallinn at 11 pm, got to our hostel (Viru Backpackers Hostel) and into bed by midnight, and it was just barely getting dark. Estonia has 18 hours of sunlight at this time of the year, so no matter what time you go to bed, you feel like it’s super-early.
The kids have never seen a hostel before, and Tallie thought this was the most amazing thing ever: everyone having their own bedrooms, but sharing a dining area, bathrooms, kitchen, and laundry. She began calculating how much it would cost to do this after high school with her friends in Paris. She felt she had discovered a whole new, better way of living. Until 8 o’clock the next morning, when a German family sat outside our door having breakfast for an entire hour, while their 1 1/2 year old screeched like a dying parrot the whole time. Suddenly, communal living didn’t seem quite as glamorous, and I am happy to say that Tallie is now safe from the possibility of a life of hippiedom.
During breakfast, I got a couple of work calls that destroyed all of the good holiday vibes and put me on edge for the rest of the day. Another reason I’m up early this morning: I need to clear those issues so I can have a holiday headspace and free myself up to having fun. However, we followed a “legends of Tallinn” walking tour for 2 hours and enjoyed it so much (yes, even my teens) that the good vibes returned.
After a lunch of cinnamon rolls (vacation is no-rules on the eating front), we toured the rest of the city on our own. We bought tickets and toured a section of the medieval wall including 4 towers, ramparts, and subterranean tunnels. And with this one visit (along with the walking tour, that covered the origins of the city) we learned enough of the history of Tallinn that we will be able to leave today, secure in the knowledge that we “get it.”
For me, the medieval history was great, but I found the tunnels that run beneath the entire city wall system (most of which still exist) absolutely fascinating. There were exhibitions along the way showing how they had been used as bomb and gas shelters in WWII as well as officially tolerated living spaces for squatters up until recently.
We went to bed last night exhausted, but confused by the light outside, and managed to sleep deeply. And now, refreshed, I am taking my much-needed “me time” to write, process, and do the hardest thing for me on vacation: letting go of real life and re-learning how to relax.
It really is need to be walking in the ground than underground where some of your ancestors undoubtedly must have been!