Brimstone Lark

Estonia is heaven on earth.

In Estonia the air is fresh as a lake and smells like the forest even in the street.

In Estonia there are antique goods and vintage clothing stores layered on top of local fruit markets layered on top of beer gardens layered on top of grocery stores.

In Estonia bakers leave woven baskets filled brown sourdough bread outside their stores with a little cardboard label that says “free” and everyone everywhere serves good coffee.

In Estonia you can eat a roast pork and potato dinner with mulled wine that tastes like Christmas for 11 euros.

Estonia is cold and crisp. It’s a city like anywhere else, but it has a medieval town center with cobblestone streets and churches.

My favorite neighborhood in Tallin, Kalamaja, is the greatest hipsters paradise in the world. Cafes and art studios have taken turns gentrifying the old industrial grunge. Brick buildings have been attacked by street art and neon signs, infested by gnarled iron lined garden parks and red picnic tables. Now, 35 year olds with tattoos and dark rimmed glasses smoke cigarettes outside the cleanly branded clothing shops that inhabit the brick shells of history like hermit crabs. I am in heaven.

I’m here visiting one of my friends on a brief excursion and break from work.

He knows a lot about the damaged history of Eastern Europe because this is his heritage. I know almost nothing and feel a sense of regret that I’m exploring a castle that reminds me of Disneyland instead of a castle where so and so lived or such and such happened. I think maybe I’ll read about it, but then I remember I need to figure out more pressing things like where I’ll be in 4 days. I wonder how the autodidacts and renaissance men of history got it all done. The answer is probably by inheriting time. My friend and I speak frequently of how to buy more time.

We drive to a place called Parnu in a rental car but the drive takes three hours instead of 1.5 because we fuck up the directions. On the way, we hike through a bog and talk about my friend’s childhood in more detail than ever, probably because we’re in his homeland.

“Tents! Pull over!” – in Parnu we discover a market of people selling their wares. It is mostly jewelry, fragrances, and sausages. We sit in a clearing where children are frolicking, people dressed like Snow White are selling a liter of beer for 5 euro, and music I don’t understand is playing. My friend tells me this song is about what it’s like to be a man “Men wear boots! Men cook dinner and are in the field“. I am in a fucking fairy tale.

On a cold and rainy day we enter a stone columned building that has the look of an abandoned library. Inside is an Estonian sauna and nightmare. Fat Slavs speak to me in tongues with their drooping testicles inches from my eyes. I watch a boy shave a man’s back. I lose my friend and I stumble naked, dripping, and dehydrated through three floors of iron doors hiding broken concrete floors, the lightless rooms completely empty except for shattered glass the occasional tipped over wooden stool. What the fuck is this place.

We lift weights twice a day and buy two sausages that we devour on the way home.

This bar is full of all of the beautiful people in this town who, for some reason, agreed to congregate at a single club to get appropriately drunk and dance. The best part is that nobody looks at me for more than 1 second. Any of the women will speak to you when you speak to them because nobody is terrified and nobody is looking for anything more than they have. None of the men are douchebags and they will all share cigarettes with you. I am in heaven.