Estonia

I said at the start of this column that I was going to document ‘the highs, the lows and all the in-betweens’ of being on exchange, or something like that. Well, this is one of those times when I will be writing about the lows: Homesickness. Oh, how I hate the word – why should I be homesick? I got paid a shitload of money to live and travel around Europe; why would anyone complain about that?

 But I guess it’s inevitable that, when you’re trudging through snow (which is more like really heavy rain at night) to get dinner, you might want to go home. In particular, when you have a fever and can barely get out of bed in the morning.

I’ve managed to hold off any colds and flus for the last two months. I think this is pretty impressive considering I’ve been in a country where it not only snows every day, but the temperature has never gone above 0 degrees. So I woke up one morning with that feeling that something was not right. Slight fever, slight sore throat, slight tiredness – it was the type of sickness where you know you’re going to feel like crap the following day.

Sure enough, the bug hit me with full force the next day, but I still made my way to class since every subject has an 80% attendance rate here. That day it was snowing in Helsinki, and by that time I began to really hate snow. Sure it’s pretty, but it’s also like thick rain pelting at your face. When the ice freezes in the streets you better make sure you avoid it or you're going to fall on your arse and possibly break a leg (seriously, the hospitals here have been flooded with patients who have broken their legs by falling on the ice). Oh, and it was something like -5 degrees.

I felt I deserved some good strong drugs, and made my way to a local chemist. Then I realised something – I don’t speak Finnish. This is one of those moments when you miss being in a country where you speak the local language. Finding a packet of Strepsils is easy enough but trying to figure out the instructions for nasal sprays and other medications can be a pain. Then I started to think about home and all the things I missed - the English language, the sun, the lack of snow and Tim Tams...

Of course, after almost a week I got over my cold and then got over my homesickness. I didn’t get another case of homesickness until a month later, but this time I was homesick for Finland.

Tallinn, Estonia

A view of Tallinn, Estonia from a lookout point.

Tallinn. One of the fastest-growing tourist destinations in Europe and with good reason - it has one of the best preserved Old Towns in Europe, lovely national parks and cheap liquor. It’s been a favourite holiday destination for Finns for years, since it’s only a three-hour ferry ride from Helsinki. So it’s safe to say I was pretty excited about seeing Tallinn. I ended up there as part of my course, as it was an assignment to spend a week in Tallinn and the university was paying for almost all of our expenses. Accommodation, travel and equipment costs were covered.

Once I got off the ferry and unloaded my bags into the hostel, I realised why all the Finns come here for the weekend. There’s no doubt that it’s a beautiful place, and pretty small so it’s easy to get around. The Old Town is a classic medieval village, with old cobbled streets and castle towers dotted everywhere. But I couldn’t forget it was a working holiday, so we were working from 9-5 and going out in the evening.

So this was all good for the first three days, but then on the fourth day we had a few well… let’s say ‘experiences’ that made me realise we were not in Helsinki anymore.

Thursday morning at 9am, my journalism student group – Mily, Anna and I – walked to the car park near the ferry in Tallinn where we had parked. We had decided to bring a car with us since we were making a television piece, and you really don’t want to carry around television equipment on an Estonian bus line!

Anyway, we walked to the car to find that the window was smashed, glass was all over the floor of the car and the GPS and radio had been stolen. Our car was definitely not the most expensive vehicle in this lot - we were surrounded by sports cars and Mercedes’ – but our little 15-year-old Toyota was the one to get broken into!

“Oh my god!” Anna and I gasped as soon as we saw the damage. Now what were we going to do? Mily, the owner of the car, was surprisingly the most calm out of all of us.

“Don’t worry, this is what I’ve got insurance for,” she said. True, but to do that we had to get a police report. And as an expat from New Zealand who’d been living in Estonia for ten months put it: the police ‘are useless.’ Not only do they not show up after you’ve called them twice to inspect your vandalised car, but then tell you to find your way to their police station, which is in hell. On top of all that they yell at you in Estonian and then the interpreter yells at you in English before they finally decide to give you a police report.

Needless to say it was a stressful day for Mily, who had to deal with the police. But she wasn’t the only one who had a stressful day. Another friend of ours was walking home alone at around 1.30am in Tallinn’s Old Town. Out of nowhere three men came up to her and pushed her to the ground, before they started kicking her. Now here’s the strange part – then they just left. She had a backpack which had her camera, phone and laptop in it – but they didn’t even try to steal anything. On top of all this - on the same day, one of our other friends fell on the ice and broke her leg.

The fatal ice, and not the diamond kind either. 

Now this isn’t something that makes Estonia a bad place - people have been slipping on ice and breaking bones all over Helsinki this winter. However, it was just the icing on the cake and once everyone got back to the hostel relatively in one piece, we cooked a nice meal for each other and drank a good bottle of red wine. It was something we really needed – I understand now why studies show that foreign reporters tend to drink a lot…

At the end of this day, the logical part of my brain was telling me that we were just unlucky and it was more the fact that all this had happened in a single day that made it worse. But by the time Friday morning came around, I wanted to go home. I realised this when I was trudging to the port to buy my return ticket and slipped on the ice. My pride was hurt more than anything, and I landed safely on my bottom – but it was cold this day, and the snow was really heavy and pissing me off.

Then the inevitable words came out: “I want to go home!”, I yelled to the snow. But I wasn’t talking about Australia, I was talking about Helsinki. I don’t know how it happened, but Helsinki is now my home. I know this place just as well as my home town. I think I’ve turned into a local – minus the ability to speak Finnish of course. I do my shopping, use the public transport and live like a Finn – and the exchange student crowd has become my adopted family. So when the ferry pulled into Helsinki, I couldn’t help but think ‘home sweet home.’ All I needed was a tram to the train station, then a bus and then I would be home.

So after waiting on a relatively cold bench for 15 minutes, the bus finally pulled into the Helsinki bus port. Holding a suitcase awkwardly in one hand, with a handbag slung over my shoulder and a heavy camera bag in the other hand (I ended up with half the television equipment to take home), I made it onto the bus and slung all my luggage   into a four-seat compartment before gratefully getting to sit down. The trip went pretty smoothly until a drunk, homeless Finnish man entered the bus.

You get a few homeless people in Finland and they're quite often drunk because, well… I guess alcohol’s a good way to keep warm. This Finnish homeless man in particular thought it would be a great idea to sit next to me and chat to me for half an hour in Finnish. Telling him ‘I don’t speak Finnish, I don’t understand you’ didn’t really deter him. I proceeded to stare out the window while he babbled on in a language I didn’t understand, and there was no way to escape with all my luggage around me and the other three seats full. Wow – I was going to be really happy to get to my bed. I managed to sneakily get myself and my luggage to the back of the bus when two ladies left and enough room so I could move. I ended up about three rows away from the drunk guy, I thought for a moment that he might follow me – but he was so drunk he seemed to have thought I’d disappeared.

So, at around 10pm I found myself walking back to my apartment with no drunk homeless locals to accompany me. I gratefully turned my key in my door and dumped my bags in the hallway. Ah – home sweet home. It had been a really long week and now I was just happy to go to bed.

The next morning I woke up after a good night’s sleep and a call from my mum. It may be a cliché but having a call from your mum after a hectic week can make everything better. As I was lamenting about my ‘unique experiences’ in Estonia, my mum said, understandably, ‘So, you wouldn’t go back there.’ The funny thing was that I would go back to Estonia. I know I had a serious streak of bad luck and it sucks that the police are lousy, but it’s still a beautiful place.  Especially its Old Town  , and I would love to see Lahemaa National Park in summer time. But the moral of the story is that if I did return to Estonia, I would be a bit more street-wise than I am in Helsinki.

A street in Tallinn, Estonia 

A friend and I were discussing this over toast and tea on the following Sunday and here’s our moral of the story:

Shit happens in every city, in every country around the world; but the chances of things happening vary from country to country. So adjust your street smarts as needed and things will probably be fine.

Well enough moralising for one day, see you next time!