Tartu

Tartu is Estonia's university town. It looks universityish; it reminds me of a midwest college town with its big old colorful wooden houses and late winter/early spring dirty snow and mud (sorry midwest, but you know it's true). It doesn't much feel like a college town, though. It is Easter weekend so maybe all the students are gone, although we had sort of a hard time finding a place to stay so there must be people here. I wonder where they are.

One of the things you can do in Tartu is tour the Le Coq brewery, at 9am or noon or 2pm. We showed up around 12.15 half expecting the tour guides to have no one else to show around and nothing else to do but start the tour fifteen minutes late and in English. The guard (the brewery has a guard which, now that I think about it, is sort of cool) first told us to come back at 2 but eventually took us in to join the tour, heavily attended and in Estonian, already in progress. (I guess now we know where everyone is.) Brewery tours are not so interesting in a language you don't understand, but at least there was beer at the end.

Tartu also has a small not bad art museum with mostly 20th century Estonian painting. They talk about the Soviet period works having to be apolitical in order to get past the censors, but none of them looked very Soviet. Maybe the Estonians were somehow able to get around having to glorify the State.

On our first night in Estonia we had a really good dinner at a restaurant that played mostly Estonian music. Well, I assume it was Estonian -- it wasn't any of the languages I can identify, anyway. Incidentally, in the restaurant's courtyard was a statue of Sean Connery that looked suspiciously like Nikita Khrushchev. Anyway, musically it's all been downhill from there. I'm used to hearing not-great American music all over the world, but the Estonians take it one step further by covering the American music. And they don't improve it. Someone decided to cover a whole bunch of George Michael songs and someone at the restaurant where we ate lunch one day decided to play them all. I like George Michael a lot more than I really like to admit, but these were not good covers. They were just bad imitations. Even worse is the apparent trend of taking a perfectly good or at least adequate rock/pop song (Bon Jovi, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, etc.) and turning it into a slow jazz piece of crap. Dear Estonia: If you want to listen to crappy music, please write your own and leave the already existing adequate or better rock songs out of it. Kokomo translated into probably Estonian was at least funny, but mostly this is just painful.