“Listen up boys and girls,  it’s Teenager Tom Tooting his Trumpet!!”

I make no apologies for my corny love of alliteration and my rather triumphant use of the letter ‘T’ in this post’s title.  I was immersed in the King James version of Biblical know-how and every Sunday morning before church (but after our devotions and prayers), when we tuned in to the Back to the Bible Broadcast.

“Remember to write Aunt Bee at Back to the Bible Broadcast at Box One, Grand Rapids, Michigan. That’s B-o-o-o-x One,  Gr-a-a-a-nd R-a-a-a-pids, Michigan.”

For years, I mixed up the radio-show Aunt Bee with the Aunt Bee from Mayberry RFD, convinced that her radio-version-self made secular appearances on the television show.  That TV-Aunt Bee still dispensed heavy-handed and very obvious moral lessons, but most-mysteriously she never mentioned Jesus.

I swear I’m not making up the Teenager Tom alliterative sentence, but I might be.  My older sister Rhonda could do a perfect (and very whispered) imitation of the entire show, including, but not limited to, the aforementioned  Teenager Tom rendition. Our other favourite….”and now, Sweet Sarah will Sing a Song,” could be done in a deep broadcast-y voice. I would have been around nine or ten years old, so Rhonda was probably around 13 or 14.  At that point, she was already going ‘bad’,  so her abilities to mock our world both thrilled and terrified me.

But then again, maybe my memory is skewed? I would love to ask my sister, she is only four years older than me and lives barely over an hour away from our apartment in Vancouver. But even if I did, I can not rely on her addict’s ability to remember anything accurately. And of course, I’d actually have to go see her. There’s that of course. There is always that. That is fraught with too much weight.

I’m not sure why I’m tangled in old memories and nights of anxious sadness these last few nights of tossing and turning. Perhaps it’s because I know the pain that awaits me at home (the sadness surrounding a very sick friend) but then again, it could simply be ghosts fogging my mind with memories from the past, both of my own and the history surrounding us.

Perhaps it’s as simple as this: There’s a sign on the wall in our room at the Merchants House Hotel that says, ‘This wall dates back to the 14th century and is protected by UNESCO.’

Exactly. This town is amazing and surely their ghosts are probably swirling through our room, determined to stay alive on my insomnia-induced agitation.

Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end…we have been wandering about Tallin, completely knocked out by the ages of absolutely everything, by the thoughts of steps trod before ours, and of lives lived as fiercely as we now cling to our own…but ones that time has reduced to nothing but plaques and whispers.

But hey, I promised you Ten Top Tips from Tallin!

The tips are mostly applicable to any travel anywhere but have a bit of a Tallin-esque focus as well.

– Women, wear a scarf or tie one on your bag. Then, when you inadvertantly open the doors to the Nikolai Kerk (Nicholas the Miracle Worker) and enter a scene of such high mass grandeur with ladies in babuschkas crossing themselves and kissing icons behind glass, with priests in the most incredibly ornately swirled silver and blue-sky perfection robes and the choral sound of the call and response from priest to angelic voices, well, you too can cover your head while the goosebumps run up and down your spine.

-Always poke your head into churches, not only to gush at the incredible grandeur or naked simplicity (Quaker houses spring to mind), but so that you’re always open to the aforementioned possibility of having the back of your brain knocked asunder which can happen in a mosque, temple, synagogue, church or sacred cave.

-Take local transit. It doesn’t matter where it goes. You get a chance to get off your feet, see a lot of neighbourhoods and interact with locals as you try to make your way back.

-Which brings us to the compass, as in, always carry one. It’s a great way to figure out where you are if the locals are absent.

 

 

 

-Take a walking tour. It doesn’t matter if it’s a self-guided one from a book or the internet, a walking tour with a local guide, or one of those cheesy hop-on-hop-off buses. It’s a great way to orient yourself and learn more than you would by staring at something and wondering how it all fits in the schematic of time.

-Go to the city’s art museum. We went to Kumu yesterday. It’s a wonderful way to provide context to an area, to see the propagandist bent that art took during the Russian years, and then to see what happened to colours and lines when that lid came off.

-Eat lunch in the art gallery. I swear it’s always good. The Vancouver Art Gallery is one of my go-to lunch spots. Fresh, tasty, and usually very affordable.

-Do what the area is known for. In this case, it’s the sauna. We had a fabulous sauna at our hotel in Helsinki and an even better one here in Tallin. It’s a great way to restore the legs after a day of stomping cobbles and helps work up the appetite for the next tip.

-Eat whatever the area is famous for. In Tallin, this is not too hard. Sour cream and pork figure heavily (pun intended).

-Go beyond the obvious areas. One could stagger around the UNESCO-gated area of Old Tallin for days, but venture beyond the gates to the stunning new design area of Rotermanni.

-Time your visit (oh happy coincidence!) for the weekly-Wednesday workmanship (nice triple ‘W’ non?) of the craft market.

And for bonus points, try to learn a few words like hello, thank you and cheers! If you can’t quite pull it off, just keep smiling.

Smiling doesn’t just help smooth out potentially awkward social situations, it also helps scare off any internal malingering ghosts.

 

 

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