:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

I wasn’t too late coming home from work today, but it was already dark. Twice on the walk along the bush track I was startled by a scuffling sound. When I flicked on my torch on each occasion, I was greeted by a possum with glowing yellow eyes. The profusion of nature, right into the city, makes living in Australia a joy.

It was Brusseling when I arrived in Belgium – that misty drizzle that never quite settles. I wondered if I’d have the same feeling about Belgium as did for France, but whether the animosity had been dissolved by the positive experiences I’d had there, or because there was so much more to my Belgian history than Marie, I was happy to be back.

I avoided the Grand Place on the first night in case they’d be doing the light show – laser colours on old stone buildings don’t work for me – and went straight to join my old writing group. Forteen people had turned out for the occasion. I only knew 4 of them, so I can’t claim they were all there for me, but it was daunting to read in front of so many people again. At least the feedback was generally positive.

I did visit the Grand Place the next day, hoping it wouldn’t have lost its charm. It hadn’t. Despite the grey sky and spray on my face, I couldn’t help smiling as soon as I saw the huge Hotel de ville. I can’t imagine future generations feeling the same about any of the Sydney Opera House or the Gugenheim, let alone the standard buildings that go up around the world these days.

In the end, the rain got worse to the point that I needed a rain coat (an event that I only recall occuring twice in the three years I lived here) and I decided to head north to meet up with my old colleagues for drinks and a hearty Belgian meal. Not stoemp or beer rabbit this time, but a bowl of beef stew flavoured with beer and the traditional side dish of frites.

Then next day began the long haul home. It was brusseling when I landed in Sydney.

I’ve been to London a few times and I’ve seen pretty much everything I want to see, done everything I want to do. In fact, London is the only part of England that I’ve ever seen. I really wanted to go for a walk through All Creatures Great and Small territory, crossing fields and climbing styles, but with two days in London, but my nights booked, it wasn’t really possible to get far away. I spent the first wandering the shops and going to see a movie. Yesterday, I looked through the Lonely Planet in more detail and realised that I could get to Windsor castle and back in a day. And you can never see enough castles. Proper defensive castles, not just palaces, but castles with thick walls, bastions and wandering corridors.

If it weren’t for all the tourists, I think I’d like living in Windsor. From almost everywhere in the town, you can look up and see the castle that the queen considers her home. Apparently it’s housed the royal family for 990 years and it’s still well looked after. The state rooms are accessible to the public, but the interiors don’t interest me too much. Except, surprisingly, the doll’s house made for Queen Mary. Everything 1:12 scale and functional right down to the electricity and plumbing.

My real interest was outdoors – the walls, the embattlements, the crenelations and towers. In this case, the walls were at least 4m thick, built to withstand the best that medieval armies could throw at them. Arrow slits and crenelations lined the walls, inside and out, but there was no way of getting onto them. I was limited to walking around the bottom and imagining what it would be like from up there. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to arrange access to a small section. But then, I guess they’re worried that a sniper might find his way up and be in a good position to assasinate the queen.

St George’s Chapel provided some interest as the home of the Order of the Garter, but there was little to explain what the Order actually does or stands for. There are currently 26 members, including the queen and Charles, and prior members include Winston Churchill, but that doesn’t give much of a guide. I even tried wikipedia, but couldn’t find much except that it seems it’s the highest level of honour a knight can attain. In that sense, it seems more like a badge or a gentlemen’s club.

I left the castle, planning to walk around the walls from the outside, but was diverted when I stumbled on the Windsor Great Park and its Long Walk. A narrow stretch of green, lined with trees (fir?) and with a road running down its centre, the park must be about 4km long in a straight line to a Deer Park where a statue of a man on a horse can be seen in the distance. I walked all the way to the Deer Park to get a feel for the size of the Great Park, but wasn’t inspired to see who the man on the horse was. Another look at wikipedia says that it was George III, but not what for.

Although there were a few disappointments, I found Windsor a great place to spend a day rather than idling it away in London.

Merle tried the door of the bar we’d come to on our return to Tallinn. In the middle of the old town, it was a place closed to tourists. The door was clearly locked and there was no intercom. Merle pulled out a card and stuck it in a reader by the door. A click and a hum and we were in. This was a bar for artists, but in her previous job as foreign PR officer for Estonia, Merle had access to all parts of the city to bring journalists and had kept that right.

Inside, the bar looked much like any other with stools before the bar, tables around the walls and a few lounges in the back room. With summer in its early days and the working week starting the next morning, there were few revelers, but I the quiet gave the pub a stronger feeling of exclusivity. I ordered a Malaysian dish from a menu covering continental and Asian food and enjoyed the last conversations with my new friends. ‘Most people who visit Estonia come back again,’ they said knowingly. I wondered. When would I next be in the area and would I make the trip again. Quite possibly.

Analie offered to show me how to use a real Estonian sauna. Merle and the boyfriend she’d come to Saaremaa to visit would take one privately later. I followed Analie into the main farmhouse to an area curtained off from the living room. She stripped off and headed into the shower room. In the name of decency, I’d kept my back turned and waited until I heard the shower stop before I stepped after her. I placed my towel on the window ledge and washed quickly, then grabbed my towel and stepped into the sauna proper.

‘Oh good. You brought the towel. You’ll probably need to put in on the seat so you don’t burn your sensitive ass.’

Once I’d recovered from the wave of heat, I saw that she was sitting naked as I’d heard was done in Scandinavia. She’d left her own towel outside. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of being naked with anyone that I wasn’t sleeping with, but there was little reason to argue. I unwrapped the towel from around my waist, placed it double on the wood and sat down next to her. We started chatting about her husband, who’d played the porn director in Sex and Death, Marie, life in Australia and a number of other topics and before I knew it, nakedness wasn’t an issue.

The thermometer read 95C, but Analie kept scooping water onto the hot stones. Eventually she decided that she’d had enough for the moment and I was glad that I’d matched her resistance to the heat, but I now realise that she was sitting closer to the heat source and the steam, where it was probably over 100C. I followed a minute later, jumping under the now icy shower, then heading out to the curtained off area, where I found she’d covered herself and stepped outside to enjoy the cool evening breeze and sip on a beer.

We repeated the process again before having a proper wash in the shower and dressing properly and joining the others to finish drinking.

After spending all weekend with a group of Estonian girls, I’ve decided that Estonian sounds like Dutch, with all the shaped vowels and plenty of k’s, but with an Italian rhythm. The girls were quite pleased with this description.

Although they spent much of the weekend talking Estonian, they took the time to translate key pieces of conversation or just to talk to me about their lives, their work, their taste in music. We took a drive to Saaremaa, the largest island, where Estonians go to chill out in the summer. It had all the fun that road trips entail, and even if I couldn’t understand everything that made them laugh, I enjoyed the antics. Merle put a piece of chocolate on the dashboard while she was driving, then forgot about it when we went to sit on the beach. Not one to waste chocolate, she licked it all up when we got back to the car. A five star hotel that Merle wanted to show us wouldn’t let us look around, so she invented a story that I was a journalist doing a story for an Australian magazine. The cover was picked up by Margit, who decided she was doing a story on toilets on Saaremaa. We agreed that strip clubs were pointless because they gave an increase in dramatic tension but never provided the climax and a happy ending.

We found secluded beaches to sit on, visited churches and walked around a Danish fortress. Unfortunately I’d forgotten my camera for the last, but the highlight was the guesthouse we stayed in on Saturday night. Built up around an old farmhouse, it had two more buildings for guests and a big barbecue area. We had to pay 250 eek (A$25) to use the grill, but it was worth it for the experience of sitting outside nibbling at the remaining salad, drinking Vana Tallinn liqueur as the sun went down after 11pm. The only other guests were a couple of Austrian hunters there to find deer and an animal I hadn’t heard of.