Jelin's Baltic Journal

Finland

Admittedly I started out cranky from a wholly unnecessary 7 hour layover at JFK that transformed my first day into a 26 hour door-to-door trip. Finnair's flight was competent and flavorless (little did I know that that presaged much of the entire experience of the region), and we landed in a howling snow storm and scant 400 feet of visibility. I was prepared for a typical Grand Circle group of kvetchy elderly and for cold Scandinavian temperatures. I was not emotionally ready for 2 women on walkers, 7 men wearing marginally effective hearing aids, and ice-glazed cobblestones whereon even the young locals were flopping and cursing.

Fortunately, there seems almost nothing worth bothering with in this city. A million of Finland's 5 million people live in undistinguished apartment blocs, which makes sense since a third of the country is above the Arctic Circle where no one but the atavistic Samis choose to live, probably because there are just so many ways to thaw and cook bear, moose, squirrel and fish (even with lingonberries) especially in pitch darkness. Evidence exists of human habitation some 16,000 years ago (talk about taking the wrong turn out of Africa) but for the past 800 years this vast forest has been a buffer zone and rag doll tossed and tugged by Swedish Wasa Kings and Russian Romanov Tsars who wanted its amber, timber, tar and fish (presumably they had enough of their own moose, bears, squirrels and lingonberries).

By 1917 Finland had fought some 40 wars and lost them all; so for its pains it got to change from a Russian Grand (tho not very) Duchy to an independent nation that then got to fight and lose 3 more ware. As a result there is not a lot of history. This was a provincial backwater...a small, built on the cheap copy of St Petersburg but with Swedish Lutheran spareness of style. Their national heroes are one good late romantic composer, one Olympic runner, a somewhat dated father and son architect team who fled to the USA as soon as they could, and a cell phone giant. It seems as if a third of the country works for Nokia, a third for the government and the last third services the first two, in a totally liberal/socialized society in which all needs are met free but taxes are incredibly high. No unemployment, nary a beggar nor a slum...but the most affluent areas look very middle class, homogenized down to an average that is not spectacular or beautiful in any way. 3 mediocre symphony orchestras and an opera, none of which seem to run on weekends and 30 or more highly specialized museums (like firefighters or postage stamps) that are not very appealing, but universal literacy and effectively bilinguality. The President is a woman, as was the Prime Minister until a month ago.

Everywhere are boats, marinas, sporting clubs, jog trails, parks and stadiums. The outdoor life runs deeper than any artistic tradition. The torrents of fresh water that the myriad rivers dump into the Gulf of Finland makes the saline level very low, so the Baltic freezes solid here and ice cutters line the harbor piers, along with ferries of every size from tiny inter-island ones to 3000 person international ones. Finns escape their claustrophobia and their high prices by ferrying to the Baltics to drink duty free on the boat and shop cheap somewhere else. The Indo Altaic language is a slough of double vowel diphthongs that make it incomprehensible despite the Western alphabet The people are pleasant and courteous, handsome in both a Nordic and a Slavic way mixed together, and seem to spend a lot of their time talking on cell phones and Nordic power walking (with poles). Otherwise it doesn't really look like Scarsdale.


Denmark

What a difference! Copenhagen's airport is actually a sophisticated, designer boutique mall with ticket counters and baggage area. The weather is grey, mild and humid, redolent of the surrounding sea and reminiscent of Nantucket in winter...a good step up from Helsinki and the tundra. This city of a million in a country of 5 million is numerically identical to Finland, but crammed onto a peninsula and 400 islands together equaling Delaware (but of course owning The Faroe Islands and Greenland, the world's largest island, as well). It is a city of 5 storey, low profile buildings, punctuated by an assortment of wonderful copper spires (one is 4 Chinese dragons with their tails entwined, another a spiral collonaded exterior staircase that gets smaller as it rises in perfect proportions). All the fine antique buildings from Denmark's powerful imperial past are still in use and handsome. Even our Hotel Admiral is a splendid 17th Century warehouse right on the harbour, with a tall ship moored outside and just a block from the Amalienborg Palace and the gentrified, Amsterdam-like Nyhaven Canal Quarter.

Punctuating the old town's pedestrianized walks are handsome squares with statuary and fine homes. Even the Carlsberg Brewery has 19th century elephants guarding its charming brick buildings. It is all human scaled, livable and charming. Bicycles abound, 10 million in a country of 5 million. Cars are not made here and are taxed at 200% (you pay for 3 when buying one). Parking, tickets and gasoline are prohibitive. Denmark 's eco-policy is the antithesis of Big Oil Bush's, which is both appropriate to a small country and appealing on a personal philosophical level. My favorite museum (there are many) is the Carlsberg Glyptotek, an eccentric amalgam of superb Etruscan, Cypriot and Palmyran pottery and sculpture and a splendid small collection of Rousseau, Cezanne, Monet and Degas oils and bronzes. Clearly 2 personal enthusiasms pursued with lots of taste and money, all displayed around a huge, glass domed, palm tree filled winter garden at least 4 times the size of Isabella Stewart Gardner's. My favorite touch was the placement, under its own spotlight, smack in the center of the Etruscan gallery, of a startlingly pink Louise Bourgeois sculpture, multi-breasted, weirdly mythic and polymorphic, elusively totemic. Great idea.

Last night I got a half-priced rush seat to the Royal Danish Ballet in its gilt and burgundy home. Alas the program was not the Bournonville 18th century dancing that knocked our socks off in the 60's. It was a brutal, anti-war retelling of the Odyssey by John Neumeier, starring a dazzling acrobatic young Brit named Kenneth Greve. Lots of neon tubing, near nudity, tortured writhing on the floor, black terrorist masks, camouflage fatigues. With no intermission it became a sitz-kreig on the antique unpadded seats in an overheated hall. Still there were arresting moments, particularly the graphic rape/murder of an Asian (Viet Namese??) village of women by soldiers in camouflage (US???) that then faded into a blood-drenched hospital with wounded soldiers fighting over the only bed, while doctors and nurses danced a laughing roundelay with IV tubes around Odysseus, nude but for a TV set over his head playing cartoons. It was gratuitous, anti-American, but surreally powerful theater in the best tradition of John Cranko and Pena Bausch.

This afternoon I spent a sun-drenched 3 hours roaming around Christiania, the 1970's hippie squatters’ commune, seized by a stoned, gentle group of 400 when the Danish army abandoned its shabby 300 year old barracks, which they then transformed into their own little secessionist country. Now, after 30 years, it has evolved into a community of 900 middle aged and older, still stoned hippies, mostly with jobs and families and cell phones and indoor toilets and TV sets. They have made peace with the government to whom individual adults pay 250 US$$ per month (kids are free) and business pay 20% of gross receipts. In return they get water, sewer, electricity, health care and public education. It is a great deal considering that they inhabit 200 plus acres of waterfront in the heart of trendy, pricey Copenhagen. The neighbors aren't too thrilled but hard drugs and fire arms are absolutely banned, though Pusher Street (no photos allowed!) sports a unique row of open air stalls selling hash and pot quite openly, all labeled by weight and country of origin like spices in a Turkish bazaar. I befriended Bill, mid-50's, born in New York, ex-dock worker and math teacher, who dropped out in the mid 70's. He now has a 17 year old daughter who drives him nuts because she won't smoke anything but like to drink. Bill hates liquor, taxes, war, government and rules. He made a nostalgic, if slightly archaic companion for a walk around, though he is clearly a sponge who will spend his later years living off a giving society to which he has contributed nothing (not even gratitude). My ambivalence must be a sign of age.

Norway

The 16 hour overnight ferry from Copenhagen to Oslo was a delight...the pier was a 4 minute stroll from the hotel, our bags awaited us in our rooms in Oslo so all we needed was a small overnighter. My outside cabin had 2 huge down comforters, 4 giant down pillows, and with the window open a lovely parlay of smells and sounds of the sea for company. I slept for 12 hours, since the gambling and duty free and night clubs held little interest. The buffet supper was a wallow in gravlaax, 2 kinds of caviar, poached salmon with dill and curried sauces, fresh fruits of all sorts and great grain breads. I never even went to the main courses or the dessert tables. Breakfast buffet equally good. I am fasting today, except for beer or course (and maybe akvavit).

Our city tour of Oslo was a great surprise...half the size of Copenhagen or Helsinki, this capital of a country 20% less populous than Finland or Denmark, exudes the prosperity of its North Sea Oil discoveries in the 1960's...and instantly one understands why it, like Switzerland, is leery about the EU, the Euro and entangling itself too much. First it can now (for the first time in a long history) afford its independence. Second, it has seen what neutrality has done for Sweden (neutral since the Napoleonic wars) and Switzerland. And third, it likes the view from the top. It is the richest per capita country in the world,thanks to its government’s sage decision to keep and not concession out the oil industry. Oslo is building a huge new opera house out in the harbor. Most of the handsome brick breweries and waterfront warehouses are now chic condos and shops. There are high rise office and hotel towers, and lots of park space and neighborhoods of elegant villas and embassies that remind one more of Potsdam or the Charlottenberg section of Berlin. Downtown is not Amsterdam/Copenhagen quaint, but it is a fine green city built at the end of an island-studded fjord that has to be one of the very finest natural deep harbors in the world.

My sightseeing highlights: the huge soccer facility atop Egeberg Hill where Jimmy played goalie for New England in the Norway Cup (Bemy and I saw him in the Dana Cup in Hjorring that summer, but did not cross over to Norway); and Vigelund Park, a vast rainswept public garden filled with colossal, thrice life-sized, groupings of nude sculptures, one in bronze and one in granite, depicting Vigelund's rather misanthropic view of the chronicle of life. Even if only a few of the individual statues are wonderful, taken as a whole the assembly is a remarkable achievement. The Royal Christiana Hotel, now a Clarion, is a conventional high rise, but comfortable and well located. Again, no slums, no beggars, no graffiti. But the new construction boom and the renovation explosion are everywhere, even with the very high prices and taxes. Few bicycles as the town is hillier than Copenhagen and more often icy, though the Gulf Stream gives it a winter not too different from Nantucket's. Lots of cars, many small and battery-powered (called "Think")...expensive but popular which is interesting for a country that produces (and taxes heavily) its own oil, harvests minke whales in contravention of international treaties, and professes to ecological concerns despite its vast lumber and fishing industries. There are also in Oslo a lot of Muslims and Indians, several mosques and Buddhist Temples and a spate of ethnic restaurants. Indeed Islam is the 2nd religion, after the 95% Lutheran Church (which no one attends). There is one small synagogue and only 1000 Jews left in the whole country.

The Royal Norwegian Ballet danced a beautiful, theatrically dazzling production of Othello with a fine score by Elliott Goldenthal (Julie Taymor's husband or partner) and exceptional choreography by Lar Lubovitch who has done stuff for Brustein at the ART. Minor quibbles about World War I Italian Army uniforms, and a destroyer instead of a galleon for the storm scene...where it mattered it was great. Othello was a tall, lean, long armed and legged mantis of a dancer named Richard Suttie (also a Brit) whose madness solo ended with his crawling, animal-like, on the floor with vicious, leering Iago standing on his back...a magnificent transcription into dance of Verdi's "Ecco, Il Leone!" Ultimately he enfolded the small, fragile Desdemona like a great spider. The Iago, Christopher Kettner, was smaller but sinuous and reptilian, quintessentially evil. His brutalization, indeed rape, of Emilia was explicit and horrifying; and his great hatred solo, danced with and in and on Othello's jeweled royal cape, was almost an epileptic seizure of violence. In the pas de deux with Othello and the handkerchief, where he finally drives him over the brink, he was obscene, laced with quite explicit homosexual passion which was a dimension I had never thought of before. It ended with him standing on top of Othello, caressing himself in an orgy of triumph. The music was lushly romantic, melodic and occasionally percussive, a kind of brew of Stravinsky and Poulenc and Honegger, all very danceable and rhythmic, and even the corps de ballet was fine, dancing classically in toe shoes. Alas the theatre is dark the next 2 nights.

Today was a 3 museum ramble in rain & drizzle but no wind. The magpies were out in force, as in Copenhagen, and as I remember from Glasgow. They are beautiful black and white and iridescent green, and chatter charmingly, mate for life, are fearless of people, steal other birds’ eggs and love shiny metal objects...far superior city birds to pigeons. The Viking Ship Museum, far out of town, and expensive, was sparse in exhibits but 2 of the 3 great ships were amazing...built in and around 890 AD, buried as funerary containers and only excavated in the last 120 years. Astonishing was their small size and beautiful lines, only 30 to 60 oarsmen and 2 masts of sails carried these intrepid (insane?) explorers to Greenland, Iceland, North America, coastal Spain and Africa, basically in the open air or under simple wood coverings. It's like the Polynesians sailing 2000 miles from Tahiti to Hawaii and Easter Island, but with snow and ice to boot.

The architecture museum was basically too technical to interest me; but the Modern Art Museum, housed curiously in a grand 19th Century stone mansion, had a small exhibit on The Art of Laughter that dwelt on threatening and dangerous and hysterical laughter as much as on frivolous and funny. The best of the pieces were a life size figure of a fishmonger, covered in blood, holding a gutted fish, and head back laughing insanely in what seemed blood lust. It was all carved, superbly, out of a single block of wood and painted realistically. A very strong work. The National Gallery had 2 rooms full of Edvard Munch, including the overly famous, actually quite small and luridly colored "Scream". Two other large works, Moonlight and Death in the Sickroom were far more sinister and painterly. The rest of the galleries were amok with cows, fjords, self-portraits, all that seemed from the dates to be about 70 years behind Paris and Berlin. The sunny day outside was a more special treat.

Today we arose at 6AM to catch the Bergen Express, a clean and modern train but a rocky ride on an old rail bed, mainly through tunnels under the city and suburbs. As we emerged into daylight, we were in a realm of fog-blanketed pine forests and prosperous dairy farms, which went on for 5 hours, along some rock dotted rivers lined with yellow leaved birches, with an occasional stone quarry or lumber mill but not much else. It is prosperous, clean and sparse. The stereotypes of Wisconsin and Minnesota have a basis in fact. Because of the numerous long tunnels, we did not realize that we were climbing until suddenly we emerged from one inky black tube to find ourselves 1500 or more feet up on a cliff-side ledge of track, with a sheer view down, through clouds, to our first fjord. It was theatrical, with the clouds above us mirrored perfectly in the water below us. I had somehow expected steeper sides and narrower fingers of water...these were like long, narrow mountain lakes, still and reflective, with the snow increasingly testifying that we were climbing steadily.

The long ride gave me a chance to contemplate the Hieronymous Bosch group into which I have slid. They are a fat, crude, uneducated, lower class herd who fart and belch, push and shove, sneeze and cough without covering faces, read every stupid sign they see aloud, report on their toilet visits, swill Cokes and eat at McDonalds, and are very unpleasant to one another (spouse to spouse). There is a doctor who was head of colo-rectal surgery at New Brunswick's Robert Wood Johnson Hospital, and who knew the Bush and Cohen branches of the family. He was not dumb, but had a colo-rectal personality. The other doctor was a navy officer and a devout Jew who went to every synagogue in every town. He was OK but his wife was a shrike and unbearable to be around. The spryest of the lot is a 92 year old retired farmer who is a good sport about everything, if not a grand conversationalist. The trip did reveal to me a natural phenomenon I had never seen...sunlight filtered thru mist that glistens like crystal and then is reflected in the still black surface of water below. It is an extravagant optical effect, that I suspect could never be captured on film due to the queer sparkling sheerness of the mist.

After 5 hours we changed to a narrow gauge, old, wooden car railroad that dropped us thru a steep narrow riverine gorge almost 4000 feet in about 55 minutes...very showy...hundreds of waterfalls plunging over grey rocks...marred only by the 40 or more tunnels and long snow-sheds through which we passed, making the constantly interrupted view like a defective kinescope. Then at sea level, we switched to a small but fast passenger boat for a 2 hour cruise down the Sogner Fjord, Norway's longest and deepest. The sun was out for most of the trip, so I stayed up on deck away from the smokers, wheezers and a group of very pushy Japanese photography nuts. Windy and wonderful views of patches of cleared grass where sheep are brought by boat for summer grazing, more waterfalls seen now from below, and a fair number of isolated (some abandoned) homesteads from which this more affluent generation has simply walked away in favor of a more urban, easier lifestyle.

It seems quite just to me that Norway, home to the extraordinary Viking explorers, home at Bergen to the rich fish and oil trade of the Hansa merchants from Lubbeck, decimated by 2/3 of its population by the 16th Century Black Death (to the point where there were not enough people left to be a country), then tossed back and forth, albeit pretty gently, between powerful Denmark and strong Sweden (plus a few outsiders like Napoleon and Hitler), that this nation should suddenly emerge from the chrysalis of least populous nation in Europe (per square mile...it is huge...its length would reach from Oslo to Rome!) to richest per capita country in the world. The trouble now is that the government doesn't seem to know what to do with the money except keep taxes high and hoard against the ultimate depletion of a finite resource. This is not working. It has produced the most expensive country in Europe, an influx of Indian and Mid-Eastern workers into a hitherto homogeneous ethnicity, a large group of disgruntled pensioners who feel they suffered thru all the bad times and are entitled to more, and a generation of younger people who are not having children (while the immigrants are). Welcome to affluence, Norway. Where is Hendrik Ibsen now, when your society needs him again?

A 3 hour bus trip brought us to Bergen, second largest city in Norway, main entrepot for the North Sea oil industry and still a serious fishing port. It was the first capital city, home to the Hanseatic League until amazingly 1899 (the fine little wooden museum stinks of coddy authenticity), a thriving University town, with a well-known Philharmonic (that is doing a tribute to ABBA this week) and a 1200 year history that remains visible in a few wooden neighborhoods that survived the 40 or more codfish oil fires that ravaged the place with its all wood buildings and high winds all the time. I spent some time in a cozy Museum book shop reading about the Hanseatic Merchants. They were truly remarkable. They understood monopoly. They knew and kept computer-detailed records of everything, particularly the updated pricing of every trade commodity (fish and fish oil in all its grades and qualities, furs of every kind, grains of all sorts, lumber in different lengths and for different uses, vegetables and meats and wines and liquors, amber and silver and gold in ingots or jewelry form, building supplies like nails and tools, weaponry of all sorts.) And thus they were able to barter profitably, to extend credit (the first in Europe to do so, religiously tolerated because they were trading not charging interest on money) and to accept specific orders for customers who wanted
specific items.

At one time they had a colony of 300 merchants and apprentices (all males) who spent 6 to 8 months a year in Bergen, sleeping in dormitories of 3-high stacks of bunk bed cubbies with wooden doors on them. Due to their credit policies, they left each year being owed enough to own the following year's catch, thus excluding the Brits and Swedes and Danes; and all their profits flowed back to Lubbeck, that magical city of 7 golden spires rising out of the estuary of the Schelde, that so intrigued Bemy and me and Thomas Mann, who set Buddenbrooks there. Then I dallied a while in the open air fish stalls, tasting six different types of caviars, salmon being the only really palatable one. They are sold in lots of ways, including a tube like toothpaste that I have never seen. I also tasted LutaFiske, the Norse national emetic, a kind of fetid freeze-dried cod that is neither as swallowable as bacalao (which it resembles) nor as understandable as an important trade commodity, which it was for 1200 years. The cod oil was for lamps and candles, and though it stank it was cheap and plentiful. But you did not have to ingest it! LutaFiske is now a traditional Christmas dish, which may explain both the bloody reformation and why only 5% of the Norwegians even attend church any more.

Sweden

With Sweden having (in the square mileage of California) almost 9 million people (twice the number of Norway or Denmark) , and having been smart enough to stay neutral since 1814 (when they picked the winning side against Napoleon and got Norway from Denmark as a prize), one can understand how Stockholm became the region's largest, most cosmopolitan city. Almost 2 million live in 8 to 10 storey blocs that range in style from Belle Epoque grandeur to art deco to 1950's Swedish Moderne (which looks very dated to my eye). These are strewn across numerous islands connected by bridges, so the entire city seems to have a water-front orientation, either on the Sea or on Lake Malleran which reaches 60 km north to Uppsala...it freezes and there is a popular skating race between the cities). It is foggy but not bitter. The food continues a felicitous mix of smoked fishes and great breads, with a significant presence of ethnic foods reflecting the influx of 20% of the population now people of color who are breeding twice as fast as the Swedes, resisting assimilation (even learning the language), and severely burdening the universal free health care and education systems.

The cultural high points were the Vasa Ship House, a museum built to house one boat...the carved and gilded, 210 foot long, 180 foot tall galleon with 60 cannons that Gustav Adolfus III (whose assassination was the plot for Verdi's Masked Ball) commissioned to fight his Catholic Polish Cousin Sigismund. In 1632 it sailed forth on its maiden voyage, and right in Stockholm Harbor tipped over and sank. Its masts sticking up were such a mortification to the King that he had them cut off, fished out the cannons, and ordered the whole thing forgot...which it was. In the 1960's she was refound, and in 1973 thru the use of huge steel cables sent thru tunnels under her entire hull she was retrieved, in 14,000 pieces. Because of the fresh water, the wood-eating oceanic worms never got to her oak, and though the paint and gilt were gone and the nails and bolts rusted away, she was in tact even to her sails and the crew’s clothes. The restoration took 17 more years, but now she sits splendidly on a dry pedestal in a huge hall, fully re-rigged and absolutely astonishing.

The second notable experience was a fine production of John Cranko's ballet of Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House, a late 19th century, 5 tiered monstrosity of a house but with great acoustics and sight lines. The music was loosely adapted from Tchaikovsky, though not exclusively from the opera score, and it wasn't all that well played. But the period recreation of Pushkin's Russi was excellent, and Cranko (whom I think of as 1950's German Modern dance like the Green Table, which I saw at BAM) created a lovely story drama, toe shoes and all. Clearly showy, long limbed male dancers are "in". Onegin was Dragos Mihalcea, clearly trained at the Kirov or Boshoi, and he was sensational. His Swedish Tatiana and the rest of the cast were eclipsed totally. Then it was on to Uppsala, home of the Vasa Dynasty and of the largest and oldest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe (and very grand, even with its brick exterior and its ugly 1890's stained glass windows). It is also home to Scandinavia's first and greatest University, where Carl Linnaeus, Alfred Nobel, Ingmar Bergman, etc have made it Sweden's Harvard.

I ducked the group and went to the Carolina Redivia rare book library to see its greatest treasure, the Codex Argentus or Silver Bible. WOW! It is one of the really important books in Western history with a story that rivals the Da Vinci Code. Originally scripted in silver on purple vellum in Ravenna by one of the Archbishops for the newly converted Goth Theodoric around 430AD, it was a direct translation from Greek into Gothic (no intervening, polluting Latin!) of 4 of the Gospels. It is the font, the Rosetta Stone of the ancient Gothic language, and it kept vanishing into German abbeys and English monasteries and Dutch private collections for centuries at a time. It survived ship wrecks, wars and the Swedish conquest of Prague. In fact a page of it was found as recently as 1973. It was a not to be missed thrill to see it. Back in Stockholm, most of the 60 or more museums do not appeal and a few disappoint. I am not sorry to have visited these cities in this economical whirlwind fashion. They really don't need much more. Been here, done that. Kiss the group good bye. It's time to head out on my own.

On My Own Now: Estonia

Sunday morning I slept late, breakfasted to excess for the last time, checked out, took a cab across 3 islands and got my tickets for the overnight ferry from Stockholm to Tallinn, Estonia and then later from Tallinn back to Helsinki for my return home. The Tallink ferry was huge...900 passengers, lots of cars and trucks, and a kaleidoscope of duty free bars, pubs, and shops. Tallinn's ferries are a major cheap drunk for tout Scandinavia. Fortunately my $42 cabin (not bad for transportation and lodging) was 2 decks below the action, especially given the non-existent sound-proofing between these mini-sleeping closets. Tallinn, approached from the sea in mist, is atmospheric and lovely, largely because one can't tell the Medieval Town's soaring copper church spires from the new city's high rise hotels and the once Soviet shipyard's tall cranes and smoke stacks. My hotel, the Reval Express, is right between the ferry pier and the Old City, a 6 minute walk to each; and it proved to be a great coup. This month the Reval chain is offering, in exchange for an $8 fee and a questionnaire to be filled out, 50% off all their hotel rooms and free email. I saved $238 in Tallinn alone.

Although hotels and housing are pricey, both rental and for purchase, food and drink and entertainment are cheaper, more like Russia than Sweden. I raced up to the National Opera and got tickets for 2 productions for a total of $9.50; and booked bus seats to Riga and Vilnius and back, since the rail service except to Russia has been discontinued indefinitely, pending next year's admission to the EU and the rumored infusion of some massive German capital. Actually Estonia, with a scant 1.4 million people on land about the size of Holland (of which there are 1000 islands and 40% is bogs) is kind of an economic miracle. In 1992, when the Soviet Union crumbled, the Estonian economy was shrinking by 15% a year and annual inflation was 1000%. Current annual growth , despite the general economic downturn, is over 5% and inflation is under 4%. EU membership is certain next year, and even with the 80,000 pages of new rules and regulations to follow the Estonians seem thrilled to have a barricade against Russia at long last. Not bad for a little country that spent 1000 years being someone or other's door mat, and that speaks a truly weird little language that is officially Finno-Ugric...example "bus station" is "autoobuusijaam".

However, they had timber and a great natural harbor...ergo Tallinn, a fortified natural hill with a nearby fresh water lake, and fairly soon a whole complex of ship yards and skilled boatwrights. The ferries are still a major source of revenue (except the one that sank in 1995 killing 850 on the run from Stockholm, which I confess I did think about on the overnight trip), but there is a major boom going on in construction of office and hotel towers and regional warehouse and distribution facilities. Many of the big department stores from Stockholm and Copenhagen have opened branches already, everyone is on cell phones, and there are a lot of out-of-season tourists, despite a lingering bad reputation for Soviet-style Mafia drug and gambling activity (there are a lot of casinos) and reports of street crime on the rise. I saw none of it, though, and I walked all over for 3 days.

The Medieval Town was oddly lucky, like Nantucket in a way. From the mid-19th century, when the Hansa merchants and the remnants of the Livonian Knights lost interest in the place, no one even cared enough to remodel or tear down or modernize the timbered and plastered houses on their narrow cobbled streets. 14th century churches, marvelous wrought iron weather vanes and merchant signs...everything just went to sleep. About 10% of the old city was destroyed by sloppy aim from Soviet bombers trying to hit the German occupied seaport facilities. So here it is, fixing itself up very nicely at remarkable speed, poised for good things, and retaining much charm. The stark white Lutheran cathedral, built as a Catholic church in the 1200's, is wonderful, heavily ornamented with great carved wooden coats of arms of the German Crusader orders who controlled the region. With many of the museums closed, it is basically a town for walking, gallerying (though not buying) and soaking up the feeling of a unique glimpse of the distant past. Even where it remains shabby, it is far more atmospheric than affluent, renovated, ever so slightly precious Scandinavia.

The museums are open today, so I spent 6 hours wandering past displays of rustic costumes, pots and pans, broken ceramics, various stuffed critters with glass eyes, boats and port facilities in miniature, ice cutters and armaments, all over an 800 year span, some even labeled in English. I learned that Estonia is home to flying squirrels and a mixed breed called raccoon-dogs, and the largest raven/crows in Europe. Also tonnage of coal and steam powered freight vessels did not exceed that of sailing vessels until 1923. The Hansa merchants colonized, built and governed under their own rules the lower town of Tallinn from 1248 until 1877, and made it the principal entrepot for Novgorod, the trade portal into Russia and the Ukraine. In the 50 years from 1940 to 1990, Russification policy dropped the population from 85% Estonian to its present 60/40 Estonian/Russian. The society is very Russian. All TV and press, all the sleazy sweaters and tacky lingerie, all the junky little wooden souvenirs in the shops, all the "amber" that looks like plastic beer bottle material, are Russian in origin. And some problems linger. The drug traffic into Scandinavia is thru Tallinn from Minsk and Moscow. In 1998 Estonia had 6 AIDS cases. In 2003 it had 1600, a bad curve in a small country.

Unemployment this year is up to 10% and most of the work-force remains unskilled despite almost universal muti-linguality. Still real estate prices go up. New buildings rise. The EU is next year. And optimism is endemic. After what they have been through, one can see why and hope for good. There certainly seems no shortage of speculative capital to back up the optimism.

I had forgotten how forgettable Strauss operettas can be. When "Night in Venice"...with all its tedious singspiel and hokey vaudeville plot is : (1) sung horribly off-key in unsingable Estonian; (2) by a cast who all look like the middle aged offspring of Zero Mostel and Miss Piggy, who studied acting with Mae West and Sid Caesar, and (3) who are required to waddle in an out of a stumpy, tippy gondola the size of a bath-tub toy...you actually get something you will never forget (rather I suspect like herpes). The sold out audience was about 50% teen-agers, which is nice to see I guess unless they were getting some kind of credit for enduring this. They talked loudly thru the first act, not that it much mattered and then left en masse. I waited till the intermission lights went up. I cannot tell you the foreboding I have about Carmen (in Estonian??) You get a bargain, you have to sit through it...

It is quite pleasing to be on a spacious, all but empty bus for 5 hours in bright sunshine. The suburbs of Tallinn, which are home to roughly 35% of the whole country, contain first a small ring of shabby, Soviet-style, 6 storey apartment blocs, which quite soon give way to a much broader band of spacious (some in need of paint) large private villas set in large, fenced, tended gardens. It looks like a run-down Larchmont, or Auburndale, once fashionable and still occupied and cared for, as best as possible...all wooden and vaguely Victorian. Then suddenly it is done. One is in flat pine and birch woods, with occasional huge cleared pastures but with not a whisker or a feather of any stock. There are barns and aged tractors and lots of baled-for-winter hay. And not a single animal. That's it...for 5 hours. Still and all, giving oneself over to being the wholly passive receptacle of sensory impression (save for the 2 cell phones on the bus) is not unpleasant.

Latvia

About half way between Parnu and Riga, I finally saw in a huge meadow 6 black and white holsteins; and there, grazing along with them, a very large moose (or elk...I do not know the difference) with a major rack of antlers, which I think made him a male. I have no idea if he was domesticated (is that even possible?) or just hangin' out with the girls. It passed quickly but it was quite enchanting. As soon as we crossed the frontier into Latvia, the driver stopped and put on an English movie DVD, the first windmill farm I have seen on the entire trip appeared (only 3 towers in a field, but still something I would have expected more of), and the architecture changed drastically from wooden Victorian to a kind of Richardson Romanesque fieldstone with brick trim and steep gabled slate roofs. It was so abrupt that it felt like a continental divide, not a dinky little border crossing.

The elimination of all the double vowels from Finnish and Estonian does not make Latvian any more intelligible. The landscape and small towns look s bit more German, a bit less Russian, especially the green domed baroque style churches. Then we were driving along a lovely stretch of narrow, desolate beaches, where the pine trees came almost down to the water's edge. We veered inland and suddenly the trees were all glazed with ice. The first modest hillocks I have seen appeared, and lots of small lakes. Topographically the 3 Baltics are no more the same than are their languages. Even the dogs are different...here generic black shepherd mixes, whereas Estonians seemed to favor leggy elkhound types. Swedes, at least in Stockholm, are absolutely nuts for Jack Russells and you see many braces and troikas on single leashes, which has to make for very chaotic small apartment living. Closer to Riga the beaches are lined with some magnificent homes, many undergoing major repairs.

There is also a lot of highway and bridge construction, and a fair number of new high rise complexes of apartments....plus of course McDonalds, a prerequisite for EU admission, I suspect. Riga feels like, as it is, a larger city...almost 800,000 out of a national population of 2.4 million in a country the size of Ireland. The city presents itself as more Parisian or Berlin-like...very 19th century, with broad boulevards and parks along the river. The saturation bombing of Germany left Riga one of the main repositories, along with Vienna, of Jugenstil, the German version of Art Nouveau. Sergei Eisenstein (the Russian Film Giant) was born here, to a father who was the foremost architect of Jugenstil in the North, and the city has many of his buildings, especially along the handsome promenade of Elisabethe Street. For during the boom years of 1870 to 1914, Latvia and Riga enjoyed a surge of flamboyant nouveau richesse among the merchant class and everyone built showily. Once again, the hard times from 1914 on saved a lot of this legacy which is now being refurbished in lovely pastel colors. It is almost light-hearted, in its leaden Teutonic way (Barcelona, it ain't!) The people do not seem as friendly, as able or willing to communicate in English, or to help with directions, as the Estonians. There is a Soviet dourness about them, and Russian is spoken everywhere almost more than Latvian. I did find a funny little hotel in the Old Town. I have the entire 2-room top floor for $29 a
night. It will be fine.

Overnight the weather turned viciously cold, damp and windy, like something out of the Russian steppes. The people have not turned any more pleasant or forthcoming, either...very Muscovite in their brusqueness. The cuisine seems to be mainly fat poached in grease, with mushrooms if you get lucky. Having little faith in Latvian Thai food, the best bet may well be (gasp) McDonalds, big, clean, friendly and they served french fried broccoli.

Part of my burgeoning hostility may very well be "the Jewish thing". Not since I visited Dachau and then Berlin's Jewish Museum have I had as strong a sense of the ugly past as I do here. In its halcyon art nouveau days Riga was home to some 85,000 Jews ...bourgeois, urbane, professional, mercantile, assimilated, Europeanized, prosperous, cultivated, art collecting, opera going, fashionable, and misguidedly secure. Then in 1941, and with the well-documented active complicity (indeed eager participation) of the Latvians, who had long coveted their property and businesses, that entire community was herded just a few kilometers out of elegant, Frenchified downtown and shot in 3 major killing fields...25,000 of them in a single two-day massacre worthy of Tamerlane. 300 of them were efficiently locked by local citizens in their synagogue and burned alive. No pretexts here of exile to forced labor camps or detention somewhere. Even the Greeks who seized the Jewish Port of Saloniki pretended to turn the Ladinos over to the Nazis for deportation and quick forgetting. Not the Rigans who wanted to be sure they were done with. And no subsequent reparations issues here, either, as there are no survivors to make claims. So, once again, I look at everyone over 70 with a very suspicious eye. And they respond with an equally hostile shiftiness. No professional Berlin-style smiles here. Indeed unless something in the attitude of the people here changes, the entry into the EU is not going to guarantee a tourist boom...though fundamental nastiness has never kept the world from flocking to Paris.

Even in early afternoon it is too bitingly cold to walk about for long. The warmest places, outside of my overheated lodgings which I have learned used to be the Soviet Labor Ministry...Given the sheer number of deportations, I would have expected something larger than a 20 foot wide, 4 storey town house...are the uninteresting churches and the even worse museums. The more modern "Museum of the Occupation" is a travesty of historical rewriting. Everyone is to blame (in 3 languages) for everything except the poor noble Latvians. Why they actually saved 300 Jews. The Russian mistreatment of 1939-41 is the whole reason why the Latvians greeted Hitler as a saviour, not having any inkling of his evil intentions. The Germans tricked and deceived a few malleable Latvians into collaborating. Cowardly Roosevelt and Churchill are to blame for not standing up to Stalin at Yalta and forcing him to extend the independence principle of the Atlantic Charter to Latvia. Sweden is to blame for buckling to Russian pressure to repatriate 147 Latvians whom Russia claimed to be Soviet nationals. Ditto the United Nations. No one came to bat for poor Latvia, which lost 550,000 people (I wonder if they include their 85,000 Jews). Even discounting the bitter taste with which I entered the museum, I left even crankier and took a Jugenstil walk. Too bad there was no sun. Art Nouveau demands sunshine.

Interesting: in 1640, Duke Jakob funded an expedition and colonized Tobago (yes the Trinidad Tobago) and 200 Latvians, with their whacko language, settled there. I never thought of Latvia as a Caribbean imperial power. I wonder what the Arawak and Carib Indians thought. Rigans do seem to like dogs...mostly German breeds, Pomeranians, long haired dachshunds, aufen pischers, etc. They really cannot cook worth a damn, though. Even the porridges are runny and tasteless.

The outside of the Opera House is silly...giant white Corinthian columns soar over dinky little steps and doors. Inside it is a handsome sea-green and gilt hall, very Napoleon III, with 4 tiers, each with only 4 rows, brass rails dividing every row, and a tooled and painted leather walled bar with dark wood and huge nude brass torcheres that could be Brasserie Bofinger. Then came the orchestra, which was full sized and quite good, and the singers who were all Russian or Russian trained in that big, outdoorsy, belt out the high and low notes style that makes me think of the Red Army Chorus or the Don Cossack Choir. It was Fledermaus, a good Strauss operetta, indeed the best, and it usually wants a more Viennese lightness than it got here. But it was OK until the 2nd act Orlovsky Ball, which turned into a mixtu baggyi of the Folies Bergere, the Kit Kat Klub and Barnum & Bailey. There was even a nearly nude snake handler with a 20 foot live python who did a 10 minute "pas de deux" (can a snake with no legs be considered to be dancing? He wriggled a lot) . There were nudie 20's calendar posters, furniture that looked like Salvador Dali had designed it, little running lights on all the steps like in an airplane, and costumes from every other opera in the repertoire (it is a costume ball, I guess). To open the 3rd act they introduced a 45 minute solo vaudeville monologue in Russian (did I mention the whole thing was sung in Russian, too which is not bubbly like champagne) which the audience thought uproariously funny. I left. The 3rd act is all people apologizing and forgiving one another, anyway...not very Viennese. Sadly the house was at most 40% full. The singing deserved better.

The national museum is a cavernous building largely given over to a huge central staircase. The 10 galleries contained:(1) a special exhibit of Mark Rothko, who (though the town in which he was born was decidedly in Russia in 1903, and whose Jewish parents took him to Portland, Oregon when he was 10 and he never set foot in Latvia again) is now claimed as Latvia's greatest painter. It is rather as if the Ukraine claimed Alice's mother, which to my knowledge they have not. Rothko, suffice it to say, is a theorist with colors who simply does not appeal to me...rather like Josef Albers...too easily executed and once done too uninteresting visually. (2) A special exhibit on the impact of the futurists, especially the Berlin ones who are justifiably the less well-known group, on Latvian artists. It was simply awful, mostly an exchange of letters and doodles with photos of the artists. And (3) seven galleries of Baltic painters of the 19th and 20th centuries.

One thing you get when you specialize geographically is a definitive collection and survey of your topical turf. In this case you also achieve a truly ghastly cavalcade of bad portraits (and these by artists who are we assume trying hard to please the subjects!) of scrofulous and flatulent looking merchants and their unhappy (for good reason) wives, many of both genders with facial hairs. You get lots of dead animals...sort of post-hunt still lives. You get a lot of stuff that is imitative of Europe 70 years after the style has passed (even though some of it is competently executed) and then a lot of bad attempts to be Gustave Klimt. It reminded me of the Columbus Gallery of Art before they got the Sirak Collection. The most you can say is it likely is Baltic-definitive, and it gets the stuff off the street.

In the interstices of this Baltic meander, waiting in bus stations, getting warm in lobbies, bars and my room (with either no English language news or only subtitled reruns of "I Spy" and "The A-Team" ....is it not mind-boggling how America continues to present itself to the world, a silly personality demanding to be taken seriously on moral and ethical issues?) I have just finished two exquisitely crafted short novels (comme il faut, as one won a Booker and the other a Pulitzer). Both had overpowering personal clout for me. J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" is about a late-middle=aged intellectual who stubbornly
pursues a self-centered, knowingly self-destructive, punishing life course, even though he senses the onslaught of age, loss of potency, lack of any real significance in a friendless world, and a total inability to save anyone he loves, particularly his tragedy-bound daughter. It was exactly the wrong book for casual travel reading by a 69 year old, wandering capriciously and alone, after recent prostate surgery. My hands shook and I had tears in my eyes as I finished the so sad ending. Then I picked up Michael Cunningham's "The Hours", glad not to have watched the movie yet, and found myself in a remarkable intertwining of 3 women's depressions and suicidal ideations. Its evocations of the horrors Bemy must have endured, its dredging up of my own repressed feelings of failure and guilt and helplessness, and the perfect word-choices and chillingly spare prose of Virginia Woolf and her alter-egos really knocked me down again. One phrase "We continue but we don't survive" is so breathtakingly apt, summing up that those who continue to live after a suicide simply go on, altered, damaged, wounded, never healing, never made stronger, never getting better or getting over, even if not limping visibly...all said in a few lean words.

Luckily I have discovered garlic vodka which I think I shall use to wash down some McDonald’s deep fried broccoli, after I go to a concert of Latvian liturgical music at nearby St John's Church. Also I am going to switch to lighter reading, something less aimed at the solar plexus and the soul.

I may be a bit unfair to Riga in my darkly curmudgeonly state. It really is a handsome city, even if a lot of its citizenry need major attitude readjustment. Perhaps the EU could mandate that the attend forced camps and schools, a concept they surely could relate to. CREDO: Always be accessible to astonishment! The free concert in the Lutheran Evangelical Church took place on the hardest, bare wooden benches, in an ugly and poorly lighted, chilly old building and consisted of an all-Latvian (sung in Latvian) liturgically inspired stringless orchestra of 60 brass, woodwinds and percussion players. If anything ever sounded un-promising this was it! It was simply wonderful, exalting! First of all, as with the painters in the museum, Latvia's composers suffered a stylistic lag-time of 50 to 70 years, so their music of the first half of the last century sounds like Cesar Frank and their music of the last 50 years sounds like Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, which is just fine with me. Then Latvian actually turns out to be quite singable and pleasant to listen to. And "liturgical" was not taken literally at all, and there were 3 symphonic pieces that seemed more folkloric than devout.

Finally both orchestra and chorus (more of a college-aged group sponsored by the Great Guild, the residual amalgam of all the old medieval guilds, which has recouped lots of their properties and now devotes itself and its moneys to cultural causes) were just plain wonderful. I am now fully prepared to believe that all the fine singers at the opera last night were Latvians. The coup de theatre was a glorious tonal "Sanctus" with which they ended, the brass orchestra soaring above the church organ, the choir soaring above both full vocal throttles out, and at the climax the bells of the church and the big church next door pealing as if the 1812 overture were ending in triumph. It was all so unexpectedly monumental and triumphant that one wanted to cheer and weep. The scant 200 or so in the audience went appropriately wild, but they were mostly parents and school chums, and I felt so lucky to have blundered into such an ephemeral but transforming moment. I went back to the hotel without even thinking about broccoli or garlic vodka.

Exiting Riga we traversed a river as wide as the Ohio at Cincinnati, with islands filled with squatters' shacks that appeared incomprehensibly to be both unheated and occupied. Maybe that's where the mean babushkas all live, and why they are so mean. On the far bank lies industrial Riga, with a fair number of wood-oriented industries, lumber mills, furniture makers, one pulp paper mill, and also a fair number of smaller metal fabricating plants. Interestingly, with all this building materials activity, Riga has none of the new high rise bustle and boom of much smaller Tallinn, with its explosion of high rise hotels and offices. Riga has one tall glass hotel tower and one dingy Stalin Gothic hotel that nearly replicates Moscow's grim and disreputable Hotel Ukraina (where I was awakened every hour by hookers who "could not be stopped because they were registered guests entitled to use the internal hotel phones").

As I drift thru yet another fogged landscape of ice-crusted trees and fields, I think I realize why this trip has proved less exhilarating than most others. It is not just the bad Grand Circle group...I've had almost as bad before. It is not the dreary weather...it has after all been dry most of the time, and I am a voluntary winter traveler who lives on an Atlantic island. It is the paucity of glamour, exoticism and romanticism about this part of the world, or even of anything palpable dramatic. Its long history has basically been a chronicle of serfs tilling and harvesting and butchering for one Feudality or Tsar or Kaiser living a long way away in something approaching grandeur and style. It all reminds me of Penelope Fitzgerald's "Blue Flower" and its evocation of the brutishness of even the rural nobility's life in 18th century northern Germany. You lived short, sickly, unmedicated lives of labor or leisure depending on your class, and you died young, usually in pain. It was a superb book...but it doesn’t exactly delineate grand tourism. I also wonder if my addiction to, and delight in parentheses may be finally driving those I love and write for to the brink of despair. That cannot be helped. I lead a parenthetical life. A child not of Prometheus but of Parentheses (mother: Ellipsis). But then, surely (Parenthetical) is superior to [Brackish]...so much more well-rounded....so less square.

Lithuania

At the frontier Lithuania and Vodaphone welcome you in English and all the signs are tri-lingual. These folks are EU-prepping. I feel positive. That may of course some sort of recessive genetics at play. My Grandpa, Abe Jelin, left Vilna (Yiddish for Vilnius) at age 7; and my Grandma Bessie's father, Hershel (Henry) Slonimsky, was a teacher at the famous YIVO Institute (actually his father was its Provost or Dean of Faculty or whatever Yiddish Institutes called their "machers"). So Arthur's middle name has some admittedly remote significance on both sides of his family. YIVO was the European center of 19th Century Jewish scholarship, learning and thought. Its library was considered the world's greatest collection of Yiddish books. Vilnius had 120,000 Jews (half its population), many of whose families had been there since the 15th Century when they were actually invited to settle and open trade. Yiddish was their language and their theatre and papers and books and music were vibrant. Indeed "Litvak" became synonymous with North European Jew (though it technically included huge numbers from Russia and Poland) and Vilnius was called "The Jerusalem of the North". Today there are 6000 Jews in Vilnius, all recent emigres from Russia. The Nazis wiped out 0ver 90% of the 220,000 Jews in the 40's, but not before "Litvaks" became some 80% of the root stock of the Jewish communities in North America, South Africa, Australia, England and Argentina. And Israel has always been a Litvak-dominated society. Interestingly, Vilnius is now working very hard to rebuild the Great Synagogue and 30 other historic Jewish buildings, at a cost to the country of some $30 million, but they are also getting far larger sums for the project from Jewish organizations world-wide. Over 10,000 Jewish tourists come to Vilnius each year on specific "roots" trips. Jewishness is a growth industry...at least in one place.

Vilnius has 600,000 people and the country has 3.5 million in an area twice the size of Belgium. It is even today 80% ethnic Lithuanian (only 7% Russian and 7% German), and it is staunchly Catholic, all of which derives from its 14th century royal marriage/alliance with Poland, designed to keep the rising Germany at bay by creating a super-power that ruled (from Vilnius for 200 years) an empire that included lots of Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and reached from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Jews, indeed everyone was welcome, and a cosmopolitan and mercantile city emerged. Then in the 1650's the Plague wiped out half the population, the court moved to Poland, and the country and city never really recovered in terms of world centrality. Before 1800 Lithuania was firmly Russian, and its subsequent history is a lot like Estonia's and Latvia's, except for its continued large Jewish population until the Nazis arrived. Lithuania certainly had its share of collaborators, but the Jews had been such an integral, accepted, numerically large part of the city's life that there is no evidence of the kind of mass betrayals in Vilnius that occurred in Riga. Still the grisly result was basically the same. I wonder what the Yiddish is for "sic transit gloria mundi". How ironic that this Litvak should only
know the Latin.

Entering Vilnius is like coming into 1975 Wheeling, W Va...not auspicious, shabby suburbs, grimy and ill-kept sections, big blocs of 6 storey Soviet concrete slabs with uncurtained windows and no lights on despite the gloom. Where were all the people? I know. They were jamming the parking lots of 3 or 4 huge shopping malls (more like warehouse clubs in appearance). This is where Vilnius congregates on a dark Sunday afternoon. Right opposite the bus station was a modest dream come true...a large, full-facility, Soviet era hotel, unrenovated, with no hallway lights, but with a fine single with private bath and breakfast for $24 a night. Since the Reval Hotel here, on its half price special deal was over $100, I booked into the Panorama and am content. it is a 2 minute walk to the bus depot and a 6 minute walk down the hill to the Old Town, the Philharmonic Hall, the Opera House, the broccoli-laden McDonalds. What more could any Litvak ask. sometimes Providence does indeed look after its Wandering Jewish and "returnees"...even if both the symphony and the opera are dark all week.

Of course, on closer inspection, the Hotel looks like a time-warped set for Gorky Park. The cavernous dining room is set with long, straight tables and stiff-backed chairs, from 24 to 72 per table. A Kommissar's meeting hall, in which I was surreally the one and only breakfaster. This was just as well, as the one and only waitress was doing her nails and talking on her cell phone. No buffet. Bread, jam, juice, coffee and your choice of one of pancakes or wieners or porridge or fried egg. Choosing what seemed the least dangerous, I was enraptured to discover that the pancakes were sweet cheese blintzes bathed in very light sour cream, precisely as I remember my non-Litvak Grandma Schwartz making them. To compensate me for the fine blintzes, the coffee was awful Nescafe, the juice was orange soda and the bread was white and stale. It seems that the hotel is the main hangout for the Russian Mafia in Lithuania. Indeed I am fairly sure I saw a drug deal going down in the parking lot of McDonalds last night. And my room door, though it still locks, gives evidence of having been broken into at least once. Graham Greene and Tom Clancy would like the peeling wall-paper, the missing floor tiles and the exposed rusty pipes. I will survive this.

A 4 plus hour walk, and I have effectively done Vilnius. The town is again different from both Riga and Tallinn, mostly 1890-1920 baroque buildings all painted plaster in soft pastels trimmed in white. The streets are cobbled but not pedestrianized, and there are many charming, pricey boutique hotels and restaurants set in cobbled courtyards, and a lot of fashion boutiques with designer names like Prada and Gianfranco Ferre all selling brightly colored furs that are perfect styles for pudgy dumplings with acne who think they are Madonna. It is gloomy but far less chilly, as we are 150 miles up river from
the sea, with 300-foot high, fortified hillocks on two sides, that act as wind-breaks...a totally different topography, with river-hugging parks, tree-lined boulevards and low buildings. The huge horrible Orthodox church looks, on the outside, like a monstrous white-washed Parthenon with a lot of 10 foot high saints glued onto it...but then, if you take away the saints, that describes the several Soviet Kino (movie) Palaces, several of which are up for sale or lease.

The official Lithuanian government tourist materials come in 2 flavors:(1) dry and tasteless, geared to attracting business investment in bureaucratic paeans to the country's late but rapid turn-around, stuffed with statistics about high tech potential, etc; and (2) spicy and hysterically funny, geared to tourism, with lots of nude women, ads for casinos and clubs and discos all of the raunchiest sort...my 3 absolute favorites being: (i) "Extasy guarantee! We have nude bar girls to service you", (ii) "Trust your meetings, conferences, parties and balls to our professionals", and (iii) "The Eden, heaven on earth for the tired businessman to enjoy topless entertainers who specialize in privates massages". Honest Injun! Classics of English disingenuity.

On a different note, the Jewish Museum, really more of a holocaust exhibit, is temporarily in a small green wooden house while the proposed new on is busily seeking funds to build. It is a collection of sad salvaged trinkets and always shocking photos, the most awful being of mothers and babies being shot and children's corpses stacked in piles or tossed into pits. Of interest was the story of Sempo Sugihara, a Japanese Diplomat who, Wallenberg-and Schindler-like, got 6000 Jews safely away. Steven Spielberg take note. The other 15 Lithuanians listed among the "blessed" (those who saved lives) include only one cleric, a Lutheran Minister in this overwhelmingly Catholic country, one uniformed officer, and one Red Cross nurse, The rest are just ordinary folks doing extraordinary things. Also new info: Jascha Heifetz, Jacques Lipschutz, Samuel Bak and Chaim Soutine were all born and early educated in Vilnius' Jewish schools. One thing the Museum faces up to quite frontally is that the Vilnius Jews really didn't have clear skies and calm seas from 1400 to 1941. There were Pogroms every 20 or 30 years. The Grand Dukes may have asked them to settle, but the community was fundamentally not all that friendly until the 19th Century. The Great Synagogue, which sat 3000 and where the Great Gaon Rabbi (one of Judaism's great seers) preached, was destroyed at least 3 times before Hitler. Still the Jews flourished...sometimes on the basis that a rising tide raises all boats...eventually because their numbers reached that critical mass where they could prosper by servicing their own needs. Then too, since Vilnius was an inland riverine trade center, there was not the ferocious competition from the Hansa merchants and Jewish trade and commerce grew.

Back to the present: The people here are almost all friendly and helpful, a marked difference, and a curious one, from Riga. Vilnius played an interesting part in Napoleon's Russian debacle, previously unknown to me whose knowledge of that history comes largely from Tolstoy and Prokofieff. First he marched in grand triumph into Vilnius, at the head of 500,000 troops (the largest army in history to that time) and spent 5 festive weeks in the Grand Ducal palace. He was welcomed as a liberator from the repressive Tsar, who supposedly got the first word of the invasion at a fancy ball at a noble estate on the outskirts of Vilnius just a week prior. Then, after Kutuzov burned Moscow, and Napoleon tragically dallied wondering what to do, he returned to Vilnius with only 40,000 surviving men, crazed, frozen and starving, of whom an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 perished in and around Vilnius, locked out by the terrified locals, curled up in pathetic fetal positions in fields and even in city streets, and dumped into recently unearthed fortification trenches that they had themselves dug on their earlier visit. Recent bone tests reveal that they were mostly teen-agers, and almost none of them had any wounds of any kind. A grisly little tale. I did find a house in town where Balzac stayed during the retreat. How fortunate for the world that he found sanctuary.

The rains waited until I was back in my room, and during the night they washed the fog away. Suddenly one could wee why this dump is called the Panorama...it sits on a 100 foot high hillock, commanding a truly glorious 180 degree view of the town, the castle, (whose monuments are illuminated at night to great effect) and the several new glass high rises twinkling on the other side of the two rivers, all hitherto invisible. Someone really ought to buy this place and fix it up. It has a lot going for it. However, they got a few things mixed up. The walls are built of single ply Kleenex and the toilet paper is corrugated cardboard. Last night the partying in some other nearby room might as well have been on my bed.

But this morning breakfast came with entertainment. The one other couple in the Hall was a paunchy 45 year old guy in a very shiny black suit and shirt and tie, out of central casting for The Sopranos, and his even more stereotypical bleach-blonde-bimbo, with huge breasts, a tight white tank top, a leather micro-mini-skirt and stiletto heeled white patent boots. First she got very peevish, in Russian, with the lanky, languid waiter (who clearly would have preferred to be anywhere else doing anything but this) because she ordered "pancakes" which are "American" and was served "blinis" which are "Russian". I dredged up enough Freshman Russian to get the drift here, aided by the fact that she repeated everything 3 times, very loud. Before the Berretta came out, it was settled with a complimentary Yoghurt, a cheap price for a young waiter, even this young waiter's life. Then Joe Soprano, hacking and wheezing, sauntered quite irritably thru the door to the kitchen, it turned out in search of an ashtray so he could commence his daily self-destruction ritual. Suddenly there were screams and he came racing out like a terrified cow, chased hotly by a Walkyrie of a Babushka, with a pink plastic shower cap and matching apron, brandishing a huge, very greasy wooden spoon. No one was allowed in her kitchen...which of course raised the immediate spectre of what she was hiding from us. However, the coffee was better this morning, the bread was black and moist, and the orange juice was mostly apple. Then the clock struck nine. The tape of Frank Zappa was shut off in mid caterwaul. And waiter, moving more enthusiastically than ever before, notified both tables that the room was closed. I wish I could say I had been thrown out of worse places.

CREDO: Expect the worst...it comes out better. The weather has turned sunny and mild. The biggest problem on the narrow sidewalks is the Scylla of overflowing gutters and the Charybdis of car and bus splatter. The local solution is to walk down the center of the street, best done for safety in a small but determined group, which serves the double purpose of staying relatively dry and annoying the rude drivers who seem to dominate the roads in all 3 Baltic capitals. Another common denominator is the total absence of auto-emissions controls. I am very surprised the EU hasn't made this a precondition to joining, as it is really very bad.

At the start of the once important Moscow Road, is the Holy Spirit Church, the country's main Russian Orthodox prayer house, that is typical and dingy baroque until you hit the altar wall, when (forgive!) all hell breaks loose. The wall is painted neon electric turquoise and then covered in a Louise Nevelson organized chaos of awful oil paintings and worse icons, all in bright and heavy gold frames. Then in front of this mess of an altar is a low glass catafalque with the embalmed bodies of 3 14th century martyrs, mercifully their shrunken carcasses covered by velvet blankets, but with their 6 scrawny legs and feet sticking out like little chicken drumsticks. It transcends bizarre and calls into question the justice for martyrs. Then an hour's walk away, along the river and past a number of University buildings and embassies, I came to St Peter and Paul, also unpromising from the outside except for a rather Monty Python-esque sign on a parking space in the front lot saying "Pope John Paul parked here" in English. But inside is a superb 1675-90 Baroque masterpiece of Italian plaster-art...floor to ceiling stark white reliefs of saints and scenes intertwined with plants and vines. It is a lot like the phenomenal Cappella Sta Maria in Palermo, though far bigger and thus less exquisite in tiny details. Still it achieves a snowy, ethereal clutter that is at once visually arresting and somehow soothingly peaceful. There is, in a frenzy of good taste, no color and no gold except for the golden swirl over the flying pulpit, and the crimson cloak on the shoulders of Christ.

About 50 years ago I reviewed for the Michigan Daily a movie with a young Robert Mitchum called "Track of the Cat" based on a Walter Van Tillburgh Clark novella. It was an all black and white film, set mostly in the snow, but filmed using color film so that glints and tones and shards of light were picked up. Then very rarely there was a red scarf, or a smear of blood. It was unforgettable, and this Church was very much like that. Something else that could easily have ruined it all but didn't...the chandelier is a huge crystal-basket-work Viking ship, under full sail, which is beautiful and sparkling in the great white void, even if its relevance or symbolism is somewhat lost on me.

En route home I stopped at a shop called "Amber Bernstein" which admittedly sounds like a pedicurist from the Bronx but which had some lovely amber-encrusted Xmas ornaments, which I pray to the 3 chicken legged martyrs arrive home unbroken. My first purchases in Latvia or Lithuania, but I figure Amber Bernstein ornaments have got to have some Hanukah validity as well. Plus I found out that there is a concert of premieres of contemporary Lithuanian Chamber music tonight in the Philharmonic's small hall. Anticipating the worst, I invested my $3.25.

In my last 10 days I have not seen a single person of color in any of the Baltic states. These economies, unlike the Scandinavians, may just be too new, and their unemployment numbers still too speculative, to encourage additions to the still largely unskilled work-force. Still and all, not a single brown or black face...a few Japanese tourists and students.

Sometimes a credo backfires. The concert was calamitous. A flatulent trombone, a shrill soprano, a piano and a bass, and 13 different percussion instruments (including 3 iron skillets hung up for whacking and a huge Chinese gong) all in the custody of one very frazzled percussionist do not produce music. Exotic names on the 6 short compositions, like Haiku and Capriccio do not help. Nothing helped. The 6 composers were all there, with their families. I suspect they didn't have friends. There were also a few put-upon-looking students. I left, reminded once again of my overwhelming gratitude to my beloved Marty Jones for the glorious sounds she has lavished on me so generously.

There is a business opportunity here. No one makes local baseball caps, and the few T-shirts are ugly and cheesy. What kind of an EU country doesn't have caps and T shirts at exorbitant prices?

Today I booked a private guided tour to Trakai, a splurge for my last day. Trakai is the town, but more particularly the 14th century castle on an island in a large lake, from which the first 3 grand dukes ruled their substantial empire. It is also home to the curious sect of Karaites, Jews from Turkey whom the first grand duke found in the Ukraine and brought back to be his personal body guard because of their fierce loyalty and ferocity in battle. They were devout adherents only top the Old Testament, and considered everything after it (including the Talmud) to be heretical. They are in fact not an extinct sect...indeed there are 220 of them in Vilnius and 66 of them in Trakai, each community with its own "Kenessa" (the Arab word for a non-muslim prayer hall). There are also still communities in Belarus, Ukraine and Turkey. Trakai has a small museum (the Kenessa was closed) which shows a very Levantine life-style that looks more Uzbek than Litvak. Their patterns are all floral or geometric, following both Jewish and Muslim inhibitions against graven images. Nowhere do they use the Star of David. They pray in Hebrew and the Old Testament is printed in Hebrew, interestingly with some vowels. Their prayer shawls are unfringed, but tipped with velvet embroideries. Throughout their 600 years in Lithuania (they were here 100 years prior to the Jewish merchants) they steadfastly dissociated and differentiated themselves from the Jews, claiming a unique identity. Initially in service to, and protected by the Grand Dukes, they escaped the early Pogroms and ultimately were accepted as non-Jews, even under the Nazis. It is an intriguing tale.

Trakai Castle is perfect for a misty day...floating as it seems to in Medieval brick splendor on a glassy sheet of water. It was 80% restored by the Soviets, surprisingly quite well and authentically, with careful research. It is crude by European Court standards, medieval brick turrets and ramparts, cobbled courts, exterior timbered walkways and staircases, interior vaults more like warehouses than royal apartments. But, by the time the Grand Dukes (who from their portraits were a pretty rough and tumble group of Crusader fighters) discovered the courtly graces and amenities, their heyday was over. So brick never got plastered over and prettily painted, big glaze windows never got cut into fortified buildings; and what you have is an intimate, authentic look at the Middle Ages as lived. Indeed there was a German film crew making a movie called "Rats Arrive". We kept wandering into their shots, but don't look for us in the final cut.

Lithuanian oddments: In a recent poll of 1000 Vilnius-ites, 67% opposed giving any property or reparations to Jews unless they were both citizens of and residents of Lithuania. Apparently Israel has been pressing the issue quite hard, and there is a fair amount of money at stake. In a perhaps unrelated (??) matter, the EU has professed to shock at the results of a poll showing 60% of Europeans see Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. The report then speculated on whether this was a reflection of a resurgent anti-Semitism (as in the politics of both France and Austria) or an unforeseen side-effect of the EU's recent efforts to support the Palestinian cause as a counter-weight to the perceived pro-Israel bias of the USA.

Sitting in the Panorama's murky lobby, killing time till my bus back to Tallinn (and swilling a very good Spanish beer called Perla Dorada, with an apple overtone), I was suddenly petrified as 2 camouflage-clad guys waving Uzis literally stormed thru the front door. I thought my last trip had just ended. They were in fact just collecting the day's take at the lobby bank/exchange office; but they gave a whole new meaning to the word "security". The Lithuanian national sport, the one that drives them frenzied and builds national icons, is of all things basketball. They have just won the European championship
for the first time in 56 years and it is a huge event. I have known a few Litvaks who dribbled...but not this.

The Perla Dorada from Seville, the chocolates from Valencia, all the fresh fruit and the $2 red wine is just the tip of the giant iceberg that is Spanish exports to Northern Europe. It is the visible manifestation of the reason why Spain is the only country in Europe that has proved recession and downturn-proof in the last few years. They are the Wal-Mart of Europe.

There is no doubt that something is going on at the Panorama. A couple of hours sitting in the lobby sees a stream of guys in black leather arriving with brief cases, not stopping at the desk for keys, not taking the elevators, going up the stairs and coming down without brief cases. They also do the same in the barbershop, which occupies the prime lobby space usually reserved for a bar or gift shop, which has no barber or manicurist, and whose only barber chair is sat in all the time by a big bozo in a black suit. Then there are teams or pairs of young toughs in jeans and leather jackets who go up and down
the stairs, go outside, return counting money, and repeat the routine. It is a lot like watching American TV live, with no plot and no commercials. The armed security guard at the front desk seems to know them all and doesn't interfere. Hercule Poirot I'm not, but this is easy. Still there is no sign of prostitution, which you would think (especially given proximity to bus and train stations) would flourish. I just wonder what the Mafia is thinking I am doing hanging around. I think it is time to head back to Tallinn.

The overnight bus trip was better than I expected. I had the front row on the upper deck, surrounded by huge windows like a B-17 turret gunner, and slept for 7 of the 10 hours, interrupted only for 2 passport checks and one silly customs inspection by some bored Estonians who like sniffing American deodorants. The bus dropped me right next to the hotel I wanted to stay at, but which did not have room for me when I checked out. Delightfully they had just had a cancellation and I ensconced myself again in the half-price arms of Reval Hotels. I then repacked, took a nap, watched Euro News, and strolled leisurely up to see Carmen, which was more good news than bad (but the bad was extravagantly so!) It was sung in almost recognizable, heavily accented French with Estonian super-titles. All the women, and Escamillo the Toreador, had good voices. And the Ukrainian Carmen was a dead ringer for Cher. Mid-way thru the Habanera she realized that her voice was not making the high notes, and she simply dropped a whole register, singing the rest of the opera electrifyingly as a contralto. She also managed the difficult task of being sexy and slutty without overdoing it to the point of poor taste or poor acting. But the tenor was without doubt the worst voice I have ever heard, an off-key, bleating sheep who missed every note. He must have owned the ground lease on the Opera House. The orchestra played much of the time in a cadence more suited to Pavane for a Dead Infanta than the ramparts of Seville and a bunch of smugglers. The stage director seemed to think that constant throwing things (lots of things...furniture, sacks of grain, cups, oranges, packs of cards, hats and helmets, guns and swords...some even ending up in the orchestra pit) passed for exciting movement. It detracted from all the singing, except perhaps the tenor. Still Cher made a super gypsy, and I still love the score, familiar and occasionally hokey though it may be.

The auto express ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki is beautifully run...240 feet long, 900 passengers and a bunch of cars....spotlessly clean, well upholstered seats, several nice bars and cafes, a full-service restaurant, a duty free shop, and an attended kiddee play hall. If Estonia can manage this, and Canada on the Vancouver/Victoria run, what excuse can there be for the Steamship Authority? My reserved Jiffy cab was waiting, as was my room at the Pilotti Hotel at the airport. Finnair performed in true Finnish style, or lack thereof, and I watched The Italian Job and Chicago over the Atlantic. I am not sad to be home from places I had never been. At this point Christmas in New Hampshire and January in the Adriatic sound alluring and exotic. Love to each and all of you.

Thx for reading all this (including the parentheticals).