h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In general, you hate travelling. Hate feeling uncomfortable and dirty, hate feeling obliged to rush around and look at anything even vaguely interesting. Hate it.

So remember, nay treasure, the fury with which you greeted the news that it was now necessary to leave the country in order to get a new visa. Closest destination: Estonia. The capital Tallinn in fact. Allegedly very beautiful. "Take a few days off. Travel around. See Estonia. Hey, why don't you potter over to Finland while you' re at it!" Ugh.

Imagine your satisfaction, therefore, when your window of opportunity was restricted to one day in Tallinn, overnight train there, overnight train back. In the circumstances, you were perfectly justified, having dropped off the application at the embassy and paid the extortimate fees, in doing nothing but wander the cobbled rain-washed old town amidst germanic houses (steep roofs), taking a quick gander at the proper germen catholic churches (spindly spires), grabbing something nice to eat in a restaurant (never thought it was possible to make kasha actually taste nice), drinking endless cups of tea in cafes, watching the world go by and listening to people speaking a very Scandinavian sounding language. Endless entertainment there. 'Tea' is 'tee' ("teeeeeeeeeeeeeee"). 'Bar' is 'baar'. ("baaaaaaaaaar"). And it was superb to have two languages to fall back on for once. Although given how Estonians feel about Russia, it would have been better really to stick to English.

But it was very satisfying to discover that your Russian is now servicable for communicative purposes, wasn't it? Though, of course, also bad enough to induce amusement in your listeners at your hoplessly garbled endings. Officials, who had taken one look at your passport and winced to a man before tentatively enquiring if you spoke Russian, were soothed, and from then on everything went splendidly, if ungrammatically, along. I swear one of them gave you a clicky little bow in farewell.

On the other hand, maybe they have just been hanging around Estonians for too long, as I think it is fair to say that the inhabitants of Tallinn have comprehansively twigged that the best way to separate tourists from their money is to be nice to them. And sell postcards.

Ah, but admit it; it was rather pleasent to be out from under the opressive, impersonal, monolithic architecture of Moscow for a bit. Quaint is what you were raised on, after all.