The most important meal of the day…….

I know that is now considered “old hat”. In our modern world of intermittent fasting. But three things come into play when you are traveling. Breakfast is an indication of the country you are in. Breakfast is an indication of the money you spent on the hotel. If you eat breakfast well, you don’t need to worry about lunch. In Tampere north of Helsinki in Finland. I had landed in a rather nice family run hotel. All by a happy accident. I had a lovely room with a view across the city. They gave me slippers and a waffle cotton dressing gown. I never managed to sort out the lights. And the top floor of the hotel was a sauna that opened from 4 to 10 each evening. With separate men’s and women’s and a joint infra red sauna.

And to the point of this whole message from abroad: Breakfast.,And I have to point out we are starting high and going low. There was an omelette bar. There was a whole honeycomb, waiting for you to scrape it. A selection of gluten free breads and cakes. there was the yoghurt and cereal section, with toppings of dried powdered berries and seeds and a green powder that smelt like a christmas candle labeled “top of the pine trees.” There were many breads, all warm, waiting for you to slice them. Rye, seeded, crisp breads. There were different butters, salted, unsalted and smoked reindeer butter. There was Kale pesto. There were jams galore. Cloudberry, lingonberry, gooseberry. ( The reindeer bit is going to be a theme, but only in Finland…makes sense really) There were containers with mushrooms and onions ( for me) and reindeer sausages ( for others) And there was a container of the best porridge I have ever had in my life. I wrote about it when I wrote about Finland and I have a packet in my case with instructions on how to make it and it involves milk and salt and butter. In the centre of the room there was an island with a massive selection of sliced cheese, sliced meats, pickled vegetables, pickled herrings, smoked salmon, smoked eggs, and yes, reindeer.

The hotel was full of Finns, who were having a weekend break or something similar, and I noticed that most of them had bread and then piled everything on top into a vast open sandwich which they held between their two hands and engineered it brilliantly so it didn’t slide an inch. I went for courses. It’s the way I do things. I started with a tiny bowl of yoghurt with aforementioned sprinkles. then I went for the porridge with lingonberry sauce, then I had a baby omelette with mushrooms and cheese and two pots of tea. One black and one of their home made roobios. I should point out in relation to the reindeer. I did try the smoked reindeer butter on a slice of rye bread. As I pushed it around on the bread I realized it was butter with tiny pieces of smoked reindeer in it. For some reason I thought they milked the female reindeer and the butter would be made from that milk and the smoked bit.. I don’t know what I was thinking… a Lapland bar-b-que?

Anyway , I left it to one side. Eating reindeer is not for me. 10/10 The next hotel was in Helsinki. A sharp slide down to a hotel that looked like it was left over from a safe house in a John le Carre novel. The room was filled with old office furniture. The shower could only fit someone under six foot and slim of girth. The lift or elevator doors looked like te belonged in a morgue.

The breakfast was meat that looked like spam, cheese that looked like it belonged on a hamburger bun, bread that stuck to the roof of your mouth and pickles. 2/10 In Estonia. The sliced cheese and meat was becoming a visual backdrop. With lots of warm sausages and containers of flavored yoghurt.I’d give it 4/10. Latvia, we were staying at this hotel I mentioned before. Built in the seventies and a few miles out of town on the Number 1 bus line. The other guests seemed to be Russians on a mini break or a large group of young and naughty Indian men who took to running around the corridor at night in their underpants. I know. I opened my door in my white cotton nightie to remonstrate with them. they looked sheepish.

But back to breakfast. In Riga there were pancakes and fried eggs along with the regular fare. And very bad white bread that had to be toasted at least three times to make it edible. And butter in packets that were labeled “ Butter.” But you can’t fool me. I am a butter connoisseur. That butter had never met a cow. 3/10 Lithuania. The first breakfast was by the sea in Klapaieda. That was very inventive, Jams and dumplings. Egg salad, tomatoes sliced with cheese, beetroot sliced with vinegar. Lots of sausages. It probably looked better than it tasted. But I’m giving it 6/10 for the colour palette. Second breakfast was in a home stay…..whole new world. A long wooden table with drop scone style pancakes one day and a quiche style thing the next. Sliced tomatoes and cucumber from the garden.7/10

Third Lithuanian breakfast was in a hotel in the capital Vilnius. I had a fantastic view from my window. And I have to stop there. If I put porridge, cheese and a pear on my plate..they would have all tasted like wood clippings. 1/10

And lastly to Poland. In this gently tacky hotel in a town called Kalisz. Which I will be more forthcoming as to why I was there, later; the entire ( been-there-before) enterprise of sliced cheese, meats, pickles, tomatoes and bready buns with a jam filling, was lifted to the ceiling by a young woman called Emily who was making scrambled eggs to order. I will never whisk them in a bowl again. I will never let the butter fully melt again. I will eschew Jacques Pepin and Delia. I will follow young Emily hereafter. Breakfast 5/10. In conclusion. Go to Lapland for breakfast , if you happen to be passing. Skip out the Baltic States unless you happen to be staying in a lovely home in the country. Go to central Poland for scrambled eggs. But only if Emily is on duty. She gets 11/10.

A skate over the two “L” Countries in the Baltics.

It’s not that I want to roll Latvia and Lithuania together. The problem is I didn’t spend enough time in either one to speak with intelligence. It was a little of the “ Oh, it’s Rome, then it must be Monday.”

I have two friends who came from Latvia and Lithuania respectively. Friend 1. was brought up in Riga, the capital of Latvia, before emigrating with her family to Israel. Her father lost his first family in the holocaust before marrying a second time and then giving up his country because of the Soviets. But she has memories of a lovely childhood in the city, as only children can do, when the weight of invasion seems such a far away concept. Friend 2. Never lived in Lithuania, but her mother came from there and would sing songs in her native tongue all the time. Her mother ran away in a party frock when she was a child, when the Russians invaded her town and her grandmother spent decades in the soviet gulags’s before gaining her freedom. I always wanted to go to Lithuania with my friend, but sadly she died a couple of years ago. So I took a tiny bag of her ashes instead. The Finns go to Estonia to buy their alcohol. The Estonians go to Latvia for theirs. And so on. The price seems to drop the further south you travel. Alcohol in all the countries are sold in shops called ALKOHOLE. Seriously. Latvia seemed more Russian than Estonia. And indeed it has a much higher percentage of Russians than Lithuania.

The story seems to be that Latvia is demanding that any person unable to speak the Latvian language by the end of the year will be repatriated. To be clear, they are talking about the Russians. These Russians were settled in Latvia from that period after World War II until independence in 1991, but for the last 32 years the Latvian flag has been flying and still, not only is Russian their first language, it’s their only language.

There is a similar story in Lithuania. But there, the Russian Population is much smaller. Education is taught in Lithuanian, so all the young Russians speak the language, but their parents do not. Nobody, anywhere, seems to be flying the flag for Russia. But the blue and yellow flag…. In the plaza in Riga, bang in front of the Russian embassy. there is a large scaffold where many Ukrainian flags are whipping around in defiance.

And with the young Rigans, the educated, multi-lingual, clear-eyed and astute young Rigans; they know that Uber-wealthy Russians are being allowed to bring their “ not so clean” money in and have bought into the nicer parts of the city and the beach resorts. They know Latvians are not without blame in the atrocities that happened under the Nazi’s and the Soviets. But they are looking westwards and all of them are very conscious of the drumbeats on their eastern border. And the Lithuanians. They are still struggling to find a way to teach the children in school about that dark period of their history in the Second World War. It is an active and ongoing story. Some would like to be truthful. But others wonder if they will ever know the truth. So I end this eavesdrop of a note on Latvia and Lithuania, with this fantastic image.

On the 23rd of August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of that Hitler/ Stalin Pact made to invade and then share the Baltic States that no one was ever willing to acknowledge; On that day in August… One and half million people stretched in a line from Tallinn the capital of Estonia, down through Riga the capital of Latvia to Vilnius the capital of Lithuania. They held hands. Women, children, men, Priests. They stood there all day. To demand their independence. They sang. A protest that shook the Soviet Union. They got their independence. The Berlin Wall fell less than three months later.

Estonia

There is a sort of joke in Estonia. That they weren’t happy with the 2 meter rule that was enforced during Covid. There was great relief when it was revoked. So they could go back to their usual 5 meter rule. Tallinn is on the north coast. On a clear day you can see Helsinki. If you look to the east you can probably see St Petersburg. it is the northern country of the Baltic States. It’s language is related to Finland but not to it’s sister Baltic countries, nor to Russia.

The population is small. And the population is quiet. These are not noisy people except for once a year when they get together and sing. In costume. Tunes of olden days. They dance. They pic-nic . And they cry.

But as you walk around they don’t engage. They don’t look at you. They don’t say hallo. They certainly don’t smile. A young student at the University was asked whether he could differentiate between the students coming into the library by nationality. He had a perfect score. “ How did you know who were the Estonians?” He was asked. “ Because each one walked in on their own and looked grumpy” was his answer. It is hard to judge. I am here in August. The days are still long. The sun shows it’s face most days. But this is a country that spends 8 months under woolly wraps. I don’t think cold climates lend themselves to friendliness. But the story in Estonia is different. It seems that the more recent of their occupations… this dance between the Nazi’s and the Soviets. Where the two forces threw these Baltic countries between them like a weighted balloon. There is a hotel in Tallinn. Outside of the quaint old town. A white solid structure. Not particularly interesting. But it sits there high and squat as you stand at the Russian war memorial and look back into the city. It clearly has 23 floors. You can count the windows. But the Soviets, at the time, insisted that there were only 22. It seems that the 23rd floor was inhabited by all these KGB agents who used to spy on all the people staying in the hotel. Every room had listening devices wired in, Every table in the bars and restaurants came with an ashtray. If you moved them because you didn’t smoke, they were politely returned, because the all important bug was stuck underneath. The talk is that the building is composed of 50% cement, 20% glass and 30% wires.

So the Estonians don’t bother with small talk. They don’t chat in the street with you or to any of their fellow countrymen. Because they have grown up with overheard conversations having the possibility of dire consequences. So they turned their hand to things that could be done with little communication. They have cemented their place in the world with their skills in the world of tech. Skype was invented here. And “BOLT”, the first of the electric scooters came out of Estonia. Apparently at some political conference the prime minister was handed a laptop and asked if she could fix it. It was meant as a joke. But that is the reputation of these taciturn Estonians.

Outside of town following the edge of the water you come to two memorials. The first is blocks of cement. A sharp tower. A metal structure linking an arch which turns out to be falling birds. There are barriers to keep you away from the bits that are deemed dangerous. There are weeds coming up through the cracks. There is no one there. Apart from a few Bicyclists who use it as a short cut back to town. It is the Soviet War Memorial. Just past that there is the Estonian memorial.

To the lost, killed and missing under Communism. Two high smooth black walls that you walk between. You turn into an open space, there on the wall are four lines of a poem from an Estonian Poet called Juan Liiv.

It’s a poor translation but here goes: And thousands fall on the path And thousands will come home Leading them with effort and care They will fly to the beehive. And on this wall are 22,000 silver bees.

One for each person who didn’t come home. Flying towards the bee hive. And when you turn around there are gentle slopes planted with fruit trees. In memory. And a home for the bees.