The Beauty of Alps

Often, in our hectic lives that are filled with exciting events, we don’t realize how much enjoyment those distinctive experiences have given us until the years have passed. As we grow older and accumulate more knowledge through various encounters, like a book what becomes thicker through author’s ever on evolving expressions, we will suddenly recognize, that the reasons why we enjoyed those delightful events in the past have changed considerably. Just as above, my life has been made up from array of incredible happenings, I just didn’t realize how much I’ve had really enjoyed them until years had slipped by. For me one of those events was spending a whole summer in Austria, in a picturesque, small town, called Semmering. The trip was for me a once in a lifetime chance to get out there, in the world, behind the boundaries of my own little country.
Austria is one of those cute middle European states, that look like a painting what has escaped from the art gallery. The land has an unbelievably scenic countryside with picture perfect cottages, like young mushrooms that have just popped out of the ground after crispy, rainy morning. It is embraced by curving Alps, their never ending tree-covered slopes and valleys embroidered with towns that just don’t have a centuries old histories but also an astonishing architecture.
I worked as an intern in a modern style hotel that was situated in a very tiny town, named Semmering. The way the town was scattered over the hill-sides and hollows it would have been more appropriate to call it a village. A village that had got lost in the lush vegetation of the mountain banks and if you didn’t mind a bit foot work, you could climb up the hill and view a horizon with the sun flickering off the snow tops.
The hotel was built right into the windward side of the mountain. In fact, if you would have wanted to step off your balcony you would have had to learn to fly like our little feathered friends. The building was respectively divided into two sections. One part was for the tourists and the other one for its employees that had every luxury what home away from home could offer. The staff had their own living quarters, even if they chose to not stay local overnight. They could use all the amenities of the hotel for free , like pools, saunas, solariums for sunbaths and other recreational facilities. The biggest pluses, in my case, were the free trips around Austria that were meant for guests, but you were allowed to join if you had a day off. The three month I spent there, I had to work half of my schedule in the service area and the other half in the production area. The hotel had a superb customer service, everyone was treated with high regard, it didn’t matter if you were an inner customer or outer customer. You could pretty much not be able to differentiate between the guests and employees, everyone was important, and they would make sure you would know that. I guess, part of this conduct came from the natural amiable behavior that the Austrian people seemed to possess. The respect toward each other and toward the common man, It didn’t seem to matter if you were the one who served others or the one who was served to.
After all these years, looking back to my amazing experience in the midst of European mountain peaks , I would have to say that, what made it so enjoyable memory was not the beauty of the Alps but the “beauty” of the people.

Häly Laasme

The Medieval Beauty

There are many tremendously beautiful cities in Europe that have a rich cultural and historical background. They have survived through the enormous devastations from the razing wars and centuries long weathering from the ever changing climate. One of these incredible and stunning cities is Tallinn. It is a capital of a tiny country called Estonia that is on the map a size of the baby’s palm.
Tallinn is mostly known for its Old Town what has been protected by UNESCO since 1997 as a historical heritage site. The justification for the inscription was that the Old Town was an outstanding, exceptionally complete and well preserved example of a medieval European trading city. It has a long and rich history full of rapacious invaders and omniscient rulers who all have quarreled for chance to own a part of it some time or another. Its impressive saga goes all the way back to the dark eleventh century when it was originally built as a wooden fortress by the adventurous conqueror, Danish King Valdemar II. The Danish national flag, white cross against a red background,originated from his siege to Tallinn. They say that it had fallen from the heavens during the king’s siege when he was praying for a victory. Furthermore, in the early fifteenth century Tallinn was a very powerful northern European trade center. It was a member of the Hanseatic League, what was the major European economic community during that time. These and other historical factors have molded Tallinn’s extraordinary architecture and given people from all.around the world a reason to visit it.
What makes the Old Town so special nowadays is its grandiose,age-old architecture. It is like a page out of the enchanting fairy-tale book with the massive, gray-limestone structures, the needle pointed steeples,the dramatic red-tiled roofs, the medieval courtyards and the passages. All you really missing is a charming princess with golden locks and a brave, romantic prince on a white, humble horse. Its fortified,magnificent stone walls with some twenty skyward reaching defense towers, that guard the town, are so colossal that you feel a need to bow respectfully and say, “Pardon me.” If those walls could only talk, they would have so much to say. They would tell us about the courage of the fearless knights, who fought here to their last breath on these blood soaked streets, or about the anguish and the sorrow of the mothers, who lost their children to the cruel and heartless Black-Plague. The town has a web of narrow, twisting,cobblestone streets that have no real direction, but the same time feel so cooling and sheltering in the blazing summer day. Sometimes it feels like the streets get so narrow with the tall, stone buildings closing around you that there is a need for a gasp of air. You look like a mouse in the labyrinth what has hopelessly lost its way to freedom. And as you wander on this downtrodden ground you can still feel the presence of the medieval spirit of the Old Town still eternally live and breathing - it is noble and imperious, but yet so calming and unpretentious. You can almost hear it whispering in the northern wind and sense its echoes of the past in the sudden gust.
The Old Town can offer to the curious visitor quite a unique course through history, it is like an outdoor museum with the giant size exhibits. For example, the Town Square, what marks the heart of the city, was once upon of time a place where you could lose your valuables to the bartering merchants or your head to the justice implementing executioner. It is a large, cobblestone square surrounded by neatly painted houses what are all in different color. Without the color, the whole town would look like a depressed being with just the wind whistling as it runs through the zigzag streets passing the speed limit. The Fat Margaret’s Tower, a huge cannon tower built to intimidate the invaders from the sea, sits on the seaward side of the town where it still takes its daily sunbaths as it protects the city from the cold, northern winds. The centuries of boiling summer sun and the winter crispy winds have only slightly eroded its outer surface. It is full of different size of holes and cracks from odd size shells and bullets. The unfortunate St. Olaf’s Church, its Gothic style with infinitely tall, slim and kind of rusty steeple, was around 1500 the tallest building in the world, but got disastrously hit by the lightening and burned down more than once. They say that you were able to see the fire all the way to Finland.
As you work yourself up these narrow streets you can see the cylindrical and most mighty cannon tower of the sixteenth century called the Kiek in de Kök. It means "Peek in the Kitchen” and got its name because you could see to the kitchens of the lower town residents from its top. It has gotten a bit separated through the time from its brothers and sisters, but never the less it stands proudly with its head high above the shady park. At last, but not least, is the not so Virgin Tower, that got its name sarcastically from being a prison to the prostitutes, but probably has the most captivating architecture of that time with its square form and the aged, mahogany color wood-gallery passing through it.
Tallinn also has a big role in preserving the culture of this small nation. In the evenings, when the sunset is still struggling to let go the last cracks and the corners of the tired city, you can hear the chamber-music in the candle lighted courtyards and organs’ low-pitched tones bouncing off the shadows of the steeples and red-tiled roofs.
It is also, here, where every five years, since 1869, the people from all over the country get together for the Song and Dance Festival, what has been proclaimed by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. It is the only place in the world where you can see and hear a choir from thirty thousand enthusiastic people singing sometimes very complex compositions of national songs on the vast open-air stage for an audience of hundred thousand. It is a well known fact that the singing or so called singing revolution, not the fighting, helped this country to become free of suffocating and cringing occupation from the former Soviet Union. So in every five years the town looks like the lyricism of summer as it gets filled with colorful patterns of national textile. You can see waddling toddlers and the wise, self-preserved elderly roaming the nostalgic streets in their vibrant national costumes. Their laughs and giggles echo between the cold, modern style buildings as they march singingly and cheerfully in the parade towards the half-moon, open-air stage in Pirita. From the distance this stage looks like a busy anthill in the spring leaning towards the sea, and if you are lucky enough to share the top of it with some other common fellows you can view the sunset in the burning sky as it passes behind the horizon…and all what is going to be left is just the resound of the songs with harmonized melodies under starry, black sky.
Tallinn is also a town where you don’t have to go to distance to find a variety of interesting and mouth watering eating spots, what can fill your ever longing taste for anything you desire. It is quite a melting pot of world’s cuisines. Just take a walk around the Old Town at the lunch time and your head will clog or the mouth will drool from the sensation of the smells and the aromas coming from the near by courtyards and the old stone chimneys. You can pick between the authentic medieval experience with centuries old recipes or choose a more modern style cuisines from Japan to France or India. You can find some really homey and cozy pubs with the jolly sailor’s yearning tunes or you can dine in the five star, black-tie restaurants with the superior attitudes. You can even go out to eat and get a hot, steaming sauna at the same time.
One Estonian song says, “Neither cedars nor palms grow on this land… Neither silver nor gold is found in this land…” We know that often tourists search for something special or highly exotic, and this palmless, Nordic town can certainly offer that with an intensive visual, emotional and physical experience which can leave even the most hardened big-city dwellers deeply moved.

Häly Laasme