Khrys weblog

I went to Tallin last Saturday. Tallin is the capital city of Estonia, just across the Baltic Sea for Finnish people. And it’s quite easy to get there : take the boat in the morning, come back in the evening. Not too expensive either.
Estonian and Finnish langauages are very close, and share the same roots. They however are different enough to sound funny to each other’s speakers. Estonia and Finland got their independance about the same time, in 1917 for Finland, and 1918 for Estonia. But the Soviets took over the country during WWII and Estonia was free again in 1992. Some Finns told me they went there, in 1992. Tallin was greyish, and you would see small Lada cars everywhere. You could almost touch misery. That was almost 15 years ago. Now, it has a very colourful and well renovated medieval Old City, where restaurants smell good from outside and taste good inside, and a lot of brand new fancy cars (and no more Ladas) all around. Estonian worked hard, it seems.
Now, I told you that Finland and Estonia were close, like cousins. Finnish came immediatly in 1992, to spend some money there, since it was so cheap. Some also came to see relatives, some went to do business. And it is obvious who Estonia’s main customer is. Most of merchants speak 4 languages (Estonian of course, Finnish, English, Russian even). And in the Russian style market, a lot of articles are obviously dedicated to those customers : Finland national ice-hockey team sportswears, Lordi tee-shirts, etc. Finnish people have brought so much money to Estonia, that they probably are responsible for a good part in this radical change of the country’s situation.
And another reason why Finns go so often there : alcohol ! beer is cheap, at least on the boat, and probably everywhere in the country but in the capital city. There, prices have risen to a European capital standard, and their future switch to Euro probably won’t make it down.
Altogether, I’d say, Tallin was a nice place to go to, although I would like to visit more the countryside, perhaps another time.
If you have a chance to get there, go for it. I think there’s even cheap flights nowadays.

Just in case you missed it, this is the brand new speech recognition that will change your life forever : Windows Vista’s !

It still needs a few adjustments, but I hope you’ll like the new layout of this site. It now has 3 columns instead of 2, allowing me to put more nice widgets or more links.
I noticed also different results depending on the browser … please let me know if your favorite browser doesn’t show it properly …
I also updated the head picture. It is taken from the same area, Punkaharju, but weather was nicer this time.
Edit: it looks like for once, IE is showing right, but not Mozilla Firefox. Opera looks alright. Anybody could tell me about Safari ?

One-week road-trip to the North of this continent, away from the heat wave of the South. 3500 to 4000 Kms, starting from Savonlinna, ending in Helsinki.

Lapland first, with its huge forests, countless lakes, and colorful swamps. With its comfortable cottages to stop by, when the day ends, to have a nice sauna and relax. With all those silly group of reindeers on the road, when you expect them the least. At this time of the year, the Inari Lake is wonderful and if midnight sun time is officially finished, the sky stay very light by night, and the sun goes to sleep for only short times.

Norway, in three steps. A first step in Kirkenes, North-East. Weather there was chilly (5 to 8°C), windy and rainy, but still, with nice lappish lanscape around, it is a place to go to.

Second step was to reach Vardø, a bit more in the North. To get there, you have to go all around a long fjord, pass Vadsø, and get to the eastermost point of Norway. Vardø is an island that can be via a 3km long tunnel. As we stopped for a coffee, the restaurant owner of ABC (if you get there, pay him a visit !), advised us to go on with the smaller road ending in Hamningberg . “If you stop now, you haven’t seen anything. Go there, you won’t regret it.” And so we went, and so we didn’t regret. It was a very rocky coast, with mountain between 200 and 300 meter high I’d say, black and mysterious. Some sheeps are to be found occupying the road, like a deja-vu of Ireland, especially in this kind of small rocky plains. The funny part with these mountains and plains, is that the rocks are very sharp, toward the sky and down there, toward the Barents Sea, like thousands of knives ready to cut the waves and the clouds. Add to the picture a very dark sky and a lot of wind, and you’ll have an idea of what this “End of the World” looks like. Why do I call it so ? because the road getting to that place finishes there, and the only way to reach BÃ¥tsfjord for example (35Km north-west), is with motoski in the winter, or to take the same road back to Tana Bru (200Km), then head north for another 120Km. And also because trying to go further (North) with a boat, leads to no land.

The third part of our trip started close to TanaBru, and had Gamvik as an objective. The road to get there is far from being boring : it is a typical mountain road, turning all the time, going up and down, being even scary sometimes, as one of the side doesn’t have a safeguard to prevent you from falling from the cliff. You’ll travel between mountains mainly 300m high I think, but up to 600. Their sides are quite steep, and show impressive lanscapes. In Gamvik, we found a small beach, and the sun made an apparition for half an hour, showing wonderful colours around us, from the blue of the sea to the light green of the grass, red and yellow houses, the black rocks, the white birds. If you have a look on the map, it is also an End Of The World place …

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Je vous laisse lire ca attentivement, attention les yeux et relisez plusieurs fois, c’est chaud !