Ferry - Tallink

I'm trying to make a reservation for my son to return from Helsinki to Tallinn. Tallink Silja apparently has never, in the hundreds of thousands of trips it must have sold, encountered one person trying to buy a ticket for another person. The website won't allow it. SO, I am on hold with the company on the phone. Lucky for me I have Skype, and I pay the flat rate, so it's free to be on hold to GERMANY(?) for 10 minutes so far. In case I wasn't irritated enough, the customer service line was designed by (fill in your favorite German here). No exaggeration, there is 2 seconds of music, then it says "guten tag! Bitte something something..." (have your customer number ready). In German only, on a customer service line that I was directed to from the English page of an Estonian website. 2 more seconds of music. "Guten tag!...." 2 seconds of music. Repeat ad nauseum.

Meanwhile I am looking for a different ferry line.

Latvia and Lithuania by bus

We are on the Eurolines luxe bus. Leather recliners, coffee and tea, power outlets, TV, wifi. It's kind of like you imagine first class on an airplane will be like (in reality this is better). It's actually an enjoyable way to travel. We are close to the Baltic Sea, the terrain is flat, with streams, birches and pine trees. If looks like northern Michigan, until I try to read a billboard. Apparently we are now in Latvia, because we have a new flavor of uninterpretable letters and words. It's a 10 hour trip total, split roughly in half by stopping in Riga for 45 minutes and a bus switch. Then on to Vilnius.

Stuff I wish I didn't bring

I posted a while back that there are things I wish I had, like clothes pins (I found those here eventually). I wish I hadn't brought 2 sport coats. One would have been enough, along with 3 ties, for my time here. I also wish I we hadn't brought blazers for Lucas and Nathan. Sweaters have sufficed for all occasions for them. 5 microphones (that was Nathan). Are we starting a studio?

We also have a lot of heavy clothes that I am really glad we had, but now I wish it would magically go to Missouri so we didn't need to haul it back.

Self portrait

I've been bitten by the photography bug. More to the point, the film photography bug. I didn't bring a film camera to Estonia, but there are a lot of old cameras in the markets and "antiik" shops. 60's and older cameras have a nice heft to them.

After reading a lot of good reviews of the Soviet copies of Leica cameras I decided to try one myself. I bought a FED 3 (with a bad shutter), and then immediately went out and found a FED 2, which I really like. I've had a manual Praktica SLR since the early 80's, so aperture, f-stop and manual focusing are nothing new. Rangefinders are new, but no big problem.

Lack of an internal light metering system take some getting used to. I ended up with an old selenium based Soviet light meter. It seems to work, unlike some old ones, but I don't have a lot of confidence in it. I carry my digital Lumix as a light meter too. I probably look strange, with my modern digital camera to check the light, then double checking with a light meter, then finally shooting with an early 60's rangefinder. But I am enjoying the deliberate pace of shooting on film.

Spring?

Sun came up at 5:40 this morning. I hung 2 jackets in the window last night, otherwise I’m up with the sun. I made it until 6:45, better than Sunday when I was up by about 6. When I was younger I could sleep a lot later, but I seem to have gotten to where no matter how late I go to bed, I can only reliably sleep until 7:30 or when the sun comes up, whichever comes first. It was also –1C when I got up. Spring here is different from Missouri. We are used to the cold now. Yesterday at mid day it was +10, all I wore all day was a windbreaker and that seemed a bit warm. Sun goes down a few minutes after 9 pm now.

Photography

One thing about being away from the routine is I have a chance to do some things I don't get to do so much at home. Lately I have been experimenting with photography. It turns out that after WWII, some of the spoils of war the USSR got were German camera and optical factories. Leica was and is one of the most respected names in cameras. The Soviets copied the early Leica's and then actually improved on them. They produced millions of them. Now, a classic Leica rangefinder might cost $800 or more. A similar (very similar, pretty much the same in terms of performance) FED can be had for $30 at an antique store, or maybe $10 at a flea market. The advantage at the antique store is you can sort through 20 or 30 cameras in one place, and they seem to be cleaner than the ones in the market.

Now that I have this great camera, with wonderful optics, the first thing I did was remove the lens and make a pinhole for it. I used a metal candy box about 2.5 inches square, and a bit of aluminum can for the actual pinhole. I've worked my way down to a hole about 0.25 mm in diameter. The pinhole replaces the lens. It's not as clear of course, but it's f157, so the depth of field is almost infinite, and it shoots photos with a certain quality you can't get with a lens.

So here's one example: St. Catharine's walk in Tallinn, f-157, 6 second exposure.

Dogsledding

We went dogsledding. North of the Arctic circle. If you are a little fuzzy on where the Arctic Circle is it's the line at which you have 24 hours of darkness on the winter solstice. Above the line you get more days of dark, below the line the sun does come up, however short, each day. It was "mushy" mushing for us. The weather was above freezing, and we were probably one of the last groups to go out this season. We were given boots, snowsuits, gloves and hats to wear, which was good since it was really wet. We got paired up on the sleds: Lucas and I on one, Polly and Nathan on the other. We swapped back and forth several times during the time we were out. We had 6 dogs pulling each sled, Siberian Huskies, Alaskan Huskies, and Malamutes. The dogs all know what to do, so it's pretty easy. Just hang on and let them follow the trail. You do have to stand on the brake once in a while, going downhill or if the sled in front slows down. It was a really great experience.