Heavy drinking, violence and cheap rooms, a trip into the Wild, Wild East of post-communist Lithuania. After the collapse of communism in the USSR, inflation in the freshly minted Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia rolled up the rouble into the cheapest toilet paper around, so I decided to go East and stock up. I needed a cheap place to wipe my ass because I was then unemployed, and an Orwellian year of freelancing in Paris had left me as restless as a Rive Gauche plongeur and ready for anything to happen. It was time to hit the road. Yet unlike all those other Gen-X American entrepreneurs exploring their sophomore angst in bohemian meccas like Prague and Budapest, I bypassed Mittel Europa entirely and prospected in the farther frontier of the upper Near East: Europe Minor. Making my way to Helsinki, the gateway to the Baltics, I crossed the Gulf of Finland to the old Hanseatic League city of Talinn, Estonia, on the ferryboat Albatross, a name which in these paradoxical parts is an un-Coleridgean avian omen of good luck and smooth sailing. On old clanking overnight trains for mere pocket change, I at last got off the main… Read full this story
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