Storybook Charm

TALLINN, ESTONIA

A woman was being arrested for having the black plague for the fourth time in the last hour. It was getting late though, and the town square had mostly emptied of the throngs of tourists that filled the square earlier. The heart of the old city in Tallinn feels remarkably like a Renaissance Festival but without the turkey legs and face-painting. The restaurants on the square make for a pleasant enough place to sit and people watch. A smattering of locals cross the square with purposeful strides, but the old town is dominated by tourists, most travelling as large packs straight off a cruise ship or tour bus. Around the periphery, local kids work their first jobs as touts for the restaurants, wearing period costume pieces slipped over their skinny jeans and chuck taylors, perfecting their English by pitching traditionally Estonian faire and extensive wine lists.

Narrow cobblestone streets stretching out from the square are home to more restaurants and dozens of souvenir shops, all promising authenticity and affordable shipping in a dozen languages. A little further out are the wool shops slightly less popular with the average tourist and an increasing number of bookshops and museums and quiet residential alleys. My favorite part of the day comes at night when the big tour groups have gone. Under the midnight sun, the crepuscular light warms the colored buildings highlighting the brightly painted shutters and doors, I trip over the uneven cobblestones, my attention turned upward to the flowers spilling from window boxes, the peaked and turreted rooftops, and birds silhouetted against the sherbet sky. It’s impossible not to be completely enchanted by this storybook town.

After a few days in Tallinn, I took the train south to Tartu. My time in Estonia was short, but I wanted to see more than just the capital. Tartu bore many of the same qualities of Tallinn- a cobblestone, pedestrian-only center, colorful stucco buildings from another century. But Tartu also felt just a little more weathered than Tallinn. Some combination of geography and its UNESCO World Heritage status means that the old city in Tallinn is both impeccably preserved, and also receives many more tourists than Tartu. In Tartu, the boundaries between old and new are a little more muddled without the physical boundary of a city wall to mark the transition between modernity and antiquity. The heart of the city boasts far fewer trinket shops, and more shops and restaurants catering to locals. I don’t see a single medieval costume.

Tartu is sleepy thanks to the Midsummer holiday. Other country’s holidays always seem like a fun time to travel, but the reality can be a little disappointing- everything is closed, residents retreating to their family’s and friend’s homes for celebrations, leaving few options for those of us passing through. I had expected things to be closed on Saturday for Midsummer day, but had not anticipated that museums and shops would remain closed on Sunday, and since most are normally dark on Monday, what was left was a four-day span of time when a handful of cafes and restaurants were the only things open. The trip to Tartu felt a little bit like a bust, though the lack of other distractions gave me a chance to catch up on work. Perhaps an afternoon in a café overlooking the square was not such a terrible way to spend an afternoon. The dreamy iced coffee in front of me helped too, a sweet coconut coffee concoction that arrived as the solution to the waiter’s confusion over my request for milk and sugar in my iced coffee.

So two days later I took the train north again, past community gardens and tiny greenhouses, distant church steeples rising in distant green fields, and thick carpets of gold and purple wildflowers. I mentally add Estonia to the list of places to return, possibly with a vehicle as much for the possibilities for wider exploration as for the option to buy yarn with abandon.

A Return to Sweden

LULEÅ, SWEDEN

Until last week, the last time I had passed through Arlanda Airport in Stockholm, I was 20 years old, and on my first trip out of the country. I was pulling an oversized duffel behind me, a large pack precariously balanced on top. I cringe a little to think how poorly I had packed, having not yet learned the value of a small backpack nor honed my packing list. I’m sure there were several pairs of shoes and at least a week’s worth of underwear, excesses I wouldn’t consider packing now.

After several days at a conference in Umeå, where I floundered through the faint memories of my Swedish vocabularly and basked in the vague familiarity of the landscape, I hopped on an early morning train and headed North. I watched the verdant birch forests pass by, and remembered that the last time I took this ride, those same forests were blanketed in snow, and the cold seeped through the windows. So desperate to experience the far north, I had left Växjö on the very first weekend, but then, Luleå was only a stop on my way north of the Arctic circle. I don’t remember much more than a futile search for a hostel that was open in the winter, and the -28˚C temperatures, the coldest I’d yet experienced. I do remember being surprised that I could actually be warm in such temperatures, and looking back on my poor wardrobe and total lack of real winter experience at that time, I am even more impressed now.

Today it is precisely 100˚ warmer than the last time I was here, and this time I visit the tiny sandy beach at the end of town. I sat for a bit in the shade of pine trees, watching two blonde Swedish boys splashing under a cloudless sky.

In the afternoon, I headed out to Gammelstad, the original site of Luleå and now an UNESCO World Heritage Site. A sea of tiny red wooden cottages (408, to be exact) radiate from the 15^th century stone church in the center of the old town. These “church cottages” were used by rural families who had to travel long distances to come to church. Built first along the roads, and later filling in the spaces in between, the houses are close together with only the narrowest paths leading to some of them. The cottages are now mostly privately owned, though it’s unclear whether they are used as similarly as a place to stay for those living further afield when they come into town, or as vacation homes- none appear to be full-time residences, although I think they’d be quite suitable for that- significantly larger than recent tiny houses. In true, perpetual Swedish fashion, each window boasts a pendant light, candles, and a couple of plants.

In the late afternoon, I catch the bus back to town. On the rumbling bus in the afternoon sun, my eyelids feel increasingly heavy, the 5am wakeup call now catching up with me.

A Side Trip to Inle Lake

NYAUNG SHWE, SHAN STATE, MYANMAR

In March of 2017, I had the good fortune to travel to Myanmar as part of a capstone project for my Master's degree. It is only after said Master's degree is now complete that I find the time to finally write about the trip and sift through photos. 

In between our two weeks of field work, we found ourselves without interpreters for the weekend, and thus took a break from interviews and focus groups and fastidious note-taking and headed to Inle Lake. Just like every other morning, I woke much earlier than I would have liked, and so stumbled across the hall seeking coffee and marginally better wi-fi and was pleasantly surprised to find the best breakfast spread I'd seen yet, with Mohinga and fresh local fruit, but also yogurt and milk for my coffee which feels like a real luxury. Having taken a boat ride the previous day, we set off in search of nothing more specific than a nice walk. Proper hiking trails were not to be found, but we found a narrow path that ambled through tiny villages along the canal. We wandered among the stilted houses, most people paying little attention to two white women walking where clearly few tourists ever venture. We passed a few boats in various stages of construction, and a few houses in progress too, where barefooted men clung to bamboo scaffolding. Packs of small children called after us "Mingalaba!" and a few curious ones chased after us. I extended a hand to two small boys which sent them scurrying, giggling, back the way they came.

We eventually made our way back to town where we walked out to the grounds of the old palace-cum-cultural museum, dodging motorbikes and lorries on the one-lane wooden bridge. The grounds of the pink and white palace were overgrown, but pleasantly shady. We opted not to venture into what appeared to be a dusty and sparse museum, instead heading towards the market where we sifted through the rainbow piles of woven and patterned longyis. We ambled through the aisles of fruit and flowers, and passed a little quicker through the fish sections where women used fans to keep the flies at bay. I could spend a lifetime wandering markets in foreign places. I love them for the glimpse of ordinary life, for the unfamiliar produce, and the strange smells. 

Fieldwork in Myanmar

YANGON & SOUTHERN SHAN STATE, MYANMAR

In March of 2017, I had the good fortune to travel to Myanmar as part of a capstone project for my Master's degree. It is only after said Master's degree is now complete that I find the time to finally write about the trip and sift through photos. 

The morning we landed in Yangon was cool but sticky, the air lightly scented with jasmine and bougainvillea. Feeling woozy from back-to-back night flights without much day in between, I winced at the bright morning sun and fished out my sunglasses while I waited for our driver to appear. Tall, lanky, and slightly hunched, Tan Saw appeared wearing a faded t-shirt and plastic sandals, and a green plaid longyi (the traditional wrap worn by both women and men in Myanmar). He had an enormous smile and impeccable though accented English and I didn’t protest when he slid the backpack from my shoulders. From the back seat of the air-conditioned and heavily jasmine-scented sedan, I watched the city slowly waking up. Most of the colorful wooden shops were still shuttered from the night before, but a handful of shopkeepers were out sweeping the sidewalks with the short-handled straw brooms. A few women in brightly-colored longyis waited at bus stops. My travel companion commented on the unexpected greenness of the city, huge trees lining the streets and reaching up over the rooftops, sprouting in courtyards and alleys. The streets seemed comparatively quiet and orderly for Southeast Asia which we attributed to the city-wide ban on motorbikes.

By the time we reached our hotel, the air was noticeably warmer, the mercury rising with every passing minute. We checked into the hotel, but fearful that travel exhaustion and jet lag would turn a nap into an all-day affair, I set off with two companions in search of food. Around the corner, flower stalls spilled into the streets, and a nearby noodle stand was crowded with families. We found an empty table and settled in on the green plastic stools. An overly optimistic young waitress greeted us in Burmese fully expecting that we’d understand at least the essence of what she said. We smiled and greeted her in English, and she called for reinforcements. Two more women came over, their cheeks shimmering slightly in the bright morning sun thanks to the circles of Thanakha, a type of bark pounded into a fine powder and used as both a moisturizer and sunscreen. One produced a menu with the swirling characters of Burmese lettering but a few tiny faded pictures. After some pointing and nodding and awkward laughter, three bowls of noodles arrived, sprinkled with peanuts, lemongrass, chiles, and a dollop of a clear gelatinous substance whose origins were best left unknown. A young girl came over and poured steaming golden tea from a plastic thermos into tiny porcelain tea cups. While I sat slurping noodles, watching street dogs sniff around the gutters for any morsel of sustenance, I thought how happy I was to be back in Southeast Asia.

That bowl of noodles was but the first of many such breakfasts over the coming weeks, as I traveled around the southern part of Shan State. We were there as part of a capstone project, to conduct field research on social inclusion in the Value Chains for Rural Development (VC-RD) project funded by USAID/Burma and implemented by Winrock International. We had the privilege of visiting tiny farming villages that most foreigners have little access to, and in each, farmers and their families invited us into their homes, poured bottomless cups of tea and graciously answered our questions about their livelihoods, their successes and challenges. In one village, young women bubbled over with optimism, having learned business skills from the project that they hoped would lead to bold new career opportunities and the possibility of a financially secure future for their family. In another valley, as the shadows grew long with the sinking sun, women hoed at hard clumps of soil between rows of bright green soybean plants. They spoke honestly of their frustrations around farming soy, and of feeling trapped, and I felt pangs of guilt that at the end of our conversation I would get up and leave, and ultimately return home where the possibilities for my future felt wide open.

We spent our days furiously scribbling notes on every conversation and every observation, interviewing dozens of farmers and leaders, and conducting focus groups with a hundred others. Between villages, as we bounced over dirt roads, we talked about the recent political changes in both Myanmar and the U.S., and about nationalism and ethnic tensions in our respective countries. We talked about our education and our travels, our childhoods and our future aspirations. Every night we landed in a new place, collapsing in bed after a curry dinner. The fieldwork added an intensity to the trip, the compulsion to not only observe the intricacies and eccentricities of this foreign place, but also to burn the images and conversations into my memory and my dog-eared notebook. While perhaps an exhausting way to travel, it was also one of the richer travel experiences I’ve had thanks to the constant companionship of a local staff member who tirelessly answered our endless questions about not only the project and agriculture in general, but also culture and history and food and politics and religion.