History and Future.

The three of us sat exhausted, sprawled out on separate damp, concrete stairs watching the purple light of the coming sunrise inch over the Baltic Sea. It was calm, everything was finally calm, a stark contrast to the past 48 hours, how did I get here?

The day following exams I boarded a plane to embark on one of the most horrendous transits imaginable – it would take me 34 hours and three stopovers to reach Tallinn. My plane arrived in the late evening; it was still light like the daytime and the airport was smaller than most of the regional airports in Australia. We disembarked the plane onto the tarmac, always a novelty.

The trip didn’t really have a plan, meeting in Tallinn and improvising from there was the only concrete thing we had to go by. But not having a plan for our trip turned out to be the most valuable thing we had.

It was 5 minutes into the conversation with my friend, who had just arrived from Helsinki, that we decided to see a band that was playing in Latvia, the following night. It was then that we had no choice but to see and experience Tallinn within 12 hours and albeit a little jet-lagged. We would not sleep.

We ran, literally, around Old Tallinn, eventually befriending a group of British students at a bar. After losing some members of the group due to unspecified ‘drunken escapades’ we attempted to locate the communist monument, overlooking the Baltic Sea. We walked for an hour at least – accounting for time was difficult at that stage. No one particularly knew where we were going but after finding the water and jumping over three shipping yard fences we came across the ‘communist monument.’ Not a monument at all but rather an abandoned cultural centre built in the 1980s, which screamed of neglect, covered in moss and graffiti.

Although it had an ugly façade, there was something tranquil about the concrete expanse that contrasted with the quaint baroque and gothic styles of the Old Tallinn buildings. The water was almost completely undisturbed, creating a near perfect reflection of the brightening sky. Two men sat and played guitars on a fresco opposite us and as we were walking to the hostel, four teenagers skated around the avenue the leading to centre entrance. A building that is seen as a symbol of such a stain on Estonia’s past is still used and impacted by the youth of Tallinn. The building that is a part of the city's past is cementing a place in its future.