It helps to believe you are, in fact, a pirate.

A combination of empty bottles, high prices, boredom, and a tradition of making very poor decisions led me to a bus stop in the wastelands of North Uppsala last Thursday afternoon. I had my hat, a change of clothes and a large book in my backpack, and three 21-year old girls in tow.
As virtually all of you have heard, I have become frustrated by the astronomical prices of Systembolaget, that den of godless communism, so I booked a ferry trip to Tallinn, which is the capital of Estonia, and is sort of straight south of Finland. You know, those three tiny little countries over by Russia.
The trouble was you can only book cabins for four, so I needed three others. These three girls (all of them from California, all of them studying "Media and Communications," whatever the gibbering fuck that is) were planning the same trip, and latched onto me like particularly locquacious remora eels.
They began talking at the bus stop, and continued for the two-hour trip to Stockholm without bothering to either listen to one another or even breathe. They were an unceasing flood of unpunctuated reports on homeostasis:
"Ohmygod I'm hungry I want bran flakes it makes me nervous."
"My feet itch I think my socks have a wrinkle in them ohmygod I'm nervous."
"Ohmygod its cold the road is so bumpy it's making me nervous."
Everything everywhere on the entire planet caused these women anxiety. They were nervous about the color of the carpets on the boat. They were nervous about whether their belongings had shifted about in their bags. They were nervous about the comparative advantages of the nine and a half trillion beauty products they had each brought. Was that girl looking at them funny? What about that guy? Oh my god. It makes me nervous.
By the time we'd boarded the ship (actually a rather impressive affair, with a sundeck, a sauna, a couple nightclubs, several restaurants, a piano bar, and like twenty-seven passengers total) their jabbering had coalesced in my mind (because women don't ever actually take turns when speaking or listen to what each other are saying) into one enormous run-on panic attack: "OhmygoditmakesmenervousIonlybroughtseventeenpairsofshoesandIcan'tpeewhileotherpeopleareinthezipcode"



It's about sixteen hours by ship to Tallinn, with a brief stop at Marienhamn, on the little island of Åland, which is between Sweden and Finland. For some reason, both countries have historic claims to the island, and its ownership is one of the very few things the League of Nations ever successfully resolved. It was evening by the time we disembarked, so there was nothing to see outside. We have neither a sun nor a moon here, you see.
The women immediately turned on the cabin's tiny television set to watch MTV. I caused a distraction (threw a piece of chocolate, which they all chased) and made a break for it.
So I spent most of the trip to Tallinn up in the piano bar. I bought a Cuban cigar and a double of Black Label on the rocks and read Richard Reeves' excellent biography of JFK. Did you know Kennedy was terminally ill? Yep, he had Addison's Disease, which is essentially kills the adrenal gland. The treatment is cortisone, which causes interesting side effects: a permanent appearance of a tan, increased sexual drive, and an enhanced sense of personal confidence. The failure of the adrenal gland stops production of adrenaline, so there is no fight/flight response. Explains a lot, eh?
Anyhow. After an interminable sleepless night during which I managed to come down with a miserable cold, we docked in Tallinn around 10 the next morning.
Tallinn looks pretty much like what you'd expect a quaint seaside town to look like once it's been occupied by the Soviets for seventy years and then abandoned to wither up and die. It has its charming rows of pastel buildings and little squares and old churches, but when you look closely, every other window is broken, every stone in every building and every cobbled street is cracked, and there are little pools of garbage and broken glass lurking in weedy corners of places. Still, once you wander your way up to the highest part of the city, it's not bad-looking:






And most importantly, everything's cheap. I had an entire pizza and a drink for about seven dollars, and picked up a whole lot of classly liquor for about a third what I'd have paid in Sweden. There was a little Christmas market in the main square, where bitter-looking old ladies sold pieces of dead sheep, jars of honey, candles, and lots of things with cats embroidered onto them. The girls loved it, although it made them a bit nervous.
We boarded the ship again in late afternoon, and the women went immediately to sleep, the way women seem to be able to do. I sat up, enjoying the quiet and my book, until they all awoke in unision and set about watching MTV and informing me about quite objectionable biological processes.
Then, just as their voices were approaching some sort of vapid event horizon, sounding only like "Blah blah blah shoes blah blah dancing blah blah ice cream blah" the gods of the sea and sky smiled upon me.
We ran into very heavy seas, and strong winds gusting from the northwest. The women were immediately laid low by seasickness, laying in their beds (MTV no quieter, mind you), clutching their stomachs, and whining loudly about "the rockiness."
I, however, have reason to believe I may in fact be a pirate. I immediately went out on deck, where I had a great time stomping around, suggesting quite loudly that my timbers be shivered or my wooden leg avasted. I may have called someone a lily-livered lubberly swab and indicated I was aware that his mother was a notorious Barbary courtesan.
I spent some hours after that watching the band in the nightclub--they were all Russian, dressed in zoot suits, and performing an odd blend of power ballads, Shania Twain, and Creedence. Hilarious with Russian accents, I assure you.
Nothing particularly eventful or amusing to report about the trip back, except that by the time we got back to Flogsta, the women had actually gotten on each other's nerves and now they all hate each other.
Soon as I work my way through my spoils of this trip, I will probably make another, this time to Riga, Latvia, and this time with a bunch of guys.