BONJOUR L'ESTONIE

Open-Air Museum : A day spanning the centuries

By Marge Tubalkain-Trell

TALLINN - Just finding the Rocca Al Mare Open Air Museum is an adventure – it is a long walk from the trolley station. Fortunately there are a couple of signs to help you to find your way a couple of centuries back in time.
Near the entrance of the museum, there is a handicraft shop where you can buy wooden kitchen utensils and other souvenir shop trinkets, as well as books, CDs and tapes with Estonian folk music.
The museum itself is on quite a large territory and covers many different aspects of how people lived a couple of hundred years ago. It is easy to imagine how they lived, worked and what their everyday life was like.
Buildings were wooden and incredibly small – I had to duck to get inside. In front of the blacksmith’s house there was an old lady explaining ancient Estonian traditions.

“In that way people showed their respect to the family who was living there. Nowadays no one bows before entering the house,” she said.
The museum also has a church and a village school. Both are humble in size. I did not have the chance to look inside the school, but the church was old and simple, made entirely of wood. Many footsteps have left their mark on the plain floor, beating a path to most important and interesting places.
A blacksmith’s sauna was tiny and compact, since smiths had to wash themselves on a regular basis. They were thinking how to conserve energy – I was standing there and wondering how on earth one person could wash himself or herself in the area.

Frequent passenger would prefer less on-board entertainment

By Anna-Leena Pyykkönen 
      
      Helsinki student Mira Suominen, 20, boards a ship in Tallinn Harbour, which is scheduled to set sail at 8:30 in the evening.
     She has but one goal : to get home to her dogs as quickly and as comfortably as possible. Mira Suominen, who studies economics at the Tallinn Technical University, travels back and forth between her home city and the city where she studies at least once a fortnight.
    
This time there is space and it is peaceful on the Star, but every tourist staggering on a stairway makes the seasoned traveller shudder. This student would prefer not to do her study travel in a floating entertainment centre.
     "The noise and the drunks annoy me as they do many other frequent travellers. I prefer to withdraw to a quiet corner with sofas and stare at my computer", she says.
     The young woman especially shuns places on the vessels where live music is played. "I don't even eat on the ships, because the price of the food has gone up. It would be nice if there were a tunnel beneath the Gulf of Finland, and a road going through it", Mira Suominen ponders.
     The student, who sails back and forth across the Gulf of Finland, has not thought of the emissions caused by the ships, and she does not plan to let her conscience bother her about them. "Anyway, I don't drive a car", she points out.
     She has noticed the pollution of the sea at her shoreline home in Jollas in the east of Helsinki.
     "There has been so much blue-green algae in the summers, that the dogs have not been able to go swimming."
    

Baltic ferry firm Tallink April traffic falls

RIGA - Baltic ferry group Tallink (TAL1T.TL: Quote, Profile, Research) transported 9.9 percent fewer passengers in April this year compared with the same month of 2007, the company said on Wednesday.

Tallink, one of the biggest ferry operators in the region, said it transported 496,090 passengers last month, with the route between Tallinn-Helsinki showing further improvement.

"On the other routes, the different time of the Easter holidays this year resulted in the lower passenger numbers compared to last year," it said in a statement.

Reporting by Patrick Lannin, editing by Will Waterman

Tallink Superstar returns to work

The Tallink Line's new Tallink Superstar returned to service after being temporarily taken out of service. On Wednesday the vessel turned back to port in Tallinn after departure for Helsinki because of "technical faults".

The Superstar was carrying 700 passengers from Tallinn to Helsinki when it returned to port soon after a 2 PM departure.

Tallink said Wednesday evening that the fault was being investigated, but did not release any more details. The shipping line provided alternative travel arrangements for the passengers onboard.

Tallink's Superfast was to make several extra runs between the Estonian and Finnish capitals. Passengers from Helsinki to Tallinn who were booked on the Superstar were transferred to the company's ships Galaxy and Star.

Tallink's Superstar entered service just one week ago.

YLE

Torturing and pampering

By Marge Tubaalkain-Trell

PÄRNU - There is more in Pärnu than just the beach, summer and sun. There is also sadomasochism.
At least it seemed like that to me. There I was, outside a cold chamber watching a man being frozen to minus 120 degrees Celsius, I kid you not, and screaming out, “more, more. Colder please.”
It’s all in the name of health at one of the city’s spa resorts.  The city is liveliest in the summer. While at any other time of the year it’s just a rather dull, small town by the sea, spa resorts have grown up to fill the gap in the market when the sun worshippers don’t come.
It’s remarkable that Parnu has one third of all the spa places available in Estonia while the city itself has only a few more than 40,000 inhabitants.

Spas it seems are addictive, if expensive.
“People sometimes book a room a year in advance. They come one summer and before leaving they already book a room for the next year,” Brigita Lääne, marketing specialist for Estonia SPA, said.
I visited SPA Estonia, which offers both relaxation and health packages.  It’s one of the biggest spas in Estonia, located in three different houses – Park House, Green House and White House.
Park House is the biggest and oldest one. On the eighth floor there’s a cafeteria from which you can see the whole town, the sea and if it’s late enough the sunset.  At the end of May a new water park will be added which will have interesting facilities such as a salt sauna with Japanese pool.
The Green House and White house are linked by a corridor, so they feel almost like one house.
The Green House is newer and all the beauty and body treatments take place there. The White House is for sauna and swimming.

Maritime traffic at growing risk

Maritime traffic experts are demanding that the state provides more funding for the monitoring and management of the growing ship traffic in the Gulf of Finland. According to the Finnish Maritime Administration, dozens of Finland's coastal radar and radio facilities are in need of immediate replacement.

The coming summer will again be a record one in terms of passenger traffic in the Gulf of Finland. During the summer cruise season, about 2.5 million people make the crossing between Helsinki and Stockholm, and 6 million between Helsinki and Tallinn.

There are over 40 departures of passenger vessels from Helsinki to Tallinn daily. During the summer months there are around 400 ships in the Gulf of Finland during any given 24-hour period, most of them freighters.

Tallink's new green Superstar goes disposable

By Sami Takala in Helsinki and Tallinn
      
      The Estonian shipping company Tallink’s brand new high-speed vessel, the M/S Superstar, started operating on the Helsinki-Tallinn route yesterday - Monday, after having arrived at its home port in Tallinn from the Italian Fincantieri shipyard last Wednesday.
      
The M/S Superstar is a new generation high-speed vessel that travels at a speed of 27.5 knots, which enables it to cover the distance between Tallinn and Helsinki in two hours, regardless of weather conditions, Tallink declares.
      Together with its sister ship Star, delivered in the spring of 2007, the new M/S Superstar will operate as the Tallink Shuttle service, a new passenger service concept combining fast and comfortable travel between the two capital cities.
      
According to Tallink, the bright green colour of its Shuttle vessels characterizes the environmental aspects of the ships. Both vessels consume less fuel, have modern technical solutions, and create much smaller waves compared to the smaller high-speed craft making the crossing.
      However, disposable plates and cups are being used in all restaurants and cafés, except in the à la carte restaurant and business lounge.
      Tallink’s Communications Manager Luulea Lääne explains that the use of disposables is part of the fast food restaurant concept.
      ”Nobody is wondering why people eat from paperboard boxes at McDonald’s, are they ?” argues Lääne, saying that the amount of daily waste aboard the M/S Superstar and other similar ships is some 7.5 cubic metres.

Late-night flights on Tallinn-Stockholm route

From April 14 Estonian Air added the flight schedule late-night flights between Tallinn and Stockholm. Additional late-night flights will be operated three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Stockholm airport offers convenient transit connections to Europe, Northern America and Asia both for leisure and business travellers. Late-night flights from Stockholm will depart after the arrival of most flights from Europe to Stockholm, which will create very good late-night connections from European cities (London, Munich, Madrid, Paris, Zürich, Amsterdam, etc) to Tallinn.

Additional flights on Tallinn-Stockholm-Tallinn route

Monday, Wednesday, Friday OV667 Tallinn 21:20 Stockholm 21:40

Monday, Wednesday, Friday OV668 Stockholm 23:05 Tallinn 01:20

The additional flights will initially be operated from April 14 until June 13. If the initial period proves successful, the flights will be continued.

The additional flights will be operated by Saab 340 aircraft with a cabin configuration of 33 seats. Flights to Stockholm will be operated with one service class, light meal including sandwich and a drink is served. All flights with Saab 340 are operated by Estonian Air Regional, a 100% owned subsidiary of Estonian Air.

Number of cruises to Estonia shows substantial growth

In recent months, cruises from Helsinki to Tallinn and back have once again become more and more popular, while the new generation of high-speed vessels are gradually replacing the old ships.
      
Cheap prices and the Old Town of the Estonian capital still attract Finns who board the passenger ferries in the evening, spend the night in the bars and in their cabins, make inexpensive purchases in Tallinn in the morning, and return to Helsinki in the afternoon.
      According to the preliminary information released by Statistics Finland, the number of Finnish visitors to Tallinn was 69,000 in February 2008, showing a growth of some 80 per cent compared with the same period last year.
      The shipping lines estimate that the growth could be attributable to the thick ice covering the Gulf of Finland in the previous winter as well as to the fact that car ferry operator Tallink’s new generation high-speed cruise ship Star started its services in April 2007. The new vessel can take up to 1,900 passengers.
      The Star sails from Helsinki to Tallinn around the year and carries considerably more passengers over the Gulf of Finland than do other high-speed ferries, which can accommodate only a few hundred passengers and frequently have to stay in port because of rough weather conditions.

Tallink's Superstar takes to the high seas

By Rebecca Leslie

Tallink Group's subsidiary Tallink Superfast Ltd. has taken delivery of the Ancona-built M/S Superstar, which will add to travellers' options on the pivotal Helsinki-Tallinn route.

The vessel is being introduced to build on the success of the year-round shuttle service that was launched a year ago on this route. It arrives in Tallinn next week and enters service a week later, to complement the existing vessel the M/S Star.

The M/S Superstar can accommodate up to 2,080 passengers and has 1,930 lane metres for ro-ro cargo. The vessel is 175.1 metres long, has 186 cabins with a total of 736 beds. Its recorded service speed is 27.5 knots.

The highlight of the ship’s interior design is the show-bar located in the fore which goes through three floors and has a large glass wall. Similarly, the stern also features a bar over two floors with a glass wall.

Onboard facilities include restaurants and cafés, including an a la carte restaurant, two buffet restaurants, a pizza restaurant, a hamburger café, and an ice-cream corner for children. There will also be a children’s play corner, a sun-deck bar, a casino and a business lounge.

In addition, the ship houses shops which sell items ranging from groceries, alcohol, the latest cosmetics and clothes to fashion accessories.

Tallink Group CEO Enn Pant said : “The shuttle service may become even more popular as the customers will have more choices. It is of importance that all of our Tallinn-Helsinki trips are now conducted by brand new vessels.”

The project expense totals to €120 million (EEK1.9 billion) of which €93 million (EEK1.45 billion) was funded by a long-term loan from HSBC Bank, London.

Tallink Group lays foundations for new headquarters – 08/04/08