Travel Blog Day 1

I figure I'll put up the pictures when I get back, but I've always ended up forgetting most of my thoughts from my trips in the past, so I'll drop them on here as I go.

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Copenhagen, Denmark and Tallinn, Estonia

It's a cliche, but it's true, Americans are flat out ugly people. I'm constantly floored by how thin and attractive everyone is. It's not just the thinness (although that helps), everyone here has good teeth, great skin, attractive features.. being the world's mutts has done us no favors in the looks department. I feel like a hunchback over here, walking amongst the pure blood. It's really hard to emphasize how jarring the difference in beauty is, people work hard to surround themselves with things of beauty to improve their quality of life, and you don't really stop to think about how the people around you can be things of beauty as well. They're certainly not at home.

One mystery that we've been trying to figure out is that the employees of every single restaurant, jewelry shop, gift store, coffee shop, and any other store we've seen, have been female. I'm not really sure if there's just a social custom of only putting attractive women in public facing roles because it's considered "women's work", or maybe because they figure people will spend more, or if there's a lot of male unemployment. It could be that the invisible work of truck driving, delivery, industry, etc are all done only by men. It's certainly bizarre though. Also, most stores are vastly overstaffed (or maybe US ones are understaffed), but even tiny little shops with three rooms will have six girls working in them, ready to assist you at a moment's notice.

A strange thing to note, but one that hit me several times while I was here was that it's nice to have nice smells. My house at home smells like nothing. Most of the shops and restaurants and hotels and even streets in Estonia just smell nice. Fresh flowers, spices, incense, having aromas around is very pleasant. Smell is a sense that I usually just use for food and noting when someone has pissed on the street in my vicinity. It's a whole different dimension when the smells are good and varied. I'd like to add more to my life when I return somehow.

As always, I forget how much everyone smokes in europe. Everyone, everywhere, smoking all the time. And they still live longer than us. How the hell does that work? They say stress makes you older, and the lifestyle around here is certainly less frenetic. On the other hand, the US is still at the heart of most of the technological innovation that I find interesting, I'm not sure if you can combine the two. Sure does make me miss smoking, though. It's easier to stay quit in California when no one ever smokes. Here, it's a part of life.

I think this is one of my favorite European towns that I've ever seen. Everyone's happy and beautiful, there's history and art everywhere, the weather was perfect, the town was clean and vibrant. We climbed to the tops of old church towers, and clung to copper roofs hundreds of feet off the ground, looking down over Tallinn, wandered huge public squares where performers were trumpeting from the rooftops, and genuine craftsmen peddled products they'd made, instead of piles of the same manufactured crap being sold from every corner like many tourist towns. There's a lot of old next to a lot of new, and it seems to really work well together. And the views from up on the hills of all the green mixed with the red roofs of town is one of the prettiest towns I've seen.