Vaata kogu bukletti (.pdf) - Maris Lindoja Disain

ed in signs of things, but rather the experience
of a more authentic thing beyond it’s sign. Ironically
this is the most problematic aspect of the
tourist industry because it invariably means doing
the things that the society that the tourist
comes from in some way inhibits. I mean here,
for example, the culture of drinking and sex,
the tourism of the ‘body experience’. Tallinn is
now on the list of stag and hen night party destinations
by UK companies. 2 This means that
groups of men or women come to the city for
their rite of passage or carnival experience of
‘debauchery’ before settling down to normal
life. Such sex tourism is now a central part of
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the industry, hotels provide TV pornography,
and bars and taxis provide access to prostitutes
and brothels. Yet these activities too are
subject to the wish for authenticity: the experience
of real sex, real eroticism and real excess.
The authentic experience is here too governed
by signs, by the semiotics of illicitness. For
those who wish to just drink there is still a semiotic
choice to be made between the places
that resemble their home culture (McDonalds
and Coca-Cola are there to make Americans
feel at home all over the world) or embrace
some exotic otherness. Here too the tourist is
caught up in a sign system, the cocktail bar,
the hotel lounge and the ‘pub’ offer distinct
types of semiotic fantasies of sophistication,
aloofness or cosiness. Yet none of these is really
more authentic than the other. Similarly
the nightclubs for dancing offer different experiences,
of types of music, age group or
aesthetics of dance, even if they are all in
some way similar in that they offer a highly focussed
space for meeting the opposite sex.
These semiotic differences are evident in, for
example the night club attached to the Viru hotel,
full of Estonians on a Saturday night drinking
and dancing to favourite old popular tunes,
while in Parlament younger Estonians dance to
more modern contemporary music, while Club
Privé offers a more minimal and sophisticated
music for dancing as well as the space for encountering
visiting tourists who can afford the
higher entrance fee. Then the strip clubs and
erotic dance floors are also subject to semiotic
scrutiny, read this report published on the web
about Tallinn prostitutes:
… ask a taxi driver to take you to a brothel.
… Normally the driver will suggest different
places – normally the following: Hotel Max -
Kadaka - Morgan Club. Most of the drivers suggest
that they wait for you while you visit a
girl. In the meantime they take a cup of coffee
in the bar, and it costs nothing extra to have
them wait for you – but ask to be sure of that.
The prices are 900 EEK for 1 hour and 600 for
half an hour. I had a girl in Kadaka a couple
of years ago, and she was fine. But later I
heard about a shooting accident (mafia related)
there so I don’t go there anymore. But Hotel
Max and Morgan Club are ok, and they
seem to be safe.
For an extra pay you can have sauna and bubble
bath in Morgan Club, and the place is nice
and pretty with a small bar where you meet
the girls – normally 4–5 to choose among,
some Russian some Estonian, most of them
reasonably pretty.
There is no entrance fee and the drinks are
quite cheap (20 EEK or so for a beer). But you
have to pay 50 EEK for a strip-tease, which is
normally absolutely boring.
Last time I was there I had a girl named Ilona,
Russian but speaking a little English. She was
really pretty and kind.
This type of online web account is typical of
the conversation that might be heard in a bar,
where men – and sometimes women – speak
of their experiences in the same way other historically
minded tourists evaluate restaurants,
museums and hotels.
Perhaps the final irony, if not tragedy, about all
this, is that in Tallinn the medieval world to
which it once belonged was fraught with the
same dichotomies. In a striking way I found
an analogy in a text by Michel Foucault about
the medieval ‘Battle for Chastity’ where the
‘spirit of fornication’ is something to be overcome.
3 Escaping the medieval work is something
that has not yet been achieved.
1 See the discussion of this idea in Dean
MacCannell’s classic study, The Tourist (New York:
Schocken, 1976).
2 See for example:
http://www.bigweekends.com/tallinn-stag.htm
3 Michel Foucault, ‘The Battle for Chastity’,
Ethics (Penguin, 1997).
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