Do Digital Nomads Dream of Cheese Pie?

The weather in Tallinn has been obnoxiously blue and sunny. I long for dark and gloomy clouds blotting the sun from the sky, which, to be fair, is not unreasonable for Estonia in March. But no, it seems that Spring has sprung and I’m going to have to put up with the outside world inflicting sunshine and flower blossoms on me.

I’ve become very used to keeping the windows firmly closed against the weather, ever since I fell asleep with the bedroom window cracked and woke up in a snowbank. When I open the windows to allow the spring breeze through the apartment, I’m almost amazed to see a city out there full of people going about their business, shoppers loaded down with bags, friends laughing, Like, I almost forgot that they were even out there, that there was anything beyond these four walls.

That’s the thing that the lifestyle magazines don’t talk about when they wax poetic about living in foreign countries. Digital nomads are always young and beautiful and it is always summer and everyone is independently wealthy (or possibly making a living by selling photographs of themselves looking moody in exotic locales). Yesterday, a website showed a young man sitting on a hammock on the beach using his laptop, as if this could be remotely comfortable, with the hammock swaying and the sun reflecting off his screen and the sand getting everywhere. I can’t imagine trying to write in those conditions: 100% of my concentration would be spent on not looping round in a spinning hammock like something straight out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

In order to earn the kind of money that would pay for the lifestyle that the magazine photographs show, you would need to hole yourself into your apartment working all day long just trying to generate enough cash to pay the rent.

Which is pretty much what I’ve been doing. I am pretty happy staying in here. I have fast internet and a good computer with LEDS that flash in rainbow colors and a monitor almost large enough to be a drive-in movie screen. I have birch logs for the fireplace and a rack full of wine. It’s tempting to stay in here and ignore that world outside my window, that world that seems content to move on, as if nothing ever happened, as if nothing was lost.

The past month has felt like constant fire-fighting, partially because Cliff was chaotic-neutral when it came to paperwork but also because he’d been unwell on-and-off for a year and putting everything off to deal with later. It’s my fault as well. I never got involved with the finances or the house automation or the business side of the lettings; they were not my forte and there was never enough time to do everything anyway.

The good news is that I’m starting to make some headway. I’ve gained enough control over my finances to not be in a panic, I’m chipping away at the company accounts so I can do the missing annual reports and the west wall lights no longer think that they are an ice machine.

But you know, I’m not sitting on the beach with a laptop and pretending that it’s work.

I could at least go out to eat. That’s part of the digital nomad life: eat local, which, according to the glossy pictures, is always glamorous exotic-looking street feasts covered with brightly colored spices and glistening with fat because, apparently, foreign food doesn’t have calories. Cheap local food in Estonia consists of cabbage and potato. The staples in my pantry are more exotic than the street food stalls and I don’t know who it is who started importing jalapeños into Tallinn, but I’m pretty sure I’m single-handedly keeping the company in profit.

Still. I should go out. I have not been going to Keskturg, the central market, since before the pandemic. I keep reading about how it is going to be renovated into a modern shopping experience, where tanned men and women in business attire pick at salad bars and drink fresh orange juice, or at least, that’s what the new mural on the main building shows. I’m sure the independently wealthy digital nomads will love it.

Today, thank god, the market looks as Soviet as ever. The corrugated tin roofs glint rustily in the sunlight and small mountains of grey snow cling to the shadows. Most of the undercover area is still empty, although there are half a dozen stalls selling strawberries from Spain and Greece alongside with local green cabbages. A van parked on the street has a small crowd clustered around the back. I draw closer to see a man with 25 kilogram sacks of salt scooping out portions into small plastic bags to hand out to the men and women crowding around him holding out cash. I score a small bag of curing salt.

The stall that used to sell plastic shopping bags on wheels now sports a chalkboard promising tšeburek and hatšapuri and coffee, freshly on the premises. Hatšapuri refers to a number of different Georgian pies (Wikipedia calls them cheese-filled breads, which is probably more correct). Here in Tallinn, hatšapuri generally refers to Imeretian yeasted flatbread which is stuffed with suluguni and imeruli cheeses before baking, resulting in a tender cheesy pie-bread for which I would happily give up quesadillas forever.

A young woman in a pink satin blouse looks as wistful as a Disney princess as she waits for customers. A heavily made-up angular woman rushes to get to the window before me. I wait grumpily as she receives her tšeburek, a deep-fried pastry with ground meat, a Crimean Tartar dish popular throughout the ex-Soviet Union. The Crimean Tartars are considered an indigenous people of Ukraine by the European Union and are unrecognized by Russia. Clearly eating a tšeburek would be a type of solidarity, besides, it looks delicious. Just as I’ve made up my mind for the third time, a heavy-set angry-looking woman appears from the back and drops a stack of more deep-fried things by the window. Hatšapuri. The skinny woman pulls out more money and takes all of them.

I hope that the pastries go straight to her hips.

Finally, Miss Pink Satin Disney Princess turns to me with a shy smile. I ask for a hatšapuri in halting Estonian. She turns to look behind her. The angry woman throws a lump of dough around and begins shouting at me in Russian, her voice rising as I chew my lip and try to maintain eye contact. I have no idea what I could have possibly done to deserve this tirade and I make a desperate face at the Disney princess in hopes of help.

“Six minutes,” she says.

When I return, she smiles in relief, having already packed my pie into a parchment bag. I hand over my money and head to the empty covered tables for a better look at my Crimean-Georgian pie-bread-pastry thing. I rip open the fried dough and a cloud of dill-scented steam envelopes me. A molten mixture of cheese and dill surrounding a single slice of tomato threatens to escape if I don’t eat quickly. I close my eyes as I take the first bite. Normally I am someone who thinks dill should be sprinkled sparingly as a garnish or, better yet, drowned in a barrel filled with pickled cucumbers. Dill is not actually food. My pie looks full of grass. But every bite confirms that the lemony licorice flavor is the perfect foil to the salty cheese. Scowling passers-by wonder what I have to be so happy about.

I run out of hatšapuri while still considering this unexpected perfection. Never again would I dare be blase about cheap local food. It overcomes me in a rush, how much I love Tallinn and especially how I keep finding new things here every time I venture out of my apartment, which I really should do more often. I love the weird items that I keep finding at the market (I have never cured meat in my life, what am I going to do with curing salt?). I love all these foods from places I had barely heard of before, let alone explored their cuisine, maybe not traditional Estonian but nevertheless local.

I do not have a beach and I do not have a hammock and dammit, if I have to work at the keyboard then I’m going to do it in my pyjamas at my desk with my blinds closed against the daylight. But, for the first time in a long time, I feel that sense of wonder that I’m lucky enough to live here and to be experiencing this perfect cheese pie-bread-pastry in this market which will someday, possibly someday very soon, cease to exist and just be a memory that people sometimes talk about. Maybe it is because Keskturg was the first big challenge when I moved here, that returning to this market has filled me with that same sense of discovering something that I so easily could have missed.

I had been feeling a tiny bit smug that I knew this market well enough, that I knew who would point me towards their freshest goods and who would short-change me. As if I already knew everything that the central market had to offer. I was wrong.

I went back the following day for another one. The chalkboard sign was there and the stall was open but as I approached the window, there was no Disney princess, just the angry woman stacking a a tray full of deep-fried savoury goodness. She put a cloth over the pastries and picked up the tray, then saw me at the window and put the tray down again. She snapped something at me in impatient Russian.

I smiled sweetly. “Hatšapuri?”

“Hatšapuri nyet!” Before I could say another word, she turned her back on me and picked up her tray and walked out of the stall.

Maybe I haven’t conquered Keskturg just yet.