(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

Strange as it may seem, doing laundry in Tallinn, Estonia was one of the reasons that we still consider Tallinn to be our favourite urban travel experience.

We always try to pack as little as possible; there is nothing worse than slugging heavy luggage through the rain, heat or snow.  Fashion takes a bit of a hit but we figure that travelers are allowed some leeway in that regard.

The only downside to packing light is that it is necessary to wash your clothes when you are traveling. Some people bring detergent and do their own laundry in their hotel rooms, others are willing to pay the extortionate fees charged by hotels, but we take the middle ground and seek out local laundromats.

This is easy to do in English-speaking countries and countries where the local language is close enough to English that communication isn’t a problem. As a result, Iceland was a breeze (albeit an expensive one) and Norway was not much more difficult.   While Estonian is a very difficult language for English-speakers, our advance research suggested that English was fairly widely spoken in Tallinn.  We planned accordingly.

Having done the necessary research in advance, I had located a laundromat within walking distance of our hotel.  We arrived with two backpacks full of laundry and were wearing our last clean set of clothes.  We were encouraged by a few English words on the outside of the building.  We entered the laundromat and tried to figure out what was going on.  It was not a “self-serve” laundromat, but neither was there much in the way of information about its services.  We approached the clerk and asked (in basically the only Estonian words we knew) if she spoke English.  She answered, but it definitely wasn’t English and it also wasn’t Estonian.

Due to the legacy of the Soviet Union and Estonia’s proximity to Russia, about 25% of Estonians are ethnically Russian.  In Tallinn, the number is closer to 40%.   Many of them, particularly the older ones who had no reason to speak anything other than Russian, never learned Estonian.   As a result, we should not have been too surprised that we had stumbled upon a laundromat with a Russian-speaking clerk.   While I know the phonetic equivalents of letters in the Cyrillic alphabet, I know little more than Да (da, or “yes”,) нет (nyet, or “No”) and спасибо (spasibo, or “thank you”).  This makes it difficult to communicate sophisticated instructions and settle on prices for laundry.

After a brief panic, we realized that our options were limited.  We took a giant leap of faith and simply assumed that leaving our clothes here would result in them being washed.  Why else would people bring clothes to a laundromat?  We had no idea what we would be charged but assumed that we would not be the naive victims of extortion.  We also hoped that the clothes would be ready by the end of the day, as we had already bought our tickets for the next day’s ferry to Helsinki.

We communicated with smiles, gestures…and copious amounts of “спасибо“.   We figured that, even if we weren’t understood, the clerk at least thought that we were fairly amusing.   Somehow, with a lot of pointing at a clock on the wall, we concluded that we should return by 5:00 p.m. and that there was no need to hang around the laundromat.

We greatly enjoyed our final full day in Tallinn.  Finally, it was time to return to the laundromat and see what had happened.  To our immense relief, we were immediately recognized by the same clerk and presented with two bags full of clean, folded and meticulously organized laundry.  Success!  The cost was actually less than what we had anticipated and was a mere fraction of what we had paid in Iceland 4 years before.  I think we might have set some kind of record for saying “спасибо” in a single day; we left with more fond memories of Estonia and a renewed determination to continue our world laundromat tour in the future.