End of an Era?

For those of you how have travelled to Eesti often I'm sure you're all well aware of Club Avenüü, a popular 24hr joint that was often the last stop on what was a long night. Well, for the past 2-3 weeks Avenüü has been closed down. It appears that they are doing renovations but that usually means that it will reopen as something different. Now don't get me wrong, the place was a dump and I certainly won't be shedding tears over its closure or modification but it was nice to know that no matter how late/early it was you could always count on finding a cheap drink and bad food at Avenüü.

Also in the closing news, the charming Cafe Anglais will be shutting it's doors at the end of the month which is a real shame in my opinion, the food was good and the atmosphere was unbeatable. There are also rumours that the popular restaurant Elevant will be shutting down as well which would also be a real loss as they had some of the best and cheapest Indian food in town. Seeing places with character and good food close down and only places catering to tourists open up is making the Old Town even blander and less authentic that it already is.

The scene at Avenüü for the past couple of weeks.
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Changes

So this past monday there was some fairly big news at work. If you haven't heard the news you can read a bit about it here. What does that mean for me? I'm not going to go into details about my situation on this blog but the "risk" of moving to Eesti is looking to be worth it now. Overall this week was quite exciting and this is an experience that won't happen again anytime soon.

25!?

Tuesday was my 25th birthday, thanks everyone who called/emailed. Those who didn't shame on you. :-)

I didn't do too much as I was under the weather all week and work was crazy as usual. Another week and another round of rumours about what will happen with us. Only time will tell.

The pics below are from a fireworks show that occured on my birthday in Raekoja plats. Not sure the occassion but I can assume they were for me. Estonians seem to have a strange obsession with fireworks as they are almost a weekly occurance in town.

Fireworks over Raekoja and seen from my window
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Pretty
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Feeds

So working at an internet company I've learnt a couple of things. One of those is RSS/Atom feeds. Now, if you spend anytime reading news or blogs online you should definetly start using RSS feeds. RSS feeds basically search your favorite news site or blogs for new stuff and post the headline. You can easily look at all the posts and decide which you want to read. It allows me to read 3-4 newspapers a day without having to search for stuff. So I add a feed to this blog. So instead of visiting the site to see if I've posted you simply let the feed come to you when I update. To use RSS feed simply download something like FeedReader the copy this link into it and you'll get an update everytime I post:
http://asehr.blogspot.com/atom.xml

All major papers and news site have RSS feeds, just copy the link into the feedreader and boom. News at your fingertips.

Geek rant over.

Football

Last night I went to a world cup qualifying game between powerhouse teams Estonia vs. Latvia. I joke but Latvia is decent, making it to last years Euro cup where they scared some teams quite a bit. I had never been to the stadium here in Tallinn, it' name after one of the local beer companies A le Coq but ironically they can't sell beer there for these games. The game itself was quite good, the stadium is very inimate and seeing the action that close up gives the game a different feeling for sure. Estonia played well and managed a 2-1 win which marked the first time in 65 years that we had beaten our neighbors to the south. The win was doubly nice since it essentially eliminted them from the World Cup (Estonia is also statistically eliminated). The night ended up at Hell Hunt where the crowd was in an excellent mood, I ended up sitting at a birthday party for someone I didn't know but there was bottles of champagne and tequila so who's going to say no to that.