Stag-party Brits discover Old Tallinn bars and nightclubs

HELSINGIN SANOMAT (FINLAND) -

"It’s completely brilliant here, fantastic", says Jules Peirson, a mechanic from Norwich. He has come to Tallinn from East Anglia via budget carrier EasyJet’s new direct connection from London Stansted.
"We drink", says Peirson. "All day and every day. This morning we were drinking until half past five."
"In England the pubs call time already at eleven and even the nightclubs close by half one. The dumb English are control freaks", laments Peirson.

Together with ten of his mates, Peirson has found his way early on Saturday evening to a bar named Hell Hunt , though to Estonians the two words actually mean "Gentle Wolf". The sensitivity of the wolf is quite apparent from the pub’s website. The place also serves its own HellHunt beers, brewed on the island of Saaremaa.
On the tables in front of the British weekenders away are an impressive array of glasses, plus three Soviet-era Russian fur caps which once belonged to Red Army soldiers. Periodically the whole group erupts in loud laughter. In other respects the large bunch of lads on the lash does not differ much from the rest of the bar clientele.

"We always say that Baltic Cities are known for their exceptionally pretty town centres and their even prettier girls...Estonia is no exception...WOW!" is the message given on www.lastnightoffreedom.com, the website of a British online travel agency, when they advertise Stag Weekends in Tallinn. As the name suggests, the company specialises in stag and hen trips.
Entering Tallinn stag in a search-engine like Google will get you to around 16,000 sites, including numerous newspaper articles on the subject of Britons getting hammered abroad, but if you try the same keywords with quotation-marks around them, you focus in more accurately on a handful of British online tourism providers.
The biggest of them, www.tallinnpissup.com, claims to be bringing in around 2,000 thirsty Brits this year, and leaving behind the equivalent of about half a million euros in the Tallinn tills.

The sheer number of British tourists in Tallinn is not actually so very large. According to the Statistical Office of Estonia, the total over the past six months is only approximately 12,000. What is considerably bigger is the attention they have drawn to themselves. "The new Finns", is how they are sometimes described here. This may not be a compliment.
The loud and rowdy Brits-On-Tour began to be recognisable amidst the predominantly Finnish "tired & emotional" voices raised in the capital’s Old Town a couple of years ago. The subject gets into the local headlines every couple of months.
From time to time, stag-partying British groups have found themselves banned from one Tallinn bar for their noisy behaviour. Jason Barry, a British ex-pat who is on the board of the local travel agency Footprint Travel, says the firm is planning to wind up the business of arranging lads’ wet weekends away.

For their trip, Jules Peirson and his mates left Norwich at around 3 a.m. on Thursday morning by minibus for Stansted, picking up the 6.45 EasyJet connection to the Estonian capital.
"We didn’t know anything about Estonia beforehand. I’d heard the name, of course", says Nev Todd, a glazier and fitter, whose 30th birthday is the cause for the group to come over to Tallinn from Thursday to Sunday. His brother arranged the trip.
Previously the group of friends have made similar visits to Amsterdam and Dublin.
"We wanted to go to one of the new EU members. My brother said that everyone was going to Prague, so we should pick Tallinn", explains Todd.
Todd says that the bars in Tallinn are much the same as in Norwich, but the atmosphere is better. "The locals are enormously friendly. Back in Norwich, things are more aggressive and people are more envious."
All of the lads sing the praises of the Tallinn girls. "They are very beautiful, slim and very fit-looking", they repeat over and over again.

In the nightclubs, some of the weekenders on the loose actually get to talk to some of the beautiful women. "I was in Hollywood the other night, and I asked two girls if they wanted a drink. They did", enthuses book-keeper Simon Richardson.
"I’m going to try to pull again tonight. I was sitting and chatting until half five this morning with two Estonian ladies in their fifties", recalls fur-hatted mechanic Tom Bennison, though he has some difficulty remembering what it was they talked about.

Ex-pat Brits and others own a few of the bars in Tallinn’s Old Town. Some offer English Premiership football matches on big-screen TV at weekends.
"The Brits are more than welcome here, because they drink more than the locals", says Andy Gleeson pragmatically. Gleeson is an ex-pat Australian who owns two popular Tallinn watering holes, Nimeta Baar (The Bar With No Name) and Nimega Baar (The Bar With a Name).
"We have personally had no problems with them. The situation isn’t as crazy here as is sometimes claimed."
This comment is to some extent borne out by the fact that the British binge-drinking weekends do not show up in reports by the Tallinn police or cause undue alarm at the British Embassy here. In Prague, the situation is reportedly rather different.

Saturday night is just getting under way. The 11-strong group from Norwich orders chasers to go with their beers and prepares to move on to the next venue on the night’s pub-crawl.
Next up is the Soho Striptease Club, located outside the Old Town, close to the big Radisson-SAS Hotel. It advertises itself as catering for hen and stag parties.

The team’s plan of campaign is to keep knocking them back and to stay on their feet until mid-morning on Sunday.
Jules Peirson fears that if he goes to bed he won’t wake up in time for the flight back to London at lunchtime.
"Then we’d be stuck here for a week*. It’s not that I’d mind being here for a week; I’d love it. It’s very cheap here, the Old Town is lovely, and the people are great."