Thank you for coming to amcsee.org The website is being built now amcsee.org was created: August 14 2012 19:48:23. Today Saturday 25 May 2013 21:46:25 Even the spaces under electricity towers were turned into makeshift greenhouses using a patchwork of plastic sheeting. Just when I thought it couldn't get any more depressing, the train shunted past three cars parked at the side of the road, nose to tail. They were riddled with bullet holes and burned out. There was no snow or ice on them and shattered glass lay all over the place. It looked as if they'd only just been hosed down and flash lighted For all I knew there might still be bodies inside. A couple of kids walked past and didn't give them a second look. The train stopped with a rumble and a loud squeal of brakes. We seemed to be in a rail yard. Fuel tankers and freight cars appeared on either side, all covered with Russian script and caked in oil and ice. I was back in a scene from a Harry Palmer film again, only Michael Caine would have had a suit and trench coat on instead of piss-stained jeans. The train just seemed to have driven into the yard and stopped, and that was it. Going by the number of doors opening, it was time to get off. Welcome to Narva. I looked out of the window and saw people jumping down onto the tracks with their shopping bags. The only other remaining passenger in my car was leaving. I did the same, traipsing through the snow across a massive shunting yard, following the others toward an old stone house. I guessed that it hadn't been built until after 1944, because I'd read that when the Russians "liberated" Estonia from the Germans they flattened the whole town, then rebuilt it from scratch. I went through gray-painted, metal double doors into the ticket office. The room was only about twenty by thirty feet, with a few old plastic, classroom-style chairs around the sides. The walls were covered with the same thick shiny gray paint as the doors, onto which graffiti had been scratched. I thought the floor was plain pitted concrete until I noticed the two remaining tiles refusing to leave home. The ticket office was closed. A large wooden board was fixed to the wall near the sales window, with plastic sliders upon which, in Cyrillic, were the names of various destinations. I looked for anything that resembled the word Tallinn. It seemed that the first train back was at 8:22 each morning, but even if they'd spoken English, there was no one around to confirm it. I stepped round the obligatory puddle of vomit and came out of the main entrance. Over to my left was what I took to be a bus station. The buses were of 1960s or 1970s vintage, all battered and some even hand painted. People were fighting to get aboard, exactly as they'd done in the capital; the driver was shouting at them and they shouted at each other. Even the snow was exactly the same as in Tallinn: dirty, downtrodden, and viciously icy. Digging my hands deep into my pockets I cut directly across the potholed road, following the map in my head along Puskini, which seemed to be the main street. It wouldn't be far to Konstantin's address. Puskini was lined on either side by high buildings. On the left, what looked like a power station loomed behind them and, bizarrely, electricity towers were set into the street and pavements, so pedestrians had to pick their way round them. Russians seemed to have sited all their industrial units as near as possible to the stations that powered them; then, if they had any space left, they'd squeezed in accommodation for the workers, and fuck the people who had to live there. I'd seen enough to tell me this was a miserable, run-down place. The newest buildings looked as if they dated from the 1970s, and even they were falling apart. I headed up the street, keeping to the right. It was quiet apart from the occasional tractor and one or two Russian-plated articulated lorries surging past. The roads and sidewalks were jet black with grease and grimefactory, and more rows of miserable apartments came into view, identical to the ones I'd seen from the train. There were no names on the blocks, just stenciled numbers. At last I'd found one thing that my childhood project had over this place: at least every building there had been named after locations in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The rest of it, though, was much the same rotting wooden window frames and cracks in the panes taped over with packing tape. I remembered why I'd promised myself at the age of nine that I'd get out of shit holes like this as soon as I could. It was only about one thirty in the afternoon, but An old man was lying on top of a cardboard box to one side of the main entrance, sheltered by the shop's canopy. His head was wrapped in rags, his p after another hundred yards or so. I came to a giant parking lot, full of buses and cars. © ISPmanager licensed