Notes

Okay, so this is the story of the night I ran away from a middle-aged Estonian woman. Twice.

I'm just sitting in the hotel bar on my laptop and some woman comes and sits next to me. We exchange pleasantries, which of course came with the typical, "where do you live? Oh, where are you from? Oh, where were you born? Oh, where were your parents born? Oh, where were your grandparents born? Yeah, I knew you were Indian!" line of questioning that I'm painfully used to by now. But anyway...

I learn that she moved here at 25 from Estonia because apparently the only way to get a job over there is to be 19, super tall and beautiful (she was neither of the former, and the latter is down to opinion, I'd rather not express mine). So here she is, 20 years later, about to start making me feel really uncomfortable.

It started off perfectly innocently, we were just talking about my experience in Helsinki so far, but when she started telling me to imagine that my parents were dead (for literally no apparant reason), I tried to back out of the conversation somewhat. And when she decided to take down my number so she "could show [me] around on Friday", I should have decided to leave. Turns out I was too nice to straight up reject my could-be-tour-guide and figured there was no harm in just never following up on her offer. Anyway, taking somebody's number is the last thing you do before you leave them the fuck alone and walk away, right? Apparently not. The barman brings her another glass of wine. Brilliant.

So begins her spiel about, amongst many, many other things, her daddy issues, her ex-husband and his inability to make her happy in the way that she wanted, and the "long-ass journey" she'd have to take back home, which in all honestly probably takes considerably less time than it would have taken for me to get drunk enough to endure her shit.

I felt I was doing a decent job of concentrating on Reddit enough to make her realise that I was only pretending to be mildly interested in what she had to say, but r/woahdude is pretty fantastic and I obviously hadn't nodded/"mhmm"-ed at her for a while, so she closed the lid of my laptop and asked me to "give [her] five minutes".

Right, I'll get to what happened in those five minutes soon enough, but let's take a second to reflect on what she'd just done. What kind of absolute bitch closes the laptop of a guy who: a) is absolutely dependent upon his laptop and b) is watching snowboarding GIFs?!?!?! I don't even particularly like snowboarding, but I was a hell of a lot more impressed with Shaun White than I was with the Estonian asshole sitting next to me. Ugh.

Anyway, I give her five minutes. Now, I can be somewhat/slightly/totally/ridiculously awkward at times and part of that manifests itself in wrapping my hands up inside the sleeves of my hoodie. She wasn't a fan of that. She gets up (not to leave, to my dismay), stands behind me, and rolls up my sleeves for me. I don't mean to sound too Tumblr, but I couldn't even.

So now that she's removed my sleeves(?!?!) and the distraction of my laptop, she 'turns the charm on'. "You're so funny... You're nice to look at... Very handsome... You have really very nice hair... I used to have long hair, it was down to my boobs". She grabs her boobs. I offer her an out and ask if she donated her hair to charity when she cut it, because, that's the natural response, right? Turns out she didn't, and she finally seems to understand that I'm not interested. Or, she's just changing strategies.

"Did somebody hurt you as a child?"

Erm. Right. What?

"You look lonely, are you lonely like I am?".

Oh come on. My answers were "no", and "no, I'm fine, thanks", respectively, and I make an excuse to leave. I still had most of a pint left and couldn't take it up to my room so my only option to get out was to go to the smoking area. In retrospect, I should have just given up that pint. Nine Euros though.

I don't know what made me think walking to a public place 15 seconds away was a fool-proof plan, because, of course, it wasn't. She smokes. She tells me this and throws me a smile that was probably designed to look flirtatious. It was creepy. I lead the way out like a hostage with a gun to his head. Or his butt, because that's what she just grabbed.

I'm becoming increasingly less annoyed and increasingly more pissed off. But I also felt really, really bad. She had her cigarettes and lighter on the table in front of her, and it was incredibly apparent that I wasn't smoking, and that I just wanted to sit in silence away from her. I stopped feeling bad almost immediately.

"Aren't you going to light my cigarette for me? You don't know how to treat a woman do you? How would you treat me after you fucked me?"

I walked away. There was only two Euros left of the pint at this point so I downed it and walked straight past her, into the lift, up five floors, down the corridor and into my ro- Oh. My keycard had stopped working. Back downstairs I go...

She's waiting at reception. God knows what for, she doesn't even stay in the hotel. She doesn't say a word. She just watches me whilst my keycard is being recoded. And then she follows me into the lift.

"Which floor are WE on?"

No. No. How is running away not a clear enough sign?!

"Floor three, thanks", I lie.

I get out on floor three. So does she, of course. But I'm too quick for her 45 year old ass and run the fuck up the emergency exit steps to my floor. I get my room door open and she's nowhere in sight. Twenty minutes later, I get a text from an unknown number.

"You left me?"

Yeah, you're damn right I left you.