Walking back from Tallinn, Estonia downtown to the ferry that would take me back to Helsinki, I stopped at a … shopping place. Too shabby to be called a mall, but enough of a building not to be called a square, it was simply a place where entrepreneurial Estonias sell everything under the sun.

What caught my eye, was a set of Kalashinkovs on sale. Or, sure, toy Kalashnikovs, and to be even more sure – my expertise on gun is very limited – toy machine guns. They might not even be machine guns, and they might not be called Kalashnikovs. So just picture a big gun in your head. Anyway, I wanted to snap a photo to show Wife so that we could be outraged together, and the laugh, and then look at the photo again, shake our heads, and just wonder what the world is coming to.

As I heard the shutter go “”chk-ooh”, I also heard somebody behind me shout something, and one of the three young men standing a little farther away jumped up to me and asked me if I’d like to buy something.

“No, thanks, I’m just looking, on my way back to the ferry, thanks,” I said and took a sip of my coffee.

“A teddy bear?”

“Ha ha, no, no, they’re a little too big…”

“A suitcase?”

“Good call, but no thanks.”

“T-shirts?”

“Nope.”

“Hats? Water? Music?”

“Not really, no, nope. Thanks.”

He gave up. He smiled, and nodded. I smiled, and said that I’d just head off to the ferry when a buddy of his came walking from the next stand, and asked:

“Viagra? You want Viagra?”

“I think it’s time for me to go now.”