The backbone of the winter

has been broken. I guess it was that woke up Winter and reminded it to come pay us a visit. So the winter has finally arrived. There were two activities worth recording that happened this week.

I used the self check out station in a grocery store. There are two supermarkets within five minutes from our apartment that I go to for our daily supplies. One is closer but smaller and less well stocked (I guess since it's new) with tighter check out area. The other one is a bit farther away but more spacious and with larger selection of goods. Both stores belong to the same Red chain originally from Sweden. Their biggest competitor is a Green chain originally from Finland. The Green chain tends to build its hypermarkets into or next to shopping centers some distance from downtown. I don't go to the Green stores too often, neither do I subscribe to their newsletter so it came as a surprise to me when shopping in one that I spotted some shoppers standing around in one spot that was in line with the cash registers but without any cashiers nearby. The shoppers seemed to be scanning and bagging their purchases. There were, however, two employees sitting behind a computer, seemingly keeping an eye on the buyers/purchases. So self check-out it was. I recalled our visits to a certain convenience store near the port in San Juan a year ago where it seemed we had to wait for a human assistant every time we tried to check out by ourselves. So I was a little weary giving this machine a try but as I only had one item with a nice looking bar code on it I decided I would. Turned out I needed no assistance so I might try again next time I happen to be in that store. By the way, it was probably less than a month ago than Mike and I discussed this modern practice and agreed amongst ourselves that we won't be seeing it in Tallinn's stores in the near future...

Another somewhat unique activity I judged worthy of chronicling involved a machine as well. This was a coin counting device housed in the museum shop of Estonian Bank. You see, it's been three years since we had to give away our kroons and take up euro as the new currency but according to some source there are still almost 50 million euros worth of kroons out there. We had them, too. Close to 300 coins and perhaps 30 notes. Coins are extra weight for people about to move, right? So we decided to take the coins back to the bank where they belong in return for a lesser number of some brand new, unused euros. The coin counting machine in the museum was like any other, nothing special about it. But the museum itself was pretty interesting if small. What I liked was that they featured wax figures of the people depicted on kroons, that they showed news reels about the issueing of kroons (I remember that day in '92 when the adults came home from the temporary exchange point in town and grandpa gave us some new smooth bills to keep), that they had some thousand year old coins on display, and that the bank/museum is still in the same beautiful house it used to be in almost a hundred years ago.