Not a laughing matter...

It seems that often, while in Finland, I'm just about to take a trip when I hear about some disaster that happened before that puts a little bit of a fright into me. When I first lived there and was about to take the overnight ferry to Stockholm, someone turned to me and said, "I hope this doesn't go down like that other ship." Huh? I was soon to find out that in September of 1994, the MS Estonia sank in the Baltic on its journey from Tallinn to Stockholm. In that tragedy, out of the little more than 1,000 people on board, 852 people died. And when I got on my ferry, I found my room was in the very bottom of the ship in the indentured servant class, and I was so far down in the ship that my room was actually below the cars and trucks held in cargo on the ship. If you look at this map, you can see where my room was. Yup, that was me, clear down on floor 2. I half expected to see shirtless guys shovelling coal into the furnace and Leonardo Di Caprio walk by in his Titanic costume.

And just a few weeks ago, when I was about to take the day boat to Tallinn, I found out that the Helicopter service that runs from Helisinki to Tallinn, Copterline, had one of its copters crash into the Baltic in August, killing all 14 on board. Click here and scroll down for details.

I'm a bit ashamed to say this now, but I had actually planned on writing a joke-filled post about me hearing about these things right before I leave on a trip myself. I got as far as going to the Copterline page and seeing that they sold a ticket under the classification of "Joker", and was prepared to make a crack about trusting a pilot who looks like this.

But as I was doing some research on this topic and prepping some links, I got to reading over some of the accounts from people who survived the Estonia sinking. In particular this story and this story really got to me, and I can honestly say I don't find this whole situation that funny anymore. I know I shouldn't feel too bad; I wasn't trying to be disrespectful or anything. It's more that I just don't have the heart to try and be funny about something like this after reading about all those people on that boat.

Sorry if this post seems so glum. And it isn't like there aren't bigger tragedies out there with higher death counts, but it is just that this is one I was about to write about. I suppose I could have just not written anything at all, but the Estonia sinking especially caught my eye due to its dramatic manner and high loss of life, and I thought it might be interesting to someone out there reading.