Baltic Sex Tour.com

We came to find prostitutes. One out of 20 tourists here asks to be driven to a brothel. Some taxi drivers even display brochures and calling cards of the brothels: around 35 are thought to operate in Tallinn in the winter—twice as many in the summer.

Brothels and pimping are illegal in Estonia. But the practice is widely visible. 

Some brothels have signs reading “Disko, Baar, Saun—24 hrs.” Many are disguised as massage parlors or striptease joints. The fanciest are new single-family homes, with a red light in a window. 

  The night begins with a pepper steak. The restaurant’s full of young, drunken locals. 

 “At the brothels, the women sit in a row and we choose. If it doesn’t look good, we move to the next place,” “It’s like trading horses: you check out the teeth and hooves. The only way to do it is if you are drunk.”

       “You can tell from her looks what kind of a girl you have,” he insisted. “I have 20 years of experience.”

       Taxis pull up to another Tallinn brothel. Officially it’s a striptease joint, and a hotel—that charges by the hour.
       A dozen women sit in a row along a wall inside. The group includes two girls who are clearly no older than 16. 

       One indicates that the girls are working.

       Their attention is directed either at the door or the bar. An older woman boasts that she can recognize a Finn the second he steps through the door: “They’re very drunk and they say they want sex.”

       When drunk, they are gentel clients, she says; the worst thing is when someone wants to have sex without a condom. 

Striptease
The glass staircase and entrance hall is a sign of even more grand things to come. These classy Strip Clubs offer a self-proclaimed 'elegant' striptease show, a casino and an impressive menu to satisfy the most demanding tastes. Admission: 10Ls.  Massage and sauna is more than just a massage; it offers tranquility stone massage, a Chinese method using heated, smooth lava stones. These are either used to massage body parts, or are left placed on the body or between the fingers to do their healing and relaxing work. A classic massage and much more...with a very happy ending for a very reasonable price.

Prostitution
Enter two women. The first, a brunette, has a ski-jump nose and wears black pants with leopard-skin cuffs. She’s in her mid twenties. The second is in her fifties. She’s a chemical blonde with short hair and a white polyester suit. She could be a secretary from New Jersey. The two do not take drinks. They take a perch above the nightclub’s bar and dance floor. They wear serious faces and scan the crowd.

“Here are two prostitutes”. Many leave their jobs as a schoolteacher, nurse, and or homemakers and become a prostitute to make ends meet in Estonia. I found it hard to believe it was in their interest to have a hotel full of prostitutes. “It’s not all hotels,” she told me. “And the manager may not even know about it. The security men generally run the business.” And she offered to let me witness it first-hand. We had agreed to meet at 11 p.m. in a prominent hotel’s nightclub, the witching hour for working girls.

“Turn 180 degrees look at That blonde behind you.” 
She’s a bleach blonde twenty-something, her hair in a frizzy ponytail. She wears spandex pants and a tight, long-sleeved turtleneck sweater. She is tall with perky breasts. An attractive woman. She is what the Mattel Company had in mind when they made Barbie. She’s talking to a man with a crew cut who wears a track suit top and blue jeans. 

“That’s probably her pimp,” “Or he might be a narcotics dealer.”
Each prostitute has paid 500 kroons to the security man working the door. This buys the hunting license for the evening.

Depending on the hotel, she may be required to take her client to certain rooms if he is not a guest. The room will not be provided free of charge, the security men will make money there, too. How much will a prostitute earn working this room tonight? I ask. “It all depends on what kind of negotiator she is. The worst might earn 20 euros. The best might earn 200 euros.” Two hundred euros. The average Estonian earns around 18 euros per day.

Currently, in a sexual transaction, Estonian law finds the middleman, the pimp, guilty. Taxi drivers—who earn commissions for delivering customers to brothels and sometimes directly to prostitutes—have told me that the Tallinn sex industry simply changed its practices to fall in line with the law. The prostitute strikes the deal, accepts the money, and later shares it with her pimp (the pimp or brothel usually taking half).
Barbie is back. She is talking with a young man in a suit. He is a few centimeters shorter than Barbie, wears his hair short and has about two days growth of a beard. He appears sober. He buys her a drink.

“See that blonde?”. She nods to someone near the bar. I’m not sure which one. I don’t dare ask her to point. “She’s stumbling all over the place. Someone put something in her drink. Never leave your drink unguarded in a place like this.” Prostitutes carry prescription-strength eye drops. Two drops in any sized vodka, says will knock a big man out for several hours. Prostitutes sometimes rob their customers. It seems to me that everything is a worst-case scenario. I want to believe the stumbling woman at the bar simply had too much to drink. After all, getting drunk is a national pastime in Estonia.

La Rocca
No doubt the largest and liveliest nightclub in the Baltics, this converted theatre provides entertainment for the eyes and ears in the form of techno, spandex garments that barely cover the waitresses' backsides, bartenders who wear paint in place of bras and hundreds of people trying hard to look their best. Surprisingly cheap drinks. Admission: 2 - 5Ls.

Club Essential
Having experienced the ill-fated disco that once occupied this space, we were relieved to discover that this trendy club is essentially a new creation or, to speak frankly, not another typical boring Riga techno club. In fact, it’s quite stylish offering a funky chill out room and several distinct, separate areas on two levels which are all a part of the action surrounding the central dance floor. The music is fast-paced and progressive which is what you’d expect given the talented DJs it imports from around Europe each weekend. Admission: 5Ls.

Fashion Club
The elegant Fashion Club is a partner of that captivating television channel Fashion TV and is located inside what used to be an exquisite theatre. Like the television show over which most men stand up with a puddle on their trousers (from the drool of course), the Fashion Club is centred on the fashion industry with regular runway shows every week. Shake your gluteus to the maximus with the latest entries on the dance charts or watch supermodels on the giant screen.