Sophie À La Carte!

I’m skipping ahead on my blog posts to cover my two days in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. It was a short but impactful visit, and I hope to someday spend more time in the rest of the country. Why Belarus? I had a vague idea to travel there in 2015/16, but upon further investigation I figured out that the visa process would have been impossible since I was already abroad, and I nixed my plan. When Scott and I booked our flights to the Baltics, and since Belarus is so close to Lithuania, I figured I would bop over there for a couple of days to see Minsk, and then fly home. My endless fascination with post-Soviet countries fed into this desire, as well. A mix of the old and new in Minsk We booked our initial flights in January, and eventually I started trying to figure out how to get this visa. Turns out, in February Belarus changed their tourist visa options, and if you visit for less than five days you can enter free ! Score. I had also planned on taking the

Our last few days in Estonia were a trip to the first national park, Lahemaa, and a stopover in University town Tartu on our way to Latvia. On the morning of our Tallinn departure, we stopped by the Balti Jarma Turg again to pick up provisions for our nights in the park. We bough chanterelle mushrooms at 6.50 euro a kilo, a half kilo of pickles that the seller scooped out of a bucket and into a plastic bag for us, some tomatoes and zucchini, and the salmon. Oh the salmon. We stopped by the fish market to shop for some smoked salmon to take with us and due to a miscommunication with the woman ended up with two entire bone-in smoked salmon filets, maybe 4-5 pounds. We paid less than 5 euro for it, and it would become the main component of our meals for the next two days. We rented a car for 2 days to drive out to Lahemaa National Park- we booked it a few months in advance, and the total was about $80 for two days. We picked it up at the Tallinn Train Station and headed out east

Hello friends, I don’t know where to start with Estonia. Scott and I spent only a week there, and I wish we had more time. Here’s a zoom-through of the places we visited and some interesting observations about the country. I won’t get into the depths of history, but Estonia was having a rough 20th Century before it regained its independence from the USSR. A close neighbor to Finland, many parts of northern Estonia have a Nordic-esque feel to it. And after years of occupation by Germans and Russians, Estonia looks ready to reclaim its Nordicness. We landed in Tallinn Monday afternoon and checked into our Airbnb, an apartment owned by Peeter, a newspaper graphic designer and freelance artist. Jetlag was not treating me well, and I was feeling kind of cranky, but combined forces of Scott’s urging and my own “wtf you can’t stay inside” led us into the Old Town for a nice stroll. Tallinn has a lot of great fortress-y structures, rebuilt and original, that satisfy any medi