Sophie À La Carte!

Three years. Three years since I hopped on an Icelandair plane to Europe, not knowing when I’d be back. Fifteen months later (not including a quick hop over in May 2016) I landed back in the states and picked up where I left off. As is tradition, I wanted to give you all a quick update on what’s been going on in the last year since I wrote a two year travelversary post in 2017 . I want to acknowledge that living in the United States is kinda rough right now. There’s been a lot of bad news coming out of DC this week, and it’s hard not to let it seep into your psyche, affect your daily routine, and darken your thoughts of what will happen next. I had the privilege of hearing NYT columnist Thomas Friedman speak on Tuesday evening. This was after the Supreme Court upheld the Muslim ban, and it wasn’t just me in the audience who was feeling hopeless, for lack of a better term. I think all of us were looking towards Friedman, a Minnesota native, to give us something to l...

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...