Sophie À La Carte!

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...

So far the trip has been pretty great. We’ve made it into Latvia, and have plenty to catch up on. Traveling through the Baltics hasn’t been too difficult, and our only regrets so far is not having enough time to see everything. My partner Scott and I spend plenty of time together, but not since last September/October when we bopped around Barcelona and Ukraine for two weeks have we had this much “us time.” And on this go-around, we’re stuck with each other for three weeks. I think both of us are looking forward to seeing if/when we crack. Before I dive into specifics of how things are going/all the quirky things we’re learning about Estonia, I wanted to give you an overview of how we planned and budgeted for this trip. To start off, we ended up picking the Baltic States because we found fairly cheap tickets over. Through Momondo, we found roundtrip flights to Tallinn/from Vilnius for $700 through the Delta/KLM/Air France Skyteam, and booked them back in January. For me, I...