Highlights from Tallinn, the first stop on our Baltic adventure.

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 medieval cravings one may have. We wandered the cobblestone streets and ogled at the throngs of cruise tourists (Tallinn is situated on the Baltic Sea, a prime ship-docking point), overpriced antique shops, and dozens of amber stores that line the streets of the old town.

Pretending not to be cranky and jetlagged

Courtyard

Here are a few other highlights of our Tallinn trip:

Teleskivi

This hipster paradise used to be a bunch of old rundown industrial buildings, but now boasts classy cafes, shops with Estonian-made clothes that I can’t afford, and most importantly Pudel, an amazing craft beer bar with plenty of tap options.

Balti Jama Turg

Teleskivi is a hop, skip and jump from the newly renovated Balti Jama Turg, the main market in town. We thought we were going to a veggie/flea market complete with grannies selling Soviet tchotchkes, but we arrived to a sleek, new building, with open spaces for vegetable wheeling and dealing, indoor areas for meat and fish, and upstairs, a cleaned up flea market type place. We did see plenty of tchotchkes, but they were a little too overpriced for us.

Linnahall

Continuing with our Soviet tour, we bopped over to brutalist concert auditorium Linnahall, which is currently awaiting renovation but is open to ruin porn-loving tourists to wander around the outside. Constructed for the 1980 Moscow Olympics and situated right on the Baltic sea, the hall was open until 2010, and renovations should start next year. For whatever reason I’m a fan of this type of architecture, so I enjoyed wandering around, except we saw someone inside the building (off limits to explorers) dressed as a SCARY CLOWN peering out the windows. That was kind of wild.

Kadriorg Park/Song Festival Grounds

On our second to last morning in Tallinn, I convinced Scott to go on a run with me, so we ran over to Kadriorg Park, where the national art museum and international museum are located. Later that day we walked back to the park to visit the Kumu, the Estonian Art Museum, which was pretty cool.

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We also checked out the Song Festival Grounds, where every five years thousands of Estonians gather to watch seemingly every choir in Estonia perform and sing along. In 2014, 33,000 people sang in the choirs, and 153,000 attended the performances. Wow.

A few other musings/bits and pieces:

We got carded in the grocery store trying to buy beer. The cashier, an older man, said to us in English, “the laws are very effective.” We’re not sure what that meant.

We tried to buy wine one morning to take with us to our next Airbnb but apparently it’s illegal to buy booze before 10am!

A ten-cent fee is added to every plastic or glass bottle you buy in the store. As in most European countries, plastic bags cost extra (cough Minneapolis/state legislature).

Restaurant food and booze is expensive if you’re going out. Of the three and a half days we spent there, we ate out twice (vegan and ramen restaurants, go figure), and mostly subsisted on bread, cheese, tinned sprats (a small fish similar to sardines), smoked salmon, and “travel curry”, a recipe I perfected while on the road. Out craft beers at Pudel were similarly priced to what we would have paid in the states, maybe more expensive (around $6).  A tall boy of local beer in the grocery was about $1.

After Tallinn, we picked up our rental car and headed east to Lahemaa National Park, which I will cover in my next post, aptly titled “Oh My Bog."