Estonian Adventures

This past weekend we made a quick trip to Estonia (sounds funny to say, but that's exactly what it was). Victoria and I both had to teach on Friday morning so right after we all went to the bus station and left on our bus to Tallinn, Estonia. It was about a 5 hour bus ride, the thing that seems like it takes forever is the passport control when you're crossing borders, it gets a bit time consuming.

Once we got to Tallinn and found our hostel it was about 8 pm. Our hostel was adorable, it was a little bed and breakfast looking place and felt really home-y, except for the stupid hole right in front of the kitchen that I tripped in every time I went to the bathroom. We were all worn out, traveling really takes it out of you, so we went to bed and got up early the next morning to explore. After all of our time spent traveling so far, you'd think we would have learned, but again, nothing in Europe opens until after 10 am, so waking up early is pretty pointless. It's still pretty awesome exploring a city (in this case Old Town Tallinn) when no one else is around.

Kiek in de Kok and town wall

At the Maidens Tower

We ended up finding a lot of the tourist areas without even meaning to, it's pretty fun exploring a new place, Old Town had it's own map so that made it really nice, we were never too worried about getting lost because we had the map and could always find out way back to the Town Square if needed.

We actually learned a lot about the city just from wandering on our own, for example, the three lions are everywhere, it's the coat of arms for the city.

Those dolls are EVERYWHERE some are creepy and some have their arms out like they just want to hang out with you and be buds. It's pretty funny, we got a few pictures with them, but this was the only photo I had of one of the dolls on my phone.

We learned quite a bit about Tallinn and it's medieval-ness, it was very old fashion-y in a lot of places in Old Town, I thought it definitely added to the environment, it was such a fun place and everything was relatively close.

One day we wandered around and found the Cat Well, which, according to legend, was used in the olden days, townsfolk would throw cats as sacrifices to the well spirits so that their water supply would be fresh and so the water wouldn't run out. We all found this pretty funny, dead cats probably don't help with the freshness of water at all.

Fat Margaret

There aren't many other stories to tell from this trip, it was pretty fast and we mainly did a lot of exploring of the city (found our fair share of dead ends) and met some really funny townspeople. Probably the most interesting story I have from this trip comes from one of the most famous lookout spots in Tallinn.

Behind me in "The Times we had." photo is a crazy drunk guy. We found this lookout spot (which we had gone looking for because, look at the view!) and of course we wanted to get the awesome writing on the wall, but there was a crazy drunk man just chilling on the ledge right underneath the sign. We got upset, but took some pictures of the city and then decided to walk back down to Town Square and then come back before we had to leave town. We got distracted for awhile because we met some guys who let us hammer our own Tallinn coins! (According to old Estonian beliefs they're good luck coins because they have a hole in the center)

We walked down toward Town Square and halfway there Kelsey looks up and points to the lookout spot we were just at and the drunk guy was totally not on the ledge anymore, we got really excited and took a trek back up to the top of the lookout (trust me, it was all uphill) and as soon as we walk up to the lookout point again, the drunk guy (who just talks to the air) walks out of the shop right next to it and beats us to the ledge. We were so mad! We figured out that we could take the picture from an angle and you can't even tell the crazy drunk man is even there! So yes, there is some crazy, drunk Estonian man behind me in that beautiful picture!

I also got the chance to have a traditional Estonian breakfast the day we left, it's a grain mixture called Kama and you either put really thick milk in it or yogurt and it was super gross! But hey, it's all part of the experience.

We're in St. Petersburg for the moment, but we're gonna be off on another whirlwind adventure starting Thursday night, we're headed to Latvia for the weekend!