Poland - Krakow

I bought a new camera. Dad told me to. The lens on my old one is having a ‘mare, the autofocus doesn’t work and it does this funny clunking thing when you turn the focus ring manually.  I went in to look at lenses for my camera, but a lens alone was going to cost me about NZ$600, and I came across a beautiful new Nikon D3100 in the same shop which was NZ$830. I told Dad my lens had sort of carked it but does actually still work, and that I was trying to talk myself out of buying this camera. He said buy the Nikon. My camera was originally his, and he’d already had it repaired once, and he said it’s not worth fixing again. So while we were waiting for our train out of Krakow I went to the electronics shop, which had the same Nikon but with a much better range lens, and it was only about $100 more. So I bought it. I got the camera, the lens, a camera bag, and a memory card, all for about $1000, and I can claim about $160 tax back when I leave the EU. That is SO MUCH less than I’d expect to pay in NZ. I’m so excited!! I’ve always wanted a Nikon.

Other than that, Krakow was like this mad dash the entire time we were there. We arrived by train at lunchtime, that afternoon most of us went on an optional excursion (a trip that Tucan will organise for you but which is not included in the cost of the tour) to the Krakow Salt Mine, then we took a city tour by golf cart the next morning, saw Schinder’s factory at lunchtime, went to Auschwitz that afternoon (which is included in our tour), and took the overnight train to the Czech Republic that night. I would’ve really liked at least one more day in Krakow, I feel like we missed a lot.

The Salt Mine was interesting.  Not overwhelmingly so though.  We walked down 380 stairs underground, and spent about 2hrs walking through passages and room after room that'd been carved out of the salt....  as you might expect in a mine I suppose.  A lot of the rooms had statues in them that had been carved out of the salt.  You have to excuse my photos, I hate flashes so everything's at least like 2.5sec exposures.

I am Oz!  Being photographed by a million or so other people while my shutter was open!

There were a couple of pretty impressive rooms.  The cathedral was the best.  It's absolutely ginormous.  (That's totally a word and totally how you spell it.)

It has some pretty impressive statues, and carvings on the walls.

This was my favourite thing in the whole mine.  The perspective is perfect.  It's flat, but when you stand in front of it, it looks like it's been carved right into the wall.

The lights are behind her, not inside.  The statue I mean.

Another interesting example of the fact that you can see through pure salt.

I'm not as verbose as usual unfortunately...  Bit tired at the moment.  Luckily a picture paints a thousand words so I'm already at five thousand and something.

The golf cart city tour was good because it covered everything in the near vicinity.  Our hotel was in the coolest street, it was full of little cafes and restaurants and bars, and it was in the old Jewish Quarter.  Krakow was pretty beaten-up looking, but I really liked it.

I found out that the reason there are buildings falling down around the place, or at least it's the reason in Krakow, is that there are so many people who they couldn't account for after the war who owned property, and because they didn't know if or when these people or their decendants would show up again they didn't sell the buildings on.  I like that the government did that.

Fortifications in the city wall.

This was at... maybe a church I think...

Amanda being very cheeky with someone else's hat.  "Quick, take my photo!"

We finished the city tour at Schindler's factory (as in Schindler's List).  They made it into a museum, which has only been open for a year.  It's an excellent museum.  We had to be back at the hotel fed and watered at 130pm, so we only had an hour to get through, and it took that long just to walk from one end to the other.  It's more about the war and the persecution of Jewish people than it is particularly about Oscar Schindler, but it was very well done.

Left:  Floor tiles

Right:  Pots and pans which form the outer walls of a room.  Inside it's perfectly round and has the names of the people on Schindler's List all over the walls.

 Fantastic museum.  Really sorry we didn't have another few hours to spend there.

Lunch.  Open baguettes from the best shop in town. 

It was in a pagoda in the middle of the market square, along with four other baguette shops.

I'm going to have to write a separate post for Auschwitz.  I didn't take any photos though, I kinda didn't feel like it was appropriate.

Poland - Warsaw

The ten hour train trip into Poland wasn’t actually too bad, just really damn boring. Amanda asked if she could read my blog, which I’d just finished writing, and then it somehow turned into her reading it out loud to the other six of us. What I write is more personal than what I would normally say out loud. I’m totally fine with knowing that everybody’s going to read it, but having it read aloud in front of me was quite a strange feeling. I was trying to hide behind Steve.

We got to our hotel at something like 930pm, and the seven of us had decided while we were still on the train to go to the Hard Rock Café and have a proper dinner. While we were en route to the restaurant it started absolutely pouring. I could hardly see out of the car. And there was sheet lightening all around the sky, all evening, but no thunder. It was Ian and Julie’s last night with us, so I’m really glad we went out and did something, but as soon as we finished eating all we wanted to do was go home and fall into bed. Adrian just about had one foot in a taxi by the time we finished paying the bill.

We had a 9am or 930am orientation walk the next day, so Pancakes and Julie came downstairs and checked out at the same time, so we could all say goodbye. It was sad!! Kat cried. Then Julie cried. It’s amazing how quickly you form relationships with people when you travel together, we’d all only known each other for 2 weeks.

Warsaw was so hot!! We walked from the hotel into the old town, and on the way we saw a bear.

Adrian does an excellent impression.  Rawr...

 

He did have a friend in there with him, but the friend was far brighter than Fluffy here, and was off under the trees having a snooze.  They’re part of the zoo, but their enclosure is outside the entrance, alongside the public footpath.  We found out that Adrian does a very funny impression of a bear when he asked a Polish taxi driver if he could feed the bear a rabbit.  He was getting a bit obsessive about feeding the bear a rabbit.

Orientation walks are good because we stop at the major churches, castles, and town squares, so we don’t have to feel bad if we don’t go back to them.  Churches do tend to all look the same to me after a while.   The old town  in Warsaw was very pretty though.

The first photo shows what was left of the square (shown in the second and fourth photos) after WWII.

It was basically rubble, and they've rebuilt it to look the same as it did before the war. 

The third photo is of the old town wall.

After the orientation walk, I went to the Gestapo museum with Amanda, Steve, Adrian, and Kat, which was along the same lines as the KGB building in Vilnius but not quite as graphic. When you walk in the front door, there’s a film playing. We all know how I felt about the last one, so I was a bit nervous. The only visual was portraits of people who’d been victimised in that building, with a voiceover about what had happened. The thing I remember most clearly is that when the war was over and the building was vacated, there was 5,500 kilos of human ash in there. After the film finished, we walked along the corridor and had a look in the cells. A couple of them had been preserved exactly the way they’d been at the end of the war, with bullet holes in the wall opposite the door.

We ended up spending the afternoon shopping. All the women in Warsaw were really beautifully dressed, so I was feeling pretty mangey in my travel clothes and I was dying for something pretty to wear. I got a new dress, and I was really hoping for high heels but couldn’t find any that I liked enough to buy. I’ve failed as a woman.

Kat had booked a single room for that night (before she met me, obviously), so I had a great big twin room to myself. Excellent. Although we were only home for a couple of hours before we met up again to go out for the evening.

It was kind of a strange night all round. I’m not quite sure how else to sum it up. Amanda and Steve had done some homework for us and found out where we should go, so we got a taxi to the Hard Rock Café and walked from there. The idea was that there was plenty in the area, but in the end we walked for something like half an hour before we found a bar. It was called “Players”, as in football, and there was no music and almost nobody there. We decided that since there was nothing else in sight that looked like a bar, we might as well have a drink and see if we could figure out where we should go from there, so we sat outside and watched which direction the girls in short skirts and high heels were walking. Then we got up and walked in the opposite direction. That wasn’t really intentional. Amanda wanted to go to a place called Organza, which was meant to be the best place in town, so we were trying to head for that.

We ended up standing on a street corner, and we could see one place which was called “Bollywood”. So we figured we’d give it a thrash, since we couldn’t seem to pin down anything else. It was certainly very interesting. There were a lot of tables of Indian men. There were five guys at the next table, and they took it in shifts staring at us for most of the time we were there. There were a few other women there, but not a huge number, and quite a high proportion of them appeared to be hookers. There was a DJ too, who was playing Indian music, which was a lot of fun. He wasn’t so good at merging from one song to another though, every now and then there’d be two different rhythms going on at the same time. All part of the fun. We had a couple of drinks and the others shared a shisha, and we played with Adrian’s new camera, and Kat and Amanda even braved up and had a dance. The guys at the next table were absolutely agape.

Mum:  He's got a girlfriend.

I had to have this photo in here because it's just so cute.

The girls

When we left, we walked outside and hailed a taxi, and asked to go to Organza. The driver thought we were taking the piss because it was literally right around the corner. We must’ve walked right past it. He took us to a club that he recommended, the Opera Club. They let us straight in, even though they’d turned away the group that were right in front of us, and as soon as we got in the door we knew we were in the right place. It was underground, through these red brick tunnels with arched ceilings and wooden floors, and then you walk into a bigger room with a bar, a DJ, and a dance floor. It was, without any exaggeration, the best club I’ve been to. Everyone was there to dance, not to get wasted, the DJ was amazing, and there was a great atmosphere. Even the bar staff were having a great time. We got there a little after midnight and left at 3am, and Kat and I danced for most of the night. We got Adrian out on the dance floor when Kat went to the bar, and he was a bit of a hit – I got totally elbowed out, every tall girl in the room gravitated toward him (and there were plenty of tall girls there), and I found myself right at the edge of the dance floor. However, it didn’t last long. We need to work on his dance moves.

Every time we go to have a group photo, Steve stands right in front of me.

The hallway into the club, featuring Kat.

The next day, to be honest, Kat and I didn’t really get moving until midday. We wandered into town, past the rather naked lady who was sunbathing in the park, Kat went to the post office, we had some lunch, Kat went to sleep at the table, we wandered over to the university library and had a look at the rooftop garden and our second view of naked sunbathing girls for the day, and then we went home again. Hard day. We’d planned to go out for a meal, but the other three had done a tour during the day and been shown a whole lot of great bars, a block away from our hotel, so it was decided we needed to go out again. We had some new people joining our tour that day, so we invited two of them to come with us. Meet Cameron (28) and Marsha (22), mates who are travelling together, who are both Aussies. Dammit! We now have 6 Aussies and me.

We went to three bars along this one street, and by ourselves we would never have found any of them. The last one was around the back of a big industrial looking building, where we sat outside in the courtyard between the buildings and watched Kat and Steve compete at badminton, until someone lost the shuttlecock.  There was also some hula hoop action from Kat and Adrian, and a group of boys who were break dancing.  Not what we expected to find in the middle of Warsaw. Still, it was a much quieter night than the one before. For most of us anyway, I believe Adrian ended up at the strip club and only got back this morning in time to pick up his backpack before we had to meet at 810am to get on the train to Krakow!

Lithuania

So I ended up only taking 12 photos in Lithuania. It was weird and kind of a shame. Also 10 of the photos are of my friends, not of the town itself. The old town was lovely, just like the last two old towns. (Sorry… starting to look forward to a modern city again already! I am such a city girl.) I still should’ve taken photos though. We arrived in Vilnius by public bus and did our usual orientation walk in the afternoon, but I was a bit tired and in a bit of a fog and wanted to be in bed, so didn’t take any photos even though I had my camera around my neck. In fact when Tony suggested that we walk up to the tower to see the view over the town, Adrian, Julie, Kat, Janette and I went for a coffee instead. And spent the time talking about kiddie porn and prostitutes. As you do. Getting a little too familiar maybe… At least we were all of the same opinion on both subjects, that could’ve got awkward fast.

After our walk, the entire group went out for dinner. Our entire group numbers 16, not including Tony, so for everybody to go together is quite an undertaking, and this was only the second time we’ve done it. The first time, we went to Lido restaurant in Riga, Latvia… which turned out to be 20min away by tram, in the middle of a random theme park that I never discovered the name of. It was a bit of a strange experience all round. This time we went to a restaurant in the middle of Vilnius’ old town, so it was easy to get to and easy to get home, which sold it to me straight away. However they led us down to the basement, which smelt weird, and the food was by general consensus not the greatest. We had two tables, and the seven of “us” always grab seats together, and we had Denise and Jason at our table as well, and everyone else at the other. So we didn’t really mix as a group any more than usual, which did sort of defeat the purpose a little. As a tour group we are pretty unusual, we have a 50-year age span between the youngest and the oldest, and the majority are closer to the upper end of the age span. That means that we tend to want to do very different things and have very different budgets, and it has very much become two separate groups. It’s a shame.

The only thing I actually actively went and did in Vilnius was to visit the KGB museum. It’s in an old building that was used by the KGB and various other related agencies during the war and the Soviet reign, which they’ve turned into a museum. It has a prison in the basement and all that kind of thing. My god, it was horrific. The two upper floors were fine, they were about the history of Lithuanians over that period of time, and had all the usual, lots of reading and lots of personal items and weapons that they’d recovered from various places over the years. The worst part was a video about the activities of the KGB etc, which had old photos, including one of five men facing a firing squad of fifteen or twenty, the instant before they opened fire. The prison was ok too, although they kept a lot people in a very small space in some of those cells. There was a sign outside one particular cell, which was about 4x2m, which said that at some points there were 15 to 20 people being kept in that cell at one time. They still had water cells too, which I’d never heard of, where as a punishment you’d have to stand on a tiny platform in the middle of the room and they’d cover the rest of the floor with about four inches of ice cold water. So if you went to sleep or fell over for whatever reason you’d land in the water.

What was truly terrible was the execution chamber. When you walk in, you come around a corner and through a doorway, and right in front of you is a screen with a short DVD playing on it, which shows how they executed people in very graphic, full colour detail. You might want to skip this bit. They dragged them into the room, gave them a good look at the wall in front of them which was covered in everyone else’s blood, the executioner walked in behind them and shot them point blank through the back of the head, and then they shoved them through a chute and onto the back of a truck, and brought in the next one. Around the edges of the monitor, there are bullet marks all over the wall. By the time I got there I’d dropped off from the rest of the group, and I really wish I’d had someone with me. I will never forget that place. I was so upset and angry and in such shock that I felt physically ill. My heart was pounding and my stomach was burning. What I really needed was someone to grab onto, but me being me I’m too shy to grab someone I’ve known for a week. It took me probably an hour to calm down properly.

We sat outside for a few minutes while we all caught up with each other. Adrian was sitting next to me, and he kept asking “why did they do it?” over and over. Steve’s the war buff so he was fielding all the questions, but he didn’t have any answer. There is no answer.

We decided after that to have a pretty quiet afternoon, and to just wander back into town and find some lunch and a drink. So that was what we did. We looked in shop windows and found a pharmacy while we filled in an hour (we left the museum at 11am and we kinda figured that even on holiday we couldn’t really justify beer at that time of day). Then we found a café where we could sit outdoors and enjoy the sunshine. We got there at midday and left at 5pm. I really needed some time to just sit and relax and listen to the others talk and wait for Amanda’s laxatives to take effect (she’d been blocked up since we had that medieval feast in Estonia, and in the end she took three laxatives and it still took 8 or 9 hours to work, which we then heard about in detail… Adrian really wanted me to put this story on my blog. I would not usually write about other people’s bowel movements). We also all got involved in a big argument, which is still going on, because Julie decided that Ian can have another dog if he buys her a Jag. He’s now offering to take her to the Galapagos Islands instead. She really wants a Jag. He really doesn’t think he should have to fork out $50k just to get a dog. They already have three dogs but Ian wants another so they can have one of each colour. Apparently he doesn’t have a black and white one yet.

We’re all with Julie. Happy wife, happy life, Pancakes.

These are my favourites of the photos I did take:

Adrian

Amanda and Steve 

Ian and Julie

And these are the photos I took of Vilnius. They’re nothing great unfortunately. You’d think if I was only going to take two I’d at least make them good ones.

Breakfast. The square shit is egg.

Where we had lunch.  For five hours.

So today we have something like 10hrs on various trains to get to Poland. Blahhhhh….. Time to go and find someone to talk to!

By the way, what does Snoop Dogg use his umbrella for??.... For drizzle.

Latvia

I bet Pancakes will LOVE this photo of himself.

The border crossing into Latvia was so easy. We literally drove across and that was it, none of the drama of getting out of Russia and into Estonia. We did the proper count of Ian’s countries on the way back from Helsinki, and Latvia was number 100 for him. He has managed to collect the nickname Pancakes while we’ve been on tour, because when we were in St Petersburg he wanted pancakes with strawberry jam for dessert, and even though they had pancakes on the menu as a starter, the waitress refused point blank to even ask the kitchen if they could do what he wanted. So apparently he argued it for ages with the waitress, then got in a funk and wouldn’t talk to anyone at the table for an hour. So Pancakes it is. We haven’t quite figured out what we can call Julie to match him, but Jam or Mrs Pancakes work quite well in the meantime. Anyway, so when we crossed the border into Latvia, we all sang, really loudly and reasonably tunefully, Happy Pancakes Day (to the tune of Happy Birthday) to Ian. On the public bus. There were people up the front with their arms in the air, cheering. Who knows if they understood.

Riga, the Latvian capital, was really really interesting. We went for our usual orientation walk when we arrived at 330 or 4pm, through the old town, which was really pretty.

I kind of thought there wasn’t too much to see, so we didn’t rush out of bed the next morning. When we did bother to get up, I went with Kat to see what was reportedly a really big organ (hahahaha) in the Doma. Unfortunately the cathedral was being worked on and was mostly behind scaffolding. Fortunately we could still get inside, and we’d picked our time perfectly and arrived 20min before an organ concert that we hadn’t known about, which was only 5 Lats to see (which is like €7). Unfortunately when we walked into the cathedral we couldn’t actually see the organ, and we spent the next ten minutes walking around to try and find it. Fortunately when the concert started it was pretty unmissable. The organ was actually right above the door we’d come in through, and they’d put scaffolding up all around it and taken some of the pipes down. The concert was only 20min long and was really cool. That organ could just about blow you across the room, it was powerful when it really got going.

Being Monday, there were only three or four museums open, but I really only wanted to see one of them, the Occupation of Latvia museum. It was excellent. It covered from before WWII until 1991, from when they were first taken over by Russia, through the German occupation, until the end of the time they were under Soviet rule. It was a hell of a lot of reading, and we were there for at least an hour and a half, but it was so interesting. I didn’t really have any idea that Latvia only regained their independence 20 years ago, or what it would’ve been like to live under Soviet rule. It was pretty shocking stuff. It’s amazing to think that Russia could just come in and force them to hand over the ruling of their own independent country, but that’s basically what they did. It’s also amazing that when the Germans took the territory from Russia in WWII, Latvians all celebrated with the German soldiers because they thought they’d been liberated. Imagine the come-down when you realised what was actually on the cards. I am certainly having my eyes opened on this trip.

When I finally finished reading everything in the museum (Kat was sitting reading her book by that stage), we went to see the zeppelin hangars!! Sadly there aren’t any zeppelins there anymore, it’s now a great big market, which was pretty cool in itself. I bought a big container of raspberries for 1 Lat. Once I’d eaten half of them I realised the bottom half were all mouldy, but I still felt like I’d had pretty good value by then. Luckily…!

Apparently, somewhere behind the zeppelin hangars, the old Jewish ghetto is still there, which after seeing the museum I was really interested in. I’d only overheard someone talking about it though, so we couldn’t pin down where it was. That was a real shame. Ian found it, but by the time we talked to him, we were out of time.

We also went Ruski spotting.  Amanda and Steve are having a very, very bad influence on us. We’re not very good at it because we don’t see them until they’re right in front of us, and then it’s really obvious and pretty rude if you take a photo of them...

That evening, Amanda organised the crew (Kat, Adrian, Steve, Amanda, Pancakes and Julie) to the Sky Bar, which was on the 26th floor of the Radisson Blu Hotel and had panoramic views of the city and really good cocktails (and cheap… loving Eastern Europe!!).  Amanda is an excellent person to have around.  She's very funny and open and off the wall and easy to chat to, and she spends lots of time on Trip Advisor finding interesting things to do and places to go, and then organising the group of us to go.  She and Steve have been travelling all over the place for about five months now, and this is their last tour before they have to go home and get real jobs.  Hahaha...  I mean, ohh, that sucks.  The two of them balance each other perfectly, Steve is softly spoken and calm and lovely, and able to deal with Amanda's very very high energy levels without getting wound up.  He's just taken to calling me Lozza.

At least Pancakes wasn't alone on the concrete in the middle of Riga.

Amanda's feet, surrounded by Kat's feet, Adrian's feet, Steve's feet, Jane's feet,

and potentially Sue's feet.

After the Sky Bar we found a steak house for dinner, which was exactly what we’d all been wanting. The steaks were goooooood.

Then we went home to bed. That was goooooooood too.  Sleeping's a very well-respected activity around here.

Finland

One thing that Tucan Travel does that I like, is to give us a list of suggested activities for each city we visit.  As much as there was plenty to keep us occupied in Tallinn, one of the suggested activities for that city was to catch the ferry to Helsinki, because I think it's the closest point in Eastern Europe to cross from.  So, in order to tick another country off our lists and to make our lives as busy as we could, Amanda and Steve, Julie and Ian, Kat, Adrian, Tony and I all decided we'd do it.

The ferry we wanted to catch left from Tallinn at 730am, so we figured we’d get taxis and 7am and be there by 710am, and that’d be heaps of time. Wrong. They shut off ticket sales twenty minutes before the boat left. Luckily, there’s not one but five ferry companies that sail between Tallinn and Helsinki. So there was another one leaving in an hour, from a different terminal. So we ran outside and grabbed a taxi and rushed over to the next terminal. The taxi had to do two rounds, but we got all there and we all got tickets just in time to get on the boat.

Personally, I was expecting something reasonably small, with maybe a small kiosk where you could buy coffee and a bag of chips, but these ferries are HUGE. When I looked at it I thought it was about the same as the InterIslander (which sails between the North and South Islands in NZ – for all my non-NZ friends!!), but when I got on board I realised it was far bigger. There was a cafe with a breakfast buffet where we were, and I know there was at least one more café, and that’s only what was in the near vicinity.

It took three bloody hours to get across to Helsinki, during which time we basically shot the breeze. Adrian went to sleep on the table, as he tends to do. He’s 28, and he owns his own business, property managing about three apartment blocks, so something like 260 units. He works far more than what I was doing, seven days a week and far longer hours. He doesn’t employ any staff, so it’s really all on him. Of course as soon as he got here and his phone stopped ringing, he started sleeping all the time. Every time we’re not doing something productive, he’ll be nodding off. He was a bit embarrassed because he had the lowest country count of the group of us, but really he’s achieved far more than most of us have. Hear hear - from Kat.

Church.  Will research significance and proper name.

Part of the Sibelius monument.

By the time we actually got to Helsinki, it was about 11am. Amanda had organised us all into planning on being there at 930am (love you Amanda!), so 11am wasn’t tooooooooooooooo bad I guess. We found a taxi van who could take the seven of us (Tony wanted to wander off and do his own thing), paid him €50 between us, and he took us for an hour around the best sights in Helsinki. There was nothing much to write home about. I quite liked the Church in the Rock and so did Kat (she’s watching over my shoulder, can you tell?), but most of the group thought it was a bit crap. We also went to the Sibelius monument, which was fun to take photos of. It was a very funny tour, there were six cruise ships in so about 12,000 tourists in town, so the traffic was so bad that the roads were almost at a stop, and we had about five minutes to run round the tourists and take photos at each site before we got back on the bus. The driver was excellent though, he spoke really good English and he could answer our questions about the things he was showing us.

Organ, rock wall, roof supports of the Church in the Rock.

  

The town is really really really really pretty. We had lunch on the main street down by the waterfront, but it was odd because they kept telling us they didn’t have stuff that was on the menu. In the end we had the choice of about four different items, from a menu of at least ten. What we did have was really nice, but we were there at 1210pm and we were a bit puzzled that they were in this situation at this point. Ian and Adrian, our business men, were totally taken aback. I wasn’t too bothered, I know what it’s like when you get totally taken and you weren’t really expecting it and you can’t spare someone to go to the supermarket. And it was such a pretty street and so warm in the sun.

That's potentially Ian's shoulder in the very bottom left, Julie, and Adrian,

amid many many tourists.  The whole street, and all the attractions, were totally packed.

After lunch Adrian and I went to the park and ate ice cream, while Amanda and Kat shopped, and everyone else amused themselves as they saw fit. Amanda bought The Most Beautiful Pair of Shoes Ever.  I tried to steal them and Julie tried to wheedle them off her but neither of us succeeded.  Amanda's about 5 foot 10 and a half, so I probably could've fit these shoes.

We’d got Tony to check the ferry timetable for us before we got off the boat, and decided we’d aim for the 430pm sailing with Tallink to get back. So we wandered around the market at the waterfront, then spent 30min trying to find a taxi, and got to the terminal at about 315pm. We went to buy tickets, and the girl at the counter said “there is no 430pm sailing, only 530pm”. Bugger. We kinda failed on the ferry sailings all round with the whole Finland trip. Never mind, we’re all on holiday and we didn’t have anywhere we needed to be, we’d only planned on going home then so that we’d still have some time for another look around Tallinn. So we sat in the bar and drank beer while we waited for the ferry.

Bye Finland!!!

Estonia

"Look in the Kitchen", apparently.

We caught a public coach to Estonia, which meant six hours on a bus. Sweeeet times. I was sitting next to Adrian, who made the mistake of taking the window seat and not swapping when I offered, twice, and then wound up with the person in front of him lying on his lap for the last three or four hours. Poor Adrian. Neither of us is what you’d call small, so we were also sitting pretty much on top of each other the whole way. Not that I particularly minded.

That morning was the first time since we’d been in St Petersburg that it hadn’t rained. As soon as we sat down on the bus though, it started. There was a screen on the bus showing the temperature outside, and in ten minutes, it dropped ten degrees. The landscape is really flat and wide and open, and there were these enormous clouds above us. It absolutely poured and there was thunder and lightning right above us. The clouds were amazing, I could see up the side of them where they were about to meet, and they were incredibly thick.

We didn’t see the landscape between Moscow and St Petersburg because it was dark and we were theoretically sleeping, but between St Petersburg and Estonia it was just flat all the way. It’s very green and there’s lots of natural forest, unlike NZ where all the pine trees are in straight rows. Outside of the cities, it’s very untamed.

We had to cross the border from Russia to Estonia (of course) which was a bit of a palaver. When we exited Russia we had to all get off the bus, take all our luggage (hand luggage as well as packs), have it all x-rayed, and stand in line with the fifty other people off our coach to get our passports stamped. And they were not in any rush to do it. Then we loaded everything back on the bus, drove across the border to Estonia, and waited on the bus while they took all our passports away and checked them again. There was lot of time spent sitting on the bus going nowhere. The border crossing took well over an hour in the end.

It’s quite funny how the landscape changes at the border. Estonia was much more groomed looking. Lots more open spaces. It’s also not so run down as Russia, St Petersburg in particular was grimy and around the edges could’ve really used a lot of work on the buildings. Both countries have this amazing habit of leaving any building that they stop using to just rot. There are even buildings in the middle of cities with the roof caved in.

So we made it to Tallinn, the capital. There was group of eight of us that had already decided we wanted to get the ferry to Helsinki in Finland the next day (Helsinki makes me laugh every time I hear the word… any Little Britain fans will understand), so Tony took us on a city walk that night. We arrived at our hotel at about 730pm, so it was 8pm before we left to go for our walk. The old town is really beautiful, all the buildings are very prettily coloured and there are lots of winding cobblestoned streets.

Tallinn Town Square

We had a quick look at the outside of a couple of churches and took photos at the best look out spots, but then most of us suddenly decided we couldn’t wait any longer to eat. So we ate. I wound up at a medieval restaurant, having a medieval feast with Kat, Amanda and Steve, and Ian and Julie. IT WAS AMAZING. So much food. So much amazing food. I can’t even begin to describe it, I’ll just have to see if I can steal some of Amanda’s photos to put on here. I was too busy eating. The service was excellent as well, from everybody we came across in Estonia, but particularly the young guy who served us at this restaurant.

This is the photo the waiter took of Kat, Steve, Amanda, Julie, Ian and me.

Lucky Amanda and Steve are so lovely and emailed me some of their (better) photos.

Kat, Steve, Amanda, Julie, Ian, and me at Old Hansa Medieval Restaurant.

 

The Feast of a Lifetime.

Medieval brews - cinnamon beer... which was surprisingly good.

Previous three photos by Amanda and Steve Tilley 

We got home at something like 1130pm, and we decided to meet at 7am to get to the ferry terminal for Helsinki. I’ll write about that on a different blog.

Ian and Julie are amazing. Ian has worked in property development for well over twenty years, building apartment blocks and that sort of thing, and I think these days he travels something like six months of every year. He adores history and natural history, and he’s incredibly knowledgeable and interesting. He has a great way of explaining things, so that it’s really easy to follow and really interesting. Jess, you’d love him and Steve, they’re total WWII buffs. Steve served in the Australian army for over 20 years. Ian’s writing a thesis on something about the war that I can’t currently remember.

When we got to Latvia, Ian was going to be entering his 100th country. Julie’s not far behind him, this would be her 85th. Personally, it’d be my 27th, but I’m pretty good with that considering my age. They leave us in Poland, but Ian’s already been talking about the next trips he wants to do. And he wants to do at least one that I know of before Christmas.

We arrived back from Finland at about 730pm, so we thought we’d go for a wander round the old town and find something for dinner. We got a taxi to town, then found ourselves in the square, and we decided to go to a wine bar we’d spotted the previous evening for a glass of wine while we figured out what to do for dinner.

We left the wine bar around 1130pm. It was a good night. Good wine and very entertaining company. Amanda in particular is hilarious, and doesn't seem to have an off switch.

The Estonian people are really lovely. Tallinn’s become a real tourist centre, but they cope with it incredibly well. Everybody who served us at any restaurant or bar spoke excellent English and was friendly and smiled and gave lovely service for the entire time we were there. Even the poor girl at the wine bar, who the boys fancied. She was very pretty, in quite a Scandinavian way.

We should probably have gone home a little earlier that night, because the next day we had to leave the hotel at 9am to get to the bus for Latvia and I know there was at least one headache on board (not mine, Kat’s!!).

Happy 100th Ian!

This is the photo Tony took of me and Kat,

after I cropped the top half of the photo of and lightened the whole thing. 

He's a bit of a pro.