"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
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.
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