Goodbye to the Baltics, Tata from Tartu and Tallinn

Estonia was our third and final Baltic country. It shares many similarities with it's neighbour across the sea; Finland. With a very pro European outlook Estonia has embraced both independence and EU membership. Our stay took us to the university town of Tartu Estonia's second city, which is also known to many as the true representation of Estonia.

Due to a mishap with the train we didn't get in to Tartu untill about 11pm.This being St Paddy's we were desperate to get out for a pint of guiness. Luckily with a map and the fact that our hostel was dead in the city centre we managed to find one of the 2 late night bars in Tartu. The guinness was much  appreciated!!

Tartu was  relaxing to walk around and we spent the time just wondering and looking at the buildings and enjoying being in a new country. One of the highlightsfor me was spotting a statue that I recognised of Oscar Wilde and another writer that sits in the centre of Galway. I learnt later that this writer is Edvard Vilde and one of Estonia's most celebrated authors and that he and Wilde were contempories and possibly met. It was no wonder that I recognised the statue as the Galway statue is from the same mould!!


Other highlights included making a wish on the angel bridge and feeding the ducks!!!!



Tallinn

After a couple of days we headed to the capital Tallinn.We had both been looking
forward to Estonia's capital and we weren't disappointed.Unfortunately at this point we were both suffering with terrible colds and needed a couple of days of orange juice and warmth. We did manage in this time to watch cool runnings and relive our bobsleighing adventures!!

Our first meal in Estonia we were pointed to the 3 dragons which was a medieval restaurant with no electricity. Here we tried Elk soup, elk and boar pies, boar sausages and had hot wine. It was all absolutely delicious and as we were to learn pretty reasonable for Tallinn. We alsogot to fish forgherkins ina barrel. I rocked at getting them, but Adam not so much!!!



The old square in Tallinn was beautiful and the old town two layers. It was lovely to walk around on the cobbled streets and just admire all of the buildings. We ventured to the puppet museum which looked pretty cool. It lived up to our expectations with puppets such as Max the dog flea and the friend cucumber. You even got to make some of them move!!!We also visited a pharmacy on the main square which has been a working apothecary since 1422 (and probably longer) whichcontained different things they used to treat illnesses throughout the ages. These included woodlouse infusion and burnt hedgehog!!(Not cool)The pharmacy was free and it was pretty cool to see amongst the museum items a counter with calpol, paracetemol and pro plus!!!






We also visited the occupation museum and although parts were interesting, we both felt that the other museums in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia were better and all considerably cheaper.I'd recommend it to someone who was only visiting Estonia, but if you were travelling to all of the Baltics there are better ones.


We went on free tour of Tallinn and our guide was fab. She told us loads about the current situation of Estonia and different stories about occupation. Estonia, on the 27th March 2013 has now been an independent country for the most amount of time (since 1991!!) Living in Britain we really don't appreciate how lucky we are to have had a fairly democratic system in our life times!My favourite occupation story was the TV story! During the USSR times people could only watch USSR TV and western influences were banned. In Tallinn they were lucky as due to the close distance with Finland they could pick up Finnish TV. It was announced that a Finnish channel was going to premier the porn film Emmanuel so peopleflocked to Talinn to watch the film with their friends and family. Thats right they sat down and watched pornography together. As well asthe watching of Emmanuel being a protest against this lackof freedom of expression 9 months later there was a baby boom. The Soviets blamed it on a power cut!!

Our last night in Tallinn we spent in a lovely Italian wine bar to celebrate Adam's 25th Birthday!It was delish!!

Finland next!!