Tallinn is Callinn for You to Visit

The great city of Tallinn was our first international study abroad trip. Tallinn is the capital city of Estonia, which is 2 countries north of Lithuania. We took an overnight bus (10:30pm-8:00am) and tried to sleep on the way. I was fortunate enough to get two seats to myself, so I was able to stretch out and get some sleep and be ready to go when we arrived. We stashed our backpacks in the hostel and ventured out into old town (pictured above). Old town is the historically preserved heart of the city. It was pretty nice out, so we broke off in smaller groups and wandered around to get familiar with the area. We saw several colorful buildings, grand churches, and fancy architecture.

Here is the view from the town hall square. This area was a large open square (of cobble stone of course) with lots of outdoor seating for cafes and restaurants. There were people dressed in traditional outfits, and even some medieval wardrobes. One guy was doing a flaming nun-chucks show! There was also delicious roasted almonds that we sampled. A little further away we found several shops and souvenir stores. All of us bought some local tea for ourselves or friends back home. It started to sprinkle so we decided to get coffee nearby and hang out until we had to be back to check into our hostel rooms at 2. The place we went to was "voted best coffee in Tallinn!" The atmosphere was very rustic and relaxing. It was sort of in a cave haha. After checking into our rooms several of us went to an indoor water park, with lots of slides, pools, saunas, hot tubs, and water falls. It was the perfect way to relax after the long bus ride.
Dinner was reserved for all of us at Olde Hansa, which is an exciting medieval style restaurant. SO MUCH FOOD! They served endless courses of bread, cheese, lentils, ginger turnips, barley, beef, sausage, salmon, and apple pie. Everyone was stuffed and satisfied by the end of the event. That evening a group of us celebrated Ira's (one of the SA interns) birthday at The Butterfly Lounge.

In the morning my friend Bree and I got up to see the sunrise over the old town skyline (first picture). It was a little cloudy but still really pretty. We went for breakfast at a cafe that served delicious pancakes (and by pancakes they actually mean crepes) with fresh jam and fruit. We returned to the hostel and packed our things back on the bus. We still had free time from 10-2. Bree and I chose to rent bikes and tour beyond old town. We saw the options of tandem bikes and thought it might be fun/funny to give it a go. The rental guy was super nice about it and told us we could always bring it back and swap it out for real bikes if we wanted. Being the risk-takers we are, of course we went for the tandem.....and failed miserably. I think it was a combination of never riding tandem, having unbalanced bags on our shoulders, and cobblestone that defeated us. I think we are mostly going to blame the cobblestone. Needless to say, we quickly turned in the bike for 2 new ones. Best decision we ever made. With our new wheels we set out for Pirita, a district on the outskirts of Tallinn. We found the Olympic Yachting Center which was the event locations for the 1980 Olympic games in Moscow. We also saw a convent. On the return ride we went through Kadriorg, another district of Tallinn. It was basically one very large park where we saw a swan pond, fancy buildings and museums, as well as the national song festival grounds, where in 1988 the singing revolution took place as a massive musical demonstration against Soviet rule. (pictured below)

 

After returning our bikes we set out for the market to buy our handmade goods from old grannies. Most of the items being sold were knitted hats, socks, sweaters, or scarves. I purchased a really unique hat that has a scarf attached that wraps around my neck in one big knitted mass of awesome.