Tallinn

En route to Tallinn I spent much of my time staring out the window. The Baltic countryside is beautiful, forested and green with little brick or stone cottages and farmhouses dotting the landscape. Farmers were harvesting in their fields. Latvia is the Baltic state with the largest stork population and as we drove through we saw stork posts and nests all over the place. As we crossed the border into Estonia we were greeted by a stork walking along the roadside next to the signpost.

When we got to Tallinn, we headed straight to the Old Town. Each Baltic state is especially famous for one particular type of architecture in their capital city’s Old Town - Vilnius for Baroque, Riga for Art Nouveau and Tallinn for Medieval. So most of the buildings were old brick with crenellated towers, wild spires and it all looked…well, Medieval.

The streets were cobblestone and the base of most buildings was gray stone topped by brick. People in medieval costumes advertised sweet almonds, ginger cookies and other good-smelling food items. We stopped in several stores trying to find my flag, but they were all very expensive. We looked at many houses and when our inadequate lunch of power bars, pretzels and gummi bears was no longer sustaining us, we had…PIZZA in the main square. The pizza was mediocre and also very expensive.

After we left the restaurant, we found this cute little medieval shop with handmade crafts, soap and hand ground traditional spices. We continued our walking tour and eventually made it to the Danish king’s garden. We also passed two archery stands on our way there. This building was also very medieval complete with a spiked barbican and dried up moat. Inside was a large platform with a viewing terrace and a long line of pointed arches making a gallery. It was the perfect picture of a 13-14th century place! We took a few more pictures, got a flag 7 a magnet and raced to the bus station for our overnight bus to St. Petersburg.

I have great pictures, but will have to add them from Irkutsk!