Anniversary Trip

Travels

Chizzy was able to take a Friday and a Monday off so that we could get away for a long weekend to celebrate out first year of marriage. Hooray for us. What tropical and romantic environment did we choose to visit you ask…?

Welcome to Tallinn, Estonia.

Even though that photo was intended to be funny, we really did go to Tallinn for the weekend and despite the freezing temperatures it was truly a great place and a great weekend. As some of you may know, Chizzy is a bit drawn to Eastern Europe having spent time in Russia back in the day and Estonia was a perfect place for us to combine a bit of the old Soviet in a city that is very accessible to tourists like ourselves. The photo above shows a concrete monstrosity called Linnahall that was built for the regatta events for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. I couldn’t find anything that explained why Moscow games choose Tallinn as the location for this (besides the fact that it is on the water and Moscow isn’t), but everybody does agree it is complete eyesore. It is still in use, though, because a steady stream of old people was heading in while we were there checking it out.

This is actually more representative of what Tallinn is bringing.

Although the Soviets ended their occupation in 1991, they were there long enough to leave behind a sizeable population of Russian speakers and Chizzy got to take immediate advantage of this with our cab driver. It’s cool when Chizzy speaks Russian. But even though Chizz and our Russian cabbie had a pleasant enough chat once we were inside the car, we had already been marked a mile away and the meter was set to 4x speed. Literally. It was four times cheaper on the ride back to the airport today. So even though she was being nice and pointing out the sights as we drove along, we pretty much hate her. The Soviet occupation is not looked upon fondly at all and the country identifies itself more with its Scandinavian neighbors. The Estonian language is much closer to Finnish than Russian but none of this language stuff matters a single bit because everybody spoke English.

We booked a bit nicer of a hotel than we usually do on account of the occasion and ended up with a great location in the heart of Old Town with some pretty good service. For as big of a tourist industry Tallinn is sporting, the service employees themselves were really not very friendly. They weren’t mean or rude, just completely uninterested. No hello when entering shops, no thank you when making purchases. It might have something to do with the types of tourists they are getting a reputation for attracting. We didn’t know this beforehand but apparently we were staying in the destination of choice for British bachelor and bachelorette parties. I’m sure those blokes and lasses are good enough people in general, but groups of 10 of them completely drunk stumbling around between the staggering number of bars there could get a bit annoying. Bachelor and bachelorette parties seem like a much bigger deal over here in general. We see a ton of them and the bride or groom is always dressed up in some completely ridiculous costume and the rest of the gang is usually matching in something else. We saw a really cool bachelorette theme this weekend with all the girls dressed up in what I would describe as turn of the century peasant dresses. Didn’t have the camera at this place, but it was quite a scene when they took to the dance floor.

It might have been this type of tourist clientele that resulted in a beer hall in which the waitresses were all dressed like this.

One thing Chizzy wanted to make sure of when choosing a location was that a Christmas market was going on. The main town square was used for this purpose and most of the booths were selling stuff to keep people warm. It started getting dark around 3:30 here so these photos aren’t the best.

The old town was a pretty decent sized maze of narrow cobblestone streets lined with souvenir shops, bars, cafes, restaurants, art galleries, and clothing stores. And there was a very nice portion of an old city wall that I really never got the story on.

The anniversary dinner was on Saturday night and we made reservations for the Russian restaurant connected to the hotel we were staying at. This is the second Russian restaurant I have been to now, and both of them rank in the top five of my all time favorite dining experiences. It probably helps a bit that Chizzy is there to reminisce about all the authentic dishes she sees on the menu but the atmosphere and food were just amazing. Like the one in Paris, this restaurant also featured live traditional music with the perfect amount of ‘in your face’ presence. I don’t like beets, but I love borscht at these restaurants. I don’t know how they do it.

It felt like everything here was super cheap but when we actually stopped to think about it, things were probably only slightly less expensive than they would be in America. Switzerland will mess you up. Paying $3 for a drink and $15 for a main dinner course in a nice restaurant was a really nice change for the weekend.

The colors of the buildings were great.

Stopped off at the Pood-Shop for a couple beef sticks one afternoon.

A few more sights.

And lastly, because we rarely put ourselves in our photos and this was our anniversary trip you have to put up with a bit of sappiness.