Sabbatical, Estonia

After our great experience in Finland we were ready for more camping in Estonia. Yeah I started with the verb hope so you are probably already getting the picture that it wasn't that great of a place for camping. I won't go in great lengths about it but the quick summary is that it was the difference you'd expect between an ex soviet union industrial place and scandinavian wilderness. The weather was definitely wett, therefore we quickly moved to a hotel in oldtown Talinn, where we enjoyed a slower paced and more tourism oriented trip. The medieval town is gorgeous and its links to the Hansa are pretty obvious, a lot of the architecture reminded me of medieval Germany.

There was quite a kitsch side to the numerous attempts at recreating a medieval atmosphere, though we ate some pretty good "medieval" food :).

We went around town probably 10 times discovering new details, new old buildings, new viewpoints. It was fun and relaxing, only difficulty was which bar to stop next :).

On the last day we headed towards the NW coast of the country to visit an old soviet submarine base city. The guide was advertising sights that you would expect from old soviet military architecture, lots of bare concrete, ghost town etc... What we found was an ordinary little city that had done some effort to bring life to its crappy assets. Our guess was that they had read the lonely planet and decided they didn't want that kind of tourism anymore :). The nicest sight of the day was a stop we made by a small natural park in the forest by an old water mill.

The next day we were taking the boat back to Helsinki to fly to Tel Aviv.
More pictures of Talinn here.