for the rest of the trip, our mode of transportation is a private touring bus. this enables us to explore the countries in more depth and visit places unreachable via public transportation. we have a private driver named griss or something like that. last name bear … grizzly bear. ba-dum. he is a fine driver. helpful with the luggage. poor guy waits for us everywhere we visit and whiles away the time by playing suduko.

we woke up early to get started on a full day of visiting different sites in Latvia and Lithuania. i didn’t sleep very well all night. had some crazy dreams. that often happens when i am sleeping away from my bed. all i know is that my sister should watch out for the dragon. i also got the crazy idea to get my family’s coat of arms tattooed on my shoulder. guess my mind is playing with the medieval scenery. my family coat of arms is three beer bottles at a diagonal on one side and the other side is a bottle opener.
Continue reading »

today was the second and last day in riga. no tour schedule and we were free to do what we wanted to do. we decided to modify a walking tour offered by the guide book to incorporate some of the other sights we missed on the tour yesterday. in the evening, we would check off the list a latvian dinner and sampling black magic, the local strange liquor.

since nothing was scheduled, we slept in a bit and woke up just in time to grab breakfast at the hotel. it wasn’t raining but the cloud cover suggested it might later.

we made our way over to the swedish gate, which is a gate built in the 17th century and is the only gate remaining of the old city wall. the picture of the gate, featured on the right, is in most guide books and postcards.
Continue reading »

maybe the jet lag made waking up at 4:45am easy although i would think i have acclimated to the time zone already, but whatever it was, waking up wasn’t very difficult.  we were up so early that we were able to watch some of the democratic convention live from the states.  the hotel provided breakfast and then the taxi took us to the bus station in tartu.  we boarded a greyhound-esque bus and began the 4.5 hour ride to riga in latvia. 

what was difficult was trying to stay awake on the bus.  the 4:45am wake up was hitting me, and as i forced myself to write about tartu, i fell asleep and quickly woke up to see that i had fallen asleep while pressing the hyphen key. i had a long line of dashes.  good thing i didn’t press the backspace

key.  the ride through the countryside was just about the same as the trek from tallinn to tartu except the bus made stops in quaint towns along the way so it was interesting to see the small towns with the big old world churches. 

we arrived in riga around 11am next to the central market.  the central market is hard to miss because it is five huge zepplin hangars.  no time to explore yet as another small bus was taking us to the hotel irina, which wasn’t very far away, but the ride seemed really long. 
Continue reading »

oh, it was tough waking up this morning at 7am.  i could have slept another few hours, but we had to get up to grab breakfast and head to the bus station.  our next stop in the tour was tartu where the largest and oldest university (ulikooli in estonian) is located.  tartu is also considered the spiritual part of estonia.  many of the events important to the national awakening occurred in tartu, such as the creation of the flag, the first Estonian song festival and the first Estonian language newspaper.
Continue reading »

the good weather ran out. we woke up to rain, wind and low 60s. a tour of old town was scheduled for the morning and then we had the rest of the afternoon to do whatever.

we met the group and tour guide in the lobby of the hotel. the tour guide was a nice old lady who spoke very good english. we meandered through the cobblestone streets and went in various places to have a look around. prior to the trip, i had read the information about the various places in the guide book, but i hadn’t taken the time to locate them in the town. now that the guide was pointing out the places, i realized i had walked right by them the day before.
Continue reading »

leaving helsinki was easy, physically and mentally. physically, the boat ride lasted about an hour and a half. it had a bar, restaurant, deck, and the seating resembled an airplane. i found a seat next to a window and wrote the entire time. mentally, don’t get me wrong, i thoroughly enjoyed helsinki. it was a very beautiful town, safe, super easy to navigate and get around, and the people were very friendly. however, the one thing that helsinki was missing was the medieval setting that awaited in tallinn.
Continue reading »

after suomenlinna, we wandered through the market square

and i bought a shot glass to add to my collection. we also walked over to the superseacat to buy our ticket to tallinn, which was 30 euros.

by this time, i was starving and would have eaten anything. we decided to head back to the roobert street to eat and sit on the sidewalk street with free wi-fi at the dtm bar. the dtm bar was having a dancing diva night with some drag queen hosting the event. while we were sitting there, they had scaffolding outside the entrance holding up a platform where they would dance and greet the crowd.
Continue reading »

today we woke up and headed to the market square to jump on a boat to the UNESCO world heritage suomenlinna sea fortress.

for 4 euros, we boarded a small ship to take us to the islands. the trip out of the harbor provided a great photo opp. of the most common photo of the lutheran cathedral with the colorful buildings in front of it as well as the huge ships sitting in the harbor. the sky was very dramatic with sporadic low hanging clouds, but the sun was pushing through them. it was a cool 65 degrees. perfect weather to be outside exploring the sea fortress.
Continue reading »

it was very easy traveling from the airport to the city to the hostel. course, you have to keep your eyes open for clues, understand maps, ask people questions, and follow others who might know the way. even if you don’t possess those qualities, you would be fine anyways. i have yet to run into a person who doesn’t know some english, and the transportation system is very good.

i slept about four hours on the plane, and overall, we felt pretty alert and ready to explore the city. Helsinki is an incredibly easy city to explore. it is flat, surrounded by water on three sides (so you can’t just keep walking into oblivion), and extremely compact. i would say about 80% of everything you want to see is either cramped into a very small area city area or on a surrounding island. on our first day, we saw amazing architecture, sculptures, churches, sipped coffee on terraces, began wrapping our english geared minds around the street names, and met up with john’s friend, katri. we were very fortunate in having the sun come out since the weather reports had scheduled rain. it sprinkled a little at the sibelius monument, but the whole day was a cool 65 degrees and partly cloudy.
Continue reading »

in this day in age, airplane food is a rarity. i vaguely remember being served airplane food. so, when i am given airplane food, i feel like it is a reward or a benefit for flying on foreign carriers. we dined on minaturized salad, pasta with meatballs, tiny water, tiny fork, tiny toothpick, tiny everything. it was adequate and i was eyeing john’s plate for seconds. along with the food, we are served several drink services, given a pillow and blanket, and have a duty free cart where we can buy tax free items.
Continue reading »