Day 106: July 20 - FINLAND - Helsinki, ESTONIA - Tallinn Accommodation: Tallinn Backpackers I tried to sleep in as long as I could today after the extra awake time forced upon me, and I had no plans after seeing what I wanted to yesterday, so I stored my bags and went straight for the net cafe, which was in fact a decent cafe with about 8 internet terminals. Surprisingly it's hard to find a net cafe that serves a good cafe coffee. I scored a yummy Finnish-style mocha and a cake to go along with a couple of hours of [View Full Entry]

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Text coming soon. [View Full Entry]

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So were the hell is Estonia I hear you thinking? And why would anyone want to go there?! Estonia is on the Baltic Sea, just below Finland, with Sweden to the west and Russia to the east. In 1991 Estonia broke free from Communist rule and in 2004 its tiny population of 1.4 million joined the EU. I was keen to visit Estonia's capital Tallinn, hoping to find a quaint little city, off the Eurail tourist trail, that was undiscovered, quaint and just a little bit different. I got all that and a whole lot more! Tallinn is modern and progressive, [View Full Entry]

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when i got to tallinn i found the hostel and did the other usual stuff had a look around then went back to watch the world cup the first few nights were priddy quiet and i was thinkin of flyin to england till i could wait for my flight instead i ended up stayin and "workin" at the hostel didnt get payed but was able to stay for free.. many nights spent at club hollywood and other bars getting slightly drunk and stagering home good times.. the moment of the trip was john and tim havin a drink called braindamage and [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody, It was the weekend before I left for Russia, so I took the ferry across the Gulf of Finland to Estonia. It is one of the countries under Soviet domination for so many years. They are proud of their independance. I arrived on a Friday afternoon. In the other countries I found that booking a hotel in advance didn't work. Most of them lie about the distance from the train station--a ten minute walk is more like 25 and I would pass lots of places on the way that would have been just fine. So I thought that a [View Full Entry]

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Tallinn!! [View Full Entry]

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Well first of all I'd like to say a big THANK YOU! to Dana who paid for this tour as my birthday present. I think its one of the best birthday presents I've ever had since I had so much fun!! Our Scandinavian Escapade party tour started with Dana, Amy and I meeting our tour group at Gatwick airport. We found the tour guide who was in a slight panic as the airline had issed all the tickets but had somehow forgotten mine! Luckily he came back a few minutes later and all was sorted so off we went to check [View Full Entry]

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There’s something disconcerting about standing beside an empty baggage carrousel in a strange country without your luggage. Worse is the ominous sound of silence as the belt grinds to a halt. Welcome to Estonia! Our adventure began at Manchester Airport. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the woman behind the ticket collection counter. “I’m afraid your flight has been cancelled. But don’t worry; you’ve been booked on another one. Finnair to Helsinki, then a connecting flight to Tallinn. You’ll actually arrive half and hour earlier than you would’ve done!” With the deal thus sweetened, we headed off to check our bags in. “You [View Full Entry]

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hellllllllllloooooooooooooooooooooo dudes and dudettes, Yesterday we woke up at the brink of dawn to catch the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn, Estonia. It looked like a cheesey hotel with VLTs, bingo, crazy bar with a dance floor and the token drunk finnish man. Pretty standard boat trip, so let us move on. We arrived in Tallinn around noon, checked in and then beelined for the nearest ATM. This particular ATM sucked up one of our tripmates debit card, which was pretty dumb. We ended up waiting around for an hour to find out that the bank could not give her her [View Full Entry]

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Tallinn was seemingly unreachable for me. Something always prevented me from getting there. Eventually I reached it, albeit 4th time lucky. In the past 2 weeks I have tried 3 times to get to Tallinn and have failed for each of those 3 times. The first time was the clostest of the 3 as I and 2 friends actually went to Helsinki in order to get the ferry to Tallinn. However, when we got there we heard of another ferry that was cheaper and travelled there faster so we went around the ports of Helsinki looking for that. Eventually we found [View Full Entry]

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