Tallinn...cool Old Town, and a seriously interesting museum...

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Tallinn, the last stop in our little Baltic excursions...and next stop will already be Russia for a good two weeks.



We started to explore the Old Town after arriving just before dinner time. Few drunk people around on the way, but a pretty cute Old Town. We stopped by a restaurant highly recommended by tripadvisor. The advise was...if you do not hold a reservation, forget about it...ok, we were lucky, they just had a table for us!



So first night, and first Estonian dinner...Tiffany went classic...creamy tomato soup...and Leslie and I went on elk meat borsh, some cool smoke salmon...and a pretty nice lamb...nice food!



As we start to do quite a lot lately, we had a lazy morning. The free tour was not going to start before 12pm, and I had few errands to run in the morning...



Eli was a truly fun guide for our packed free tour. Not much of a funny crowd, but a truly funny guide who took us around the Old Town for a good 3 hours....enjoying this famous medieval fortified city.



One more time, Tallinn is a completely different city than Riga or Vilnius. From the outside, I was led to believe before visiting the little Baltic States that these three were very similar. Well, the countryside look very much alike, flat and with a lot of forests....but the cities...they have not much in common between the three of them. This made it for few very interesting days of going around, in countries that have for the last 22 years, enjoyed their longest period of independence...ever!



We follow our little tour by a late lunch of schnitzel in an empty restaurant. This is pretty normal as this is the end of the tourist season...and it was 3pm! We than made our way to the Seaplane Hangar. Note to any visitor, they have from time to time huge cruise ships in town for the day...5,000 tourists in such a city on a single day, must simply be a nightmare day, for any visitor...or any tourist...



The Seaplane Hangar museum is a brand new, top modern and top quality museum...and has won many accolades since the opening. We spent a good two hours there...there is not only the huge building, but a submarine dating back to 1937, the oldest we have ever visited. We start to have quite a deeper knowledge of submarines, having visited a Second World War one in Portland, and the atomic one in New York....it's impressive how those improved in just a few years....for the need of the Second World War as well as the Cold War.



The best part of the museum, is that at the end, they have all those interactive "toys" for the kids...and for the grown up as well....we could have spent way more time here!



Our bus to St Petersburg was not going to leave till midnight. So we spent an evening at the cinema...when it comes to culture in the evening, next two stops will be way better!



The bus was an easy affair all the way to St Petersburg. I have to admit, this is the part of the trip I knew I was not going to like, but due to an empty bus, it was way easier than expected. We had many stops till the border...but less than 10 passengers left at the border. Huge protection wires all over the place...but an easy crossing...they didn't even bother going throug our bags. As a result, we arrived an hour ahead of schedule in St Petersburg.



Guess the next entry will be one of a kind...and a sunny one too!

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