Estonia is cool. Literally!

Hi all! We (Morgan (or Morgon as he was known), Anecia, Alun and I) went to Tallinn, Estonia on the weekend just past. We were very lucky with the weather with it only going down to zero degrees (although Nec & I were in full ski gear with snow boots!). We got there on Friday evening, left Sunday and apparently the temperature dropped to minus 12 degrees on the Monday! Friday evening we arrived late, after a somewhat short flight (compared to the one that got us to London last week!) and we were hungry. After checking into the hostel, the guy there told us we'd be able to find some food at a place around the corner called Hell Hunt. We found it and were surprised to be able to get served food (it was after all midnight), and what great food it was! (except for the pickles with honey that Alun ordered...) This was very much an expat hangout and as we were to discover over the next couple of days, the Old Town was basically full of tourists only.

There are sort of 2 parts to Tallinn, the Old Town and the New Town. The New Town looks basically like any city, so we only looked around the Old Town (which is where our hostel was conveniently located). The Old Town is full of awesome old buildings, with highlights being the Alexander Nevski Cathedral, and the remnants of the fortified wall with towers. Be sure to check out some of our choice photos here.

The food is the other interesting thing of note in Tallinn. At lunch one day morgan ordered Pig's ears - fortunately for me, they had cut them up into strips (I don't think I could handle eating it if it was ear-shaped) - but they were quite tasty.. just imagine the taste of pork crackling = YUM! For dinner on Saturday night we went to this medieval restaurant called The Olde Hansa.
You can check out the menu from the website, but I stuck to "edible" foods ie beef steak, whereas morgan chose bear/elk/wild boar sausages, which I have to admit were quite tasty. Alun also ordered some dried elk meat (like beef jerky) which was fairly disgusting ;) The waiters/waitresses were all dressed up in medieval style clothing and talked as such. eg the waitress we had came to give us our cutlery and said "some tools to work with later", and when I asked her what sort of meat I would find in the "thick meat stew" she replied "oh, different meats, all in big chunks" to which I replied "no, what type of meat" and she said "oh, meat of animals from the forest of course..." riiiight. She basically kept this up all night which was rather funny/weird. When explaining what we had ordered, she would say "oh, and these are veges from the forest"etc etc. The other thing about this restaurant is that they supposedly don't run on any electricity, well at least not in the 3-storey restaurant bit. They just use candles, so it was all rather dark.. my theory is that it was to disguise the food ;)

Basically all we did was walk around the Old Town and take lots of photos, so there's not much else to tell! We did walk down to the port on Sunday which was half frozen. Morgan wanted to walk on it, but I wouldn't let him. We did however all slide around on the frozen lake in this park where they had made all these cool slides out of ice for the kids. Speaking of ice, we also drank local vodkas out of glasses made out of ice! at the Ice Bar too, where Morgan also tried the local Vana Tallinn; a bottle of which Alun and Morgan brought home. I also bought some locally made chocolate by Kalev which was delish!

Well I hope everyone is well, and send us some emails will you!! Btw, I've changed my email address to esther.johnston@gmail.com. See ya - esther (aka Estev). Photos

London aint so bad

Well, we're here! We arrived in London 2 nights ago, the flight was long but somehow we made it. When we arrived the local time was 7:30pm but our origin time was 2:30am so we were fairly stuffed. It was really cool because Steve & Larissa and Anecia came to meet us at the airport and took us back to Alun & Anecia's place who are letting us stay with them for a while in Shepherds Bush (yes I know, funny name). It was also really awesome to find a warm bed waiting for us.. these guys are tops. They have looked after us so much.

So yesterday Esther and I (still quite jetlagged) checked out Shepherd's Bush and then took the tube to Oxford Circus station and walked around central London and checked out some shops etc, it was a fairly uneventful day which concluded with us crashing again at about 5pm. Today we got up, I was starving so we went down to the local all day breakfast for some tasty fried treats. Next we headed off to the Borough Markets. This place is awesome. There was just about every kind of food for sale here including some of the weirder things like Wilderbeast, Donkey, Impala, Rabbit, Deer?? So we walked around there and tried a lot of stuff. Next on the agenda was the Tower Bridge, aka London bridge which was looking picturesque with BLUE SKY and SUN (e: all those who said we'd see no sun .. ha!) in the background and then onto Kensington Palace / Hyde Park to try and find a squirrel. Not many to be found, but we will return again. Tonight we had a feast of cheese and donkey salami that we bought at the markets and then Anecia cooked us some beef and couscous and we had the "worlds best" brownies for dessert (my mum's are actually better). So yes, a good day.

We have just been looking into Tallinn in Estonia where we are heading next weekend,, apparently they are predicting maximums of -6 and minimum -11.. so we're a bit terrified about that.. Anyway 'till next time - Morgan

A few photos from London so far

We Stopped in Bangkok

After saying goodbye to our families and trying to watch a bit of cricket in the departure lounge, we boarded our flight to Bangkok. The flight was very good and the aeroplane and food was top notch. Our first day in Bangkok yesterday we did some tourist stuff that we missed out on last time like going to the Dusit Zoo (and the worlds only now missing Albino Barking Deer) and checking out the Dusit Palace grounds and surrounding exhibitions. The palace grounds had lots to see but we were apparently underdressed and so Esther and I had to wear all sorts of scarves and cloths to cover ourselves - once I even had to wear some enormous puffy blue pants, which I decided to wear around my armpits to emphasise the ridiculousness of the situation. Oh and also no shoes and no cameras, so we don't have much to show for most of that day.

We also viewed one of the many exhibitions of the King of Thailand's photos. He also obviously thinks he is also the King of Photography, but he is not. There were all sorts of "interesting" photos of things like irrigation. The caption below the irrigation photo was this "His Majesty once said "I have had an interest in irrigation since early childhood" ". Havn't we all? Another humourous caption outlined how the king had saved people from a flood by taking "excelent photographs" so the engineers could understand what the problem was. Pure genious. We also went on the wildest Tuk Tuk ride of my life, I think this guy wasn't too happy with my negotiated price so he was trying to kill us, but we emerged unscathed at the other end.

This morning we have been down to MBK again and walking around some markets. We managed to find the filthiest and cleanest places in Bangkok and they are almost on the same block. This afternoon we're going to catch the skytrain down to Patpong to the night markets / red light district and see what happens there on a Tuesday night.

Check out a few of our Bangkok photos here

1 day until liftoff...

yesterday was a bit of a sad day for us - no longer can we say "come over to my cribb", as we moved out of our cribb street house. We also had to say goodbye to our cool neighbours Emanuel and Jill and to my awesome little mitsubishi mirage that I've been driving for the past 4 years :(

I have also discovered that I have muscles! we have been doing so much lifting and moving this past week - we thought we'd have a couple of relaxing days just before leaving... but it is not so. This morning we took our last load of stuff out to a shed on morgan's parent's property and now we have arrived home to start our final task = pack. Hopefully this won't be too time-consuming, I've already done a "trial" run and now I just have to work on culling my luggage back to meet the 20kg limit!

Tomorrow we leave for Bangkok where we spend 4 nights. Then we fly into Heathrow where our friends Anecia and Alun, and my brother Steve & his wife Larissa will be waiting for us :) So far the first weekend we'll be going to a travel show and then the following weekend (we're very excited about this) Anecia & Alun have arranged for us all to fly to ..... Estonia! Yeh! How exciting (I am going to be sooooo cold). I have already packed my ski suit... and will be wearing that proudly around ;)

So stay tuned for the next updates! - esther :)