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