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Adventures
9/8/17 07:33We are back in Helsinki, after three days in Tallinn, which is an utterly delightful city. We were brilliantly located in the old town--about ten minutes walk from almost everything (including a couple of quite good restaurants and one that was just stellar). It rained off and on on the ferry over from Helsinki (the cloud formations are spectacular over the gulf of Finland, lemme tell you) and on our first afternoon in Tallinn; Eileen Gunn, cursed by the Gods of Travel, did not meet us in Helsinki, but wound up flying direct to Tallinn, where she joined us in the world's most adorable mitteleuropean apartment. Shawna McCarthy and Ellen Datlow were staying right across the street, so we dined with them; afterward Shawna and I wandered in the off-and-on rain, getting the lay of the land. Curiously, at about 1am there was a crowd of youngish club-goers under our window (like 30+ people) being instructed in something by a highly gesticulatory fellow who was exhorting them to who knows what (afterward they all filed back into the club). I will never know.
Sunday it poured buckets. We found a delightful cafe for breakfast (good enough that we went back the next morning) where the porridge was delicious and the coffee excellent. Fortified--and despite the rain-- we walked the walls and climbed towers, went to the Church of St. Nicholas to see the Danse Macabre there, wandered a little more, then Shawna and Ellen and I went off to dinner with Mem Mormon and her husband at Olde Hansa, a medieval restaurant where we ate boar sausage and elk cutlets and rosy pudding and were generally made merry.
Monday we loaded into a van driven by Our Guide Yvgeny (aka JJ) a lovely Masters candidate in business organization who was our guide on a drive to Narva (a city across the river from Russia on the eastern border) with scenic stops at a coastal fortress (Toolse), a Soviet ghost town, and a Russian tank. We didn't get back to Tallinn until about 8, but went to a restaurant called Farm, specializing in farm-to-table Estonian cuisine, which was amazing. The most high-profile was the spiced Baltic sprat ice cream on a stick--a starter we shared that was improbably delicious--but the baked goat cheese was amazing, and the game cutlets (red deer meatballs) were wonderful. Too full for dessert, we rolled back to the apartment... to learn that Viking had cancelled our ferry to Helsinki for the next morning.
Obviously we found a way around that, but perhaps that's a topic for another day?
Sunday it poured buckets. We found a delightful cafe for breakfast (good enough that we went back the next morning) where the porridge was delicious and the coffee excellent. Fortified--and despite the rain-- we walked the walls and climbed towers, went to the Church of St. Nicholas to see the Danse Macabre there, wandered a little more, then Shawna and Ellen and I went off to dinner with Mem Mormon and her husband at Olde Hansa, a medieval restaurant where we ate boar sausage and elk cutlets and rosy pudding and were generally made merry.
Monday we loaded into a van driven by Our Guide Yvgeny (aka JJ) a lovely Masters candidate in business organization who was our guide on a drive to Narva (a city across the river from Russia on the eastern border) with scenic stops at a coastal fortress (Toolse), a Soviet ghost town, and a Russian tank. We didn't get back to Tallinn until about 8, but went to a restaurant called Farm, specializing in farm-to-table Estonian cuisine, which was amazing. The most high-profile was the spiced Baltic sprat ice cream on a stick--a starter we shared that was improbably delicious--but the baked goat cheese was amazing, and the game cutlets (red deer meatballs) were wonderful. Too full for dessert, we rolled back to the apartment... to learn that Viking had cancelled our ferry to Helsinki for the next morning.
Obviously we found a way around that, but perhaps that's a topic for another day?