estoni-creepy

we landed at the tallinn airport, got to our hotel, and then headed into the walled city of "Old Town" Tallinn for dinner. we strolled up the huge staircase that lined the wall, and then traversed back down a steep street to enter the town square of Tallinn. like any other old (tallinn was first charted on a map in 1154, by an arab cartographer) euro city, the streets are quite narrow. the roads are cobbled stone and the buildings are fairly dark. so we get to the main square, there are outside tables abound. it appears that at 10.30 on a tuesday, most places have either closed or are getting ready to. so as we're wondering about the many places in this town square, what should we happen upon??? yep. molly malones. i think rico's right, there's one of those in every city in the world.

so we stop in there for a pint, guiness of course, and ask if their kitchen is still open... the bartender looks over to the kitchen area, see's that the lights are out and informs us that they have just closed it. oh well, where do we go now??? it appears that all the touristy trap-ish stuff are closed down in the city square. luckily for us, tomato tom (a former coworker from ATK) had lived in estonia for a year studying their economy and had given us the name of his favorite watering hole in tallinn. more of a locals place than a touristy place. so before we abandon all hope of a good meal in search of a kebab place or mickey d's (by the by, i'm beginning to think that mickey d's is taking over the world.... seriously, they're everywhere. no joke.), we decide to check out this place Hell Hunt (apparently it means little dog or something like that).

we make our way through the winding streets to this place. step inside and definitely woulda caused the juke box to stop playing if there was one. but we snipe out a table in the corner and sit down. the waitress meanders on over and, oddly enough, asks us in english what we would like. was it that obvious sweetie??? i guess it was. first question we ask, is the kitchen still open??? delightfully, she replies that it is open until 1am every night. Sweetness!!! we order a round of the bar's own micro-brew. sure, why not. and then decide on a set of local heavy apps (meatballs with spicy sauce - aka ketchup - and meat dumplings). eh... they weren't that bad, just didn't have any flavor. the taste kinda reminded me of communist buildings, just blah!!!

on our way home, we noticed a heavy fog in and around the old town. talk about scary. we almost thought that they were filming a new dracula movie here and had used dry ice to make that stuff. it really was kinda scary walking through those winding, small, cramped streets.

the next day we set off to do touristy shit. parliament, churches, high steeples, museum of occupation, laundry - hey, it's important. so we found the full-service laundry (shoot, you didn't think we'd actually spend time doing it ourselves, did you??? - plus, it only cost us $5 or something like that) and then made our way to the other destinations.

first stop, the steeple at the church of St. Olaf. this thing is really really high up in the air. it provides such a good line of sight of the city, the KGB used it for surveillance back in the day (and possibly still do, we're not sure). so we get over there, then walk up what seems to be about 18.3million steps winding clockwise, counter-clockwise, straight, backwards, up, down until we finally get to the tippy top of the square portion. luckily for us, they had ropes on both the inside and outside of the stone built staircase to help us from falling. they were also kind enough to box in the platform so there was no possible way we'd fall off. great view of the city, you can see for miles and miles up there. anyway, 10min later and we're done. on to next things... short version of the story is that we covered everything we wanted to in about 2 hours. so we head to the tourist office and inquire as to what the city of Tartu holds for us (tomato tom actually lived in tartu, it's the main university in the country). we plan to head out in the morning as soon as we get outta the hotel...

well, touring takes its tolls on your body. and although we had been surviving on 5hrs sleep for the last couple weeks, it finally caught up with us. so we didn't end up leaving the hotel and venturing out to the bus station until the butt crack of 2pm. so we got round-trip tickets for one day (returning on the dreaded 3am bus). we thought tallinn was small, shoot, tartu was even tinier. luckily they had some sort of cultural festival goin on in the town square, so we just pulled up a table at one of the outdoor restuarants and enjoyed the atmosphere. we walked around a bit, but there really wasn't much to see. they had a pretty cool lit up bridge, but besides that not too exciting. so we gathered ourselves and stopped off at the mickey d's driver-thru before jumpin on our return trip to tallinn.

our final day there, we just walked around a bit and then headed off to the ferry docks to take a boat over to helsinki... you are now welcome to cue up "on a boat (ft t-pain)" in your heads right now... cause i am