thitherward

In order to travel by land as much as possible, my original plan was to take the train from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, Finland, and then take the ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm, Sweden. However, the train to Helsinki has not run for several years now and it was recommended to me by one of my first CS hosts, Liz, to visit Tallinn, Estonia, rather than Helsinki. Furthermore, I couldn’t justify the cost of land travel to Göteborg, Sweden, ($125 ferry, $60 commuter train from Stockholm, 20 hours) compared to the cheap airfare that is available through much of Europe ($200 airfare, 2 hours), especially when I knew that I wouldn’t see any of the terrain when traveling at night and that it only would take about 5 hours to cross Swedish land from east to west.

So, to sum up, I found myself roaming the narrow streets of Old Town Tallinn for two days before my flight to Göteborg on the west coast of Sweden. Honestly, I could have stayed only one day/night in Tallinn and still seen all of the Old Town. It’s a quaint little area that has kept it’s medieval architecture but is such a tourist spot that one person described it accurately as “medieval disneyland”. It was picture-perfect and very comfortable for tourists. I’m sure the rest of Estonia is nothing like it.

Walking around Old Town Tallin, you can hear the seagull’s calls echo against the stone walls and cobbled roads. I followed the sound to the edge of the water at a quiet end of the port, just 10 minutes walk from Old Town.

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