Estonia

    When I left my host family, I took a train from Tampere to Helsinki with my friends Emily and Tristan. This was my first time being on an actual train that wasn't just a metro train. The ride was about two hours and we chatted the trip away. At one point Tristan's infamous deck of United States trivia playing cards came out and that took the last third of the trip. I learned two new card games (that I would have no idea how to play now) and one of them was Finnish. We got stuck on the way through the Finnish game but luckily the Finnish man who was assigned to the same table as us said something to help us through...okay, help me through.
    We got to the Helsinki main train station and were quickly attacked by three other scholarship students on the platform. We crammed ourselves into a taxi and were soon on our way to the harbor to take the ferry across the Baltic to Finland's southern neighbor, Estonia. Throughout the morning there had been the wondrous feeling of knowing we'd be in another country that same day.

    We met up with the rest of the students who were going to Estonia in the harbor of Helsinki and we boarded! When I say 'Baltic Sea ferry', I'm not talking about a ferry that can hole ten cars. More like hundreds. The ferries that cruise the Baltic are more like ocean liners than ferries. They have hotels, casinos, malls, restaurants, and just tons to do. We rode the Tallink Star, which was huge, but not as grand as the ones that would cruise to Stockholm, Sweden, for example. But woah. 

(This isn't my photo.)

    The ferry ride was going to be another two hours across the Bay of Finland to Tallinn, Estonia, the capital city. We hung around on the back deck and just took in the vastness of just this small part of the Baltic. People know that there's a Mediterranean way of life, but there is just as much of a Baltic way of life in Northern Europe. 

    Getting off the boat into Estonia was a cool moment. We had all become so used to Finland, and it wasn't foreign to us anymore, but now that we were in a new country, it was an awesome feeling. We said that Estonia felt so exotic to us because it was a new place to us, with another language (similar to Finnish though) and knowing the fact that it used to be part of the Soviet Union just about twenty years ago showed us how progressive this country actually was. We also had the chance to be tourists again as we'd been seeing Finland as residents. 

    We walked to our hotel to drop our backpacks off and then we met up with four Estonians in the lobby who were YFU volunteers and had been on exchange in the last few years. They were going to give us a tour of the old town of Tallinn. In the rainy weather we walked about twenty minutes throught the new downtown area to one of the gates in the medieval walls that surrounded old town. We basically walked around and stopped here and there for different stories and myths about different places in these old parts. We went to a few lookouts at the top of the hill in the middle of the city, went into some churches, and for the greatest view of Tallinn, we went up to the top of the tallest church's steeple, which happens to also be the tallest steeple in Northern Europe. 

The Russian Church. After I took this, some guy told me to put my camera away...  woops.

We climbed to the top of this one! Only to the top of the white part though.
(Fun fact: hundreds of years ago this cathedral caught on fire and it was so bright that it could be seen from Helsinki across the Baltic.)

A famous door in Tallinn, which is on the cover of a book I know of. 

    The rest of that afternoon was full of more touring until we went to dinner. When we finished, we headed to the 'Peppersack', a medieval restaurant that served traditional Estonian food. The waiters and waitresses even dressed in medieval clothes! (Well, Tallinn is said to be the best kept medieval town in Europe.) That night we crammed into one hotel room before actually dispersing to our rooms to sleep to hang out for hours.

 The next morning we ate at the hotel's buffet for breakfast and then met two of the Estonians we had met the day before. We had the rest of the day until the boat left to go off to anywhere in the city by ourselves (we stayed in one group though). They both had been exchange students this last year in Ecuador and Colombia, so they definitely knew the exchange life too. We first went to a shopping mall where we went to a Kalev chocolate shop, which is an Estonian chocolate company. Let's just say that my life took a turn in the right direction when I tried the grapefruit dark chocolate... oh my. Across from this shop was an Estonian handicraft shop (there are so many handicraft shops in Tallinn that I saw) where I picked up some souvenirs to take home to my family. After, we went to a supermarket in that same shopping center to try a sweet Estonian creme filled chocolaty half-frozen something or other. I'm not too sure what it was but it turns out that something that could be a dessert is actually a breakfast food. So then we were off in the city again on our own. We took the tram to go see Kadriorg palace, which was the palace of Catherine I of Russia. We meandered our way through the grounds of the palace which were filled with very ornate royal gardens and fountains with statues. 

Our new Estonian friends, Madli and Liisa.

The back of the palace.

       

    From Kadriorg Palace, we walked along the coast, saw a famous statue and then we headed to Tallinn's giant outdoor concert dome where huge concerts are held. We went up on the steps where massive choirs perform and had our own little concert, of the American national anthem...in Tallinn, Estonia. We hung around there for a while, just messing around and taking a break from all the walking we were doing.

The stage was HUGE. (you can't really tell here.)

ACTION SHOT.

    The dome was at the bottom of the hill, so it was like a natural ampitheater. We labored to the top and became loud teenagers again.

    To get back to the city center, we took the bus from a stop near the dome. Did we buy bus tickets? Nope. Let's just say it was a very sneaky moment... We went back into Old Town, where we were the day before, and meandered around some more. That meant some more souvenir shopping too (I got a sweet Estonia scarf!) Then we took a final relaxing moment while being in Estonia in the main square. We sat at long outdoor table at one of the cafes that line the perimeter of the main square. This was a total European moment. 

With my very sparse knowledge of Estonian, I ordered Estonian apple pie, and a frozen Estonian drink made with plums. The pie was different from American pie, mostly because there was vanilla creme on top, then strawberry jam. 

    We were running a bit late so we hurried back to the hotel to meet our chaperone and her daughter so we could head over to the harbor. We had a very Finnish buffet dinner on the ferry on the way back to Helsinki.

It was funny because once we saw Helsinki again off in the distance, we all felt not as excited as when we saw Tallinn in the distance. It was Finland which was our second home country, and not so foreign to us any more. 

    I had a lot of fun during my side trip to Tallinn. It was definitely one of my favorite things I did this whole summer, and I got to go there with some pretty awesome friends while meeting even more international friends.