baudot

I've been doing a run down the Baltic states for the last bit. Two days each. Honestly, it was an afterthought on the way to Krakow, which people keep raving about. But I'm quite happy for having done it. Most of all, I was blown away by Estonia.



Tallinn, Estonia

In short: I loved it.



There's a sense you get first walking in to a town, and if it's not right I've at least found it to last so long as I stayed there. The feel for Tallinn was overwhelmingly positive. My first sight off the ferry was an old stone skyline mingled with green. The first smells away from the harbor were baking bread. Arriving at my hostel, I was happy to see the next business over was a smithy, practicing the old hand hammered methods.



Tourist purists and architecture snobs freak out here. "It's all fake!" "It's just paint and plaster!" "If the tourists went away, this place would be dead in a week." "It's nice like Disney World is nice." But my experience disagrees. For nice, I saw strangers stopping on the streets to help me get un-lost. I met Russians who pressed their vodka on the wandering American late into the night and took absurd photos the whole while. And when that was over and we were all stumbling home, they warned me which streets NOT to go down this time of night. As for plaster and fake, I couldn't help but notice that where the paint flaked away, and the plaster crumbled, coarse stone underneath. Not marble, nor the precisely mortared and fixed up granite blocks of Prague, but big round stones and cement: Something that had been there for a long time.




There's the old fortress walls of the city, and the myriad abbeys built into them or enclosed within. There are spires a plenty. What part of the old town that isn't ringed in medieval fortifications is wrapped in parks, art, and green space. I arrived in the middle of a four month gardening festival, when a baker's dozen local gardeners put their designs up against an equal number of challengers from all over Europe.




If you, as a tourist, want to focus on the plaster and call Tallinn fake, all I can say is "more for me." Let it never be so thinly divided between onlookers as Prague Old Town.

For all it's old culture, Tallinn is sneaking up on the future, too. There was no shortage of WiFi scattered about town, on the ferry in that was based there, or on the bus leaving. Skype, the internet phone company, is based in Tallinn also. On mentioning it to my grad school friends, I was told that the town is very friendly to start-ups.

Tallinn makes the "to come back to" list.

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Tallinn also has some of the top unfortunate transliterations ever. 8-year-old humor under the spoiler.