Saturday, 29 September 2007

Tallinn & Helsinki - September 2007



Samantha and I had read some travel reviews and books about Tallinn and it sounded similar to Prague, a city that we had visited, and enjoyed, a little while earlier.



So, we booked some tickets with our air partner, EasyJet and we headed off for a few days.







A little history to start...Tallinn, the capital of Estonia is a seaside port town on the Gulf of Finland, bordered by Russia and Latvia. Finland is about 80 kilometres across the bay to the north. Tallinn has been occupied by various nations throughout its history including the nazis in the second world war and from 1944 to 1991, the Soviet Union controlled Estonia.


The Soviet control is evident but interestingly for me, the relics of this control, for instance a concert hall and monument (both INCREDIBLY ugly) along with various housing blocks, are all unkempt and looking shabby. (Probably deliberately so, or maybe i'm reading too much into this). By contrast, the newer parts of town and the Old City, are beautifully maintained and the city is really coming along in leaps and bounds with Estonia one of the most innovative and computer literate places in the world.




So, enough of the history, Tallinn is a fabulous place and is one of our most favourite places we have visited. Four days was a reasonable time to get a feel for the city and we walked around and visited loads of places but there is still so much to see and do.




Tallinn is a compact city, easy to walk and the public transport, particularly with the brilliant value Tallinn Card, is great.




Indeed, as much as we normally don't travel on hop on, hop off buses (never used one till Tallinn), as they were part of the Tallinn Card, we decided to get on and relax whilst listening to some city history and check out the views.




There are actually three separate buses, each with largely different routes traversing different parts of the city. There are plenty of high rise apartments, left over from the Soviet occupation and despite these, there are also loads of great areas that we went past on the buses.




One area that was particularly interesting was Kadriorg Palace, lived in by Peter the Great's wife. The palace is beautiful and is also used now as an art gallery. The gardens also, were very pleasant to wander.




The main section we wandered through though, was the medieval old town which featured several churches, wonderful buildings, a town hall and main square and classic views from the higher areas of the town, across the rooftops.




The restaurants were also great, it has to be said.




On the second day we were in Tallinn, we decided to head across the water, by SuperSeaCat, to Helsinki, Finland.




We hadn't done much research on Finland so we decided to simply wander around town, checking out the various sights.




It's fair to say that Helsinki isn't the most exciting place in terms of architecture, but it still had a very pleasant feel, with some amazing churches, including one that was built into the rock. Amazing. There was an orchestra, complete with conducter, practicing on the day we visited and this was quite interesting, especially to watch the conducter in action.




Helsinki also has some quality markets that we ventured through as well as some interesting art deco styled buildings.




So, we only spent a day there, but it was worthwhile and interesting.




Overall though, Tallinn was certainly worth the trip across there and we'd like to head back there at some stage.