Tallinn Vacation part 1

Note: I fixed the link to the Tallinn pics.

So Tina planned a trip to Tallinn, Estonia. Yeah, I wasn't sure where it was either. Turns out its just across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki and almost due East from Stockholm. We had a bunch of flight vouchers we picked up on our way back to Sweden from our Christmas trip in the US. Through the mystery of beuacracy that is all things Swedish and especially SAS (the airline not the British commando group), we had a limited selection of where we could use the vouchers. We had heard that Tallinn was nice and it fit the voucher profile so we booked it and off we went.

If this post is Tallinn part 1, then part 0 was that Sophia got the Noric Flu over the Easter Holiday. BTW, Easter in Sweden means a half day Thursday and all of Monday and Friday off. Because Sweden is a totally secular socialist country (has a million old churches that appearantly no one uses) the stores etc. are closed Friday and Monday but open on the weekend. Anyway, the Nordic flu is a puking disease that in an adult makes you vomit non-stop for 24 hours and for kids cause random vomiting for approx. 2 weeks. Loads of fun let me tell you. The point there is that JB and I almost didn't bring the girls along and in fact we almost cancelled the trip entirely. At the last minute, though we figured if Tina and Sophie are going to be stuck inside anyway, might as well be someplace where we have room service and maids to deal with vomit covered bedding instead of hauling it all up and down from the 4th floor apartment.

Travelling with kids is usually a bit stressful. They tend to wander, complain etc. Come to think of it, I must be a pain to travel with too for the exact same reasons. For some reason this trip got off to a great start, no whining or wandering, arrived in plenty of time and things are looking good for a relaxing trip. Every adventure has mishaps and its about how you hanld them not prevention. Prevention is impossible especially travelling with my wife.

Tina has a sort of royal sense in that she fundamentally doesn't think that rules apply to her. She follows most rules but in a way that shows that its only because they happen to coincide with her interests. Case in point with travelling, she always insists on breaking little cross border rules. For example, we have spent hours at the Mexican border because she insists on brining back fruit and other tihngs forbidden. Today's example was scissors in Jackson's carry-on luggae. We were of course stopped and I had to throw the things away myself before Tina started to pull the "I understand you have rules but you need to understand they don't apply to me". I think its a relation back to her Indian roots. In India they seem to have a kind of fluid system of rules. Very subjective and open to intreprtation.

Back to the trip. All is well till we board the bus to go to the plane. We are in the international terminal at Arlanda which is all highly polished dark wood floors and modernistic design. We get on the bus and drive through what looks like a shanty town behind the airport full of evil looking squatters and fires in trash cans right out of Gangs of New York. Round the corner and there is the De Havilland Q400 waiting to take us to a fiery death. Planes with spinny things on the front are the best of 1929 technology and I refuse to fly in them. Have you ever seen a movie about people crashing that didn't involve properlers? The flight was fortunately uneventful and only gut-wrenchingly scary part was watching the landing gear go up and down right outside our window. It was loud and seemed very impractical.

Taxi from the airport should be 120 Kroonies (love the currency) or $10. We hit bumper to bumper rush hour traffic worsened by the soccer match that night pitting Russian vs. Estonia. The country of Estonia has the population of greater Pima county. I wonder how good their soccer team could be? Tax bill = $23 (switching to US from here out so you don't have to do the math) but at least the taxi man apologized profusely and I had to force him to take a small tip. The key here is that he was a nice guy. Very un-Swedish.

Hotel is nice, biggest one we have had in Europe. J has a nice couch bed, Sophia got a baby bed and Tina and I get the "standard" bed which is two twins pushed togehter and held in place by a super thin Euro mattress. The view is of the main drag through town and Old Town is visible in the distance. Not a bad setup at all. Next door is a casino featuring a 2 table No-Limit freezeout tournament on Saturday night. I am hoping to make it.

Dinner was at Olde Hansa a mediveal place near the town square. The building is from the 14th century and the inside of the place was beautiful. All rough-hewn lumber, candle-lit. Exaclty like you picture a medieval tavern from the olden days. The 'serving wench' played the part well. Not too over the top to be annoying but never broke character. She was a bit older than the muffin-heads you would get at a place like this in the US and not so Renesacne Fair-ish which would have driven me insane. Huzzah!

The spiced wine was crap, just like the Glog (need the o w/ 2 dots over it key but not possible) in Sweden. Appetizer was a sampler plate of seafood stuff, mostly forms of smoked/smoked+grilled salmon. Tina and Sophie liked the boiled quail eggs and Jackson killed the salmon quickly. The white bread w/ nuts was tasty and they had a rather tasteless herbs plus cottage cheese thing to dip it in. A dark bread also allegedly had meat inside but we couldn't taste it, it tasted good just not meaty. They do give you forks and knives but part of the game is to only use your knife like in the olden days. Dinner was way better than the appetizer. Mine in particular was great: 6 sausages, 2 each of Bear (Bear!!!!!!), Wild Boar and Elk, spiced turnips (tasted like squash), some super tart berries (common local stuff like Lingonberry, Cloudberry, Cowberry and mabye a Blueberry), the best saurekraut I have ever eaten and a really good horseradish for dipping the sausages. J had creamy almond chicken drumsticks, pickeled vegetables, a bean-bag (this was easily the coolest visually and a pretty good flavor too, it was a pasty that looks like a pouch tied at the top filled with a bean paste, you hold the bunched up part and bite the 'sack' bit which has the beans) and a barley bean + nut mix that was awesome but that he wouldn't touch it. Tina had the same sides with a good cut of filet mignon covered with a so-so sause. Re-reading I think I underplayed this meal but it was quite good and well worth the $80 (total w/ tip). Coming from Sweden, this was about half the cost and 10x the flavor of Swedish food.

Picked up a bag of roasted, sugared and cinnamoned nuts on the way back to the hotel doding drunks winding their way back from the soccer match. We turned in pretty early as we just moved an hour from the daylight savings thing and then another coming here. Circadian rythms are a mystery to me.