Getting back to the trip. It started this past thursday when we all hopped on a bus to Tallinn at 5:45 pm. I was really nervous about being carsick for six hours, and I only had one dramamine left, so as soon as I got settled I closed my eyes and made sure to not move and shift around too much (motion sickness is a CURSE). I listened to my iPod and faded in and out of a sleepy daze. We stopped at the border obviously, and we had to show our passports to a lady with the scariest pink nail-polished talons ever. She ended up keeping my migration card, and for a second I was like, uhh, why does she have one of my documents. Sean?! Adam?! Is this normal?! Yes, it was (this program has ingrained in my mind a paranoia about keeping my documents with me at ALL times).
We finally arrived in Tallinn at around midnight. We caught one of the last buses running to the city center, and from there we proceeded to walk in one big giant circle around where we wanted to be. It was dark out, and we had no idea where we were going. I whipped out the screenshot I had taken of where Google maps told me to go, but that wasn’t very helpful, so we used a combination of our intuition and street maps to eventually find Old Town, the center of Tallinn - exactly where we wanted to be. If there is one thing that I have taken away from my trips to Tallinn and Helsinki, it’s a little regained faith in the ability of people of my generation to navigate their ways through an unknown city without the help of smart phones.
We finally found our hostel, Mr. Ryokan’s house, around 1 am. This hostel turned out to be some dude’s (he was a dude in every sense of the word) three room apartment; it was made up of a hallway with a few appliances to constitute a kitchen, his room, a bathroom, a living room, and then another bedroom, which you could only get to by crossing this one living room. The apparent owner of Mr. Ryokan’s, Luke, looked to be in his late twenties. He was very tall, attractive and spoke English like any one of us. We went into the living room where we paid (around 20 euros for two nights for each of us), and he whipped out a tourist map to show us all the places to check out the next day. I remember noticing that he held the pen weird, and the length of his fingers reminded me of the project I did on Marfan’s disease in Jonah Rosenfield’s class my freshman year of high school. We asked him a few questions genuinely out of curiosity. Luke moved to Tallinn six years ago, apparently because he took a vacation - “a really good vacation” to Tallinn. He asked us where we were all from, and when he said that he was from Connecticut, I exclaimed, naturally, “oh! I go to Connecticut College,” to which he responded, totally nonchalantly, “yes I know. I saw that on Facebook... (looks up at us all)... I like to know who’s coming...” Heh... 
We were in the bedroom off the living room the first night, and we slept in bunk beds. There were no curtains, and at exactly 9 am someone upstairs started playing the piano. I guess that’s what you get for 10 euros a night! It was fine though, mom and dad. The door had a secure lock, and Luke was friendly. Would I go back there? Probably not, but it was all apart of the experience. We got up around 9 the next day. It was overcast and the forecast said it was going to rain, but luckily it held off until late afternoon. I packed my camera, hat and other items in my bag and we set off to explore. 
Tallinn, and I can’t stress this enough, is absolutely adorable and charming. Old Town is super small (we definitely didn’t need more than a day there) and enclosed by a kremlin fortress, but all the streets are narrow and cobble stoned and cute as all hell. The buildingss have really old doors and their architecture mimics some medieval style in their appearance (I think I just made that up?). Old Town was very quiet, and the streets were filled mostly with tourists. From the locals we did see though, they were dressed infinitely better than any Russian, and were that much more attractive as well. People strolled in the middle of the streets at a leisurely pace, and we followed them in and out of side streets as we walked past tourist shops, bars, restaurants, and residential houses. 
First on our agenda was to check out the three spots in the city with birds eye views. It didn’t take us long to get there, only stopping to take pictures and to try and decipher the street names in Estonia, which looked like absolute gibberish to me. Estonian also seems much harder than Russian. We eventually climbed a hill (haven’t experienced a hill in MONTHS) and past many castle towers before we ended up on a patio with, oh my god, spectacular views of Old Town. You could see towers and the tops of churches, which looked like they had a mix of both Russian Orthodox and Christian influences. The roofs of practically all the buildings are a burnt reddish-orange that contrasted nicely with the cream colored bodies of the buildings. Tallinn is an extremely old city (I want to say 11th century?), and it certainly shows. At certain points I shared with Sean and Adam that Tallinn is what I imagine parts of Scotland, Amsterdam and/or Copenhagen to look like. It was so different from Petersburg it was overwhelming, but in the best way. There were so many times when I said how much I already loved Tallinn. I’m not sure I knew where Tallinn was until a few years ago, but I’m so glad I went. It’s a gem of a city, and I would recommend anyone traveling around Eastern Europe to make it a pitstop.
After we saw three different views of Old Town from three different high points, we made our way through a park which was the ahh, the greenest green. We walked past the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, the pink parliament building and a few statues. We only passed a few people; Old Town seemed very quaint and quiet that Friday morning, if not always. We ended up in Freedom Square next (think protests and the dissolution of the Soviet Union), and walked through more cobble stoned streets with churches and tavern looking cafes and restaurants. 
Later in the afternoon we continued to explore by leaving Old Town and exiting the kremlin. We wandered to the harbor and found ourselves on the Roof of Linnahall, which according to our tourist map was “originally built by the Soviets for the 1980 Olympic regatta[.] This tremendous concrete edifice also served as a defense structure in case the Finns attacked the USSR by sea. Occasionally Tallinn youth gather on the roof to have a beer and watch the sunset before a heavy night of clubbing.” We just wandered in and our of the graffitied concrete walls and eventually sat down on some exposed stairs to gaze at the ocean. There was a helicopter launch pad right in front of us, and as if on cue, a helicopter landed on it about a minute later. 
After that we went to a park and sat on a bench. Although all we really did was walk around, we were dog tired after a few hours. We sat on the bench for at least 45 minutes as the sun disappeared and reappeared from under the clouds. I had this weird urge to read Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories a few weeks ago (I had until that point only read The Cask of Amontillado [thanks, Mr. Hoy!], and my Nabokov professor won’t shut up about how Poe is the closest thing Americans have to Pushkin [are you serious Valerii?]), and by some odd coincidence, Jackie just happened to bring a book of Poe’s short stories with her abroad. So I ended up reading a few stories from The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales on that park bench. Weird, I know, but you know what/who’s even weirder? EDGAR ALLEN POE. That guy was messed up, but obviously brilliant. As much as his stories gave me the creeps, I haven’t read a short story since, wow, probably Guy de Maupassant in my French classes in high school (great choice, Madame!), and I forgot how nice it was to read something short, but complete like that. 
Sensing that we were all at the same energy level, we walked around the city with the intent of making it back to our hostel for a nap. Sean decided to walk around (by this time it had started to rain), but Adam and I didn’t feel like moving. An hour and a half later Adam and I set out for Hell Hunt bar and restaurant, where we were to meet Sean at 6 pm. Hell Hunt is apparently one of Tallinn’s most popular bars, and for good reason. It seems like a chill place where a lot of locals go to have a good time. We ordered the recommended dark beer, and for dinner, Sean and I ordered a pesto ham pasta dish (yum!). Our waiter was a young, tattooed guy who spoke with a slight British/Australian accent? It’s incredible; in both Tallinn and Helsinki most everybody speaks English, Russian and either Estonian or Finnish (I can’t even master one foreign language!). We spent the next two hours shamelessly gossiping and sharing stories. We had to wake up early to catch a ferry to Helsinki the next morning, so I didn’t drink that much, but we all had enough to say silly things like, “SEAN TELL US A SECRET” or, oh boy, to whip out the would you rathers. The conversations we had, I’m sure, could be overheard at any middle school boy or girls sleep over party.
And that was it. We went back to the hostel and crawled into bed, which just happened to be an unfolded couch in the living room this time, which was also occupied by two separate Japanese travelers... Awkward.
But that was Tallinn in a nut shell. This is already a long post, so I’m going to take a break and write about Helsinki at another time. Stay tuned!
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