August 6th - Estonia

We left Helsinki and took the ferry over to Tallinn, Estonia. Estonia is about 50 miles away from Helsinki Finland so it took about 2 hours on the ferry.  Don't think of Estonia as being a third world country.  Estonia is a global trendsetter in technology and by 1998 every school in Estonia was already online.  Estonians vote and file their taxes electronically. The product Skype that many of you have used  was developed in Estonia. 

Here is a view of Old Town Tallinn. Now we are going to climb the 245 steps up to the top of the highest tower you see in the center of the picture. So follow along with us and we'll take you up there.

The first thing we're going to do is enter the town through the best walled medieval city in all the Nordic countries. The tower on the left of the arch as we enter the town is called Fat Margaret because it is not very tall but it's very big around.

Once we get inside the gate notice the 3 houses that are connected on the right hand side. They refer to these as the Three Sisters. Notice the beam perpendicular to the face of the buildings where the merchants would attach their hoist to lift goods up to the 2nd and 3rd floors.

Just follow Bonnie through this short door and on up the stairway.

This is the only straight part on the stairways as we go up to the top of the tower. It was a constant spiral with narrow steps as we ascended. By the way this is inside a Baptist Church.

Now that were up at the top we will walk around the edge of the roof and take some pictures the city. The towers with the pointed orange roofs mark the preserved city wall.

You can see the grey city wall in the picture below underneath the row of buildings in the center of the picture. The wall also separated this city of Tallinn into two separate cities.  The higher part of the city on top of the wall was for the upper class people and the ones that lived outside of that wall was for the lower class people.

That is Fat Margaret over there on the left with the blue and white umbrellas on top of the roof.

Your some open-air shops on the outside of the wall.

More city wall.

Now we are going to walk past some buildings that I think have interesting architecture.

The two-tone green building with the yellow medallions on the front of it used to be the local headquarters of the KGB

The Russian Orthodox Church in Estonia in the upper town

That is the town hall with the high tower on the building. The criminals we're chained out in the courtyard for public humiliation. Not while we were here, I was referring to back in the fourteen-hundreds.

This just made me laugh to see the description stating that this was authentic Texas food.

OBSERVATIONS and other useless information:

• on our ferry ride from Estonia back to Stockholm we were not surprised to hear a live performance  singing some ABBA music since ABBA is from Sweden. But we were surprised and it was an interesting accent and twist on the music that the person chose to sing some Johnny Cash, John Denver, Willie Nelson Olivia Newton John, Gordon Lightfoot and Elvis.

• after we boarded this ship and before it left port, we just happen happen to be reading that the ship that sailed from Tallinn to Stockholm, prior to this one, sunk in stormy weather back in 1994

• from what we have seen so far in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Estonia I would like to let all of you know that if you were planning on going to Japan for a visit don't go right now because nobody's home,  they're all here.

• we visited the Vasa Museum today in Stockholm when we got back from Tallinn. The Vasa Museum is dedicated to the recovery of the Vasa sailing vessel that was built King Gustav. It sank in 1628 on its maiden voyage and was only about a thousand metres out when it sank. It laid in the bottom of the Stockholm Harbour for 333 years before it was salvaged. I couldn't take any pictures of it because of the way it was stored it was very dark inside the museum to help preserve the wood.