France and the Beach

I ended up in Cannes because I couldn’t find anywhere to stay in Nice. I arrived on he train from Bern at around 7:30pm and, following the instructions, made my way to my host, Franck’s, place.

Franck was cool. Extra friendly and hospitable and after a long chat about everything and nothing, he suggested that we go and get some kebabs and a drink with his friend Marco, a Dutch guy living in Cannes. So we headed out, only to find that the kebab shop which Franck wanted to go to was having it’s one week of closure for the year. We then headed down towards an Irish pub (they have these all over the place!) and had a few drinks which continued into the night back at Francks, despite the fact that both he and Marco had work the following day. At about 3am, we decided to call it a night.

The next morning Franck poured both him and I a coffee and left for work. It was a beautiful day so I got ready and headed out to explore Cannes. After stopping by the tourism information centre and grabbing a map, I headed down towards the beach only to get distracted on the way by one of those shops which sells hippy clothes, incense, and blankets and other items from various Asian countries; Tibet, India, Malaysia, etc.

I got stuck in this store for about an hour and half. The guy who ran it was half Chinese, half Tibetan and born in Borneo, and a motor-mouth extrodanaire. He talked and talked and talked, and gave me coffee and talked some more. It was ridiculous. But finally I got out, phew!

Me and the shop owner

Then I headed down the main shopping street, passing a cinema which had a small film festival playing French films, and another playing old films in English. They were playing the 1979 version of Planet of the Apes, which incidently I had thought about seeing recently, but unfortunately it wasn’t at the right time. So I kept on walking and ended up at the beach!

Cannes beach

While I was there I saw the real thing, French kids flipping all over the show practising Parkour!

Parkour!

I started to walk along the beach in the direction other than what is seen in the photo above. Soon I had to leave the beach because it turned into a marina full of large, expensive, launches and the theatre where all the films are played during the Cannes Film Festival each year in May.

Film festival theatre

Af ter this I made my way over the Cannes’ old town. I wandered around though this for some time, checking out all the old buildings and old people, then made my way up the hill to where a clocktower and church looked over the city of  Cannes. The weather was beautiful and it was a great view from up there.

View over Cannes

As the sun began to set I made my way back down to the beach and began to walk. I walked for a while along the beach. It was good to smell and feel the sea spray. Soon the beach ended but I continued to walk further along the shoreline with no real objective other than feeling like walking. As I walked the sun began to set behind the hills in the distance.

Cannes Sunset

Once the sun had set, I began to head back. As I approached the Old Town again, I noticed a fun fair which I hadn’t seen on my way out. I spent a little while checking it out, not being able to tell if it was being set up or down, being yelled at by random carnies, and trying to avoid spending any money.

Carnival by night

I soon left the carnival and headed back to Francks where we decided to have a quiet night –  both of use were still feeling the gin from the night before.

The following day I planned to go to Monaco but the train workers were on strike. The shortest amount of time it would take for me to get there (usually a one hour or so train ride) was 5 hours so I decided to flag it. Isn’t the French train system supposed to be one of the best in the world? This is ridiculous. I ended up heading back to Francks and we just hung out for the day, listening to music and watching crazy French TV.

In the evening we set out for Marco’s house for dinner. Franck promptly reversed his car into another parked car then drove off, got lost, went around in circles and arrived at Marco’s about half an hour late. Another friend of theirs was also there and that evening we sat around and ate far, far too much food and drank even more wine, which Marco told me I had to do as I was in France.  He also told me that I had to eat several cheeses after dinner, so I indulged and ate some crazy cheeses which I would never have dared eat before – they were not half bad either. By this time I was bloated, drunk, and it was 3am so Franck and I headed back to his place. No late night gin this time!

(This post is rubbish! I’m starting to get lazy I think. Sorry my fair readers.)

Berning Down the House!

From Zurich I made my way to Bern. I had intially planned to take the Luzern-Interluken route but since I had already done this the day before, it was just a one hour trip. I arrived in Bern at about midday to find my next host, Regula wandering around the station looking for me just as I was doing for her. Lucky for me that we found each other at that time, as my train was late and she was about to leave.

In an old house near the train staion which usually had a bar, cafe, womens area, theatre and holds frequent parties, a once a month flea market was being held. Here you could by almost everything you could think of from scooters and bikes to console games, candlesticks and tea. I had to hold myself back as I saw so much stuff that I would have liked to buy but unfortunately can’t carry around with me. We spent a few hours looking around the markets and then decided to head back to her place.

Crazy bicycle for sale

Regula lived in a very old house which was situated inside an industrial area in a town about half an hour out of Bern called Oberburg. This industrial area has a building right next to the house which begins some sort of extreme hammering each morning at seven o’clock which shakes the entire house, continuing until five in the evening. Asides from Regula living there, there was also Nicole and Dino, a suitably hippy couple, another girl whoes name I never found out, and one more guy and another couple who were away at the time. For me this was great as I was given my own room which included its own fireplace to keep me toasty warm in the freezing nights. That night Regula, Nicole, Dino and I just hung out, ate some amazing food cooked by Nicole (who should be a chef), and listened to music. I spent half the evening dashing up and down the stairs to keep my little fire going.

The old house

The next day I was to meet up with a girl called Flurina who has contacted me the previous night on CouchSurfing, asking if I’d like to be shown around Bern. So at around midday, I met her in the Bern station and we set out on our mission. The first place to visit was the house where I had been at the flea market the previous day. I had wanted to get a betting picture of  it.

Flea market location

Next we wandered down to one of Bern’s many bridges. Following this we made our way to the highest tower in Bern at the XXXXXXX church. It was many more stairs that I had predicted and after we fought our way up with a number of stops, we found the the view was totally worth it. Unfortunately over half of the tower was closed to it was next to impossible to get a decent view from the other side.

View from tower

After we headed back down, Flurina suggested that next on the agenda should be “bears and fountains”, so we went for a walk towards the Bern bears. For some reason or another, there is a pit in the middle of the city which for numerous years has held a number of bears. It’s a horrible concrete pit and many people oppose it. The bears look so sad in there, just sitting around waiting for food and most probably wishing that the winter would become cold enough to hibernate.

Bern's Bear

Next were the fountains. Not as amazing as many of the other fountains which I have seen on this trip, but pretty cool as a number of them (which run up the middle of the main pedestrian streets) are statues of folktales. The one which is the best and I think every one agrees with is this one of a man eating small (bad mannered) children – a tale parents would often tell to their kids to keep them in line!

Child eater!

A walk down the riverside followed lunch, and when we were about ten minutes down stream (which was 6.66 degrees by the way!) I spotted the zoo on the otherside of the river which Flurina seemed to think was free. So back we headed and over a bridge which we had passed. Then we just walked in! Past some ponies and mules, fluffy rabbits and then… RACOOONS! My god I just keep having child-like exciting moments! So mischevious looking and so cute at the same time.

Racooooooon :)

Onward we walked up the hill to find a pond full of pink flamingos. I find these birds hilarious, especially the way the walk around in the water. They would move around to find the sun in flocks, flapping their wings to gain all the sun they could get.

Flamingos

Our trip to the zoo was our last activity for the day, and as the sun was setting we headed back to the train station where I thanked Flurina for showing me around and then set off back to Oberburg for another evening of music and hanging out.

The following day Nicole had no work and so decided to come with me on a trip to Gruyères to visit the H.R. Giger museum. This is the guy who invented the alien from the film Alien. It was lucky that she came along as it involved 3 trains and a bus, plus numerous amounts of German and French speaking. On arrival we had about an hour to spare so we decided to have a look around Gruyères, a very quaint little medival town set on the edge of the Swiss Alps.

Gruyères

At 1pm the museum opened. This place was crazy, the mind of this man insane. There were so many amazing pictures of creatures that I could never dream of. Very dark and for some reason, also very erotic. They had this little “adults only” section which seemed pretty pointless as almost all of his work had some weird alien sexuality to it. Unfortunately you were not alowed to take photos inside, but this was on the outside:

Babies in a gun

And there was even a bar which he designed, indeed also crazy:

Giger bar

And soon it was time to make the long trek back to Oberburg. We were not back for long when Regula came in from work, covered in snow! “It’s snowing!” she called, and looking out the window, it definitely was. So after another beautiful dinner made by Nicole, she, Dino and I headed outside into the already 4-5″ snow to play around. Snow fights were not an option of choice, and I was amazed to find that you actaully can roll snow into huge balls, resulting in by far the best snowman I have ever built.

Snowman!

This went on for a few hours and by then we were all tired and soaked and ready to sleep, but not after more music and hanging out, though!

I had initially planned to leave the following day, but it took me a while to find a place to stay so I spent one more day in Bern. This day I used for doing nothing. I headed into Bern to get a train ticket and then just spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and watching the snow out the window. A quiet evening and my time in Bern was over, again going so fast!

The next morning I was off to Cannes!

An Italian List

I’m am around three or more places behind now, and I reckon that it’ll take far too long to catch up if I write a 1500 word essay for each one, so I’m swapping back to the list format to deal with all these Italian towns that I’ve visited over the past two weeks.

The morning after I arrived in Rome, I got up earlier than ever to go and meet Sarah at the airport. She’d come over from NZ to visit me and travel around Italy, have some fun and see the sights. We checked out Rome, Venice and Florence with a few trips on the side – so here we go!

Rome

• Rome is a very walkable city. We  just began to wander and ended up in many interesting places. On the first day, this is all we did. Just walked around and tried to organise ourselves for the coming fornight, figuring what we wanted to see and where we wanted to go. This popped out of nowhere though
  

  One Colosseum please!

• On that first day, we also saw glimpses of the Roman Forum and Palatino (which unfortunately we never made it into). Along with many, many, many churches, there was the Arch of Constintine.
  

  Arch of Constintine

• One amusing thing which we saw was the Running of the Nigerians. In all of the cities which we visited (and also in Athens) you can find shady Africans trying to procure you fake Gucci and Prada bags, sungasses and various other things you don’t really want. This is obviously not legal, as you can see them on the constant look out. Popular tourist spots are a haven for these guys, and there must have been no less than 50 or 60 of them at the Colosseum. They stand around, harrassing you as you pass: “Hello, hello, hello, cheap bag, hello, hello, half price, hello”, etc. Then one spots the police, and it’s the oddest situation I’ve ever seen. Sixty men carrying white sheetss and big blue plastic bags full of merchandise are sprinting through the crowds of tourists, swarming for a place to hide. Very crazy to see, I recommend it if you are in Rome.
• We ate way, way, way too much pizza. I don’t think I could handle one for at least a few months now. Pasta is a bit easier to stomach, but I’m almost over Italian food. A proper breakfast would be nice too.
• We did go inside the Colosseum:
  

  Inside the Colosseum

• Outside there were guys dressed up as ancient Romans trying to get you to pose with them for photos all the while trying to stay out of photos from the public. Must be a very stressful job.
• Ruins are all over and everywhere with in the city. Amazing!
• We took a tour through varioous crypts and catacombs of Rome. This was very interesting. The first place we went to, the Capucian Crypt, was 5 or 6 rooms decorated with the bones of thousands of human bodies. There were chandalliers made of bones, patterns all over the walls, hourglasses with wings made of pelvis bones, the full skeleton with a scithe representing death, and horrifying of all was the numberous mummified bodies of monks set around in positions, one who still had a beard on his face. Also in the tour was the Catacombs of Domitella; 11 miles of underground burial passageways which delve 100ft below the surface. Most graves had been removed, but some were still intact.
• We walked the poo gauntlett. A beautiful riverside walk under huge trees, chriping with the sound of birds. Beautiful until we realised there was poo dropping all around us!
• From Rome we took a day trip to the ruins of Pompeii. This was amazing! I was amazed at how large and intact they are. There was hardly anyone there and you could just walk around, getting lost inside houses and temples. This place is so big you need a map to figure out just where you are.
  

  Pompeii

• On the Wednesday we went to the Vatican and happened to see my good old friend, The Pope.
  

  Mr Pope

• While we were there, we also spent a huge amount of time walking around and getting lost in the Vatican Museums which hold an exceptional amount of paintings, sculptures, and other amazing works including my favourite, and entire gallery of ancient maps, some even made out of tapastries. Also part of this is everyone’s favourite Sistine Chapel which holds the ceiling fresco God creates Adam by Michelangelo. To be honest, after walking  around all this art and through numerous decorated churches and chapels, I found this famous work to be rather underwhelming and no way near as large as I had pictured.
• In Rome, the food was really not that great at most of the places we visited. The Italian style pizza is very bland in most regards, and I felt that the lasagnes that I had in The Netherlands and Germany were much better than the ones which I had in Italy. I wanted it cooked in a little pot damnit!
• We also saw such sites as the Spanish Steps which were covered in people, and Trivi Foutain which was pretty impressive. People throw money over their shoulders once to ensure a return to Rome and twice for a wish. Sarah got hit by flying money from above!

Trivi Fountain by night

Venice

• Venice is made up of 400 little islands separated by canals and connected by bridges. It’s located in the north of the Italy. What a maze this place is! At pretty much all times you can’t look straight down a street for more than 100m without it turning a corner. Most of the streets are about 2 meters wide and you just keep going around in circles or off on wild tangents of incorrect direction. If there was a place to get lost, that is what we did in Venice. Just look at a map to see what I mean.
• The canals were everywhere and awesome. It was impressive to see a city which has it’s main transport by water and absolutely no cars. Even the police , fire and ambulance come by water!
  

  Just one canal

• We saw some of the Nigerian bag dealers get chased by under cover police and caught.
• Our very own gondola adventure though the canal was schedualed and on afternoon we were paddled around the city by a man who seemed very disinterested in being a gondola driver. It was cool to see the city from the perspective of the canals, though. It gives a good insight into how the residents actually live.
  

  Gondola ride

• We went on a “ghost walk”-type tour which took us around the back alleys and what are supposed to be the scarier parts of the city where horrible crimes have been committed and ghosts like headless lovers are often seen. It was also a good way to find sights that we hadn’t found earlier, like this cool snail staircase:
  

  Snail House

• On our final day we checked out the 11th International Architecture exhibition which was amazing. Heaps of very interesting ideas were shown by at least 30 countries. One of the coolest displays was the Belgian one, which just consisted of a house with white walls, a few chairs, and confetti EVERYWHERE! It was very cool!
  

  Confetti

• On the day we were leaving, it began to snow and the water began to rise and smell. I hear that they have just had the highest floods in something like 22 years.

Florence

• We visited the Duomo church and it’s baptistry.
  

  Duomo

• We climed the 467 stairs inside the dome of the Duomo church, and came out to an amazing view over the city.
  

  View over Florence

• We spent time each day browsing the endless markets of Italian made clothing and accessories, only to buy nearly nothing.
• We took a day trip to Pisa to check out the leaning tower. It was a beautiful day and the tower was leaning just as much as it should, 4° I’m told.
  

  Leaning tower!

• We visited the Uffizi Gallery which houses Botticelli’s Birth of Venus  and numerous other amazing paintings, all overshadowed by about 5000 images of Christ. We also managed to see Michaelangelo’s statue of David which I thought was the most amazing piece of “important” art which I had seen. Very big and very well made. Truely epic!

And that was a brief summary of Sarah and I’s two weeks in Italy. I’m sorry it began to the more and more brief during the last part, but I am so far behind that I need the time to write the next three posts, let alone getting all the pictures up.

After this, I dropped Sarah off at the airport and headed back to Rome for two nights. Back to CouchSurfing. And then I was off, off to check out Cinque Terre on the recommedation of my good friends Prasna and Frankie.

Саинт Петерсбург (Saint Petersburg)

If Tom Cruise ever taught me anything, it’s that “sometimes you just gotta say ‘what the fuck’”.

My time in Estonia had given me a brief look into the eastern European culture and in particular the times of Soviet reign. This, coupled with meeting Ben, had swayed my decision about Russia and even though my tour was cancelled I decided to head there anyway – I wasn’t going to miss an opportunity that I might never have again. So upon leaving Estonia, I headed back to Helsinki for a few more days to rest up, sort out some visa issues, and most importantly board the train to St. Petersburg.

My train from Helsinki was at 7:30am and I was staying half an hour from the main train station so I decided to take the 6:05am bus in. Unfortunately it was some sort of public holiday and all the timetables were different, the bus never came, I started mildly stressing, but luckily a woman who was late to work helped me navigate several busses which deposited me at the central train station with about ten minutes to spare. Then off I was.

The change was not so subtle. Looking out the window, I noticed that all the signs surrounding the train line had changed from the latin to cyrillic alphabet. Next, a message came over the intercom system saying that the train was now entering the ‘border control zone’. I wasn’t too sure what that meant would happen untill about 10 guards jumped on the train and removed everyone’s passports from them. This worried me slightly as I didn’t want to lose my passport while staying in Russia on a visa which was gained from an invitation which was no longer valid. I didn’t even know the last name of the girl I was staying with so wrote the defunct tour’s name on the immigration forms and hoped for the best.

Half an hour passed with nothing, and then finally… I WAS IN! I had legally arrived in Russia!

The train arrived at Finland Station in St. Petersburg at two o’clock. I wasn’t to meet my CouchSurfing host, Ira, until seven, so after figuring out how the metro system worked in a place with very little English writing and speakers, I dumped my bags in the locker room at Vosstaniya Station (where I would meet Ira later on) and went for a wander. I headed down the main street, Nevskiy Prospekt, and what I saw was wonder. The buildings were amazing; colourful, magestic and grand. The writing everywhere was different, the cars were different, the people were different, it was all very much more different from anything I had ever seen, even Tallinn. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the central city area, checking out the amazing buildings, churches, the seaside, oh and it was freezing!

At around seven I met Ira and we headed back to her apartment. This is when I began to understand what people mean when they say that the binary of wealth distribution in this country is expansive. Everything about the innercity was beautiful, and almost everything about the outskirts was the opposite. Ira was living about half an hour out of the central city by metro, the area was bland, dirty, the people seemed like they were barely making it through the day and the soviet architected apartment blocks stretched out as far as the eye could see in every direction. In this country you either have money or you don’t, there is no middle ground. The poor people can’t afford the good stuff, but they can afford to indulge. In one supermarket I saw half a litre of vodka for $6.50NZD and a pack of cigarettes for around $1.10.

Ira had, that night, invited a bunch of her friends around to her flat for some drinks. So I spent the night drinking with Ira, Vlad, Pascha, Sascha, Stas, Nadya and a few more people who’s names I can’t rememeber. It was cool, their english wasn’t the best, but they were heaps of fun to party with and so it happened, the more they drank, the better their English got. My Russian on the other hand failed to improve in anyway.

Russian Beer

The next three days (Sunday, Monday and Tuesday) were Russian public holidays so Ira had some time to spend showing me around the sights. I had told Ira that I was interested in searching out some old Soviet Lomo cameras as I heard the authentic products could be picked up very cheap if you knew where to go. So off we went to a local flea market. This place was very intense. It sold everything that most people don’t need. Old computer parts, hats, badges, cell phones, memory cards, power tools, rusty bolts, old clothes, and happily, the camera. I was able to pick one up from a more ‘reputable’ camera dealer for 100 rubles which is around $6.5NZD. Pretty good find I must say. We spent a little while rummaging around the markets and then headed into town to meet up with Ira’s friends again. We ended up at a ludicriously expensive shisha bar where for some reason they gave us a pipe with no water. It was horrible! After this was pretty late so we all decided to call it a night, but not after I was invited to a poker night the following evening.

On the Monday Ira decided that she might show me some of the sights of the city. So after eating a breakfast of blini (russian stuffed pancakes), we set out into the centre of town. First stop was the local huge cathedral, St. Isaac’s. This building was huge, so big in fact that you had to cross a road and half a small park to even include the entire building in a photo.

St. Isaacs Cathedral

Next we headed over to the famous statue of the Bronze Horseman.

The Bronze Horseman

Afterwards we walked over to Spit of Vasilyevskiy Island to have a look around. Here we saw a russian wedding with the bride and groom throwing glasses of champagne over their shoulders into the sea, only both missed, one smashing on the ground, the other hitting a statue behind the groom’s head, projecting broken glass towards the bride! She fell to the ground covered in blood as a huge shared severed her jugular. To be honest, she was fine. Next we walked back towards the Winter Palace or Hermitage.

Winter Palace on the Sea

Past the Winter Palace was the Palace Square.

Palace Square

And just through the arches was a man with a monkey!

Monkey!

After checking out these main sights, Ira wanted to show me an interesting apartment block which contained a huge amount of crazy mosaics everywhere. Almost all of the walls were covered and the public sitting areas were made completely of mosaiced concrete.

Mosaic Apartments

Soon it was dark and time to head to Nadya’s place for the poker game which I didn’t do very well in at all. A nice Russian pork dinner was cooked by Nadya and then it was time to head home for sleep.

The following day, Pascha, Ira and I went to Pushkin which is a huge park south of the city. Inside this park is an enormous palace which was built for Catherine the Great. Unfortunately it was off-season so we could not go inside and none of the fountains were working, but it was still amazing to see.

Catherine the Great's Palace

In the summer this park splits into two parts. The part which the palace is inside becomes a tolled park, so you have to pay to hang out in there. The other part is free and increasingly more desheveled. Even though it was winter you could easily tell the difference between the two parts, the free part muddy and dirty and unkempt while the paid part was tidy and manicured.

Inside the free part we also found some interesting ruins.

Ruins at Pushkin

That night we decided to haev a quiet one and Ira and I watched an interesting Terry Gilliam film starring Robin Williams as a crazy homeless man.

The next day was Wednesday, my last day and time to head back to work for Ira. I decided to check out the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Peter and Paul Fortress

This place is an island in the middle of the harbour which is shaped in a star-like manner. It was built in the 18thC and up until the 1917 was used as a political prison. Even Dostoyevsky was housed here. The fortess even contains a beach were some crazy guy was swimming in Speedos. The water can’t have been more than 1 or 2 degrees! Inside the fortress was the Peter and Paul Cathedral.

Peter and Paul Cathedral

From the fortress I walked past some sort of military weapons museum full of tanks and rocket launchers and more, and towards a frigate which I was advised to look at. On the way I walked past a pretty cool pirate-type ship as well. I walked on and on, the mission to get to another bridge to pass back onto the main land. Evening slowly fell with a beautiful sunset, my last day was almost over.

Saint Petersburg Sunset

That night it was time to leave. I was on the 1:20am night train to Moscow which I boarded after a few language barriers about passports and the like. The cabin was small and old, the train wobbled around a lot, but soon I fell asleep and woke up in Moscow.

P.S: Some how I forgot to mention the Saviour on the Blood church, but this place was amazing! We saw this after the monkey.

Saviour on the Blood

Traveling South to the East: Tallinn

On the Thursday morning I made my way to the Helsinki port, boarded the Tallink Star, sat around for two hours, and got off in the Estonian city of Tallinn.

Here I was staying with a girl called Triin, who at my time of landing was working, so I had half the day free to wander around the town before I had to meet her “in the square under the dragons” at 5:15pm. So I locked up my gear, got a map, and start walking towards the city. The map had twelve sights placed on it that were within the Old Town, so I figured that I’d check some of these out.

Walking through the (new) town, there was construction everywhere. It was blatently obvious that Tallinn was fast developing into a very Western city. The architecture was great, the streets were packed, and the people looked like they had taken all their style tips from those living in Berlin, Stockholm or Amsterdam (but probably Helsinki).

I entered the main town through the eastern gates.

Old Town Eastern Gates

To the left was a McDonalds, what an introduction to a well preserved medieval town. To the left, running along the city walls was some sort of knitwear market. These are everywhere. Every second shop is trying to sell you a knitted jersey or (and what I forgot to buy) one of those long woolen hat that you see people skiing with in cartoons.

Knitwear Market

As I ventured in, it became obvious that this was a town that would be overrun by tourists in the summer months. I keep hearing the word “touristic” being thrown around, I’m not sure if it’s even a proper word, but this is what I imagine it would be like. Similar to Brugge but with a more Eastern feel.

I began to follow the map around. It first led me up an old alley which was lined with ancient tablets from the old Tallinn.

Ancient Tablets

Once past this alley, I continued my way north within the town, and stumbled across St. Olaf’s Church, a huge white building with a tower which was once the tallest building in medieval Europe.

St Olaf's Tower

I walked inside and as the day was beautiful, I decided to climb the tower to the make shift viewing platform which they had built into the copper roof, 60m above the ground.

View from St. Olaf's Tower

From the tower I had spotted a huge building full of right and 45 degree angles, which looked to be made entirely out of concrete and left to rot. So I once I had decended the tower’s rickety stone staircase, I made my way further north towards the sea. What I found was a huge Soviet style building, purely in grey with huge staircases, graffiti and rubbish everywhere. Half the place was broken and it looked like no one had used it in 30 years. But it definitely had that Russian “for the people” feel to it.

Soviet Concert Hall

Later I found out that this place was built when Tallinn was under Soviet occuptaion, and amazingly, it is still in frequent use! You would never know it from seeing it, and even walking around on it. I was even on the roof to get some better photos, if I had known there might have been people inside I don’t think I’d be running around on the roof. It turns out that they can’t afford to renovate it, and they can’t afford to pull it down, and they don’t want to get rid of it because of it’s historical significance and architectural value.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the streets of the old town, through alleyways, pasts interesting shops and cafes, and at 5:15, I met Triin outside the town hall, but not after an interesting performance from a group of Hare Krishnas.

Hare Hare Krishna

We walked back to her apartment and hung out for a few hours, had dinner, then not long later, we were out again. One of the CouchSurfing hosts in town had moved into a new flat and was having a flat warming. There I met a number of the other CouchSurfing hosts in Tallinn and the people who were staying with them. There was Mattias from Italy, Ben (an Aussie) from Moscow, and Shigi (a Taiwanese guy) from Austria. We hung out and talked rubbish, listened to traditional Estonian music which they all know from their singing festivals (it turns out Estonians love to sing). Later, Shigi and I decided to meet up the following day at 12 and wander around the city together.

So at 12 the next day, we met outside the town hall.

Tallinn Town Hall

I ended up seeing a number of places that I’d seen the previous day, then I took Shigi to the concert hall. It appears that this is a place that no guide books talk about and no touists seem to know about, so I’m pretty happy thaat I found it on my own. Then we walked to the south end of the city, up into the highest part, past some crazy bird scultpures:

Me and the Bird

…the orthodox church:

Orthodox Church

and ended up climbing the town walls to spy on a crazy Russian wedding, complete with a guy with a megaphone ordering people about and “beautiful Russian women” who seemed a bit undressed for a wedding.

Russian Wedding

That afternnon Shigi and I decided to walk along  the waterfront towards the ruins of the Piirita Convent. This appeared to be a short distance on the map, but in fact took us about an hour and a half to walk. It was well worth it, though. This place was old, very old! There were floor foundations and sky reaching walls everywhere, and amoungst them were scattered gravestones and small underground passages. It was a beautiful place.

Piirita Convent Ruins

Later that night we met Triin and Shigi’s host, Christina, for dinner. Afterwards, they left and Shigi and I checked out a few bars.

The next day Christina and Triin wanted to show use a few more sights. First we headed into Kadrioru Park which was very close by to Triin’s apartment. Inside this park was the Tallinn art museum which was originally built as a Russian palace.

Art Gallery

Next we headed to a huge Soviet WWII monument which was built inside a massive park.  But before this we made a stop at the Estonian History Museum for a look around the ground, where we found a Lenin graveyard.

Lenin Graveyard

Soviet WWII Monument

Later on we visited a large park where these Estonian singing festivals are held.

Festival Park

That night it was the birthday of one of the Tallinn CS hosts. She had decided that she wanted a pirate party, so at about 8 o’clock, Triin, Christina, Shigi and I headed over to the home of Eva (who was hosting Ben the Russian Aussie). Everyone got dressed up in pirate regalia and we headed about 1 hour  out of town. The party was full of crazy Esotinans in priate gear, vodka, rum, and other assorted alcohols.

Pirates!

Later in the night it was time for me to finally experience the Finnish sauna which these people had in their house. So, basically, everyone got naked, went into a 60+ degree room, sat around for a while, and then went running around outside in the 3-4 degree night. Crazy, but very fun!

Finnish Sauna users!

The night was great and ended up with us all sleeping on the hardest floor I’ve ever experienced.

The next day it was time to go. I had decided to head back to Helsinki so I could sort out some visa issues, and I decided that even though my tour to Russia had been cancelled, after talking to Ben, I had decided to go anyway, I’m not going to miss that oppurtunity! So here I am, hanging out in Helsinki for a few days while I wait for my Russian visa to begin on the 1st of November.