Estonia was supposed to be peaceful. I haven’t done anything. No grand plans, no schedules, no nothing. Just a week staying at a couple spas,¹ relaxing. And for some reason, it just hasn’t worked out.

I visited Estonia because I had a friend visiting the area who wanted to check out Tallinn, and I’m heartily glad I came. It’s certainly been lovely. And I highly recommend visiting places with Old Towns and Christmas markets, especially if you can go early in the season, before the tourists arrive. But I guess there was a steady drip of stress from the upcoming larp this weekend, and there was some unexpected drama around getting a spot in a different larp,² and I decided to move my blog off of Medium,³ and of course when my friend arrived he was all sorts of messed up from the game he just finished⁴ so there was a bit of triage involved there.⁵

Whatever the reason, I just wasn’t sleeping well for most of the trip. Such is life.

My first stop was Kuressaare, a tiny town⁶ on the island of Saaremaa. Estonia’s one of those places that’s been occupied by just about everybody — Danes, Swedes, Poles, Germans, Russians — and Kuressaare isn’t an exception. Kuressaare Castle, one of the sights⁷ in the city, was built in the 1300s by Crusaders looking to Christianize Saaremaa. The island’s been held by various groups of vikings, then passed back and forth between Sweden and Denmark. During the Soviet occupation it was controlled by the military, and access was strictly controlled.

Of course, 50 years of minimal development has meant it’s currently benefiting from significant amounts of untouched nature, which makes for relaxing, outdoorsy vacations far from pollution or industry. Kuressaare’s known as a spa town, which is why I thought it’d be nice to visit for a bit. And yes, it would have been nicer in summer, but I still got a room in a nice place for cheap and just sat around for three days, meandering through the castle, poking at my computer, and otherwise just not doing anything.

Tallinn was kind of the opposite. In December the Christmas market is the big draw, and it’s right in the middle of the Old Town, which is actually the big draw. My friend arrived the same day I did, so we checked into the hotel together and spent most of the following three days evenly split between Old Tallinn and New Tallinn.

New Tallinn is the more fascinating of the two, of course. One of the consequences of being repeatedly occupied by different cultures is you tend to develop a rather cosmopolitan worldview. Certainly the Soviets left their dreary mark on the architecture, but in the thirty years since they left there has been a lot of development. The city feels modern and vital, wired in to the rest of the EU in a way that a lot of Eastern Bloc cities — I’m thinking of Kyiv, Vilnius, and Prague — haven’t quite managed.

My friend and I ran out to the movie theater to see Knives Out⁸ which I had feared I wouldn’t manage to do before it vanished from theaters, and that provided a first look at the city beyond the touristy areas. The next day we immersed ourselves in Tallinn under occupation, touring the Hotel Varu where the foreigners were required to stay (and, purely coincidentally, the KGB had offices and listening posts) and then heading over to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom.

The Museum was particularly moving, covering both the Nazi and the Soviet period, starting with the artifacts of those who were deported to the camps, pivoting to those who managed to escape and live in exile, then returning to those who stayed behind before telling the story of Perestroika and, finally, liberation. It was light on facts, not bogged down with dates or statistics, choosing instead to highlight the narratives of those who lived through it. And it was surprisingly introspective on the nature of freedom, of how choosing to live in exile alienates you from the countries you ostensibly love, just as much as staying and watching it change under an occupying power.

But Tallinn is really known for the Old Town, and it’s hard to fault it for that. It’s substantial enough you can get lost very easily and find yourself wandering down the wrong street, but manageable enough that you’ll find yourself accidentally back on the right path eventually. The Christmas Market is particularly nice for this; a couple wrong turns and you inevitably find yourself in the middle of the town square helping yourself to another cup of mulled wine.

We ate at Olde Hansa the first night, which I think everyone does; it’s right off the main square in a spot you’re bound to pass by two or three times a day. For tone, imagine Medieval Times without the floor show, if anyone in the organization had bothered to open a cookbook. I’ve no idea how authentic the food actually is, but the collection of cheeses and lentils and barley certainly seemed to make a reasonable attempt at it.

But the real highlight of the trip, for me anyway, was Rataskaevu 16, a restaurant in the old town that had been recommended to me by a couple of different people. We almost didn’t get in; for some reason I thought they didn’t take reservations⁹ and so when we got there, starving, they didn’t have a space available for an hour. We resolved to eat elsewhere, but that place had a 20 minute wait, and when we went across the street to have a cocktail while waiting I thought we might as well have a small snack and just wait for the place we really wanted to eat. And by then the wait had dropped by a half-hour anyway.

It was worth it. Rataskaevu 16 specializes in taking traditional local ingredients and incorporating them into modern dishes. And it worked. The most interesting dish was probably the frozen bluecheese cake, it was cheesecake using a blue cheese, covered in a sweet sauce of sea buckthorn¹⁰ and carrot, with a load of fresh berries on the side.

Maybe that’s the best way to remember Estonia. A weird fusion of the traditional and the modern. It was a lovely place to hang out for a few days. I would have stayed longer, but I guess I’ll settle for making a note to come back.

Next: Hamburg (HAM) to London (LGW)
Prev: Brussels (BRU) to Tallinn (TLL)

Footnotes

¹ This sounds fancier than it is, especially in the off-season. The quite nice spa/hotel I was staying at in Tallinn, with four different kinds of saunas, ended up being less than 60€/night, and that was split two ways.

² I’m not prepared to elaborate here.

³ Oh, yeah, about that. So I wasn’t exactly unhappy with Medium, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled. It was a pain in the ass to put in previous and next buttons — I had to add them manually — and I surely didn’t appreciate having to dutifully click the “Don’t put this behind your paywall” button for every post. But boy is it a pain in the ass to write your own templates from scratch, which I had assumed I wouldn’t need to do but 99% of the ones out there seem to be targeting either professional photographers or yoga bloggers who are overfond of using the hashtag #blessed.

Medium really isn’t suited for serial blogging; it’s much better with random essays. And somewhere between the facts that I didn’t have my own writing somewhere, there’s no way to backdate posts, and the archival listings utterly suck, I snapped. The big problem, of course, is those of you who had accounts on Medium and subscribed will no longer get an update when these posts go up. There’s now an RSS feed, if that’s a consolation. Am I the only person alive still using RSS?

Personally, I’ll miss the WYSIWIG editor a bit. But only a bit.

⁴ Yes, I realize it’s a weird hobby, where how emotionally messed up you are after an event is often used as a sign of quality. cf roller coasters, haunted houses, soap operas, weddings, bacchanals …

⁵ Protip: stay at a spa.

⁶ Population ~14,000

⁷ Really the only sight

⁸ Strong recommend

⁹ I mean, you wouldn’t know it from their website.

¹⁰ Sea buckthorns were a major thing. I guess as a winter fruit, they’re now in season?