Update from Tallinn, Estonia!

Hey All! I am blogging from Estonia right now… never thought I would say that considering I had absolutely no idea where Estonia even was until about 2 months ago. I guess I don’t really feel too bad because it is about the size of Delaware with a population of less than 1.4 million. For those of you who may not know where Estonia is either, here is a map:

But let’s rewind to where I left off on my last blog post. Saturday night I ended up staying in with my host family. I helped my host mom cook dinner, so I made the salad and prepared the baked potatoes to go in the oven. Dinner was with my host sisters Ann and Katherine, Ann’s boyfriend, Kasper my host brother, and my host mom. We never have dessert at my house, but my host mom bought a traditional Danish birthday cake, lagkage, for me to try, and they sang me the Danish birthday song once again. Dinner ended up lasting over four hours, and it was after 10pm when I finally left the table. I was so tired from only getting 4 hours of sleep the night before, so I just went to bed so I could be rested for the long study tour the next day.

On Sunday morning I packed, and my host mom and dad drove me to the airport to meet the rest of my public health class at 1pm. Our flight went really fast… it was only 1.5 hours, but the landing was probably the scariest thing I have ever experienced on an airplane! Here is a picture from outside of the airport. Tallinn is covered in snow/ice right now, and it is much colder than Copenhagen!

Then we bussed over to our hotel to drop our stuff off before dinner.

I am sharing a room with Chelsea again! The hotel is nice, but our beds are freakishly close together haha!

Also, there is a mirror right in front of my bed, which is kind of awkward.

After settling into our rooms, we met the group downstairs to walk to our dinner reservations at a medieval restaurant in Old Town Tallinn called Olde Hansa. On the walk over there, I thought I was going to fall and break my legs… I don’t think they have ever heard of salt in Estonia because their “sidewalks” are covered in about 2 feet of ice! No joke! Talk about public health hazard. On the way home from dinner, Chelsea and I saw an ambulance helping a man who had fallen on the ice and they were putting him on a stretcher.

 

Dinner was fantastic though! The waiters and waitresses wear medieval costumes complete with pointy elf shoes! Also, we had to wash our hands in this old basin before we sat down because we have to break the bread with our hands since it is holy and cannot be cut with a knife.

We were served appetizers right when we sat down, which included white bread, some brown bread made with some sort of meat (it was actually really good!), radish salad, olives, pickles, and pig tongue spread (I tried it… IT WAS GROSS!)

They also played some music for us while we ate!

Each of us was allowed to get a drink, and they had a bunch of weird medieval drinks to choose from… spiced wine, cinnamon beer, honey beer, etc. I just got a regular light beer, but I did try some of Chelsea’s cinnamon beer. It was tasty, but SUPER cinnamonny… I don’t think anyone could finish theirs. They also came in these super fun mugs :)

The rest of the meal was served family style, and I didn’t think anything really tasted that great, but the atmosphere and the whole experience made it fun. We ate fried cheese, barley with nuts, lentils in some sort of sauce, ginger turnips, baked-smoked sauerkraut, and two kinds of meat that I honestly cannot say I know what they were! We also got cheesecake and coffee for dessert. Needless to say, were were stuffed by the end! We didn’t leave the restaurant until about 10:30pm, so we just went back to our hotel to sleep and do our homework for the next day.

Today started with breakfast at the hotel at 8:30am, then a walking tour of Tallinn from 9:15-11:15am. It was really cold being outside for 2 hours, but I also really enjoyed learning the stories behind all of the sights and buildings we saw. Below is a picture of “Old Town” in Tallinn, which was built around 1050. There was a huge fortress built around the town, and some of it is still there today!

This is the largest entrance into the fortress, and they call it “Fat Margaret.” Estonia has been under control of several countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and it was a part of the USSR until August of 1991.

Our tour guide was a really nice Estonia women who is in the picture below! The three little houses behind her is actually now a hotel, the nicest one you can stay at in Tallinn… apparently it is where all of the famous people stay when they visit. It used to be a merchants’ houses a long time ago, and people would only live on the first floor. On the upper floors is where they would store their goods, and they would get them up there with a pulley system by hanging a rope from the poles sticking out above the third floor windows.

A lot of the buildings in Old Town have these weird bars on the outside of the building like the one below. They actually help hold the floor to the wall!

Below is a picture of St. Olaf’s church, which was built during the 12th century and was the tallest building for 400 years. It is still used as a Baptist church today.

One of the saddest times of Estonia’s history is when they were under Soviet rule. This building was the KGB headquarters, but today it is not used for anything at all. The windows on the lower level are all blocked off because they used to hold prisoners there. Our tour guide says that nothing has been done with the building for two reasons: it is extremely expensive, and the generation that would have the money to afford it still has painful memories from when it was used by the KGB. She also told us a dark, kind of creepy joke the Estonians say about the building. She said they call it the tallest building in Estonia because from the basement, you can see all of the way to Siberia. This is because many of the prisoners who were held there would end up being sent away to prison camps in Siberia, and most likely killed.

Luckily the next story she told us was more lighthearted and funny! The picture on the right is actually a close-up of the top left corner of the building in the picture on the right. The story goes that a man and a women used to live in that building, and across the street was a creepy old man who used to stare at the women while she was taking baths. Her husband got sick of the peeping tom, so he put up the peeping tom statue, so whenever he looked over, instead of seeing the women bathing, he would see a replica of himself! I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a good story at least haha.

 

Then we walked up the “mountain” that Tallinn is built on, which took about 3 minutes to climb, and saw Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. It is a Russian Orthodox church, and we went inside to warm up for a little bit while the service was going on. It was creepy/weird, but the church was absolutely beautiful inside. We weren’t allowed to take any pictures, though.

 

The pink building is Estonia’s parliament. They had elections yesterday, and the exact same people were reelected.

I can’t remember what the building below is used for, but the clock only has one hand. Our tour guide said it is because when the building was made, Estonians had all of the time in the world, so they only needed a minute hand?

Then we got to see a beautiful view over the entire city! It was so pretty!

Hi Chelsea!

After our tour was lunch at a cute little café.

Then we took a bus to our first academic visit, Estonian Sexual Health Association. The association runs 20 youth counseling centers throughout Estonia where they help/educate young people, mostly ages 15-24, about sexual health, such as contraceptives, STD’s and testing, pregnancy, abortion, etc. I think one of the craziest things is that in 1992, the abortion rate in Estonia was around 80% of pregnancies because contraceptives weren’t available during Soviet rule. Now it is down to about 20% because they have increased it’s availability, and sexual education became required in schools in 1996. After our visit, we had a free time for the rest of the night. Chelsea and I found a random shopping center, which basically had nothing, then went back to our hotel room for a nap before dinner. We decided to go to a restaurant called Kompressor, which I read about in my guide book, online, and it was listed as a place to eat on the map provided by our hotel. We read that they served “monstrous” pancakes for cheap… count us in!

I told Chelsea that I read online that the pancakes were 25 inches across, but I don’t think she believed me because she decided to get fried potato balls with garlic dipping sauce for an appetizer. I think she thought I would help her eat them, but I wasn’t really a fan, so I only had one.

Then came my pancake! Estonian pancakes (and Danish ones) are not like the pancakes in the US. They are more like crepes. The picture below does not do the pancake justice. It really was 25 inches across, but they stuff it and fold it twice. I got a ham and brie pancake, and it was absolutely delicious.

Five other DIS students from our class met us there, so we all hung out for a couple hours before heading back to the hotel to play a few rounds of Bananagrams before calling it a night.

That’s all for now! I will be back later with more updates from the long study tour!

-Emily