The Wandering Chocoholic

Lazy Sunday morning today, as we opted to not plan any specific activities and instead, just meander for our last full day in Tallinn. After a late sleep-in and a leisurely breakfast, we set out to wander around town a bit.

We visited a couple of spots I’d seen on Friday’s walking tour, including the Parliament, the lookout points over the city, and a few churches. After that, we headed over to the train station and picked up some picnic fixings for lunch, including bread, cheese, fruit, and these mini-cheesecake type snacks that are popular in Estonia and other Baltic countries. We had a makeshift picnic lunch in the park with the city walls in the background. Not bad.

After lunch, we spent some time walking along the city walls, and we stumbled upon a few interesting things like a Flower Festival full of random weird art. (There was a sculpture of a cat taking a selfie. If I take a selfie in front of the sculpture, is that a meta-selfie? A self-selfie?)

The afternoon was hot, and the beach sounded like a good idea. There`s no beach directly in Tallinn, but there is one a few kilometers away in Pirita. We tried to rent bikes for the afternoon to bike out there, but the rental shop was all out of them. So instead, we walked around to the Viru Centre to catch a local bus. On the way, we noticed an archery area set up in a park outside the city walls. Well, hey, why not? We each paid for 20 arrows and the lady working there gave us some instructions. I felt a bit like a character in the Hunger Games, or, if you rather, Robin Hood, with a bow and arrow outside a medieval city. It may surprise you to learn that I wasn’t spectacularly bad at it; my first set of 10 arrows went a bit all over the place, but my second set all hit the target and some even came fairly close to the centre. Okay, I wasn’t as good at it as Alex was, but in my defence, he’d had way more practice.

From there, we hopped the bus to Pirita and spent a few minutes checking out the spectacularly ugly remnants of the site of the 1980 Olympic Village. The Soviet Olympics, boycotted by the US and others, were mostly held in Moscow, but Tallinn was the site of the water and seaside events. It was actually a boon for the economy at the time. But never fear, Montreal, our own Habitat 67 and Big Owe are in no danger of being eclipsed by the ugly concrete Soviet-era buildings in Tallinn’s site.

The beach at Pirita was quite nice, if a bit overcrowded and full of the types of people who care more about how they look playing beach volleyball and blasting loud music than anything else. The water was really warm, mostly due to the whole swimming area being on a sandbar so it wasn’t any deeper than waist-high and mostly only came up to my knees. A bit tricky for swimming, though the wading was good.

Back in Tallinn we went out for one last night on the town. We started off at the Beer House restaurant, which is the sort of place where the servers wear costumes, the beer is homebrewed, and the portions are ginormous. Seriously, one pizza was enough for maybe five people. I was determined that it would not get the best of me, but sadly, I had to concede defeat about seven-eighths of the way through. The atmosphere sitting outside in the suddenly perfectly-temperate Old Town was amazing, though. And the beer wasn’t half bad either.

After that, we went on a makeshift mini pub crawl, which included beer and political conversation at the Hansa Brewery, and then cocktails at one of Tallinn’s oddest bars: A fan bar devoted entirely to Depeche Mode. The drinks are all named after their songs, the decor is entirely band-related, and the so-called greatest moment in the bar’s history was when the band members came for drinks one night. Totally random, so of course we had to grab a drink there before we left Tallinn.

So ultimately, for a day where we had nothing much planned, we ended up doing and seeing quite a lot. Sometimes the best moments in travel are the random unexpected ones. And I’ve discovered that Tallinn is a great place if you’re a fan of the random and the unexpected.