So, a few days in Tallinn with Daryl’s stag party, and I’m not sure what to make of it really. The Old Town has lovely architecture and has been well restored. Particularly worth visiting is Toompea – the historic fortress hill at the centre of the city – with its two viewing platforms looking out over the lower town.
Overall, though, I didn’t find Tallinn as appealing as Rīga, perhaps because Tallinn’s centre of business activity has moved outside the old town, leaving the old town as a fairly quiet place of restaurants, cafes and souvenir shops. In Rīga, the main business of the city still seems to take place in and around the old city centre. This means that Tallinn is a bit EveryHansa while Rīga has more of a spirit of its own.
Another factor may be that the Latvian language, though very different to Polish, is still marginally more familiar-looking than Estonian. I find it quite discomforting to be in a country where I don’t speak a word of the language and can’t even recognise words on signs.
Of course, experiencing a city with eight other blokes is different from wandering round on your own (though I did a bit of that). We had the main formal dinner of the trip at Karl Friedrich, a “pepper restaurant”, on the Town Hall Square. I assume that pepper is their main ingredient, although in the set menu we enjoyed there was not that much of it: smoked salmon (far too salty); pork (with chopped red peppers, in a perfect delicate cream sauce), and finally some sort of ice-cream that was more vanilla than pepper. The interior was very elegant and comfortable but the music (including a rasping cover of Atomic) didn’t really go with the setting.
Otherwise, we did some usual stag weekend things: shot guns with the friendly and amusing Mr Death Shooting Academy, played poker (very successfully from my point of view), and had a cultural walking tour in the freezing cold wind.