Sunday June 30 – Tallinn in Estonia

Tallinn is a truly beautiful city and we were fortunate in both Riga and Tallinn to have really good thirty year old female guides who spoke excellent English.  The Estonian language has some similarities with Hungarian and Finnish.  It has have no prepositions, no gender pronouns and no future tense.  Quite complex. Our guide was a language expert who specialised in translating from Spanish to Estonian. She was very proud of her country and its successful fight for independence.

As in Riga, the Estonians have little time for the Russians of the past.  Our guide told us about her great grand parents who were reasonably wealthy with lands and animals.  When the Russians took over they were told by a friend that their names were on a list of people to be sent to Siberia.  They left their village that night and friends in another village sheltered them in their basement.  Many Estonians were transported to Siberia from 1941 to 1949, but they came back to their homeland after Stalin died.  The Russians bombed Estonia in 1944.

Tallinn consists of an Upper Town and a Lower Town joined by old streets known as “short leg” and “long leg”.  It began as a small pagan village in 1248 and was taken over and Christianised by the Danes later in the thirteenth century.  The word Tallinn is Danish for “city of Denmark”.  After the Danes, came the Germans till the sixteenth century, then the Swedes till the eighteenth century, and then the Russians.  The Nazis were in power for a time and after the war, the Russians took over again. 

Upper Town belonged to the nobles and Lower Town was where the German merchants lived and worked.  Gates were closed between the two towns at night to stop the different classes from mingling.

The many mediaeval churches with their sky-reaching spires, the Gothic architecture of the houses that belonged to the German merchants and the historic Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral remind one of pictures in fairytale books.

Now I must mention that despite the fact that 90% of the people on our cruise are Australians, we were in the minority on our ship’s tour today.  There were only nine of us on this particular tour, four New Zealanders, three Chinese and two Australians, namely, Bill and Barbara.  There are twenty Chinese on our world cruise.  One entrepreneurial Chinese travel agent has brought 20 Chinese on board.  They flew from Beijing to Sydney.  When they get back to Sydney they will fly back to Beijing.  Money seems no object to them.  One of the ladies bought a dress for three hundred dollars today.  It was very ordinary in my opinion having been made in Russia.  This lady walks around with headphones on all the time.  I found out today that she uses her phone and whatever is said in English is automatically translated into Chinese which she hears via the headphones.

I think the Chinese tour guide would have liked to have taken over from our expert Estonian guide.  At times he complained about not having enough free time or about being tired and needing a rest.  Thank god she would just tell him that there would be free time after another hour or that we would rest at lunch time which would be at two o’clock.  It was a very long and strenuous day but really worth the effort.  We knew before we started that it was going to be strenuous and not suitable for walking stick people or wheelchair people.  There are no cars in the old town so you have to walk and the walking is all on cobble stones.  When Bill and I arrived back at the ship, the first thing we did was stretch our legs out on the bed. 

P.S. The last photo below is part of a memorial called "broken journey" which commemorates the 852 passengers killed in a tragic ferry sinking during a journey from Tallinn to Stockholm in 1994.