First stop: Tallinn

Going to Estonia was a breath of fresh air: literally. I’ve come to realize that the company you are traveling with really can make or break and experience. The trip to Estonia was kind of a last minute “what the heck” decision… and totally worth it. You see, my friend Diana from Montreal (who I met when studying abroad in France and who also traveled with me in Florida and San Francisco) said she was going to be in Estonia and told me I should join her. Well, I didn’t really see the logistics of that since the dates she was going to be there overlapped with my trip in Kansas, so I said it just wasn’t going to work out. Well, then I was talking to my friend Chris (who is from Estonia and who I met when staying in Dublin while studying abroad) and I told him before I left Moldova I wanted to make it a point to come to Estonia. Well, as it turned out he was going to be arriving the day after Diana was supposed to leave with 3 of our other friends I’d met when I met him… from France and Italy. So with a little bit of convincing (it really wasn’t difficult) I got Diana and her brother to extend their trip in Estonia a couple of days so we could all hang out together. So, that is how it all worked out. One American, one Estonian, one Italian, two Canadians, and two French with one common language: English. Awesome.

I was the last to arrive in Tallinn, making it trip 3 for Chris to the airport in one day. We went to the pub to meet up with the rest of the group who had apparently just finished a HUGE dinner and were now wrapping up the evening with some drinks (sounds like a great time, if you ask me). However, I was a little behind and had some catching up to do, so I was thankful for the 2-for-1 mixed drink specials for the ladies. After some time there we made our way to a club that charged 1.30 euros for a glass of water- yes, you read that correctly. They CHARGED for WATER. In a GLASS. I couldn’t believe it, but I guess it could be worse, eh? (Oh no, the Canadians totally rubbed off on me). When we finally wore down and decided to head back to the apartment it was 3:30am. We went outside and get this- it was STILL light outside. If it wasn’t for all of us having phones that said 3:30am, I totally would have thought Armageddon had come and changed all of our clocks or something because it felt and looked like 6am… but of course it was much better that it wasn’t so we could still have an early start. Wait, a what?

At around 4:30 we finally hit the sack after indulging in everything that had been purchased for breakfast (a big meal only stays with you for so long). Next thing we knew, we got a wake up call from Chris (who had stayed elsewhere because there wasn’t room in the apartment) at 10am saying we needed to get our International booties moving because we had a tour at 11am of an underground city, and when he called and said he would be late they got mad and said, “that’s what reservations are for!!”… so we arrived just in time to catch the tail end of the rather silly (but probably quite informative) film about the history of the underground city.