20120702 Tallinn, Estonia Sunny, 65*F
We rose late to find the ship still underway. We could see land to the south. We ordered a pot of coffee from room service and did computer and photo things for a while. As we approached the dock area we met with others from our Vignette walking-tour group in the casino. After docking, we went to the pier and to the bus that was waiting for us. Ann was the name of the Tallinn tour guide.
Ann gave us some information regarding the city as the bus drove inland and up, past old city walls. Tallinn has two Old Towns, the upper and the lower. We stopped at a convenient place next to the upper walls to go walking. The government building was first. We didn’t go in, but just listened. Ann went over Estonia’s history - only from 1919 to 1939 and from 1991 to present has Estonia been independent of foreign domination. The present flag has three horizontal stripes - light blue on top (the sea), then black (the earth), and white (for hope). Ann has no love at all of Russia although she says that speaking the language is sometimes an advantage.
We walked across the street into the Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. It was erected by the Russians when they first dominated Estonia at the end of the 19th century. It’s ornate, especially the icon screen and the exterior onion-domes. Then around the corner to the Lutheran Cathedral to St Mary the Virgin, a somewhat different Lutheran church. It’s somewhat ornate in wood decorations. The pews have doors. The place was unheated as usual in those days, but an enclosed box seat was attached to the wall opposite the pulpit for the gentry that was heated. The coats of arms of the wealthy families are displayed on the walls - they grow bigger and more ornate over the years. The leaders of these families are buried under the floor of the church, but the practice stopped in the 1830’s because the place was getting smelly (the bodies were buried on top of each other until the most recent were quite shallow).
Ann gave the Orthodox religion 10% of the population and the Lutherans 20%, with the remainder agnostic due to two generations of religious persecution by the Russians.
Ann gave us a break here to do some souvenir shopping. We bought a small book on Tallinn.
Then back to the bus and a ride into the countryside. We came to a farm and stopped. The farmer has 7600 hectares (16,000 acres) he manages with six laborers. He keeps 300 cattle, half for milk, half for beef. He turns all his milk into products he sells in the area around Tallinn - cheese, yoghurt, etc. He can speak English and understands it very well, but prefers to give a short talk then let the tour guide translate for us. I talked with him later about neighboring farmers helping each other - he replied he has no neighbor farmers, that they all work in the city now. His wife is a doctor, his son a banker, his daughter a caterer. The farm dog came around to be petted - he stays with the farmer all the time. The Estonian bird is the swallow; there were plenty of barn swallows going in and out of the machine shed with bugs for the young birds.
I saw several tractors, a horizontal-wheel rake, a baler, a smaller tractor-towed combine/thresher and other tools of the trade in their places. Some old equipment (single-share plow, sickle-bar mower) were there for some reason.
A lunch was served to us in a large log room for that purpose. Animal heads on the walls, very rustic. The menu included chicken in a cream sauce, boiled potatoes, cole slaw, another cabbage dish with dill, bread, coffee and Estonian wine (a little sweet for me). Quite nice.
Then we drove to a local “manor” house. Of maybe twelve rooms, one upstairs center front was a ballroom where a young man with guitar and a young lady with cello gave us Estonian classical music. They were very accomplished, even if the music wasn’t familiar. We toured the house (every room with a tile wood-burning furnace).
Then we drove back to the ship. We went around the lower old town, so we never saw any of that. Some of the tour members wished the tour had skipped the manor house and allowed time for walking the lower old town. But ....
I went to the souvenir place on the pier and bought a couple of trinkets, then went aboard. D & I took places at the sunset bar to watch our getting underway. But it was too windy there, so we moved to the pool deck, which has glass panels to shield people from the wind. Then the parade began. One people and car ferry got underway, then another. We couldn’t move until the second one got out of the way, then an incoming ferry from Helsinki threatened to cut us off. Our captain got underway, turned north at the end of the pier staying to starboard of the incoming ship to force him to go around us to the east. Slick.
We watched for a while, then did dinner with the group. After that, we watched the Broadway show by Eric De Gray of Toronto. He’s very talented and educated in music, but I’m not much on Broadway tunes. He did do “Send In The Clowns”, which I do like.
We crashed after that; I’m doing these notes the following morning.
PIcture Link OPicture Link D
