Pre-Christmas - Tallinn

The last leg of our pre-Christmas holiday was in Tallinn in Estonia, which we reached via a short ferry trip from Helsinki (which we only just made it on time for, being unexpectedly held up in the Helsinki traffic).

I have to say I was a bit sceptical of this last part of our trip, since most guide books seem to brush Tallinn off as a day-trip from Finland, but actually it was one of the nicest part of our whole trip.

Linda had found us an apartment just off the main square of Tallinn (although finding it at first was a bit difficult, thanks to an unhelpful taxi driver and a confusing numbering scheme). On the main square was the Christmas Markets, which were really nice and suitably snow-covered.

Tallinn is famous for it's crafts and so we spent some time going from shop to shop, buying more presents and more Christmas decorations.

In between shopping we had plenty more Glogg to keep us warm, and even managed to figure out the Sauna in our apartment to help thaw us after spending too long in the freezing outdoors.

Since the old town of Tallinn is medieval, they have some medieval themed cafés and restaurants and we dined on some delicious (if sometimes heavy) meals, including pastries and game meats. The beer was also excellent!

We took the time also to head out to another open air museum, which always sound tacky in theory, but in practice they are fantastic because they have lots of cute historic buildings covered with snow, and in Tallinn they even had re-enactments of life from the respective period.

We were lucky enough to find some hearty pea soup for lunch, and getting back into Tallinn was no problem because a friendly Moldovan diplomat gave us a lift back into town!

We finished our stay in Tallinn by taking a stroll in the upper part of the town, where we found some fantastic views back over the historic centre.

We flew back to Switzerland via Copenhagen relatively stress free, which was lucky because all across Europe airports were blocked because of snowstorms!