the baltics.

helsinki


my travel break became significantly more exciting when i met up with my boyfriend timmy for another week of northern european adventures. my mom was extremely generous and gave him her frequent flyer miles so that he could come visit and what a treat it was. we are both so lucky that our travel dreams became actually became a reality! i flew from stockholm to helsinki and met him at the airport. we hit the ground running and took a bus to the student-y district just north of downtown helsinki, kallio, to meet up with the couple that was hosting us over the weekend. our hosts arho and paula were really kind and it was a great introduction to couchsurfing, the network of couches for travelers. we spent a fair amount of the weekend just hanging out with them, talking about life as a young adult in finland and the united states. we also saw a queen cover band playing at a bar, walked around the downtown area looking at the city’s impressive churches and other neoclassical official buildings, and tried to keep warm over coffee. for the most part the city was quiet and nondescript, as if everyone was just minding their own business and living life without having to succumb to tourists. it seemed very genuine. our biggest excursion while in helsinki was when we took a ferry to the sea fortress called suomenlinna (or sveaborg, in swedish) and the water was covered by chunks of ice, which made me a little nervous. the island is now home to a small community of families who live in the old military barracks; there appeared to be a fair amount of industry there as well. i’m sure it’s swamped with visitors in the summer but on that cold april morning we had the island’s bastions and ramparts to ourselves. we got a lovely view of the baltic sea and ate our lunch in peace. i really liked helsinki, although it ended up being kind of a blur, and i would like to return to finland someday. perhaps next time i will get a chance to explore the country’s northern reaches in lapland?

tallinn


we boarded a giant cruise boat in helsinki and rode four hours to the port of tallinn, estonia. the city is famous for its extraordinarily well-preserved old town with its medieval stone wall and gates— and with good reason. it is amazing to see that slice of history! tallinn was more touristy than i thought it would be, and we kept running into the same group of spanish tourists. we spent our two days there meandering around the old town’s winding cobblestone streets, taking in the juxtaposition of cute pastel-colored administrative buildings (their parliament is painted light pink) with run-down concrete homes. i enjoyed walking around toompea, the section of tallinn atop a hill, trying to see the surrounding area through heavy fog. we spent a while in tallinn’s top-notch museums: the photo museum, the occupation museum, the city history museum, the workshops of the craft association. we stayed in a nice but strange hostel that didn’t have a real kitchen. we eventually found ourselves in the modern part of the city, where the majority of the city’s residents live, and saw that it was not all so clean and well-preserved. we stumbled upon a local market where farmers were selling their crops alongside imported goods, cheap tennis shoes, babushka scarves, and lots of other knick-knacks. i am certain that among the sizeable crowd, timmy and i were the only people under 50. it was odd to consider what these tiny old estonian women (the shoppers were mostly women, but there were a few men there too) had been through in their lifetime. estonia was occupied by the third reich in world war two and then the soviet union until 1991. clearly these periods of occupation have impacted the national identity and morale in immeasurable ways, and it was seeing these market-goers that made me realize how influential the nation’s turbulent political changes must have been to these families.

rīga

our euroline bus took us four hours through the estonian countryside to reach latvia, where a landscape of dense forest and soft hills made up for our bus driver’s obsession with passing other drivers on a narrow, bumpy road. rīga, especially compared to tallinn, had a decidedly cosmopolitan feel. there were so many (young) people out and about, packing the sidewalks full. it was obvious that people were trying hard to look good, in contrast to tallinn where everyone had clearly gone through too much to care about what they looked like. the stereotypical eastern european aesthetic was very much at play among rīga’s citizens, with countless women teetering along in high heels, acid-washed jeans and big, fluffy hair. oddly enough these crowded streets and parks emptied at night, transforming the city into a mostly barren collection of art nouveau offices, churches and apartment blocks. i personally felt uneasy venturing out at night considering the drastic language barrier (i knew i was no longer in denmark, where literally everyone under the age of about 30 speaks near-fluent english) and rīga’s tourist-extortion schemes i had read about online. we definitely lucked out in finding a great hostel in central rīga. we stayed in a loft apartment in a very clean, safe and colorful building; while eating our free breakfast (!) in the common room, we met two other americans, who we ended up hanging out with for a few hours. one of them was taking two years to travel the entire world and had already made it to every country in south america as well as antarctica, asia and across russia. we dined on traditional latvian pancakes for dinner two nights in a row; the ridiculously low prices there made it possible for us to go out instead of cooking at the hostel. i was particularly impressed with the massive occupation museum in rīga, but we also made it to the architecture museum, the history and navigation museum, and their insane central market where you can literally find anything you would ever want. we accidentally walked into a room full of freshly butchered pigs’ heads and promptly turned around as my stomach was hit with a queasy wave…sadly our time in rīga ended on sort of a bad note as we experienced one pretty hellish day. we packed up early, checked out and walked through a heavy rain with all of our luggage in order to wait for a bus that would take us to the airport. the ride was about 45 minutes and was not at all pleasant considering the bus was way beyond its capacity and i stood clinging to my purse. i could barely see my other bags even though they were right next to me simply because of how crowded it was. the fun continued as we waited in a few outrageously long lines in the very poorly-designed rīga airport. our ryanair flight to liverpool was definitely the most terrifying flight i have ever experienced; i’m not sure if it seemed so scary because of my already frayed nerves or if the pilot was feeling very playful that day, but it could best be described as “a free for all” that at one point left us suspended nearly sideways above liverpool. we then had an hour-long bus ride and another 30 minutes of walking through the rain with heavy luggage before finding our couchsurfing host’s house in suburban manchester…. more manchester stories next time!