{"id":1102,"date":"2016-10-07T23:20:53","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T22:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1102"},"modified":"2016-10-10T12:21:27","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T11:21:27","slug":"tallinn-estonia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/tallinn-estonia\/","title":{"rendered":"Tallinn, Estonia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, we visited Tallinn, in Estonia.<\/p>\n

The rough seas and high winds had taken their toll, resulting in us not arriving until just gone midday, over two hours later than originally anticipated. The knock-on effect of that was that all the shore excursions had to be rescheduled, and our sail-away time amended to 6pm instead of 4pm, with a new all-aboard time of 5:30pm.<\/p>\n

The excursion amendments didn’t affect us at all because today we were given a day off from escort duties. This meant we could take the free shuttle bus into town and please ourselves what we did with our time.<\/p>\n

Tallinn Old Town is an interesting place, with lots of old buildings, churches and magnificent city walls. It’s quite hilly, too, so the best views are to be had from its higher points, which is where we headed towards once we’d left the shuttle bus.<\/p>\n

\"2016-10-07_tallinn_1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Old winding, cobbled streets led us gradually uphill until we finally arrived at the Cathedral with its massive onion domes and ornate exterior. The last time we’d visited here, it had been closed, and mostly covered in scaffolding, so it was top of our list of today’s primary targets. Fortunately, the Cathedral was open, and the scaffolding has been reduced to only a small section. I have to say that, for all its massive size, we found the interior to be a little underwhelming. It was a big space, to be sure, but it didn’t quite have the ambience and aura that many such buildings have.<\/p>\n

\"2016-10-07_tallinn_2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Objective achieved, we went off pottering, happy to enjoy whatever Tallinn would spring upon us, and with no other itinerary (not sure what happened to our list of primary targets). We stopped off at a couple of the high viewpoints for photographs, and meandered in and out of several souvenir shops, looking at more or less the same old tat in each (although, we did find one that was selling some reasonably-priced stuff that we actually rather liked, and ended up spending some money on presents).<\/p>\n

Eventually, all roads lead downhill, and we found ourselves in a square, where several bars encouraged us to spend a little bit more money. We found ourselves a bar and ordered a hot chocolate and a tea. The canopies flapped above us in the wind, but the electric outdoor heaters kept us warm as we sat supping our drinks and gazing over the square.<\/p>\n

Time was getting on, though, and we had to think about getting back to the ship. We’d been told that the last shuttle bus back to the port would be at 5pm (it was almost 10-to now), although all-aboard time was 6pm, and walking it back would only take 20 minutes at the most. Having decided early on that we would walk it back, we surprised ourselves by changing our minds at the very last minute and made a dash for where we were told the shuttle bus would be, and caught it just in time. As it turns out, it waited an extra few minutes before setting off anyway; it didn’t stop me making an idiot of myself frantically trying to flag down the wrong bus that was just pulling out in from of ours.<\/p>\n

Short as our visit was, it was very satisfying to reacquaint ourselves with the city, and vowed to add ‘walking the city walls’ to the top of the primary targets list on our next visit, whenever that may be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, we visited Tallinn, in Estonia. The rough seas and high winds had taken their toll, resulting in us not arriving until just gone midday, over two hours later than originally anticipated. The knock-on effect of that was that all the shore excursions had to be rescheduled, and our sail-away time amended to 6pm instead of 4pm, with a new...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1107,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions\/1107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}