When planning this visit to Finland with the rents I wanted to try and get over to one of the Baltic countries. I was thinking Latvia because I’ve been once already to Estonia and I thought it would be cool to add a new country to my list of places visited. We ended up deciding on Estonia.
- It’s close – only 90 minutes by jetboat (more on this later)
- I have a friend who lives there – it’s always nice to have a local tour guide (Evelyn)
- It’s an opportunity – there are limited chances to visit places like this
- It’s cheap – the cost of one restaurant meal in Tallinn is the same as ten in Helsinki
Still, I would have like to have seen Latvia. Evelin told me that the way to identify Latvians is by their six toes (on each foot). She added that this technique does not work very well in the winter so you have to invite them into the sauna.
So I was given a day pass for Monday and Evelin said she could make it to Tallinn for the afternoon (she ended up having to work so we were on our own). We decided to take the jetboat – forty euros for the one-day return journey – it was more expensive but much faster (90 minutes) than the larger, non-jetboats (3-4 hours). The ride over was pretty rough. At one point we were rocking so much the merchandise was falling off the shelves of the little store they had down below. I don’t have a lot of experience on boats but it could not have been that bad – I didn’t see anyone ralphing.
Local jetboat.
We spent the whole day in the old town. All in all it was pretty relaxing. Here are some pics for your enjoyment.
Local Transportation
Local Cuisine.
Localized amnesia (ah, the missing memories)
Local View
We got back into Helsinki around 2100. The boat ride was uneventful except they kept showing these old Soviet era cartoons (I think they were from Czechoslovakia) that I found hilarious because they were obviously the inspiration for Worker & Parasite. Classic.
Die Hard Three 
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