More top tips for Tallinn

Tallinn

Top tip number one. When looking at a menu thinking, mmmm that steak looks nice, rethink. The Estonians do a lot of things well, (kitch-shops, amber, old-towns, views, city walls etc) but beef is not one of them. When given a choice, choose fish.

Number two is more of a warning if you are driving. How many times have you pleaded with the bus driver to let you off when stopped at a red light just outside of where you are going, instead of having to go 2 miles down the road to the bus stop only to be refused due to health-and-safety. Not so in Tallinn, when driving on a main through road (compare it with an a-road in England or a blue 'riksväg' in Sweden), and a tram stops in the outside lane just ahead of you - break, for the love of god, break. That might just be a tram stop and people might start pouring out, as we discovered yesterday. I was ... surprised ... to say the least, but I think we managed to keep the bumper clean.

Top-tip number three is twofold, if you are aiming here to shop for more reasonably priced alcohol, look for beer and spirits, wine is not that cheap. But make sure you have done your price check before. We found a few discrepancies in the pricing here. We've been looking for two types of wine, valpolicella and chardonnay since we are going to need about 40-50 bottles of that soon. So we made tracks to the big outlets, because obviously thats where the cheap wine would be, and we found one pretty soon that had exactly what we wanted and in bulk, so all looked good, right?? Wrong!!!
Fortunately while all the other Swedes ran wild amongst the shelves we've had gotten a few reference prices to check up on;


Masi Campofiore: Sweden 83 SEK -Tallinn 95 SEK
Tommasi Valpolicella: Sweden: 99 SEK Ferry, 91 SEK (262 SEK in the restaurant!) Tallinn : 89 SEK

Lindeman Bin 65: Sweden 73 SEK Tallinn : 100 SEK

And those are just a few examples, fortunately we brought the price list from systembolaget with us. I originally aimed to bring that as a reference to check the descriptions and recommendations, since I am not that good at reading Estonian. It turned out to be quite useful to avoid being ripped off as well.

So come prepared!

Top tip #4. Spend some time in the old town in your walking shoes and do it on a weekday. If you have a look at the pictures, you'll see that there were not that many people around. IT was quite nice to wander around, read the plaques, take lots of pictures and to stop at lovely smelling coffee shops and watch the local kids go wild. I expect it to be quite different during weekends in peak tourist season.


So we might have failed in our quest to get a huge batch of wine, but this is my first visit to Tallinn, and I really enjoyed the walkabout in the old town. It reminds me of Gamla Stan in Stockholm, but with less aggressive shop/restaurant owners trying to sell you stuff. We also managed to book ourselves into a spa hotel and made use of the hotel pool in the evening, as if the 4 hour walk wasn't enough exercise, but it felt really good afterwards.
And on top of that, just next door is a huge marina, with some gorgeous evening views accompanying a decent dinner, but again, be warned - eat fish, not meat .