Wanderung 31

Since we were not scheduled to reach Tallinn until noon, we had a leisurely breakfast and then tried to find a newspaper, real or electronic. After a dogged search Monika found the "News" option on a kiosk outside the Salon Wien, Wien (English: "Salon Vienna, Vienna"), but the charge was 10 Euro for 6 days of electronic news, another example of the creeping fee-ism on Costa, so we gave up on that!

The emphasis inside the Salon Wien, Wien clearly seemed to be classical music. Inside the salon, the walls were decorated with cellos and violins, and possibly a viola or two. But not all string instruments play in harmony. Some are simply out of tune, and others apparently behave badly. Right beside the piano, turned to face into the corner, we found, as you might expect, a COUNTER-bass, enduring a "Time Out" no doubt!

Docking at Tallinn was much more exciting than it should have been, due to a 15-20 knot crosswind on the only dock available. Our Captain's first approach was aborted into a "go-around" where he steered the ship in a large, 360-degree circle out in the bay in front of the dock giving us a nice view of the skyline of Tallinn. Then he tried a second time to back in with the assistance of the "Helios", a large tug that helped push us into the crosswind with its stern, but to no avail. On the third attempt, the Captain tried a bow forward approach on the leeward side of the dock, and with the tug's assistance he was just barely able to force his way sideways up to the dock and tie up there. Phew!

The two aborted approaches cost time, so we docked at 12:30, but the Captain made up for that by delaying our departure time until 6:30, with an "all aboard" at 6:00. We had a quick lunch and met up with Linda and Jerry just before disembarking about 1:00. The new cruise ship docks are about a mile from the Old Town section of Tallinn, but I grabbed a local map with a walking route marked on it (see below), and we followed that route to town, entering the historic district at the corner with Fat Margaret's Tower (4 on the map). The tower now contains a maritime museum so I was tempted to stop, but we continued into the Old Town past the Three Sisters, which were three old storehouse buildings from Tallinn's Hanseatic period.

We first paused at St Olaf's Church, and I was relieved to find out it was dedicated to the Norwegian king of that name rather than the snowman with the carrot nose from the movie "Frozen" made by Disney, although I'm still not sure why it was named after a Norwegian king.

We continued into town but branched over to the old city wall at a place called Borsi Passage, apparently an old merchant guild building. But there we could clearly see the old wooden walkway on the inside of the stone ramparts.

We worked our way uphill to the Toompea district, which in the old days was the central fortress area but nowadays is the site of the Estonian House of Parliament building (13 on map) and the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (12 on map). We could go into the cathedral, which was very fancy in a Russian Orthodox manner, but were not allowed to take pictures. The Parliament building was much more modern looking, but we had missed the 12:00 English tour and couldn't get in to wander around, much less take pictures. Maybe next time!

Climbing down the ramparts of the old fortress, we passed St Nicholas's Church (10 on map), which also now houses a museum. But we were getting hungry and thirsty by this time, so we made a slight detour over to Dunkri street to find a local micro-brewery. The sign out front said "Beer House", which is probably some mysterious Estonian phrase meaning "Pub" or something. Monika and Jerry tried out the local draft beer, which was judged to be good quality, and Linda and I shared two pots of loose leaf tea, which was also good although surprisingly expensive.

Refreshed, we took a gander at the Tallinn Town Hall , located in the spacious Town Hall Square (9 on map). That was an impressive building although much smaller than Hamburg's Rathaus, but then again Tallinn is a much smaller city. I then stopped off in a nearby Tourist Information center ("i" in the green dot on map) to procure a bicycle map of Estonia. Chatting with the lady in charge, I asked about how I could fly in Estonia, and she made phone calls to the government aviation officials right on the spot! It turned out that I would need only my passport, my logbook, and my pilot's license (and then wait 5 working days for the paperwork to be processed). Great news!

We continued downhill to another intact section of the old city wall, the Viru Gates. That section of the wall was intact enough that they even allowed you to take a walk on the wooden walkway on the inside of the old stone ramparts, but Monika and Linda wanted to use the time to check out the booths selling craftwork along the wall. Monika was also sucked into a yarn store, where she bought some nice, uniquely-colored yarn that transitions from a dark brown at one end of the skein to a very light honey blond color at the other end of the skein. She started on a new knitting project using that yarn the same evening!

We branched back into the center of town through the Katarina Kaik, a narrow but very picturesque old alley with curious flying buttresses (?) spanning across its narrow width. Turning right we passed a Roman Catholic Church, which was surprisingly locked up tight, and St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church ((6 on map), which was surprisingly wide open.

We finally exitted the Old Town near the Fat Margaret bastion where we had first entered, and then headed back toward the ship. Along the way, I bought Coca-Cola and Monika bought a can of beer and a 1-liter box of wine to smuggle back onto the ship. But when we went through the security screening while reboarding the ship, Monika was busted and has to consign her can of beer over to the nice Costa "Alcoholic Beverage Control" people. I, on the other hand, got through Security just fine with the 1.5 liter bottle of Coke and the 1-liter box of wine. What can I say, I have an honest face!

After we all reassembled on board, we were too late to make our normal dinner time, so instead we had dinner in the buffet on Deck 9. We were all quite hungry and ate so quickly, however, that we could catch most of the first performance of the evening entertainment, a very good Italian tenor. He sang everything in Italian, naturally enough, but it would have been nice to have English subtitles or something so that I knew what he was singing about! You see, I hate to laugh if it is a tragic song about lost love, or conversely I hate to burst into tears if the song is a comedic riff on life's absurdities. Of course, subtitles would not be simple with the multi-cultural composition of Costa's passengers, but having them in the 5 basic languages of Italian, German, French, English, and Spanish might do the trick.

In any case, after that we just retired to our cabin for the night and turned in early as our tour of St Petersburg was scheduled to depart at 7:15 the next morning.