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We left our hotel in St Petersburg today at 8am and headed back to the bus station to catch our bus to Tallinn, Estonia. We boarded the bus at 9am and it took us about 7 hours to get there. The bus was amazing, it had power sockets and free wifi….makes the old Greyhound bus I usually get down to Canberra look obsolete.
We crossed the border between Russia and Estonia about two hours in, at Ivangorod. Most of us went through smoothly, except Ying who is Malaysia and Lakshan who is from New Zealand but is of Sri Lankan descent. Racism, is unfortunately rampant in Russia and it was blatantly obvious why it was just those two who got stopped. They didn't actually do anything, they just made the whole process take twice as long for those two passengers. When I went through, I thought there was going to be a problem. When I handed my passport over, the lady came flying out of her booth when she saw one of the visas in it, and went into the next booth and started talking to the guy in there. I wish I knew which visa it was that upset them. There was no problem though, she came back and stamped my passport and I moved on.
After the whole crossing the border debacle was over, we drove for about another five hours before we reached Tallinn. We immediately dumped our stuff and went out on the walking tour. It started to snow and sleet was coming down and only two of our passengers made it past the town square, the rest opted for sitting in Molly Malone's Irish pub.
Tallinn is quite a small town, with a population of only about 400000 people and the town itself is quite charming and has a much warmer feel to either St Petersburg or Moscow. Here people actually smile.
We did the walking tour going past many churches, including the church of St Nicholas and the famous Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, with its spectacular black onion domes. We walked up to a view point from which you could see all of Tallinn, which was very pretty with all its red roves, not unlike a smaller version of Heidelberg which I had visited four years previous to this trip.
We followed the old fortification walls down to the port and past the monument to the 850 people who died on the ferry going from Tallinn to Stockholm. The snow was really starting to come down now and I was freezing and I really felt for those people, who must have frozen to death in the icy sea, long before they would have drowned.
We walked up past the Marzipan museum and the Holy Trinity church which has the oldest clock in Tallinn, which was pretty cool and then ended up back in the main square and proceeded to join the group in the nice warm pub. Once inside everyone laughed at me because someone pointed out that I had snow in my eyebrows.
We stayed in the pub for the rest of the night, I had a lovely Irish stew for dinner and a pint of Guinness. It was Jane's birthday so we all stayed out pretty late. I left with Ying at about midnight….it took us a while to get back to the hotel in the snow. Both because of the actual snow and because we kept stopping to take pictures of it.
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