Tallinn / Estonia

Tallinn is the capital and most populous city of Estonia. Situated on a bay in north Estonia, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea, only 80 km south of Helsinki, Finland. Ferries from Helsinki to Tallinn leave from the port every day, and several times a day. The journey lasts between 2 and 3 hours. There are also express ferries from late spring to late fall, which reduce the journey to 1 and a half hours. It offers a lot to the visitor: an impressive and varied monumental heritage, museums, viewpoints from which to contemplate the Old City, which is a walled city, with spectacular walls that are one of the best preserved in Europe. But Tallinn is not only the beauty of its Old City, its walls, its medieval buildings and its cobbled alleys. It is also a modern, avant-garde city, which surprises with its modern neighborhoods with a bohemian atmosphere and full of life. Personally I want to highlight two places in the city, apart from the beautiful town hall square (Raekoja Plats). First, the pharmacy in the town hall square, the oldest pharmacy in Europe, which was opened in 1422 and has not stopped operating until today. Second, the Aleksander Nevsky Cathedral, an Orthodox cathedral located in the historic center, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1997 with an architecture based on the Russian model, from the time when Estonia was part of the Russian Empire, with its 5 domes and its 11 bells!

The company I had during my visit to the city will also remain in my memories. As I boarded the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn very early in the morning, I ran into another solo traveler, a Japanese boy from Kioto called Kouki who was just as frozen and lost as I was. As we kept bumping into each other around every corner, we ended up talking and spending the day together like tourists, including food and some hot tea stops. These are the little things that can happen when you travel alone and that in the end add up to good memories of the visit.