Yup, we’re in Tallinn. Tere Tulemast means (as far as I can tell) “welcome!”

We’ve been here 3 days now and have had a bunch of adventures.

Estonia seems to be more like a Scandinavian country than any European country I’ve been to. When you get off the plane at the airport you feel like you’re at IKEA:

But there’s no shortage of Old Soviet architecture to be found outside the old parts of the town:

When the Soviets occupied Estonia in 1940 onwards, they bombed much of the city of Tallinn, then built those big, concrete apartment blocks. Then they filled them with workers from rural Siberia in an effort to overwhelm the ethnic Estonian community. Ethnic cleansing, soviet style.

Anyway, in our first two days we did a lot of sightseeing around the Old Town, or vana linn. The old town has been around for oh, about 1000 years now, and is still encircled by a mostly intact wall. The original wall had over 45 towers and 26 of them still stand:

Inside the walls is a beautiful old town, with a really cool town square:

But we’ve done more than sightseeing…Dave had to take a trip to the emergency room of Tallinn’s Central Hospital (where both Kitty & Ivar were born). He had an infection in his right baby toe that was mostly cleared up by the time we left, but it came back with a vengeance just after we got here. All that walking we did in London and in our first day of sightseeing here in Tallinn. Amazingly enough, we were in and out within about half an hour, and that includes walking to and from the hospital! Evidently Estonia has a very high-tech and modern health care system.

Day Two took us to the Canadian Embassy (again) to authorize paperwork in order to get Estonian citizenship issues for Dave, Melissa and the girls (it worked, they’re all citizens now), to the Museum of Occupation and more touring about town. But that’s for another day’s blog.