Castles, Cake, and Open Road

Our next step was Tallin, Estonia's capital city and one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe (with human habitation dating back 5,000 years!). I've wanted to go to Tallinn for a long time because I love that Russian-tanged flavor of Eastern Europe, and I wasn't sure I'd ever make it there, so this was the highlight of the trip for me.  We stayed in the Telegraff, a luxury hotel that was definitely our most comfortable room of the trip. It even had a pillow menu! And since it's nestled right in the heart of the Old Town, it was the perfect location for exploring while still being able to get back quickly for naps. Since we got in fairly late on our first day in Tallinn, dinner was the first order of business. We ate at Olde Hansa, a medieval-style restaurant that uses 700-year-old recipes. It was flickering and dim inside and felt like you'd stepped right back into the past, especially since the waiters were in traditonal Estonian garb (which incl...

This post is just for the odds and ends of Riga I didn't put in the other ones but don't want to leave out! One of my favorite things we did was an Art Nouveau walk. Art Nouveau is a style of both architecture and art popular between around 1890 and 1910, and Riga has the highest concentration of such architecture in the world in its center. This construction exploded at the turn of the century in Riga, because the bourgeoisie needed somewhere appropriately impressive to live.  The detail and whimsy are amazing, and I spent a good amount of time gawking with my head turned up.  We also went to the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum, which as one would expect is very sobering. The stones there are actually brought from the Riga Ghetto, and the walls list the 70,000 Latvians and 25,000 other European Jews who were brought to Latvia to be murdered.  In the room above, each glowing box had a picture...