Rick Steves

Dateline: Tallinn, Day 2 – T and D

Tallinn, Estonia
15 June 2009

I woke up early today, actually using my alarm clock for the first time on this entire trip, to meet a T, a good friend from work, and his wife D. T follows my blog and let me know a couple months ago that they would be on a Baltic Sea cruise about the time I would be in the Baltic states. It happened to work out that we could hang out for the day in Talllinn.

Unfortunately, today’s weather has been downright crappy: rainy and cold. But we made the most of it. D had Rick Steves’ Scandinavia book, so we did the walking tour that Rick details. Afterward, we grabbed a bite to eat before going to explore more of Tallinn.

DSC_9991
18.0 mm || 1/15 || f/3.5 || ISO1600 || NIKON D70


DSC_9993
18.0 mm || 1/15 || f/3.5 || ISO1600 || NIKON D70

We first tried going to the Estonian Museum of Occupations, however it was closed (on a Monday). I looked through the ripped out pages of my Europe on a Shoestring book and thought that going to the Tallinna Linnamuuseum (Tallinn City Museum) would be the next best bet.

We started working our way up to the opposite end of town, weaving our way through the streets to find whatever might be off the beaten path.

The Tallinna Linnamuuseum open and was a pretty neat little museum of Tallinn’s history. It was getting close to 4, and T and D needed to leave to get back the boat. We said goodbye and parted ways.

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18.0 mm || 1/30 || f/3.5 || ISO1600 || NIKON D70

I went back to the hostel and took a nap before heading back out on my own. I was pretty hungry, but nothing looked terribly exciting. Because of the weather, no one was eating outside. I walked down through the town square, out of Old Town, and to the shopping center across the way. It was mostly a mix of western foods that I’ve been desperately trying to avoid, usually in vain. Nothing looked particularly appetizing, so I started walking back toward Old Town.

I eventually settled on McDonald’s, again. Although, this time I had a Chicken Bacon Onion (CBO). It seemed like a local offering, seeing as they didn’t have it either of the McDonald’s in St. Petersburg, and certainly not at any McDonald’s I’ve in the US.

It was decent, and certainly better than having a биг мак1 again.

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  1. Big Mac ↩

The Free Range Method

After talking with many great people, I think I finally have a plan.

There are really two parts to this story, however I’m going to tell them in reverse order.

On Monday, I was feeling quite anxious. I’ve been feeling rather anxious all semester and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I went to More on Mondays, which is a targeted “seminar” that The Annex arranges. This past Monday was specifically for graduating seniors and they brought Cindy Smith, a woman who specializes in transition. Cindy usually deals with missionaries, expatriates, and repatriation. But being a senior is not entirely different. She provided us with a slide that shows the major steps of transition and then walked us through them:
transition
Click image to embiggen

This was really helpful. Just realizing that transition, especially on this scale, can be stressful and chaotic. This also helped me realize another thing: transitioning from college/Colorado to mission trip to work/Seattle would be way to much for me to handle. So I pretty much have nixed the idea of doing a mission trip over the summer, and I think it’s a good call.

Second, I talked with Jessica a couple weeks ago. She spent last fall traveling for about two months in Europe, which is great because that’s basically what I want to do – although I may go farther East than she did. I also filled in some important details of my trip. For me, it will probably cost about $4k-$5k, which is a lot, but I don’t think unreasonably so. I saved at least $1000 by using airline miles to fly from the US to Europe (assuming there isn’t some insane “fee” for booking said flight). Keeping cash on hand seems the way to go, which is what I remembered from my trip to Europe a couple years ago (I paid cash for everything…still have some left over, too).

In terms of getting around, Jessica said that using RyanAir (which I’d heard of) and easyJet (which I had not heard of) were probably better than getting a Eurail pass, although I don’t have to make that call just yet. In terms of sleeping accommodations, HostelWorld.com is the site to visit. I poked around it a bit and it seems really easy to use and should fit the bill just perfectly. The Lonely Planet series of books is what Jessica used, I currently have one on reserve at the library to see if I like the format and what they cover. If not, I may just end up using Rick Steves’. Or just wing it.

The plan, thus far, looks something like this: fly into and out of Europe via Paris or Frankfurt using airline miles. Spend several days in each city until I’m ready to move on to another city. Use HostelWorld to find places to sleep and meet new people. Theoretically find some other people travel with at a hostel and join them for a little while. Rinse and repeat. I’m calling this the free range method.

I would like to list out some places that I would like to visit, although I don’t want to attach a particular time or order in which to visit them. I think this will help move my journey along.

One of the other major things that I need to resolve is what I’m bringing. I would like to bring some photography equipment, but I’m not sure what and how much. There’s also the problem about what to do with all my photographs after I take them. Since I shoot in RAW, I need some special equipment and software to do any sort of editing, I can’t just upload them to Flickr. Do I want to just bring a stack of memory cards? I’m thinking about purchasing a netbook1 to bring with me. Costco is currently selling an Acer Aspire One Netbook with 8.9″ display, Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 160GB HDD, no optical drive, and integrated webcam for $299.99. I could load it up with the most basic of RAW viewing tools so I could delete any photos I think are absolute crap and would never keep (e.g. blurry photos) and then upload the rest to a secure storage space online. This way I wouldn’t be completely SOL if the netbook was stolen, lost, broken (not that I’m planning on any of that happening).

Also, how much stuff do I really want to be taking? I want to be nimble.

If you’ve ever traveled abroad in this sort of fashion, what did you bring?

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  1. A netbook is a small and cheap computer used primarily to access the Internet ↩