Back to Baltics

After I came back to Finland from my New York-India-Malaysia-Singapore trip, it was back to reality. And what is reality? At that time, reality was working in a bank, working in a bar and working on my thesis. Reality was busy. Reality was also the arrival of summer in Finland. This meant four weeks of summer vacation. What do you reckon I did with these four weeks? Yes, correct, I went traveling! The plan was to hit the Baltic countries for about a week and then carry on through Poland and Germany. So off we went.

Bags packed, ready to hit the road!

We hitched a ride with my dad and his wife Anu from my tiny hometown of Vaasa to the somewhat bigger capital of Finland, Helsinki. Before we continued our trip, we had one stop to make in Helsinki. A Bruce Springsteen concert. So Matt, my travel buddy for the following weeks, me and my daddy made our way to the Olympic stadion in Helsinki where we awaited the arrival of The Boss. And oh did he play. And play. And play. The concert went on for 4 hours! Jeez... Whatever, we had fun drinking red wine out of the bottle and secretly smoking cigars when security wasn't looking.

Me and my Daddy! Love you dad! <3

On with the show, enough of Helsinki and Back to Baltics. The first stop was Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. I've been to Tallinn before. The first time around I was about 12 years old. I remember laughing at a dubbed version of "The Bold and the Beautiful". See, the Estonian language sounds somewhat like Finnish, in fact, it sounds like a Finnish person who's had a bit too much to drink. I also remember the old town of Tallinn as a quite busy but pretty place. I went to Tallinn a second time a couple of years ago, just before christmas. It was a lot busier then I remembered. The third time, it was even busier.

But first things first. We took the ferry from Helsinki across to Tallinn. It's not a long ride, but if you ever take it, be ware. Tallinn, with its cheap alcohol and close proximity to Helsinki, is know to many Finns as a place to get drunk and get drinks. People buy truckloads of alcohol from Tallinn for weddings, parties or for any given Saturday night. So a typical ferry to or fro Tallinn will most probably be full of drunk Finns. Fabulous. This ferry, however, was surprisingly clean and sober, perhaps because it left at 2 pm.

The sober ferry

After we arrived in Tallinn, we made the short walk from the ferry in to Tallinns old town. It was August, which means high season in Tallinn. The place was crawling of tourists and so we had minor difficulties in finding a room. After some walking back and forth, we settled for a dorm at an Aussie owned party hostel. We were lucky, because it was Wednesday. Wizard Wednesday! The goal was to drink enough beer to make a staff of empty beer cans longer than your own body. If you succeeded in this difficult task, you became a wizard. Unfortunately, we failed. This guy, however, succeeded with grace!

It's the Wednesday Wizard!

The night turned out to be a hard one, moving from one bar to the other and making friends with other Aussie party hostel guests.

Would you like one? Or two? Or seventeen?

As a result, we were thoroughly hungover the next day. However, we managed to visit one of my absolute favorite places in Tallinn: a restaurant called Kompressor serving pancakes. Only pancakes! The perfect hangover breakfast/lunch. The rest of the day was pissed away by strolling around town, however, managing a really nice birthday dinner. Happy birthday Matt!

So I like pancakes, who doesn't?

We stayed two nights in Tallinn. It's a nice town, but as I'd been there two times prior to this trip, it wasn't anything new, moving on. We took a bus from Tallinn to Riga, the capital of Latvia. During our quest to become Wizards, a Dutch guy told os with warmth in his voice of the women of Riga. What is so utterly special about the women of Riga? Is there something wrong with the women of, let's say Vaasa? It didn't, however, take long to realise what was special about the women in Riga. Eastern Europe, that's whats special about them. Meaning? Short skirts, tiny shirts and stilettos. That's the women of Riga.

Oh, the women of Riga!

There is, however, more to Riga then short skirts and high heels. For example, driving in to Riga, the depressing signs of Soviet become evident in the form of concrete boxes, trying their best to look like apartment buildings. For you who don't know the history of Latvia, let me enlighten you a bit on the recent history, as the old historian I am. In 1944 there was heavy fighting in Latvia between German and Soviet troops, ending in German defeat. Part of Latvia, once more, was under Soviet control and after the German surrender it became evident that Soviet forces were there to stay. Latvia was, as the Beatles would have put it, Back in the U.S.S.R. In 1989, approximately two million people joined hands to form a human chain spanning over 600 kilometers across the Baltic states, at that point republics of the Soviet Union, to draw attention globally to their desire for independence. It illustrated solidarity among the three nations and has been described as "emotionally captivating" and a "visually stunning scene". Within six months after, what was named the Baltic Way (also called the Chain of Freedom), Lithuania was the first to declare independence, Latvia following in August 1991.

"Chain of Freedom"

Very impressive. Enough history, back to present. As any other European capital, also Riga has an old town. I suppose as in any other European capital, this is where you will want to stay. And so we did. After a slight miscalculation on exchange rates, we thought we were Rich in Riga, and so got a private room and got ourselves a mighty Latvian dinner of cabbage, cabbage, potatoes and cabbage. Delicious. After discovering we weren't Rich in Riga after all, we moped around what became Rainy Riga. Thankfully we found a band of guys dressed up like old ladies singing and dancing on a square to cheer us up. Appropriately, they were performing Rihanna's Umbrella. Oh the irony.

Under my umbrella,
ella ella eh eh eh...

Riga was not all bad, though. The next day the sun swopped places with the rain and we decided to go explore. First stop, Riga Central Market. I have a secret love for markets. Let me explain why. Regardless of the country you are in, markets are always filled with people selling weird shit you won't find anywhere else. There you find the local foods, drinks and people mixing and mingling. When I was at at a market in Bangalore, the stall keeper gave me a discount because I had come all the way from Finland to buy, whatever I was buying, from his stall. Very cool! At the market in Riga we tried our first (and last) Kvass. It is a fermented beverage that is made from black or regular rye bread. Interestingly, Wikipedia cites that Kvass is "classified as a non-alcoholic drink by Russian standards". By Russian standards, excuse me, but is that supposed to calm me in some way? It sounds to me more like a warning... Well, non-alcoholic or not, I would describe the taste as an old coke that someone left a piece of bread in. I don't think I would be fooling anyone if I said I particularly liked it.

"Yes, I think this Kvass is delicious"

Moving on. Do you know the old proverb "after every Kvass comes a beer"? Well I do, and so we had one. Except for concrete boxes, Riga also has some more charming buildings. There is a block filled with magnificent art nouveau architecture and so we went to see it. I always find it interesting when Magnificence sits next to Nasty, like for example a pile of trash next to the Taj Mahal. Conclusively, this block was interesting. Next to Magnificent art nouveau sat Nasty crack house. Crack house? Yes, I nicknamed the houses crack houses because of the many cracks they had. Nonetheless, the area is definitely worth a visit.

Meet Magnificent...

...and Nasty

We spent our last of two nights in Riga listening to yelling and bottles braking, this city knows how to party! We woke up early the next morning, sleepy from the nights jangle, and took a bus to the third of the Baltic countries: Lithuania. Moving through the Baltics is easy, each capital are only around a 4-5 hour busdrive from each other.

Our itinerary for the Baltics, took us about a week

Rolling in to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was a different deal then Riga. This place looked more put together with less concrete and cracks. Even though we knew it was high season in the Baltics, and even we had troubles finding rooms before, we still didn't prebook anything for Vilnius. We thought everything worked out pretty well when we found a nice hostel that gave us their last room. Sweet! I took a shower and walked back to the common room, only to find our hungover French hostel host explaning how he had made a mistake. The hostel was fully booked, we had to go. What is the Britts say again, "don't trust the French"?

This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. You have to pack the bag you just unpacked, throw it on your already aching shoulders, get all sweaty again walking in the hot sun on streets you don't know to a place you hope will have room for you. And even more so, you have to give up a nice room you were planning on enjoying. Fortunately we found something almost as nice, or what do you think?

Sleep tight in you little box!

We were hungry, we were tired and we were not happy, I won't deny. Traveling can have its setbacks. And when it has, there's only one thing to do: go eat a good meal and drink an even better beer. So we did. Naturally, also Vilnius has an old town, so we headed there and had ourselves some comfort food. And it helped. We got our spirit back and decided to go explore what Vilnius had to offer. Being a European city, there are churches. There are so many churches I don't know who goes to them all. I don't much care for churches, so we didn't go see any. Instead, we decided to walk up a small hill. As we were still in eastern Europe, walking up the cobble stone path we saw a women walking up in her skirt and stilettos. I took a look at my dirty sneakers and came to the conclusion I could never live here.

Definitely worth the walk up. In high heels? Wouldn't recommend it.
See the white church in the background? Yes, that's one of the many churches we didn't go to.

One of the nicest things with traveling is just sitting down and waiting for things to happen. You can sit down at in an Indian coffe shop and all of a sudden you have the kids of the owner messing around with you, or you sit on a beach in Malaysia enjoying a beer and all of a sudden you're enjoying the biggest party on the island. We were walking in a park, after enjoying what might have been the best ice cream of my entire life, and saw two girls and a guy rehearsing a dance routine. They didn't have music. We walked a little further and all of a sudden a funky band started playing some funky tunes.

The funky band

What happened next makes me believe there is a god after all. The three dancers, joined by a fourth dancer, a waiter who worked at a cafe near by, started dancing to the funky tunes of the funky band.

The happy youth of Lithuania rocking it out!

It was a perfect moment of an American band coming together with Lithuanian youth, playing and dancing for an audience of spontaneous by passers.

Vilnius was saved. A hill, a good meal and a cool moment of music and dance. The next day, our last day in Vilnius as we had tickets for an overnight bus taking us all the way to Warsaw, started off in an interesting way. We had lunch at a restaurant serving traditional Lithuanian food. This is what we had

This is Cepelinai. Say what? Cepelinai, a Lithuanian national dish. A type of dumplings stuffed with minced meat, or whatever. I know my mama taught me to always finish my plate, but really, I couldn't. Sorry mom. After horrid cepelinai lunch, we headed for a cafe to sit down and recover from the experience. Ok, so it was a bar, so what? But because of the name, we just had to go in.

Welcome to Gringo!

Why is this so special? As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, I work at a bar. Actually, I work at a bar and a pub. The pub is called El Gringo. Many customers simply call it "my living room".

Serving beer at El Gringo. One of my favorite things to do, believe it or not!

So sitting in Gringo felt comfy and homy. As we let the beer erase the memory of the cepelinai, the day grew darker and it was time for us to head to the busstation for our next stop. Thank you Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, next stop Warsaw!