May 28 Tallin Day 3

Another lovely day in Estonia.

I spent most of the day at the Estonian Open Air Museum. This is a pioneer village, representing farms from, mostly, the 1800's. it is about 8 km from the city center, but can be reached by a local bus. You walk, for about 15 minutes, through a lovely forest to get to the museum.

There are a dozen farms, actual old farm buildings, moved from different  locations in Estonia, to this location. Each farm consists of all the buildings it had. There is the main house, barns, storage buildings, smithys, outhouses, wind mills and so on.

There is also a fire station, church, school house, and a store.

The setting is beautiful, right on the water at Kopli Bay, and very peaceful. It takes up 200 acres, which means the buildings are spread out. The nice thing is that it is easy to avoid everybody else who is there, not that there were a lot of people. I saw one tour bus, a couple of school groups, and maybe a dozen or so individual tourists like me.

This museum was part of a Rick Steves show. When he was there there was music, twenty or so dancers; it was quite a party. I did mention I was a personal friend of Rick's, but no luck, no music, no dancers.

There weren't any demonstrations, like we are used to in our pioneer villages, but all the buildings had explanations in Estonian, English, and Russian, that were good.

Aside from the farms the thing I enjoyed the most was the peace and quiet, beautiful forests, lots of birds, I even found some Lily-of-the-Field. Gorgeous little white bells, with a lovely aroma. They are very popular here. In Gdansk, and everywhere since, i have seen numerous ladies selling bunches of them on street corners.

In the late afternoon, after a rest, (there is a lot of walking to cover 200 acres), I went back to the Old Town one more time.

I did learn an interesting fact. In Amsterdam, and Gdansk, the buildings are narrow, because taxes were dependent on frontage. Well, in some Baltic cities, taxes were determined by the size of the windows, so small windows were in style, to save money.

I have read a couple of books by Bill Bryson on this trip....love those ebooks, from the library. One was "The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid". The other is "At Home". Both of those books fit into this trip. The first one is the story of Bill growing up in Iowa, during the fifties and sixties. Travelling through these countries I couldn't get over the difference between life in Iowa, at the same time as everybody here suffered under the Soviet regime. In North America it was the best of times, in Eastern Europe the worst.

Bryson's other book deals with the evolution of how we live, and I have seen, first hand, some of the developments he documents, especially at the Outdoor Museum.

Interesting.

Tomorrow I have a bus at 7 am to St. Petersburg. My passport and Russian Visa is ready. So am I. I'm down to my two last cities, St. Petersburg, then Warsaw.

Ralf