North Sea Serenade – I can’t keep track of the days anymore so this day is Tallinn

First of all we moved our clocks BACK an hour so between last night and this morning Tom and I slept 11.5 hours.  When we got up first this morning we opened the drapes to see what kind of a day it’s going to be.  Imagine our surprise when there is a gigantic mega-ship a gangplank’s distance away.  That resulted In a lot of screaming and running around and slamming curtains shut on my part.

So we go downstairs and I had poached eggs on some excellent corned beef hash and Tom had pecan pancakes which he said were very good.

Then at 10:30 A we went downstairs for our tour.  That is a very civilized time for a tour.  We stream out of the ship along with 6000 of our closest friends from the neighboring ship.  Nobody pointed and laughed so if someone did see us they didn’t see us on the gangplank.  Turns out that despite the mass of humanity heading toward the dock there were only 24 of us on the tour.

We drove through Tallinn and the guide pointed out the highlights of which there were not many.  It is a colorful and picturesque town but shows the marks of decay and neglect.  Apparently their humidity is very high and even massive stone buildings when not maintained do not survive.

The Town Hall is about 800 years old.  At various times this country has belonged to Sweden, the USSR, Denmark and then the USSR again.  So they are pretty happy about their current independence.  My only problem with these towns is that while cobblestones are very photogenic and add a ton of local color they are darned hard to walk on.  The guide called one street the street of vendors and I said more like the street of twisted ankles.

We went to the chocolate place and it was smaller than our house.  24 of us squeezed ourselves around a table which was designed for 8 people at most.  The woman who is the “master chocolatier” didn’t speak English so the guide translated.  Then we got to take some hunks of chocolate and dip them in white or dark chocolate and then decorate them with rose petals and hunks of orange and chili peppers – she said that in the winter they made chocolate with garlic and “wodka” which sounds quite frankly disgusting to me.  But it was fun and I had some really good hot chocolate from their store and then we continued our tour and had some free time.

We had the option to walk up a hill but Ann, Tom and I decided to stop in a local café and have some local food.  Ann and I had some delicious cheese and Tom had the mushroom  salad which turned out to be half mushrooms and half onions diced fine with bacon and two hunks of potatoes.  We had some wasps who were interested in sharing our meal, even though we didn’t invite them.

Then we went back to the chocolate place and picked up our chocolate and came back to the ship.  It’s a short day for us – all aboard is 3:30 P.  So we have tea and trivia (hopefully we can manage to win) and then we have dinner tonight in the steakhouse which is super yummy.  Then on to Riga!