Did you say Kick in the Cock???

The medieval Old Town of Tallinn has been the stuff of fantasy novels and we have loved it! Seeing snow gently resting on the spires and curling around the ancient walls is magical. We’ve wandered up and down the cobbled streets just breathing in the sights. On the second day as we walked past the walls of St Olaf’s Church we could hear beautiful singing. Realising it was Sunday we decided to go inside and watched as the Sunday service unfolded. It was really nice to be able to walk in and see this old Church full of life.

I equally enjoyed seeing the Estonian mummas in their scarves coming up to the old priest to be blessed in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. He had a beard that even Merlin would be proud of! Just down from this 19th Century Russian Orthodox church was what Damien and I have dubbed the Kick in the Cock…I’m sure we aren’t the first English speaking tourists to do so. I mean a cannon tower called Kiek in de Kok is just asking for it, right? Apparently it really means ‘Peep in the kitchen’ as back in the day (and that’s wayyy back in the day too, it was built in 1475!) from the top part of the tower you could sneek a peek into the kitchens of the peeps in the town below.

Realising our Euro goes a bit further than in Finland we have also indulged in eating and drinking out. Siider has been the order of the day for me and besides siider Damien has been trying out a range of beers on offer, which we have mused that our mate Glenn would be very appreciative of! My favourite meal while we have been here was the french onion soup with cheesy brioche I had yesterday.

Although today is actually Valentine’s Day here, we decided to celebrate it a day earlier cause basically our money goes further in Tallinn and we had some stuff we wanted to do here that we thought was worthy of a special day. So our Valentine’s day involved a couple of hours lazying in the sister spa hotel next to ours. We’ve been residing in what really is more like the ‘poor cousin’ rather than the sister! Ha ha. But it has been warm, clean and has a great breakfast buffet.

Anyway, I digress, the spa had a couple of pools, several spas and lots of jets, fountains and bubbles exploding out of everywhere. We both agreed there was something not quite right about the feel of this place. Damien declared he could imagine being watched from the walls….yeah, it had that slight iron curtain chic about it!! Damien just told me it was built in 2007…as he said, it’s amazing how they could make something so new look so old! Anyway, we enjoyed lazying in there.

Our other Valentine’s treat was to go out to dinner to a restaurant called Olde Hansa. The food is all made to medieval recipes and the whole experience is designed to look and feel like you have stepped back in time. Damien had a game pot which was a mince made of wild boar and elk. I had the sausages of boar, elk and bear. I was somewhat dubious about there really being a bear in there so I asked the very lovely waitress who assured me that the bears came from some forest in Estonia. So I can tick bear off the culinary list now 🙂

One other nice unexpected part of yesterday was when we were on our walk to the Town Square and we spied some interesting back streets and ended up stumbling across another part of the old wall which we were able to ascend and walk along the top of. This afforded us a view of the town and also another opportunity for me to drift into fantasy land again and visualise what it would have been like to be one of the guards who would have manned these walls centuries ago.

Today we will head back to Helsinki on the Tallink cruise ship and spend a night there before we go to Porvoo tomorrow which is the second oldest town in Finland. I have included a video I took on the cruise ship to Tallinn the other day as quite frankly I’m rather facinated with travelling through frozen water.