Trip to Tallinn

Halfway through my exchange year, the Latvian crew and I went to Tallinn, as we all now know, the capital of Estonia. Well, I was completely annoyed again, because we left Riga at 9:30 on a travel bus. In other words, for me: wake up at four o'clock and then drive 3.5 hours from Liepaja to Riga, and it was even the express bus. But as I was driving towards the sunrise and listening to "Jenny Jenny" by Annenmaykantereit, my bad mood quickly disappeared, and of course, I was excited for the trip with my friends. Because: After every landing, it's the smile in the surf. However, I still didn't see a donkey caravan.

Because I obviously hadn't had enough bus rides that day, I sat for another 4.5 hours, used my time to sleep, read, talk, and actually, it was relatively bearable.

On site in Tallinn, we took a short walk with our luggage, took selfies with strange characters, and checked into the hostel. The operator immediately sympathized with me, a bit stuck in the hippie era (I know that from dad ;)) probably a yoga guru in his free time, and his laughter, which followed every second word, reminded me of a goat. The girls slept eight in one quite rustic room, the boys had to share one of the same size with three people. The supervisors bought snacks for us (the boys got just as much for three people as we did for eight, I just wanted to mention that), we talked a lot, and nothing else happened that day, except that we gathered at the water in the evening. Mistake: It doesn't work so well when you send eight very good friends who haven't seen each other in a long time to sleep in ONE room. Well, another short night for everyone.

Now let's get to the most eventful day: The city game with the Estonian exchange students. In the morning (please, dad), I was woken up by Johanna's glorious words, "It's snowing." Basically, nothing bad, but it was just freezing cold, and the sidewalks were dangerously icy because they were completely covered in ice, and we spent the entire day outside. Now to the events: The coolest thing about the whole thing was that I met people I got to know in Germany in Estonia. Unfortunately, I wasn't in the same team as any of them in the rally, but nonetheless, everything went well. Well, actually, we lost by a landslide, were scolded by another tour guide because we attended her tour without permission to get the correct answers, and we were quite late, but it was still a lot of fun. By the way, we saw Santa Claus, and I was able to show off my Latvian teacher skills and act like a grammar professor when Luca asked me about those things. I better not talk about the thing with the city map and the transparent film. But in the end, it didn't help us anyway. Afterwards, two Latvian girls, an Estonian friend, and I ate at a Latvian restaurant where they served Estonian food. Estonian cranberry quark is not really my thing. It wasn't the other girl's thing either. Then we were unfortunately left again, but we still had a great day in Tallinn among ourselves, we even plan our next trip together, without adults ;). In the evening, we went together to a semi-good pizzeria, and our lack of sleep became very noticeable. Uncontrolled actions, Fiona sat next to me laughing throughout the whole meal for no reason, and the game of Chinese Whispers didn't go as well as expected, so we had to quit after the second round. The supervisors left the restaurant earlier than us, we think they didn't want to be seen with us anymore. Unfortunately, a lot of people here speak German, so our verbal diarrhea was probably understood. It didn't get better when we wanted to go to the roof of a luxury hotel to take a look at Tallinn from above and were thrown out quite kindly. At least the guy was nice. The second attempt elsewhere didn't go any better. We also saw the rehearsals for the Estonian National Day with a military parade in the city center. But the whole thing seemed rather threatening to me, and I didn't think it was great to celebrate the 101st anniversary with things used for mass destruction. Johanna and I realized at 10 pm that we needed water to drink, so we ran to Rimi, which had just closed. A young man next to us realized our absolutely life-threatening situation and offered us his water if it was so urgent. The people in Estonia are just really open-minded, warm-hearted, and all the other nice adjectives. I like it. From the hostel, we visited the associated bar, where everyone was greeted with "Howdy" to play Werewolf. Unfortunately, it didn't go well since we were all very inattentive and aggressive, but there will certainly be another time. We let the evening more or less end relaxed, and the next day we had to get up early.

Sunday was very depressing and tired, we bought provisions for the return journey on the way to the bus station before we finally left Tallinn. We arrived in Riga right on time just as my chosen bus to Liepaja departed without me. That didn't really lift my spirits, to put it that way, because the next bus came an hour later and was also a travel bus, but it stopped in many other Latvian cities, so I had to spend five hours there. No comment on my chemistry test the next day.