Buy A Tallinn Card
by PhilC2
I would advise buying this if you intend to visit a lot of places during your stay. We each bought a 72h Tallinn Card at the Lennujaama airport from Estravel Airport office. You can also buy them from Estair Airport, Kaleva Travel Airport, Wris & GoTravel Cassandra at the airport.
Full details of the Tallinn Card are available on www.tourism.tallinn.ee. A great site by the way, which I used a lot to plan my trip.
You receive a 100 page booklet, which details all the savings to be made i.e. free unlimited city transport, free sightseeing tours & free entrance to nightclubs. They cost 450 EEK each and we easily made a saving by purchasing them. Also it was easier to flash the card than shout in English to make them understand (only joking- its not our fault that English schooling is so bad). You can keep the booklet and it acts as a little souvenir for all the places you visited as well.
Buying Produce
by mcblacktiger
In most of the food shopping stores in Estonia(but this is slowly changing) you must weigh and price tag your own fruits and vegatables before you check out. If you do not they will not let you take it and they will not save your place in line.
In the fruits and vegetable section of the store you will see an electronic scale with a lot of numbered buttons on it. You put the produce on the scale and push the appropriate number for whatever you are buying, take the sticker that is printed out and put it on the bag of produce. The numbers used to have pictures of the produce with the numbers but most do not now. To find the right number you must look at the price per kilo sticker by the produce and it will say "kahlav 1(or whatever number)" and that is the number. If the produce section does not have one of these numbered scales then they don't use this system.
This may sound pretty basic, but when you have different fruits or vegies above and below a single line of price tags, or different types of the same produce, and you don't read Estonian, it can get a little tricky. Many times some of the produce is preweighed and prepriced so you must also figure out it it needs to be weighed or not. Don't rely on the check out person to catch any mistakes either, most of the time they just swipe it and don't pay atention.
Tallinn information and on-line services
by Gili_S
You can get information while in Tallinn from the tourist info as well to collect information on-line in advance. Tallinn city has a nice official web site, there is general information about the city and also including lots information for visitors.
The site is available also in English & Russian
Links:
Tallinn Official
Direct link to the tourism site
Festival: Vastlapäev
by antistar
Known as Shrove Tuesday in much of the English speaking world, the Estonians celebrate this day a little differently. Instead of pancakes, they eat split pea soup and the delicious vastlakukkel cream cake. Traditionally children will sled down any available hill of snow, and in Tallinn they all rush to the Song Festival Grounds for a four o'clock slide down into the bowl.
The food is, like pancakes, traditionally the last thing you eat before the fast, and the name Vastlapaev is taken from the German word "fasten" (to fast). The cake is similar to the traditional Swedish fastlagsbulle, but with the marzipan swapped for strawberry jam. The whole tradition is also shared by the Finns, who celebrate Shrove Tuesday in almost identical fashion.
You can find the cakes on special menus in restaurants all over the country on Shrove Tuesday, and also on the shelves of shops.
Monument to Dostojevski
by grandmaR
Under construction
Dostojevski is a great name is connected with Tallinn. Between 1830 and 1840, Mikhail Dostoyevsky lived in Uus Street in the old part of Tallinn, being employed at the Reval Engineer Commando. His brother, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, frequently visited Tallinn at that time.
Sign in with Facebook
Kadriorg Palace, Tallinn
The 'Suur Toll' steampowered icebreaker
Pikk
Kadriorg Palace
