Drink

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Chișinău, Moldova

Chisinau could use some sprucing up. In fact, when my bus crossed the border from Romania into Moldova the roads instantly became bumpier. As we bumped along the road to Chisinau we passed other road users such as cars, and trucks, and horse carts. Dilapidated could be one word to describe the city. The sidewalks are cracked, uneven, decaying, you always need to watch your step.

And yet it’s quite nice here. People are friendly, there’s some things to see, some lovely parks. I wandered the city, taking in the atmosphere that is very pleasant despite the disrepair of the streets. And of course the interior of shops and restaurants is modern and clean and nothing like the exterior. In the centre there is a massive indoor and outdoor market, where you can buy everything from cheese and fish to clothes to bed sheets, and the amount of produce for sale was a breath of fresh air after the sad selections in many grocery stores I’ve been in recently.

I visited the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History, a ticket for which costs less than one dollar. I think it would have been a top notch museum maybe 30 years ago, and it’s still quite good, but not very modern. They have a huge collection of taxidermised animals, and fossils, and info about the geography of Moldova, as well as the history of people in the area from the stone age till the present day. I probably would have learned a lot if there had been any info in English. It didn’t help that since I arrived with only 45 minutes till closing there was a strange old man shooing all the visitors to follow the same route and hurry up so that he could turn off the lights in each section after us. But as I said earlier, $1.

I was very happy to find a bar serving Moldovan craft beer. It was surprising to find, and even more surprising that there was quite a good selection of quality beers. Moldova is known for their wine, so I certainly didn’t expect a menu of 20 different beers from 4 local breweries.

A highlight of my time in Chisinau was exploring an abandoned observatory. Right next to the main road and the University of Medicine is a building with all its exterior walls removed. Upon climbing to the top floor there is a tower leading into the dome of an old observatory. The building is covered in graffiti and piled full of trash, and it made for a fun bit of exploration.

Well, that’s about all I have to say about the least visited country in Europe. Join me next time for an even less visited country in Europe.

Here be photos.

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Kraków, Poland

I don’t recommend night buses. I took one so that you don’t have to. Fifteen and a half hours from Vilnius to Kraków, Poland. 11:00pm to whenever the heck I arrived the next day. I severely overestimated my ability to sleep on a bus. Every other bus journey I’ve taken during the day I’ve been nodding off and fighting to not fall asleep and miss my stop. As soon as I had to sleep on a bus however… there was absolutely no chance of it. I think I got maybe an hour over the night. Awful.

Why such a stupid bus ride? I’m not sure. I wanted to get to Kraków and this was a way to do it. The thing about Poland is that it’s quite a large country by European standards, and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to see while there. My main interests are in the countries south of Poland, so Poland is just kind of in the way. Plus I set myself a deadline since there’s a concert I want to attend in Prague. So I skipped over most of Poland and came to Kraków, primarily for a certain infamous nearby attraction, which will receive its own post.

I had two and a half days in Kraków, one of which would be taken up by aforementioned infamy. If you ask the internet what to do in Kraków, drinking is recommended. There are a lot of bars here. I’m not in Europe to party my way across the continent, so I was leery of this suggested activity. However, it was a Saturday night, and a couple of Brits in my hostel room roped me and an American into a bit of a pub crawl, and we had a very good time.

Our hostel was right next to the Jewish district of the city, which is a very nice area with a bit of a gritty, grimy vibe to it. One of the Brits had researched the best bars in the area, so he led us through a selection of very nifty bars, all within approximately two minutes walking distance from each other. The bars all had very good atmosphere and were much more interesting than your average drinking establishment. One, called Singer, lived up to its name by using Singer sewing machines for every table. Two bars in particular stood out. One was a Communist themed bar. Inside was dark and dingy, a portrait of Lenin gazed down from the wall, you could smoke inside even though its not legal in Poland. There was also a secret bar, the entrance of which was at the back of an “out of order” toilet in another bar. This was super cool not only because it felt exclusive, but also due to the drink menu. Each cocktail they had available was represented by a piece of art by a local artist, with no ingredients listed. You simply picked the art that stood out to you and received the corresponding cocktail. Very cool.

I also ate some food whilst in Krakow. Pierogies of course, which are incredibly budget friendly and delicious. Kielbasa and blood sausage from a street vendor, both delicious. And a popular pretzel which was big and bready.

I barely took any pictures while here, but I saw some neat things. The aforementioned Jewish district was very nice. The old town was quite magnificent, and there was a lot going on. At 13:00 somebody played a trumpet from the top of a church tower. Then, a children’s marching band played Sweet Caroline in the main square. At the palace I saw something I never thought I’d see in my life, and probably never will again. Dragon Bones. They were incredible. Massive, unbelievable bones hanging outside of the cathedral at the palace. They belonged to a dragon that used to live in a cave beneath the palace. Naturally, I was skeptical at first, but having seen the bones I can only conclude that they must belong to a dragon. No other animal could possibly have such large bones.*

I’m currently on a train to Prague to see a concert tonight, and I guess the city might be worth looking around. Keep an eye out for my next post which will be about Auschwitz, although I’m not sure what to write about such a place.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention. In the Baltics the temperature was getting down to about 10°, and it was grey and a bit rainy, and in Belarus it even hit 0° on one day. But I arrived in Krakow to 20° weather and sunshine, so things are looking good.

Click for photos. (The few that they are)

* okay okay they’re petrified whale or mammoth bones

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Vilnius, Lithuania

Vilnius is pretty cool. It’s the first city on my trip that begins to feel like what I imagine Prague and Budapest to feel like (I’ll be in those cities soon and no longer have to imagine). Everywhere you look there are church spires, red terracotta roof tiles stretch out before you, and everything is rather nice. Not that every city I’ve been to so far hasn’t been beautiful, they’ve just been less grand.

It makes sense that Vilnius would be nice. It was only the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which for a time was the largest state in Europe, encompassing Lithuania and much of Poland and Belarus.

Vilnius Cathedral is the most unique church I’ve seen thus far. It’s built in a classical style and wouldn’t be too out of place in the Mediterranean. I highly recommend taking a tour of the crypts, it’s inexpensive, it’s the only way you can see them, and my tour guide was excellent.

I might not recommend the Museum of Genocide/KGB Museum. It is similar in content to the Museum of Occupation in Tallinn, but not as well presented. The content is good. Lithuania had a very active resistance to soviet rule, first armed and then peaceful; and the KGB prison in the basement is evocative (although again, Tallinn was better… sorry Vilnius), but the information was not very well presented and I found myself growing bored with what should have been interesting material.

Also like Tallinn, Vilnius has an abandoned soviet sport arena, The Palace of Concerts and Sports. It is some top notch soviet architecture, and abandonment and graffiti only makes it more evocative.

There are a lot of good, very modern feeling restaurants in Vilnius. Places with slick interior design and aesthetic menus. Also the food is good. I even went to a vegan restaurant since I’ve been eating mostly meat and potatoes and maybe not enough vegetables for the last month. And it has been one month since I arrived in Europe. Time flies.

The absolute best thing I discovered in Vilnius was a coffee shop. Crooked Nose & Coffee Stories is a micro roastery and coffee shop. The owner roasts very small batches of beans, and only brews them using manual drip methods. There’s the standard Aeropress and Chemex, but also traditional Japanese Nel drip, and a method he developed himself called Bro. Needless to say, I loved it there. The owner (whose name I should have learned) was very friendly and happy to talk about coffee, and the coffee was good. He had beans from Yemen, which I have never experienced before. They come from a British-Yemeni company that works with growers in Yemen to improve their crops and export to the world. It was a rich coffee with notes of dried blueberries, cocoa, and an earthy quality. Good stuff!

Here be pictures!

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Tallinn, Estonia

Tallinn is a quick two hour ferry ride from Helsinki. This makes it a very popular destination for Finnish tourists, or more commonly, a destination for Finns to come, get drunk on cheap alcohol, and return to Finland with the maximum amount of inexpensive Estonian booze they can carry. But there is more to Tallinn than the beer, I just can’t remember any of it… I kid, I kid, although I did drink some beer in Tallinn, only it wasn’t the especially cheap kind.

Tallinn has a large and beautiful old town, which is packed full of tourists. It’s nice, and I like medieval buildings of course, but one wonders how many one can see before they all blur together. However I did go all in on the medieval-ness of everything when I went to the medieval themed restaurant III Draakon. Honestly, it was really good. This wasn’t a gimmicky, over-the-top medieval restaurant, it was hearty, simple food, served in a real medieval building, lit by candlelight, with staff dressed in authentic medieval garb. Yum. Luckily there’s more to Tallinn than just the old town. I didn’t make it too far from the old town, but I could see skyscrapers in the distance (something which Helsinki lacks, either to its credit or detriment depending on your view). What I did see outside of the old town was quite something.

I first went to the Museum of Occupation. This tells the story of Estonia’s difficult past as a country occupied first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, and then by the Soviets again up until the break up of the USSR. Needless to say, this was not an enjoyable time. During Nazi occupation, Estonia became the only (unless I’m mistaken) country to be deemed Jew-free. Although the Nazis then brought more Jews into Estonia to be held in concentration camps, which is slightly ironic and very sad. When the Soviets returned at the end of WWII things continued to be bad, with huge amounts of people being arrested and deported to Siberia or simply executed. The exhibit ended by looking to the future and moving forward, rather than dwelling in the past, which was nice.

The National Library caught my eye because it is a massive, imposing building. Inside it is equally impressive. I just looked it up, and it seems that it was built right at the end of the 80s, so it is, as it appears, a piece of Soviet architecture. It was also designed by the same guy who designed the next thing I want to talk about.

Linnahall was built for the 1980 Moscow Olympics because Tallinn is so close to Moscow (12 hour drive). I don’t know what they were thinking. What it is is an amphitheatre and hockey arena, neither of which are currently open, sadly, but with an exterior that is a massive, brutalist, concrete thing. I guess most of the interior must be below ground, because you can walk around on the exterior in this strange, abandoned plaza and up sets of stairs like you’re ascending some sort of Communist pyramid. It was very cool.

I set out on a bit of a walk to get to one place in Tallinn that I really wanted to visit, and I’ll tell you about that in a moment, but first let me tell you what I stumbled upon on my way. It was a prison. A prison is what I stumbled upon. Upon an old, disused prison I stumbled. This was very cool because the prison was hosting an exhibit about its use during the Nazi and Soviet times as a horrible place for political prisoners and the like. This was an immensely powerful exhibition. I read the stories of what was done there, and who was kept there while standing in the cells and hallways of the prison itself. This was not a pleasant place at all. By the time I made it through I was drained and ready for something less wretched.

Luckily! I was on my way to a brewery when I upon the prison stumbled. So I continued unto there. A couple years ago I had a beer from Estonia in Victoria, BC, and it was possibly the best beer I had ever experienced. A gose that was crisp and subtle and refreshing. This beer was from the Põhjala brewery, which is conveniently located in Tallinn. And it was very good. They brew beer which is easily on par or better than any craft beer I’ve had in Canada.

Tallinn, and Estonia in general, didn’t get much of my time. I would like to see more, but there are so many places I want to visit that I decided to move on. Where am I now? you ask. Well, let’s just say its probably haunted and leave it at thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Here are photos! CLICK CLICK CLICK

Helsinki, Finland

Here I am, back in Helsinki after over six years. I have the most stereotypical tourist image of the city at the top of this post because I barely took any photos while I was here, since I didn’t really feel like a tourist. The moment I arrived on the train from Turku I made my way to the Tuomiokirkko (cathedral), just to get it out of the way, and I figured I may as well take the photo while I was there.

Helsinki feels the same as when I lived here six years ago. I have changed a lot in that time, and Helsinki has too, but the way the city feels to me, and how I feel while I’m here, is still the same. When I arrived I felt as if I had never left. It was not an emotional reunion like I thought it might be, I just got off the train, exited the station, and set out through streets that felt as if I had just seen them days before. It feels good.

The city is peaceful for how large it is, there is so much green space, and it’s very easy to get around by walking, biking, bus, tram, metro, and train. I just feel at home here, even after all this time. But that also means that I’ve got to move on, because I’m in Europe to travel, and Helsinki’s familiarity might shake me out of my groove.

Anyhow, below are a couple of pictures from my time here, with captions!

First up we have the tasty Finnish pastry korvapuusti (which means ‘slapped ears’ approximately), it’s essentially a cinnamon bun, but not too sticky and not too sweet like those in North America.

My most interesting culinary experience to date. These are fried crickets, with some sort of sauce, and I think there are crickets in the crackers too. This isn’t a Finnish delicacy or anything, but it may have to become a worldwide delicacy in the coming years. Honestly, they were delicious. I surprised myself by not even hesitating to pop the first one in my mouth and I just chowed down from there. They taste just like any other crunchy, seasoned snack. I also sampled an unseasoned one and it was also good.

And finally. I stayed at an AirBnB, and this is what welcomed me when I arrived. All the kittens were being adopted that day, but I got a few minutes to enjoy these glorious little critters. Yay!

Next stop, Tallinn, Estonia.