What better way to wile away a lazy Sunday afternoon than by wandering around the streets of Tartu? As we enter our fifth week on the road, the unhurried pace of our holiday is effecting the evolution of this sojourn from our normal lifestyle into the lifestyle itself.
Clearly, most tourists skip the east of Estonia, but that was already apparent in Narva. Here again, we have the city more or less to ourselves. You’d almost think summer was grinding to a halt, and yet Black Saturday was only yesterday. Happily, we notice none of that, way up here in the Baltic countries.
This morning, we looked around the Dome Church ruins and climbed the towers there. Eloïse’s wild imagination turned this routine pastime into spoken zoeken (searching for ghosts). In the evening, she would recall this as a highlight of her day, together with the time she spent in the nearby playground.
Dinner this evening was delicious, thanks to Moka, which is very close to our hotel.
Tonight is our last night in Estonia. I feel as if we’ve been in the country a long time now, but it’s an illusion, of course. Time really stretches and distorts when you’re travelling.
In the morning, we’ll continue south, back into Latvia, to the small town of Gulbene. There, we’ll take a narrow gauge train to Alūksne, where we’ll pause for half an hour before returning on the train to Gulbene.
There’s not much else to do in the area, so we’ll be spending just the one night in Gulbene before continuing south.