Veljo and I are on the road from Tallinn to Tartu in the south. We’re about halfway (or 100 km) into the trip. We’re stopping at this pub for a lunch of salmon chowder. The interior of this pub is like a Swiss/Nordic chalet, with light colored wood, high ceilings and loads of snow outside.
The road between Tallinn and here has been full of snow-covered fields with hardly anything of note, save a few express buses that make the round trip every hour — and a handful of female hitchhikers, who Veljo says are somewhat common, particularly in the rural areas.
We should be in Tartu in about an hour, where we’ll spend the afternoon doing a few interviews with some city officials about WiFi stuff there. Its supposed to be a cool university town. Its university cultivates an Oxford/Ivy League tradition but has combined it with the radicalism of Berkeley or the London School of Economics (Estonia, Bradt Travel Guide, 4th Ed.)
After the afternoon, we head further south all the way to near the Latvian border and will stay in some semi-rural area with a sauna apparently and will hang out in a local pub with some local music. That sounds good to me.
