The Estonian Maritime Days Meetup '17
Aug 8, 2017 9:26:11 GMT -5
Gelquie, Birdy, and 5 more like this
Post by Huntress on Aug 8, 2017 9:26:11 GMT -5
(aka Beertravaganza II: Now Even Snobbier.)
A few weeks overdue, but better late than never.
Mid-July, we got Thorn and Celestial over for a week for the Tallinn Maritime Days/sampling all the Estonian food/also beer/general meetup goodness/bringing us back to the world of the living for a brief instance before we sunk back to the neverending chaotic madness of life with a bebe.
If I’d had any sense, I would’ve written this up right after the meetup so that I’d actually remember what happened when, but sense is at a premium in this household, so we have to make do with the timestamps on photos and the others can correct me if my memory goes way off-kilter.
July 14 – Gathering
Thorn and Celes were to fly in on the same day, except three hours apart. My impeccable logic said that it’d be smarter to pick Thorn up first, go get food at the nearby mall, then kill the remaining three hours at the rest of the mall until it’s time to get Celes and then we could drive back to the house together. It went mmmmostly without a hitch.
…yes, okay, so there’s massive roadwork going on around the airport. Excellent news for anyone who’s flying to town from September onwards, because we’re getting a brand new tram line connecting to the airport. Not so excellent news for anyone who, say, might attempt to walk from the mall to the airport using the road that’s getting the new tram line and is subsequently all closed up with fences and piles of gravel. If one was to attempt that, one might end up detouring about seven times before finally making it to the airport.
…on the plus side, Celes got in fifteen minutes later than we’d thought, so we got in justabout when she got in and roadwork-related crises were averted. So we headed on home and in place of dinner, had various different sorts of candy and cookies and chocolate and kvass, because we’re adults, dangit.
Thorn also brought us a traditional New Zealand buzzy bee and Celes brought a wee wild hairy haggis.
The buzzy bee is going over well with the kid, although he insists on carrying it half of the time. When he happens to be dragging it along, it makes a clicky-clicky-clicky sound and spins the wings.
The haggis was my One Big Regret of 2010, when I went to Scotland, saw them at a tourist shop, and didn’t get them. Seven years later, we have been reunited C:
What’s more, turns out that it squeaks.
July 15 – Adventuring
This year, the Maritime Days (previously a weekend event) lasted four whole days, meaning we didn’t need to run through everything a-sap, meaning we got to start with every tourist’s must-go and went to the Tallinn Old Town, because said old town contains an adventurers’ tavern that we always drag everyone to, partly because it’s awesome and partly because the food they serve is decently affordable for the old town. Not to mention delicious.
Then we went through all the mandatory medieval-old-town-goodness while the kiddo slept, and beelined for the St Nicholas Church after he woke up, because said church contains the world’s only remaining Danse Macabre on canvas and the last time Celes was in town, the church had been closed because it was a Monday. Stuff is frequently closed on Mondays, presumably because nobody likes Mondays. This time, we did get in.
Celes, Thorn, a view, and a seagull thug.
Bling at the Silver Chamber of the church, which we got lucky with because the chamber is only open at certain hours.
The Danse Macabre – an enormously big deal if you’re a history buff, otherwise a decently nice piece of tapestry from 1633. The point of those things was a sort of memento mori, reminding people that everyone is mortal and dances with death, from popes and emperors to lowly dung farmers.
Eventually we made our way to the actual harbor area with the Maritime Days, or at least part of it – the event gets spread all over the city’s coastline – and dug through the little booths for handicraft and food and other such fairstuffs. Then headed home for the day, with the view to order sushi.
Sushi did not happen. The sushi place in question is by far the best sushi place we know of in town, and it’s fairly close to boot, but the app we use to place the order wasn’t cooperating and they just weren’t taking our money. We figured that we’d just have sushi for breakfast the next day – adults, dangit – and got a big ol’ pile of pizzaburgersteaks instead.
July 16 – Escaping
Sushi did not happen for breakfast either.
The amount of effort we put into trying to get that bleedin’ sushi really goes to show how good the sushi actually is. The app wasn’t taking the order after what, five tries, so eventually I got in the car, brought Celestial along for extra firepower and went to scope the place itself.
It was closed, which was highly suspish because they were supposed to open an hour ago. We cased the joint for some time, trying to figure out if they had a hostage situation or a zombie infestation or both, but eventually gave up, went back and headed out for burgers instead. Which gave us just about enough time to make it to the Seaplane Harbor for our murder mystery escape room.
Some time before the meetup, my mom had emailed me some promotional stuff about the Maritime Days, having no idea of what she’d unleash, because the promo included a blurb about a brand-spankin’-new escape room centered on a murder mystery on a docked ship that was in-story found stranded with everyone on board shot dead, and the job of the players was to be the investigators to figure out what happened. In other words, a murder mystery escape room on a ghost ship. Best band name ever.
Couldn’t take any pictures inside, obviously, but this was the ship.
We are the picture of tough CSI officials, clearly. Especially the bebe.
I can’t tell very much about the escape room itself, in case we get more forumers over sometime who get dragged to the same escape room (it could happen) but we entirely failed to escape from it. Partly because as far as escape rooms go, it was actually pretty difficult, in that it was in a ship that hadn’t been cleared of all the actual ship-stuff, so there were a lot of red herrings and we wasted a lot of time trying to figure out if a random little booklet or map might actually be relevant. In large part because the escape room was fairly new and they had several technical difficulties, starting with padlocks and ending with the DVD player. Said DVD player eventually just died on us, and that was also the point where we ran out of time, so the GM came in to give us a walkthrough so we’d get to find out how the room’s plot actually went. It was a good plot and we entirely intend to have a go at it again sometime, possibly not when it’s sweltering hot outside and there are a lot of gawkers milling about on the outside of the ship itself. There was no AC (that was said to be part of the experience and sense of urgency) and they told us to bring water for the kid. The kid took the whole experience like a champ, considering how we were all dripping with sweat by the end of it.
Then they told us that since it was their fault that we couldn’t finish, due to all the technical shenanigans, they’d give us our money back.
I told them that we plan on going to the Seaplane Harbor itself anyway, so they could just convert our escape room money to ticket money.
They were all “nonono, we’re not taking any money from you, you’re getting free tickets”.
At which I felt sort of guilty – it was a great escape room, even if we ended up serving as troubleshooters – so I ended up dumping a good thirty euros at the museum gift shop. They sell pretty much anything and everything nautical-themed, which is right up my alley, so I tend to get new stuff from there every time we go.
Not pictured: a pack of nautical napkins I got from there more recently. Was not kidding about my recurring hauls.
Free tickets acquired, we went off to feed the kid (this is where the Seaplane Harbor gets even more kudos for having a café that will happily warm up baby food for you) and sent Celes and Thorn off to the museum itself. The Seaplane Harbor has displays on two levels, with the café on the second level where you can access the museum via scanning a barcode on your ticket, so coming and going is pretty easy.
Photos never manage to do the space justice. Squint and you should be able to see a biplane and a submarine in the distance there.
Once we met up again, we poked around with the machine gun videogame where you shot down enemy choppers. Machine guns are not the most accurate ways to take down enemy choppers, but thankfully they insisted on attacking one at a time, as one does.
(We had a conversation that morning about the principle of always dressing like you’re cosplaying yourself, and subsequently tried to figure out which of my characters I was dressed as. My best guess was Famine.)
Thornsplosion!
The kidling puttered around while his parents killed a lot of people in cold blood.
The museum closed at 7 and once we headed out, I accidentally put the kid to sleep (it happens sometimes), so we walked along the coastline to see if there was more Maritime Days happening anywhere, stretched out as it is. Didn’t find anything, but we did end up at a coffee and beer shop we frequent (because of course we do) and on the way back, I checked the food delivery app one more time, saw that the sushi place had finally thwarted its zombie attack and was open, and placed the order. So we finally got the sushi once we got home.
July 17 – Marketing
With the sushi finally got, our options for delicious takeout were actually starting to get exhausted, so that day’s breakfast was at the street food hub at the new railway station market. The market is a big ol’ white elephant that’s probably never going to get as many visitors as it seems to be built for, but it’s a nice area with nice shops that then becomes the central bohemian area of the city as you move away from the market itself. Well, bohemian in the sense that all up-and-coming young families try to move there due to the atmosphere and greenery and hippie-dom, making it ridiculously overpriced. Excellent area to visit, though.
This wall had been painted recently, but they’d skipped this area because of the bird nest.
It was a rainy day. They can’t all be winners.
After that, we headed back to the Seaplane Harbor, since we hadn’t had a chance to go on their 1920s icebreaker the day before, it closed at the same time as the museum.
Café selfie, the oldfashioned cumbersome way with a timer because no, none of us carry a selfie stick.
Accosted a nice most-probably-Italian couple on the icebreaker to get another group photo.
Then went on a Brazilian sailship, because the Maritime Days get a lot of sailships coming in from the world over and it’s not a chance I’ll pass up.
Thorn was leaving early the next morning, so we fired up our sauna that evening. We can’t very well send foreign people off without doing a sauna first. People might talk. We’ve only ever used that sauna once before, seeing how we moved into this flat when I was heavily pregnant and a baby doesn’t mesh with sauna relaxation too well, but turns out that our sauna is a particularly good one by the standards to which saunas are judged (namely, its humidity and heat maintenance). This meant that we got out at around midnight and poor Thorn had to be up at stupid o’clock in the morning to catch the plane, but she’s presumably caught up on sleep by now :’D
July 18 – Waffling
Celestial was going to leave two days later and we’d made pretty good headway going through the Maritime Days, so we did what we didn’t get to do during her trip here for the wedding two years earlier, and dragged her to the castle in Rakvere, aka the town where my parents live. During the wedding trip, she’d left too early to be able to visit that, and we only went there with Lulu at the time. See, it all evens out over a long enough period of time.
Since it’s an hour-and-a-half drive with baby on board, the plan was to crash at my parents’ place for the night, do the castle the next day and then drive back. Meaning not a whole lot happened that day, other than driving over, settling down and bringing all of the beer we’d accumulated over the meetup, because we are endless beer snobs and when beer snobs get together for a meetup, sampling happens.
Behold, the glory of Westvleteren 8.
This either made you go “…” or “oooooh”, depending on your level of beersnobbery.
Westvleteren abbey beers are made in one specific Belgian abbey. They only make one small batch per year. You have to book an appointment to buy a crate. They mark down your car’s licence plate when you visit and won’t sell to the same car for three months. You’re not allowed to resell the beer for fear of invoking the wrath of God. There is, of course, a sizable black market for the beers regardless, so we got this bottle from the coffee-and-beer shop mentioned two days earlier.
It cost 18 euros.
So of course we used champagne glasses to drink it, what else would we have poured it into?
(As for flavor, it tasted unlike any other beer I’ve ever had, which is an achievement in and of itself. It was beer, and dark beer, and good dark beer, but it had flavors I’ve never encountered anywhere else.)
Mom also made us a big ol’ pile of waffles for the evening, which is something you can only really get 1) for big money at various little bakeries that have begun to crop up to capitalize on good ol’ Soviet waffle nostalgia, or 2) at the kitchen of anyone lucky enough to have kept a working Soviet waffle iron. My mom being one of them.
July 19 – Fencing
Started with “okay, so we’re driving to the castle – hmm, how should I get to said castle – bugger all this roadwork everywhere, it’s been thwarting us ever since we got the car in the first place – oh yeah, there was a parking lot right here, score – la la la walking to the castle – oh yeah, the castle itself has a parking lot that I completely forgot about.”
You can tell that we have a long and proud history of walking everywhere. But it did give us some good views of the castle itself, which I dutifully photographed because I’ve been to the castle a million times and as such, it’s easy to stop taking photos to commemorate specific trips, so I tried to avoid that this time around.
It looks a bit like a pile of sad rubble, but you try looking better than that after 700+ years of active castle duty.
The aurochs statue, erected for the town’s 700th birthday in 2002. The town’s had a few different names, the original one meaning Aurochs Hill. The building in the background is the theatre.
Headed on to the castle, found a kitty asleep in a picturesque view.
The curious thing with Rakvere castle is, they keep adding new stuff. Every time we go there, something has been opened that I don’t remember having been there. It’s kind of themepark-y with horseback riding and jousting on wooden horses and cattle milling about and a small tavern, but since it was an actual castle, there are nooks and crannies that keep getting restored, developed and opened to the public.
We always gravitate to the big upstairs area with all the swords, though.
I have a growing collection of pictures of Forumers Holding Swords at this castle, come to think of it.
Not that I take very good pictures with a bebe to keep an eye on at the same time.
At some point, a random swordfight broke out in the courtyard below. Because of course. There aren’t any timed events at that castle as far as I know, stuff just happens depending on when the various people employed there feel like doing their thing, I guess. This one ended with the girl in green losing and throwing the guy a money pouch, and they ran off in separate directions. We speculated that this would lead on to the plot throwing them back together a few scenes later when they’d become unlikely travel companions who bicker all the time and develop massive UST.
Once we were done with the castle, we went to eat at a Slavic restaurant that keeps luring me back because best dumplings. Since that was pretty close to the city center, we detoured there after eating and discovered that there was a thingy on the town square.
This thingy.
Rakvere is getting infamous for weird punk thingies on its town square. It started with the Christmas tree in 2014, which looked like this. The next year, there was another weird Christmas tree, and in 2016 they went full steampunk with this (it changed color and the wheels spun, so there was no good way to take a photo. If you happen to be on my Facebook, I have a video of it there.) So I was pretty used to seeing thingies on the town square, but they usually also come with a story and there wasn’t any information about the thingy posted anywhere.
I did what I usually do in those situations: called mom. She works at the town hall. Which is actually right by the square and we could’ve stopped by there as well, because it’s a fancy new building with a whole lot of spaceshippy smart interfaces to look at. Gonna need to remember that for next time. This time I just got her on the phone, all “hey, you have the city architect in the house there, what up with this thingy?”
Mom went and accosted the city architect in question, who said that it’s just a thingy for the sake of having a thingy. Mom pressed the issue with “come on, come up with something, there’s this Scottish tourist who wants to know”.
Other dudes in the room pitched in, “hey, didn’t you originally have this in mind when you came up with it?” and the explanation we finally got back was that the thingy is in the colors of the town flag (straightforward enough) and placed so that it’s visible from all directions coming to the square, intended as a sort of center point upon which all roads converge, hence the planes.
Pulling explanations out of the backside on the go as needed: we’re right there with you, city architect bro.
On the way back, we also swung by a small flower and crystal shop that we like to frequent, in part to buy candles and in large part because they have a cat.
And that was about it – we headed home that evening, sent Celestial off the next morning and probably would’ve ended up feeling weirdly empty with nothing else to do if not for Wrighton to keep us occupied. They were pretty action-heavy days.
It was an awesome meetup <3 Really, we needed this to shake our brains out of ever-pending cabin fever. Now seriously wondering if we might be able to pull off a trip to Britain next year after all. The kid is frankly a very good traveler, so it’s really mostly a matter of getting over the apprehension and forging ahead with it.
A few weeks overdue, but better late than never.
Mid-July, we got Thorn and Celestial over for a week for the Tallinn Maritime Days/sampling all the Estonian food/also beer/general meetup goodness/bringing us back to the world of the living for a brief instance before we sunk back to the neverending chaotic madness of life with a bebe.
If I’d had any sense, I would’ve written this up right after the meetup so that I’d actually remember what happened when, but sense is at a premium in this household, so we have to make do with the timestamps on photos and the others can correct me if my memory goes way off-kilter.
July 14 – Gathering
Thorn and Celes were to fly in on the same day, except three hours apart. My impeccable logic said that it’d be smarter to pick Thorn up first, go get food at the nearby mall, then kill the remaining three hours at the rest of the mall until it’s time to get Celes and then we could drive back to the house together. It went mmmmostly without a hitch.
…yes, okay, so there’s massive roadwork going on around the airport. Excellent news for anyone who’s flying to town from September onwards, because we’re getting a brand new tram line connecting to the airport. Not so excellent news for anyone who, say, might attempt to walk from the mall to the airport using the road that’s getting the new tram line and is subsequently all closed up with fences and piles of gravel. If one was to attempt that, one might end up detouring about seven times before finally making it to the airport.
…on the plus side, Celes got in fifteen minutes later than we’d thought, so we got in justabout when she got in and roadwork-related crises were averted. So we headed on home and in place of dinner, had various different sorts of candy and cookies and chocolate and kvass, because we’re adults, dangit.
Thorn also brought us a traditional New Zealand buzzy bee and Celes brought a wee wild hairy haggis.
The buzzy bee is going over well with the kid, although he insists on carrying it half of the time. When he happens to be dragging it along, it makes a clicky-clicky-clicky sound and spins the wings.
The haggis was my One Big Regret of 2010, when I went to Scotland, saw them at a tourist shop, and didn’t get them. Seven years later, we have been reunited C:
What’s more, turns out that it squeaks.
July 15 – Adventuring
This year, the Maritime Days (previously a weekend event) lasted four whole days, meaning we didn’t need to run through everything a-sap, meaning we got to start with every tourist’s must-go and went to the Tallinn Old Town, because said old town contains an adventurers’ tavern that we always drag everyone to, partly because it’s awesome and partly because the food they serve is decently affordable for the old town. Not to mention delicious.
Then we went through all the mandatory medieval-old-town-goodness while the kiddo slept, and beelined for the St Nicholas Church after he woke up, because said church contains the world’s only remaining Danse Macabre on canvas and the last time Celes was in town, the church had been closed because it was a Monday. Stuff is frequently closed on Mondays, presumably because nobody likes Mondays. This time, we did get in.
Celes, Thorn, a view, and a seagull thug.
Bling at the Silver Chamber of the church, which we got lucky with because the chamber is only open at certain hours.
The Danse Macabre – an enormously big deal if you’re a history buff, otherwise a decently nice piece of tapestry from 1633. The point of those things was a sort of memento mori, reminding people that everyone is mortal and dances with death, from popes and emperors to lowly dung farmers.
Eventually we made our way to the actual harbor area with the Maritime Days, or at least part of it – the event gets spread all over the city’s coastline – and dug through the little booths for handicraft and food and other such fairstuffs. Then headed home for the day, with the view to order sushi.
Sushi did not happen. The sushi place in question is by far the best sushi place we know of in town, and it’s fairly close to boot, but the app we use to place the order wasn’t cooperating and they just weren’t taking our money. We figured that we’d just have sushi for breakfast the next day – adults, dangit – and got a big ol’ pile of pizzaburgersteaks instead.
July 16 – Escaping
Sushi did not happen for breakfast either.
The amount of effort we put into trying to get that bleedin’ sushi really goes to show how good the sushi actually is. The app wasn’t taking the order after what, five tries, so eventually I got in the car, brought Celestial along for extra firepower and went to scope the place itself.
It was closed, which was highly suspish because they were supposed to open an hour ago. We cased the joint for some time, trying to figure out if they had a hostage situation or a zombie infestation or both, but eventually gave up, went back and headed out for burgers instead. Which gave us just about enough time to make it to the Seaplane Harbor for our murder mystery escape room.
Some time before the meetup, my mom had emailed me some promotional stuff about the Maritime Days, having no idea of what she’d unleash, because the promo included a blurb about a brand-spankin’-new escape room centered on a murder mystery on a docked ship that was in-story found stranded with everyone on board shot dead, and the job of the players was to be the investigators to figure out what happened. In other words, a murder mystery escape room on a ghost ship. Best band name ever.
Couldn’t take any pictures inside, obviously, but this was the ship.
We are the picture of tough CSI officials, clearly. Especially the bebe.
I can’t tell very much about the escape room itself, in case we get more forumers over sometime who get dragged to the same escape room (it could happen) but we entirely failed to escape from it. Partly because as far as escape rooms go, it was actually pretty difficult, in that it was in a ship that hadn’t been cleared of all the actual ship-stuff, so there were a lot of red herrings and we wasted a lot of time trying to figure out if a random little booklet or map might actually be relevant. In large part because the escape room was fairly new and they had several technical difficulties, starting with padlocks and ending with the DVD player. Said DVD player eventually just died on us, and that was also the point where we ran out of time, so the GM came in to give us a walkthrough so we’d get to find out how the room’s plot actually went. It was a good plot and we entirely intend to have a go at it again sometime, possibly not when it’s sweltering hot outside and there are a lot of gawkers milling about on the outside of the ship itself. There was no AC (that was said to be part of the experience and sense of urgency) and they told us to bring water for the kid. The kid took the whole experience like a champ, considering how we were all dripping with sweat by the end of it.
Then they told us that since it was their fault that we couldn’t finish, due to all the technical shenanigans, they’d give us our money back.
I told them that we plan on going to the Seaplane Harbor itself anyway, so they could just convert our escape room money to ticket money.
They were all “nonono, we’re not taking any money from you, you’re getting free tickets”.
At which I felt sort of guilty – it was a great escape room, even if we ended up serving as troubleshooters – so I ended up dumping a good thirty euros at the museum gift shop. They sell pretty much anything and everything nautical-themed, which is right up my alley, so I tend to get new stuff from there every time we go.
Not pictured: a pack of nautical napkins I got from there more recently. Was not kidding about my recurring hauls.
Free tickets acquired, we went off to feed the kid (this is where the Seaplane Harbor gets even more kudos for having a café that will happily warm up baby food for you) and sent Celes and Thorn off to the museum itself. The Seaplane Harbor has displays on two levels, with the café on the second level where you can access the museum via scanning a barcode on your ticket, so coming and going is pretty easy.
Photos never manage to do the space justice. Squint and you should be able to see a biplane and a submarine in the distance there.
Once we met up again, we poked around with the machine gun videogame where you shot down enemy choppers. Machine guns are not the most accurate ways to take down enemy choppers, but thankfully they insisted on attacking one at a time, as one does.
(We had a conversation that morning about the principle of always dressing like you’re cosplaying yourself, and subsequently tried to figure out which of my characters I was dressed as. My best guess was Famine.)
Thornsplosion!
The kidling puttered around while his parents killed a lot of people in cold blood.
The museum closed at 7 and once we headed out, I accidentally put the kid to sleep (it happens sometimes), so we walked along the coastline to see if there was more Maritime Days happening anywhere, stretched out as it is. Didn’t find anything, but we did end up at a coffee and beer shop we frequent (because of course we do) and on the way back, I checked the food delivery app one more time, saw that the sushi place had finally thwarted its zombie attack and was open, and placed the order. So we finally got the sushi once we got home.
July 17 – Marketing
With the sushi finally got, our options for delicious takeout were actually starting to get exhausted, so that day’s breakfast was at the street food hub at the new railway station market. The market is a big ol’ white elephant that’s probably never going to get as many visitors as it seems to be built for, but it’s a nice area with nice shops that then becomes the central bohemian area of the city as you move away from the market itself. Well, bohemian in the sense that all up-and-coming young families try to move there due to the atmosphere and greenery and hippie-dom, making it ridiculously overpriced. Excellent area to visit, though.
This wall had been painted recently, but they’d skipped this area because of the bird nest.
It was a rainy day. They can’t all be winners.
After that, we headed back to the Seaplane Harbor, since we hadn’t had a chance to go on their 1920s icebreaker the day before, it closed at the same time as the museum.
Café selfie, the oldfashioned cumbersome way with a timer because no, none of us carry a selfie stick.
Accosted a nice most-probably-Italian couple on the icebreaker to get another group photo.
Then went on a Brazilian sailship, because the Maritime Days get a lot of sailships coming in from the world over and it’s not a chance I’ll pass up.
Thorn was leaving early the next morning, so we fired up our sauna that evening. We can’t very well send foreign people off without doing a sauna first. People might talk. We’ve only ever used that sauna once before, seeing how we moved into this flat when I was heavily pregnant and a baby doesn’t mesh with sauna relaxation too well, but turns out that our sauna is a particularly good one by the standards to which saunas are judged (namely, its humidity and heat maintenance). This meant that we got out at around midnight and poor Thorn had to be up at stupid o’clock in the morning to catch the plane, but she’s presumably caught up on sleep by now :’D
July 18 – Waffling
Celestial was going to leave two days later and we’d made pretty good headway going through the Maritime Days, so we did what we didn’t get to do during her trip here for the wedding two years earlier, and dragged her to the castle in Rakvere, aka the town where my parents live. During the wedding trip, she’d left too early to be able to visit that, and we only went there with Lulu at the time. See, it all evens out over a long enough period of time.
Since it’s an hour-and-a-half drive with baby on board, the plan was to crash at my parents’ place for the night, do the castle the next day and then drive back. Meaning not a whole lot happened that day, other than driving over, settling down and bringing all of the beer we’d accumulated over the meetup, because we are endless beer snobs and when beer snobs get together for a meetup, sampling happens.
Behold, the glory of Westvleteren 8.
This either made you go “…” or “oooooh”, depending on your level of beersnobbery.
Westvleteren abbey beers are made in one specific Belgian abbey. They only make one small batch per year. You have to book an appointment to buy a crate. They mark down your car’s licence plate when you visit and won’t sell to the same car for three months. You’re not allowed to resell the beer for fear of invoking the wrath of God. There is, of course, a sizable black market for the beers regardless, so we got this bottle from the coffee-and-beer shop mentioned two days earlier.
It cost 18 euros.
So of course we used champagne glasses to drink it, what else would we have poured it into?
(As for flavor, it tasted unlike any other beer I’ve ever had, which is an achievement in and of itself. It was beer, and dark beer, and good dark beer, but it had flavors I’ve never encountered anywhere else.)
Mom also made us a big ol’ pile of waffles for the evening, which is something you can only really get 1) for big money at various little bakeries that have begun to crop up to capitalize on good ol’ Soviet waffle nostalgia, or 2) at the kitchen of anyone lucky enough to have kept a working Soviet waffle iron. My mom being one of them.
July 19 – Fencing
Started with “okay, so we’re driving to the castle – hmm, how should I get to said castle – bugger all this roadwork everywhere, it’s been thwarting us ever since we got the car in the first place – oh yeah, there was a parking lot right here, score – la la la walking to the castle – oh yeah, the castle itself has a parking lot that I completely forgot about.”
You can tell that we have a long and proud history of walking everywhere. But it did give us some good views of the castle itself, which I dutifully photographed because I’ve been to the castle a million times and as such, it’s easy to stop taking photos to commemorate specific trips, so I tried to avoid that this time around.
It looks a bit like a pile of sad rubble, but you try looking better than that after 700+ years of active castle duty.
The aurochs statue, erected for the town’s 700th birthday in 2002. The town’s had a few different names, the original one meaning Aurochs Hill. The building in the background is the theatre.
Headed on to the castle, found a kitty asleep in a picturesque view.
The curious thing with Rakvere castle is, they keep adding new stuff. Every time we go there, something has been opened that I don’t remember having been there. It’s kind of themepark-y with horseback riding and jousting on wooden horses and cattle milling about and a small tavern, but since it was an actual castle, there are nooks and crannies that keep getting restored, developed and opened to the public.
We always gravitate to the big upstairs area with all the swords, though.
I have a growing collection of pictures of Forumers Holding Swords at this castle, come to think of it.
Not that I take very good pictures with a bebe to keep an eye on at the same time.
At some point, a random swordfight broke out in the courtyard below. Because of course. There aren’t any timed events at that castle as far as I know, stuff just happens depending on when the various people employed there feel like doing their thing, I guess. This one ended with the girl in green losing and throwing the guy a money pouch, and they ran off in separate directions. We speculated that this would lead on to the plot throwing them back together a few scenes later when they’d become unlikely travel companions who bicker all the time and develop massive UST.
Once we were done with the castle, we went to eat at a Slavic restaurant that keeps luring me back because best dumplings. Since that was pretty close to the city center, we detoured there after eating and discovered that there was a thingy on the town square.
This thingy.
Rakvere is getting infamous for weird punk thingies on its town square. It started with the Christmas tree in 2014, which looked like this. The next year, there was another weird Christmas tree, and in 2016 they went full steampunk with this (it changed color and the wheels spun, so there was no good way to take a photo. If you happen to be on my Facebook, I have a video of it there.) So I was pretty used to seeing thingies on the town square, but they usually also come with a story and there wasn’t any information about the thingy posted anywhere.
I did what I usually do in those situations: called mom. She works at the town hall. Which is actually right by the square and we could’ve stopped by there as well, because it’s a fancy new building with a whole lot of spaceshippy smart interfaces to look at. Gonna need to remember that for next time. This time I just got her on the phone, all “hey, you have the city architect in the house there, what up with this thingy?”
Mom went and accosted the city architect in question, who said that it’s just a thingy for the sake of having a thingy. Mom pressed the issue with “come on, come up with something, there’s this Scottish tourist who wants to know”.
Other dudes in the room pitched in, “hey, didn’t you originally have this in mind when you came up with it?” and the explanation we finally got back was that the thingy is in the colors of the town flag (straightforward enough) and placed so that it’s visible from all directions coming to the square, intended as a sort of center point upon which all roads converge, hence the planes.
Pulling explanations out of the backside on the go as needed: we’re right there with you, city architect bro.
On the way back, we also swung by a small flower and crystal shop that we like to frequent, in part to buy candles and in large part because they have a cat.
And that was about it – we headed home that evening, sent Celestial off the next morning and probably would’ve ended up feeling weirdly empty with nothing else to do if not for Wrighton to keep us occupied. They were pretty action-heavy days.
It was an awesome meetup <3 Really, we needed this to shake our brains out of ever-pending cabin fever. Now seriously wondering if we might be able to pull off a trip to Britain next year after all. The kid is frankly a very good traveler, so it’s really mostly a matter of getting over the apprehension and forging ahead with it.
Quintessential