Saturday, March 04, 2017

Tallinn - An Overview, and Restaurants Not To Miss

Tallinn Old Town in winter
But first, allow me to explain why we were in Tallinn.

I'd hardly heard of Estonia until they introduced the relatively avant-garde concept of an e-Residency. (read more here). It kind of sounds like setting up a company on the Cayman Islands, except the residency is for you, personally, for instance, you can open a bank account like a local and even start a medical record and get prescriptions. Almost any generally law-abiding person from almost anywhere in the world can get one, giving you the right to operate out of Estonia without even having set foot in the country. I decided that at some point, I wanted to visit a country that thinks so out-of-the-box.

Beyond Old Town - An afternoon in Telliskivi, Tallinn

On the way to Telliskivi Creative City, we passed Depoo, a temporary Soviet Market in an old train depot
Most people head to Tallinn on a day trip from Helsinki - for Finns, it's for the cheap alcohol, bachelorettes and whatnot, and for tourists in the area, it's to see Old Town, Tallinn's UNESCO-listed Medieval town (more about that here). Old Town is very pretty - not that there isn't good stuff there - a lot of the town's best restaurants, important historical features and views are there, but it felt too well-preserved, and too tourist-ready (in that way, it reminded me of Venice). It was a good sign that we should go explore other areas.