August 10, 1998, Monday

Breakfast was a well stocked buffet including eggs cooked to order. I fixed a sandwich to be eaten at lunch. We were picked up in the morning for the city tour. The tour guide spoke English and Finnish. She would talk first in one language and repeat it in the other. It began to rain. The umbrellas opened and the tour went on. We were permitted to enter a beautiful Russian church. An attendant told me to remove my hat.

We left the bus and entered the Old Town. Some of the buildings date back to the thirteenth century. The Germans bombed Old Town during the war, destroying 11 percent of it. Most of that has been rebuilt. Our guide took us to the Old Town square and told us the tour was over. We had to find our own way back to our hotels. Luckily I had been in the square before so knew my way back.

Back at the hotel the girl at the tour desk told me how to find the bus terminal, about a mile away. I walked there and bought a ticket to Tartu, a university town one 116 miles away. On the way, I passed a man who could barely walk. He had a huge German Sheppard dog on a leash. As I got closer I saw that there was a muzzle hanging from the dog’s collar. I didn’t like the way the dog was looking at me. I moved out into the middle of the street to give them plenty of room. Back at the hotel the girl at the tour desk made me a reservation at a Tartu hotel. The 116 miles from Tallin to Tarto was ¾ of the way across the country. The area of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were about the size of Washington State. These were extremely small countries.