From the monthly archives:
SooSoo is a great little gallery and design shop tucked away on the outer edges of Tallinn. In addition to the usual design shop items that you can find everywhere around the world (think UglyDoll, light up furniture, etc), they also had a great collection of locally and regionally designed goods. I thought the knitwear was especially fabulous–I am totally loving these bright Baltic patterns with a twist. [read the full post…]
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In addition to there beautiful country and delicious food, the Basque have a rich tradition in symbolism. You often see older buildings and pathways marked with various patterns and icons. When we were at the Fete du Piment in Espelette, I was blown away by a local artisan company that takes these traditional designs and applies them to tableware with a modern twist. They are all locally produced, handmade, and use bio-friendly ink. If it were not for the backpack, I would have easily walked away with a server plate or two. They do ship overseas though! Check them out at Gatu Creations.
Google translate does a fair job on the site, and in the “Collections” section you can find brief explanations of different symbols
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Tallinn seems to have a couple of faces. On one hand, the city center is often compared to Disneyland – there are a number of Medieval restaurants complete with employees dressed in period costumes (however the buildings are genuine Medieval period construction). On the other hand, Estonia was occupied by both the Russians and the Nazis and once you get outside the Old Town city center, you start to see subtle (and not so subtle) traces of the Soviet influence and oppression. On top of that, there’s a significant modern commercial presence throughout the city. These are just a few photos of the range of scenes you find in the city.
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The fact that most of the EU is on the Euro makes traveling from country to country a breeze as far as money is concerned, but not everyone uses the same money yet. Here are a few of the currencies that we’ve been buying in as we travel and their current exchange rates (locked in time for future reference).
100 US Dollars will get you:
60 British Pounds
67 Euro
109 Australian Dollars
138 New Zealand Dollars
1,046 Estonian Kroon
1,744 Czech Koruny
2,885 Russian Rubles
105,606 South Korean Won
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While trekking through Spain we spent one night in the small town of Najara. Wandering around the city we came across the local library and decided to take a look. It was your basic small-but-nice library, relatively forgettable except for the series of BBC English language books we found. Our Spanish was (is) terrible and we figured we could reverse engineer them to learn a little Spanish on the road.
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Day 4: Pamplona to Puente la Reina
25 km – 15.5 mi
Before leaving Pamplona, we realized that we had neglected to visit La Plaza del Toros, Pamplona’s famous bull ring and the final destination for the running of the bulls. Going all the way to Pamplona and not at least seeing the stadium seemed absurd so we made a slight detour on our way out of town.
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