10/2008
A short Baltic trip to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, all in all in 10 days. I was there with Anup and Hui-Cheng. We flew to Vilnius and then took EuroLines bus connections between Vilnius/Riga and Riga/Tallinn in comfortable restroom equipped buses. After that, we took a 20 minutes long CopterLine helicopter link to Helsinki where we flew away from back to Prague. I must say that the worst meal I have ever eaten on plane was during this trip with Finnair on our way back from Helsinki to Prague.
Those 3 former Soviet Union countries are similar to each other and frankly I haven't spent enough time there to see major differencies which I'm sure must exist. You can read your travel books but that's not what I mean. All of those countries are heavily forested which is where Forest brothers, people fighting against the Soviet occupation after the WWII, could live and engage the Red Army. All countries have a museum like the one in Vilnius, The Museum of Genocide Victims in a former KGB building with engraved victims' names on the facade who died in its execution cell, and extensively documenting the cruel and bloody past. If you haven't lived at that time it's definitely worth to see one of them. Unfortunately, a lot of my countrymen should do the same since their memory is very short-term. If I return to any of those countries I'd definitely want to spend the time out of cities, in the countryside, which seemed really beautiful from the bus when moving between the countries.
Also, as EU countries, they try to orient to the western Europe a lot but who spent some time in Ukraine or Russia which I did some 10 years ago can still see a lot of legacy pictures, be it a street market, dark and dirty bus terminals, randomly closed museums (they usually close on Mondays and Tuesdays and sometimes the other days as well, as they see fit; it was Wednesday that day) or plastic alcohol bottles. The left one, Vodka bottle, was bought some 10 years ago in the southern Siberia close to the Mongolian borders. The green one was bought in Tallinn during this trip with some national herb spirit in it. The same material, the same shape, and the same sound when you throw them against a brick wall. Anyway, I'm sure one could say something similar about the Czech Republic, too. I was also amused when I went to the post office in Riga to send some postcards. Similarly to 10 years ago, the notion of the Czech Republic is still not everywhere since Czechoslovakia was the right word to say about where to send those postcards. No wonder that we neither exist for this hotel there.
The trip was also quite tiring because having a limited time for each city we wanted to see as much as we could but when I was bored of looking around at churches, statues or traditional wooden houses, there was always something else to look at. Well, at least before we flew over to Finland. In Helsinki, we just spent one day and I liked the city very much as well. A very nice way of exploring the town is from a one hour long circle tour by tram 3T.
The pictures were taken with my brand new Panasonic TZ5 camera. I was very satisfied with it and it can also take a fairly good video. This one was taken from the heliport, it's quite shaky because of the strong wind, and this one is from the helicopter.
