{"id":2092,"date":"2011-06-09T21:33:18","date_gmt":"2011-06-10T04:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayivey.com\/wordpress\/?p=2092"},"modified":"2011-06-09T21:33:18","modified_gmt":"2011-06-10T04:33:18","slug":"spring-forward-day-81","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rayivey.com\/wordpress\/spring-forward-day-81\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a>\"instagram\"<\/a>

Tallinn
\nJune 1, 2011<\/h2>\n

Yesterday had three Pieces Parts[1]<\/a> and two of them were dandy.<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a>
My beautiful "sister-in-law" Milana<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the first part of the day I took myself on a walking tour of Tallinn that I got off the interwebs.<\/p>\n

After a few minutes at the ferry disaster memorial and then walked through the gate at Fat Matilda Tower into the Lower Town portion of the Old Town.\u00a0 Old Tallinn is really two towns : The lower town inhabited by the prosperous Hanseatic traders and the upper town where the Estonian locals who worked for the traders lived.\u00a0 The Old Town is wonderfully well preserved.<\/p>\n

\"Night<\/a>
Night shot<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Part 2 of my first day in Tallinn began when Milana met me at my hotel in the afternoon.\u00a0 Milana, you may remember, is my cousin John\u2019s wife.\u00a0 They live in Vilnius, Lithuania, but lived here in Tallinn for about a year a few years ago.\u00a0 Milana decided, much to my delight, to take a tiny vacation and spend a couple of days with me here.\u00a0 It\u2019s the first time she\u2019s been away from her new baby Vivienne, so it\u2019s a pretty big deal!\u00a0 John and I consider each other a third brother and so Milana, who I\u2019ve known for over a decade, feels like a sister-in-law.\u00a0 She and I discussed this yesterday and she agreed that \u201cMy Cousin\u2019s Wife\u201d didn\u2019t really adequately explain our very affectionate relationship.\u00a0 I told her I was just going to start referring to her as my sister-in-law.<\/p>\n

\"rehearsal\"<\/a>
rehearsal<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We had a wonderful afternoon traipsing around town.\u00a0 We climbed the very tall tower of the Baptist church as the harbor side of Old Town to get a breathtaking series of views.\u00a0 This Church has a dark history, as the Soviets used it during their occupation of Estonia to block television signals coming in from Finland.\u00a0 \u00a0Now the Baptists use it to talk an invisible character from a Bronze Age book of myths.\u00a0 I leave you to judge which is the more reprehensible.<\/p>\n

\"Sad.\"<\/a>
Sad.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Okay, now to Part 3.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to try to dispense with this unpleasant conclusion to the day as economically as possible.\u00a0 We were to have dinner with a mutual friend.\u00a0 I do not know what is going on with this mutual friend, nor do I really care, but he was supposed to pick us up and take us to this cool seafood restaurant out in the country.\u00a0 He finally showed up, two hours late, drunk as a skunk, with his appalled ten year old daughter in tow.\u00a0 We had actually given up on him and gone to a local Italian restaurant, but he regrettably followed us there.\u00a0 The dinner that followed was . . . unpleasant.<\/p>\n

\"Old<\/a>
Old Town from the port<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"pink_palace\"<\/a>Although everyone knows I am a teetotaler, I am not opposed to the consumption of alcohol by those who enjoy it. This being said, I have no interest in spending time with drunks.\u00a0 Drunks are boring and pushy.\u00a0 They suck all of the oxygen out of the room.\u00a0 This dude was rude and aggressive and it was all extremely uncomfortable and I thought it would never end.\u00a0 We finally escaped at almost midnight (that is to say, dusk).\u00a0 Bleh.<\/p>\n

Anyway, we\u2019re done with him.\u00a0 I must wrap this up because I\u2019m expecting Milana any minute!<\/p>\n

A Partial List of the Cities My Cousin John and His Wife Milana Have Lived During John\u2019s Crazy Career[2]<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n