Day 25, Thursday 7/4 (Easter Saturday):

We awoke today to find that it was still snowing quite heavily, so we decided that a museum was in order. 

Firstly however, we had to finish visiting the sites we didn’t get to see yesterday. These included the very pretty St. Olaf’s Church and Fat Margaret, the largest and most impressive bastion of the city wall, dating from the 16^th century. 

Next stop was the Tallinn City Museum. This is set up to portray the history of the city from the very early days of merchant ships right through to the recent soviet times. One highlight was having an old man, who works for the museum, talk us through the history of the 1700’s and three subsequent soviet invasions. One of the most harrowing tales involved a time in history where, due to both German and Russian invaders, Estonians had to fight on both sides of the line, against each other. He described this as ‘Estonia’s Verdun’. We certainly left with a much better appreciation of this country’s very complex history. After briefly heading back home to warm up again, we decided that we should have a short saunter along Tallinn’s foreshore. We figured out how to get there by bus and we set out again. Once at the foreshore we walked about 200m into the driving wind and snow, before chickening out, and going back to the bus stop. The minus temperatures were a tad too extreme. When we arrived home we went to check on Alice (the car) to find that she was covered in 10cm of snow and was registering -2˚C, although, with wind chill, it felt to be much less than this.