Tallinn
23min -
DJ, broadcaster and ‘My Dad Wrote a Porno’ podcaster Alice Levine joins Richard for a 48-hour fling around the Estonian capital Tallinn. Over two maxed-out days Richard and Alice rip around the city’s most see-able sights, summit the country’s highest structure, nosh at its top restaurant, and stroke Sean Connery’s face.
Swerving Tallinn’s hotels and hostels, Richard books them into two Estonian-designed compact dwellings called Kodas. Bags dropped, they head to the top of Estonia’s tallest building, TV Tower, to scope Tallinn and its surroundings.
Back on the ground, Alice gives a masterclass in television presenting. To get the most out of Tallinn’s medieval centre the pair take a free walking tour. Their super enthusiastic guide Riina leads them through a thousand years of Estonian history, littered with peeping Toms, murders, and invasions. For a nightcap, the pair try to decide if Cold War cocktail the Hammer and Sickle is ready for a revival (spoiler: it’s not).
Next day, the Soviet-era theme continues as Alice and Richard visit Hotel Viru, where the KGB had a secret station on the top floor in order to spy on guests. On a frozen (but, slightly alarmingly, thawing) lake, our heroes try kick sledging, a skating-meets-skiing sport that’s never made it much further south than Estonia. To refuel, they ruthlessly assess the merits of new Baltic cuisine at top restaurant NOA. Richard and Alice round out their time in Tallinn with a trip to the Scottish Club to check out a Sean Connery sculpture, and learn the art of painting marzipan, before boarding a submarine to consider the high and even higher points of their trip.
8.2
