My wonderful trip in the Baltic states

Hello. My name is Annia Costa. I am 30 years old. I live in Timisoara, Romania. I am an English teacher and in my free time I love to travel.

Summer 2016 I was in a wonderful trip in the Baltic Region. I can say that it was one of my best trips full of adventures. My friends called me crazy when I said I wanted to go in a trip by coach. I said why not, I can visit 5 countries (Poland, Baltic States, and Finland) at a reasonable price. Anyway I didn’t have to sleep in the coach, so this was all good for me.

After visiting in Poland, Krakow and Warsaw, we went to the first Baltic States, Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius. I was expecting Vilnius to be a typical communist town, cold with massive grey buildings. Well, I was right. The only nice part from Vilnius was the old town. It was small, with beautiful brick buildings and wooden chalets were handmade things and souvenirs were being sold. You could find almost anything there. Or this is what I thought. Before leaving Romania, my mum asked me to buy something with name Laima. Laima is my younger sister. I was told that her name is very popular in Lithuania and Latvia, as it represented an old Baltic goddess. OK, so I went to find something with her name. My friends told me they would wait for me, but they didn’t. After realizing that I was left all alone in a new town I wasn’t very pleased. I didn’t know the language and most of its inhabitants didn’t know English. Russian I didn’t know, so what was I supposed to do. Luckily I remembered that we had just gone straight ahead so I decided to go back. In 10 minutes I was back at the coach and happy that I didn’t get lost. Near the hotel, I found some “Laima” chocolate. At least I found what I was looking for.

Next stop was Riga, Latvia. Latvia is such a beautiful town. It’s a pity that we stayed little in it. We arrived around dinner time, so all we could do was visiting the town by night. I was happy to see that the “Laima” chocolate factory was here in Riga. It even had a shop called Laima. I wanted to go inside this shop. But, of course it was closed. If you compare Riga with Vilnius you would see that they are totally different. Riga has a beautiful old town which was to my taste. Of course we had to have a mini adventure in Riga. While we were having dinner a terrible storm started. It was so terrible that even locals told me that they had never seen such a storm. My roommate and I were wondering what the best thing to do was - should we stay or should we go. There were no signs that this rain would stop soon, so in the end we decided to go. It was night time and it was raining and of course we got lost. We only had a map and the street of our hotel. We also asked some taxi drivers to help us. But it wasn’t helpful at all. Each of them gave us another direction so we were on our own. Finally we arrived at the hotel soaking wet after 1h and a half.

The last Baltic state that I visited was Estonia. Here I stayed for 1 day and a half. I have to admit that I felt in love with Tallinn. I don’t know why but I liked everything that I saw there. Its buildings, its people, and its weather - everything seemed very appealing to me. Together with my roommate we wandered every inch of the old city. It was the only day in our trip in which we could say that we relaxed. No one was rushing us and we could find some time for ourselves. Of course, at some point of the day we got separated from the group. We didn’t mind because then we could chill a little and do and visit what we wanted. Even though we expected serious rainfall we were surprised to see that for the first time the weather forecast was wrong. Knowing that the next day we would go to Helsinki, Finland, we decided to finish our souvenir shopping that day. So, we went and looked in small shops for the best things to buy. By the end of the day we had visited all the monuments that we wanted to see and buy all what we wanted.

All in all I must say that if I were to make a top 3 of the Baltic capitals I liked most, the top would be the following: Tallinn (1st place), Riga (2nd place) and Vilnius (3rd place).

 

Annia Costa

 

 

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