The day started early, because it was already time to move to the next location: Tallinn, Estonia. Ville was nice enough to give us a lift into the city centre, where we said our farewells, and from there we could easily walk to the port, as we were taking a big ferry across the Gulf of Finland in order to get to Tallinn.

But first, a bit of drama at the ferry ticket office... We had reserved our tickets weeks before, but we had to pick them up from the office at the port in Helsinki. We had actually tried to do this right after we arrived in Finland, but the woman told us we could only take the tickets on the day the ferry would depart. We were told that we should come between 10-11am to do this. So, we arrived at about 10:45 to quickly grab the tickets (we hadn't wasted any time getting there). This was when we discovered that the gate had already closed and the ticket people were looking at us like we were idiots. Fortunately someone radioed the boat and we could get up there, but only by sprinting a fair distance with our backpacks. In the end we just made it on board, albeit pretty rooted from running with the backpacks. The rest of the two and a half hour ferry experience was much more pleasant.

Upon arriving at the port in Tallinn, we were soon approached by another tourist. We were working out how to get to the hostel when a woman came up to me, and using very slow English and lots of hand gestures, asked if she could make a call on my phone. She, just like many others I would encounter in the days to come, thought I was a local based on my appearance. I listened for a while, chuckling to myself, because I could hear that she was an Aussie. Finally I replied to her with a simple "so which part of Australia are you from?", and at that point she figured it out, hehehe. It was around this time as well that we discovered that we had arrived in Tallinn at a pretty special moment. The day after tomorrow would be the formal opening of the Estonian Song & Dance Festival, something that happens about once every 3-4 years. Basically, the whole country was going to be in Tallinn in the next couple of days. It also explained why accommodation prices were higher than we expected here, and why it had been pretty difficult to find anything...

After finding our hostel and putting down our belongings, we went straight into the UNESCO-listed old town of Tallinn. It was very impressive from the start. We spent the next few hours walking around most of the old town, exploring the various streets, plazas, lookouts, while having an awesome lunch in a Georgian restaurant (ok, not exactly local cuisine, but how many opportunities does an Aussie and a Brasileira get to eat proper Georgian food? No regrets).

We also saw the Alexander Nevski Cathedral, an impressive looking Orthodox church built during the occupation of Estonia by the Russian Empire. For this reason, it is apparently disliked by many of the locals. Unfortunately the look of it was slightly less impressive than normal thanks to renovations, but it was still worth seeing.

After some more food and a couple of drinks later on, we went back to the hostel and spent the evening organising some stuff for both Tallinn and the next stage of our trip.