Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

The plan for today was to visit some museums, but we started with a side trip back to the alley filled with craftspeople's shops. More of them were open today and we got to see a glassblowing demonstration.

We took the tram over to Kadriorg park, which was given by Tsar Peter the Great to his wife Catherine I. The park houses the KUMU, an art museum that focuses on Estonian art. There was some interesting Surrealist work from before WWII, and a floor dedicated to art under the Soviet occupation. It starts with Stalinist Realism, which was a style that glorified the working classes and depicted everyone as pleased with their work, but as time goes on, it gets stranger and more subversive. There's an interesting display of Pop Art, which is a special challenge in a country cut off from the "Pop" material that inspired the movement in Western Europe.

As we got off the return tram, it started pouring. We holed up in a basement restaurant and stuffed ourselves with dumplings. The sweet curd ones were really good.

I went by myself to the Maritime Museum, which has some of the largest model ships I've ever seen. It was as if the model builders had decided on the 1/100 scale when they were working on schooners and kept it consistent as they worked their way up to supertankers. Interestingly, some of the models included the dry docks where those ships were constructed. I don't know that I've ever seen a model dry dock before.

After dinner, we went over to DM Baar, a Depeche Mode themed bar. They have a full page of cocktails named for Depeche Mode songs. I tried the "Never Let Me Down Again", which, sadly, involved creme de menthe. There was a constant Depeche Mode soundtrack, and a number of the patrons were singing along.