Hotel Hunting in Tallinn: My Experience
It's easy to get Tallinn wrong. I learned that the hard way after spending three hours wandering the Old Town, chasing a hotel room that didn't exist. I'd booked a "central" place near Town Hall Square, only to find it was actually a 20-minute walk from the cobbled streets I'd imagined, past a row of souvenir shops selling plastic Viking helmets. The receptionist at my "central" hotel gave me a look that said, "You're not the first to make this mistake." I ended up checking into a tiny guesthouse on Pikk 12, a street that's actually in the heart of the Old Town, where the owner, a woman named Liina, handed me a key made of carved wood and said, "You're lucky. The last room was taken by a man who only spoke Estonian and didn't know how to say 'I need a room.'" That's the thing most visitors get wrong: they assume Tallinn's Old Town is all one compact, walkable zone, but it's actually a maze of ...