Baltic Visitor

Regular visitors to this site may have noticed that I recently added an Amazon widget in the sidebar on the right hand side of the page, allowing visitors to buy copies of some of the best Baltic guidebooks. I thought that it might be a good idea to give a run-down of the main options […]

[Read more →]

The first thing that most people mention about the climate of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is that the winters are really quite cold. This is undeniably true, although it never gets anywhere near as chilly as much of neighbouring Russia. The temperature in many parts of the region rarely gets above freezing between December and […]

[Read more →]

From today, passengers flying with a range of airlines – including Estonian Air, Czech Airlines, easyJet, SAS and others – will be required to check in at the new southern extension of Tallinn Airport. The extension includes nine new gates and will allow the airport to handle 2.3 million passengers per year, twice as many […]

[Read more →]

The new Nordic Hotel Forum opens on Viru Square this Sunday, offering yet another accommodation option in the Estonian capital. It has 267 rooms including 8 suites, and apparently cost over 22 million Euro to outfit.
The hotel’s website raises more questions than it answers, including ‘what on earth is the “mysterious tree of dreams” which […]

[Read more →]

Apologies for the downtime earlier today. I updated the blog’s software (Wordpress) a few days ago and have been updating some of the plugins since then. One of them – ShareThis – was not playing nicely with the site, but somehow I didn’t notice. I was wondering why traffic had taken a nosedive and took […]

[Read more →]

Tourists considering a visit to Estonia and looking beyond the capital may want to read an article on the website of the Finnish magazine Free! The gist of John Pagni’s piece is that the islands of Saaremaa, Muhu and Abruka are attractive not for their tourist facilities but for the lack of them:
For what they […]

[Read more →]

The Latvian capital has a decent selection of hotels to suit every budget, but outside of the capital things are not always so rosy. Major cities such as Ventspils and particularly Liepaja have some good options, but smaller towns may only have one or two hotels and some of them are unappealing Soviet relics.
Earlier this […]

[Read more →]

[ 2 December, 2007; 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm. ] Although there are several rival explanations, the Latvian capital Riga lays claim to being the birthplace of the Christmas tree.

One story goes that it was the handiwork of the members of the House of Blackheads, an organisation for unmarried foreign merchants living in the city. They supposedly set fire to a tree and left it […]

[Read more →]

[ 4 December, 2007 to 17 December, 2007. ] The name ‘Christmas Jazz’ (Joulujazz in Estonian) may well strike fear into your heart: surely not a festival of Christmas carols performed in a jazz style? Or some kind of Wizzard-meets-Miles-Davis fusion fest?

Thankfully not. Christmas Jazz is simply a jazz festival which takes place in the run-up to Christmas, and what’s more it has a […]

[Read more →]

[ 30 November, 2007 to 9 December, 2007. ] Today sees the start of the 11th annual Black Nights Film Festival (POFF) in Estonia. The largest film festival in the Baltics, this ten day event will showcase more than 200 films from around the globe – most of them with English subtitles.

There will be screenings in Tallinn, Tartu, Viljandi, Narva, Johvi and Kardla, and […]

[Read more →]