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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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[ 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 [...]

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[ 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 [...]

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Tallinn airport has announced a drop of almost 10% in the landing taxes which it charges to airlines, effective from March 2008. It is as yet unclear whether these savings will be passed on to customers, although one side effect may be to make Tallinn more appealing to Ryanair.
The low cost airline had refused to [...]

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Earlier in 2007 the Estonian Ministry for Economy and Communications said that Ryanair would be flying to their nation’s capital by the autumn. There’s still no sign of the aggressive price-cutting carrier in Tallinn, but the Baltic Times reports that representatives of the ministry held talks with the airline on 12 October, and there are [...]

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Until a few days ago I had never heard the term ’scooper’ when applied to beer. Then I started doing some research into Baltic drinks, and came across a site called ScooperGen. I had always realised that some people like to try as many beers as they can, eschewing dull mass market brands and checking [...]

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