Tallinn

Let me take you along on our trip to Estonia, Finland, and Russia with the university's string quartet. Any of these pictures can be clicked on for a larger view.After church in Tallinn, Estonia last weekend, the church members took our group out to the ruins of a monastery at Padise for a picnic. The scale of the place was huge! We explored the cellars, the chapel, the rooms, the staircases in the walls, the attic, and the top of the tower. This monastery eventually was made into a fortification, then a residence for nobility, and finally became a ruins after fire.

Oh, and here's the picnic spread. Pretty attractive, yes?
The next day we went with the string quartet to two prisons. They were really grim places, with faces more hardened and scarred than I'd expected to see. I don't think they fix broken noses after fights in there. The men had those kind of sad eyes that you see in concentration camp pictures (and the prisons did remind us of concentration camps), and many had complete defeat in their postures. But there were a few happy ones, as well. In particular was the young man below, who was baptized the day we were there.

His story is a sad one, and all too familiar, from what we heard. He was drunk at the age of 17 and killed a person, leading to his incarceration here. After a series of Bible studies recently, he chose to follow Jesus and asked to be baptized. The chaplain, a soft-hearted guy who has the most sympathetic expressions and absolutely focused listening posture I've ever seen, was thrilled to baptize his young friend in this tiny 8x8 foot room near the prison chapel. I was taking the picture through the doorway. While in Estonia, we got to explore the old Hanseatic league town of Tallinn. This town on the Baltic Sea is a charming one, more reminiscent of Germany, Austria and Czech Republic than of Scandanavia. The crowning building on the hill of old Tallinn, in my opinion, is the Russian Orthodox church, with its beautiful onion domes and icons on the inside. But the adventurous part was taking a guided tour through what the locals call "the catacombs" a system of tunnels in the hill that were built for both shelter and fortifying the hill so that troops could more safely fight off attack. Interestingly, the tunnels were never actually used except by homeless people in more recent times, looking for a sheltered place to sleep at night.

Finally, we walked out through the picturesque old gate, and headed "home" for one more night at our host family's home (the one with the watchdogs who don't bark and the fresh produce from the garden straight to the breakfast table) before boarding the ferry for Finland the next morning.