Estonia; Sunday, 23 July, 2006
Next stop was St Olaf's Church. Once it's spire made it the tallest building in Europe. Today the top 30m or so of the spire have gone, and it’s been eclipsed by a lot of other buildings, but it's still impressive, as are the views from the top of it tower (after an interesting climb up the narrow and crumbling spiral staircase inside where you regularly meet people going in the opposite direction!
I wandered back through the old town to the bus station and picked up the bus out to the TV tower, about 4KM outside of the city centre in Pirita. From it’s viewing platform at 170m odd the views are stunning, with, on what was a very clear afternoon, the southern coast of Finland just visible in the distance. The TV tower is sighted just a couple of hundred meters from the botanical gardens and it was here I headed to next.
The gardens cover a large area, but, as was quite obvious from the TV tower, are mostly landscaped open spaces (given that the place spends quite a lot of the time under snow it’s hardly surprising). In the centre of the gardens are the greenhouses which all radiate off a new palmhouse in the centre.
Having spent not that long looking around I wandered back to the bus stop and caught the bus part of the way back to the ruins of St Bridget's Convent. The shell of the main building has survived almost intact with just the roof, windows and the entire inside missing! The rest of the site is mostly foundations.
I caught the bus back into the centre of town and went on one of the different hop-on-hop-off tours that run around the city.
When it got back into the city centre I caught the tram back to the hotel to drop stuff off and have a quick rest before heading back out for dinner.
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