Tallinn, 2004

Market Square

The centre of tourist life in the City. Sometimes I felt that all of Estonia´s 3.2 million annual tourists (yes, two and a half tourists per year for every inhabitant!) were in the square, so crowded was it. But the pictures of the Baltica 2004 revellers are in another page.  So I shall start with a panorama of the square as dusk begins to fall - it was 10.45pm, and most tourists were watching some football match or other.  England against Croatia, I think.
The market square at 10.45pm
The ¨pronounced red shift is just visible on the town hall roof.  This photo was taken with no exposure compensation, while the town hall shot (my excuse is that MC wanted a photo showing the time on the clock) has only 0.7 stops of compensation (and no digital jiggery-pokery afterwards, either!).
Town hall, 2230
During daylight hours, the basement acts as a museum.  Unfortunately, the EU translation fund hasn't got around to all of Tallinn's museums yet, and the descriptions were only in Estonian and Russian.  So we photographed the waxworks and passed on.
Waxwork burghers
On the last day, we saw some real people dressed up as mediaeval merchants:
Cloth merchants
But the best thing about the Town Hall is undoubtedly the tower.  Again, lots of steps (I didn't count them).  But a magnificent view.
Market Square from Tower
and there are all those 3.2 million people milling around like ants:
Market crowd from tower
A ground level view of the market revealed weird hats for sale:
Hatstand
Though arguably, these were less weird than the hats the traders were wearing.
Old hat
and
Even older hat
All these were about to be eclipsed by the costumes of the Baltica 2004 participants.

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