Women's day in Tallinn

When one lives in Helsinki, travelling to Tallinn is roughly twice as cheap as for example travelling to Tampere (a Finnish city about 1:45mins by train), and if you add to that how cheap everything is compared to Finland one could easily understand why it's such a popular destination. 

As a burlesque performer who makes most of her costumes though, there is an even more important reason for travelling to Tallinn, and its name is Karnaluks. Karnaluks is a huge store full of everything one may want for the making and embellishing of costumes (except maybe fabrics), and not only are they many times cheaper than equivalents found in Finland, but I would guess 80% of the products CAN'T EVEN BE FOUND in any shop in Finland. I guess some of you lucky people living in London or the States are used to these kind of stores, but I personally almost had a heart attack the first time I was introduced to Karnaluks. 

Since I am at the moment working on a new act, and one of the ferry lines that does Helsinki-Tallinn happened to have discounted prices a few weeks ago, my dear friend Tiitta and me decided to book a day-trip for the 8th March. 

happy faces in the ferry

What we actually didn't know, but found out as soon as we visited a couple of stores, was that it seems they have crazy sales in Tallinn on women's day! So the shopping part of our trip was even a bigger success. 

The first and most important stop was in Karnaluks, because it was the store that closed the earliest. I found almost everything I had written down on my "shopping list" (and absolute must-have unless you want to end up buying tons of things you don't even need!), and still found one crazy pretty trim in another store called Kangadzungel. This already took a few hours, so by the time we were done with the shopping, we were starving!

The other reason why I absolutely love day-trips to Tallinn is that food and drinks are much much cheaper than in Finland, so you can actually pamper yourself with a small budget. Our first stop was an indian restaurant called Bollywood in the Old Town, which Tiitta knew from previous visits. We got one of the low tables next to the window, so we could enjoy our food surrounded in cushions :-)

waiting for the food in Bollywood

Since it was a special occasion, and we had agreed to pamper ourselves, we decided to have a piece of cake and hot cocoa for dessert. For that we chose one of the cutest cafeterias I've ever been to, which is a tribute to the amazing Josephine Baker. This cafeteria is also in the Old Town, and their selection of homemade cakes and chocolates is really impressive! (besides dangerous)

We decided to go for a hot cocoa each and a piece of chocolate cheesecake and a piece of calvados/white chocolate cake to share.  

taking pictures inside isn't allowed, so the 
lower pic is from www.likealocalguide.com/

And of course no pampering day would have been complete without a proper cocktail! And for that we headed to African Kitchen, which is an amazing little restaurant in the edge of the Old Town (conveniently close to the harbour) that not only has exquisite food but also absolutely delicious cocktails! The cocktails are named after African countries, and the one I tried this time was called Zaire. I liked it so much I may repeat next time!

After that we headed to the ferry and back to Helsinki, but we're definitely coming back soon! 

Tallinn I love you <3

cocktail awesomeness in African Kitchen and some
of my Karnaluks loot in the ferry, pics by Tiitta