Kuressaare

I'm still not really sure how to pronounce it, but it's easy to remember an approximation if you think Kurosawa. The Estonian language is a disaster. It's one of those impenetrable non-indo-European languages, and the vowels sometimes have umlauts and other times have tildes (sometimes in the same word) and words often have ridiculous things like consecutive umlaut-ed u's or o's. This language loooves consecutive identical letters. Even the very few recognizable-to-me words have extraneous letters, like baar and stopp.

Anyway, Kuressaare/Kurosawa is the biggest city on Estonia's biggest island, which is Saaremaa (see?) and has no useful mnemonic that I can think of. With the hotel/lockout saga we missed our bus here, and my super eloquent Russian (we have tickets Kuressaare but we are not here 9.30 is it possible…) was not enough to get out of having to buy new tickets. Not paying for the lockout hotel, we ended up a collective two euros ahead plus a breakfast buffet, we lost 1.5 hours of Kuressaare and at least that much sleep, and a gained a story to tell our friends.

The island is better seen with a car but we don't have a car. So we took a taxi to the crater lake and ate bread and cheese and sausage by the side of the road (no snow today and we were able to find a dry non-frozen, non-muddy place to sit) while waiting for the bus that took us to see windmills. The bad thing about going to see windmills is they put them in places that are really fucking windy, but we got to eat bread made from rye ground at the windmill and there was a group of old Estonians touring the windmills and very thoroughly documenting everything and they were pretty cute.

The island allegedly has a brewery, but we looked everywhere and found nothing but the same two adequate Estonian beers we saw all over Tallinn. Aside from failing that little holy beer grail quest, though, no disasters this stop. And no snow. Maybe it really is spring after all.