Great Pizza

PARNU, ESTONIA I sweat my way through a two-hour Express bus ride to Parnu, it's on the way to Riga, where I thought I'd stop off for the night just because. Musing and actually feeling grateful that the thieves last night had not taken more and totally screwed me, I thought about the phalanx of rogues, thieves, and corporate profiteers, who's single goal is to take advantage of your venerability as a foreigner. At home, in the routine of our lives, this is seldom a problem. As a tourist, it's an everyday occurrence. This morning, in hopes of exchanging some of my remaining dollars for Kroon, a currency exchanger tried to convince me that 30% above the published rate was good. I didn't buy it and when I protested he balked at giving my money back. I had needed to exchange some cash because the night before, although I had explicitly told BofA that I needed to use the one card that had not been stolen, blocked the card anyway. I called them this morning and was advised through a recorded message to call back during working hours. I called back this evening and they told me the one good card I had on me had been cancelled and the two bad cards I had reported stolen had been left open. Can you believe it and so it goes. This all must be a test to see how I deal with adversity.

Great Pizza

The ride to Parnu is through undistinguished country-side, much like central Minnesota, except less developed. Very few farms and except for an occasional wheat, alpha, or hay field, the land lies wasted or wooded. The highway, initially a four-lane, quickly becomes a two-lane. The traffic is light, and so we're able to make good progress. Parnu, with a population of about 40,000, is a popular resort destination, for people living in this area. It has one main shopping street, a pedestrian walkway, that you can cover in ten minutes. It boasts a modern, architecturally aesthetic library, an opera house, a small modern art museum, and a sprawling white sandy beach. Intermingled among the elm shaded streets of Estonian homes are the occasional soviet era concrete block apartments. As I strolled the streets, I came across Steffani, which some say is the best restaurant in Estonia. It serves a mouth watering pizza unlike any you will have tasted before. Hotel rooms are hard to find, very expensive, quite tacky, and without air conditioning. Here like in Tallinn it's easy to find an open wifi connection.