Otepää Tourists
Wednesday was a day off from skiing so after a leisurely breakfast (I don't know what people mean by jet-lag we seem to keep sleeping in too much) Kikkan and I went to explore Otepää.
Town is pretty small, pop about 2500, so we wandered around for awhile. We did find an old stone sign with a map on it to ponder.
but we could make neither heads nor tails of it so we continued wandering.
We managed to find a nice old church that was mostly redone since 1944 but had been originally built a long long time ago according to the sign (conveniently in both Estonian and English).
Then we found a hill to climb. Estonia seems pretty flat from what I've seen so a hill was a pretty exciting find. Don't get me wrong, the 5km course for the distance races this weekend's going to be brutal.
The sign called it "hillfort" and there'd been a series of forts built on top of the hill. They claim the first signs of human activity on the top of this hill date back to the 6th century B.C.E. although permanent human residence of Otepää only date back to the 7th century C.E.
At least the old foundations were good for jumping off!
Estonia's had some disputed ownership for awile, variously being under the control of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the polish-lithuanian commonwealth, and Russia. The Estonians declared independence from Russia in 1918. Then in 1940 they were occupied and then annexed by the Soviet Union. Although from 1941-44 Estonia was under German occupation. And it sounds like being part of the soviet union pretty much sucked for the Estonians.
Finally Estonian went back to being officially independent in 1991 but the last russian troops didn't get out until 1994. Wow, the kind of political tensions out here have got to be way different and more bitter than with our N.American neighbors (the US keeps the land it annexes).
Anyway, from the top of this hill with the remnants of old fortresses we found a sweet zipline!
Although we didn't have anything to zip down with so we could only pretend.
And we had to walk down the hill instead of zipping.
It appears that we maybe weren't supposed to take the path down that we did.
We walked down to the end of the zipline and even found another one.
Finally found a helpful signpost... only 10844km to Salt Lake City!
Town is pretty small, pop about 2500, so we wandered around for awhile. We did find an old stone sign with a map on it to ponder.
but we could make neither heads nor tails of it so we continued wandering.
We managed to find a nice old church that was mostly redone since 1944 but had been originally built a long long time ago according to the sign (conveniently in both Estonian and English).
Then we found a hill to climb. Estonia seems pretty flat from what I've seen so a hill was a pretty exciting find. Don't get me wrong, the 5km course for the distance races this weekend's going to be brutal.
The sign called it "hillfort" and there'd been a series of forts built on top of the hill. They claim the first signs of human activity on the top of this hill date back to the 6th century B.C.E. although permanent human residence of Otepää only date back to the 7th century C.E.
At least the old foundations were good for jumping off!
Estonia's had some disputed ownership for awile, variously being under the control of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the polish-lithuanian commonwealth, and Russia. The Estonians declared independence from Russia in 1918. Then in 1940 they were occupied and then annexed by the Soviet Union. Although from 1941-44 Estonia was under German occupation. And it sounds like being part of the soviet union pretty much sucked for the Estonians.
Finally Estonian went back to being officially independent in 1991 but the last russian troops didn't get out until 1994. Wow, the kind of political tensions out here have got to be way different and more bitter than with our N.American neighbors (the US keeps the land it annexes).
Anyway, from the top of this hill with the remnants of old fortresses we found a sweet zipline!
Although we didn't have anything to zip down with so we could only pretend.
And we had to walk down the hill instead of zipping.
It appears that we maybe weren't supposed to take the path down that we did.
We walked down to the end of the zipline and even found another one.
Finally found a helpful signpost... only 10844km to Salt Lake City!
posted by LAV at 02:35
1 Comments:
Wonder if the church and the forts are from Livonian times. There was a far-reaching event for Russia just a ways north east, on Lake Chudskoye (Lake Peipus) in 1242. Which of course was revisited in 1942...
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