We love to travel. We are pretty much addicted to
being in other countries and experiencing other cultures and coincidentally we
both ended up in Estonia – at the same time!
But let’s start from the beginning with: Who is “We”?
We are Alexa from the US and Lola from Germany. Both of us are former YFU
Exchange students – Alexa went to Germany and Lola went to the US (we know we
are total clichés) – and now we are interns at the YFU Estonia office. Even
though we haven’t met before we immediately clicked and our adventure started.
Alexa came here on May 16th and Lola followed about a
month later on June 12th. Since Alexa had already a month-worth of experience
on Estonian life it was rather easy for Lola to adjust here in Tallinn. But
there was still a lot to discover. The first day we met we made so many plans
to where we have to go and what we should really do – but admittedly most of
our “To-Go”-places were restaurants. Estonian restaurants are delicious, and we
should know, because all we talked about all day was food!
But of course we didn’t come here only for traveling –
we actually came here to work for YFU Estonia. And we can honestly say this
office is utterly amazing. Every single girl (yes, only girls work for YFU
Estonia right now) here is a fantastic and lovely person. They are always up
for a good joke or some random storytelling and we have never seen anybody in a
bad mood – ever! Whenever we needed help or advice we could ask anytime – no
matter if it was work-related or if we needed instruction to some new
restaurant we wanted to try! Our work tasks
varied since Alexa was working with the
inbound students whereas Lola was working for the outbound program. We did
everything from creating quizzes and games for fairs to designing a “Welcome”-
brochure for the inbounds and social media work. But of course there was also
some office work to be done – Lola once spent a whole day shredding old
application files and Alexa had to prepare over 1,000 letters at once. But we
still had a lot of fun. There was always music playing in the office and most
of the time there were YFU volunteers, who stopped by to finish some work or
just to have a little chat with the office people.
Our weekends were filled with experiencing Tallinn.
The city has so many beautiful places and interesting sights to see that at
some point we got the feeling that almost three months wouldn’t be enough to
see everything we wanted to. But we did our best. We went to every viewing
platform to get every possible view of Tallinn, we walked through almost every
park (and believe us, Tallinn has a crazy amount of parks), we went to the
beach, we did a sightseeing tour through the old town and strolled through that
part of the city so many times that we are sure we could find our way through
the streets blindfolded. We went to the “Hipster”-part of the city “Kalamaja”,
we visited the harbor and we tried quite a few bars throughout the whole city.
All in all, there is no part of the city were we haven’t been.
But we also got to see quite a lot places outside of
Tallinn and those places didn’t fail to amaze us any less than Tallinn. Estonia
has a really beautiful landscape. You can find anything from wild forests to a
rough seaside. From cute country houses to lively cities. You might wonder how
we got to see so many places outside of Tallinn. That has a really simple
reason. Estonians are very welcoming and they
All in all we can only recommend Estonia and YFU
Estonia to everyone. It is a beautiful and unique country, and definitely worth
a visit!