Midsummer trip: Pärnu, Estonia

Helsinki, 20 degrees

To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour. 

As promised, here follows my second blog post about my Midsummer trip to Pärnu, Estonia. On the second day of our trip we walked down to the beach that we'd heard so much about beforehand. The reason was obvious - the beach was beautiful. White sand as far as the eye could see. Since we reached Pärnu the day before the season-opening, we found the beach early in the morning to be quite empty, but we still wanted to have a look at it. It had also been raining that morning, so no wonder. Stubborn as we are, we had been dying to get out Helsinkian feet in the Estonian sea, haha.

Oh, how happy my feet were when they felt the warm water between their toes! The stunning seaside was filled with hotels, restaurants and cafés. We also found the wooden elephant slide I mentioned in my earlier blog post about our trip. If you missed it, you'll find it here.

Later on, after lunch, the beach became very crowded when the sunbed rental started and we ended up spending several hours there enjoying the sun!

In the evening, it was time to get ready for the Midsummer Eve celebrations. In Estonia, however, they didn't celebrate Midsummer when we did, on Friday the 21st, but in Pärnu that was the summer season opening, so there were still lot of festivities taking place in the city!

I chose to put on my blue chevron print dress that I bought at Lulu's, some blue ballerina shoes, a white shoulder bag and of course a floral headband! In Finland we have tons of local traditions that talk about the importance and meaning of having a floral headband during the period of Midsummer. You can read more about those from my blog post from last year here.

This is how the outfit turned out on me! Before we went out, we took some group photos of all of us six girls that were staying together in Pärnu.

Like I mentioned, Pärnu was celebrating the summer season opening that Friday, and we managed to see some of the celebrations the locals were having in town - rowing competitions, a carnival atmosphere and live concerts in the parks! It was such a nice evening!

I ended up dancing the night away with one of my friends first on the street (yes, that's right) as Pärnu was also having a street festival that night with a singer coming all the way from LA, USA to join in, and then later on in a nightclub called Sugar.

The song that got stuck in my mind after that night was Daft Punk feat. Pharrel Williams' song "Get lucky", because it was one of the songs we heard performed right before our very own eyes on the Pärnu streets! How cool is that!? It's amazing, even as a cover if the singer can sing it!

I will definitely remember that Midsummer forever!

The next and last full day in Pärnu was spent doing some shopping and sightseeing around the city. Pärnu was having great sales, and I managed to find some new lovely skirts at Vero Moda. I'll show you my finds in later blog posts.

In the evening we returned to the beach. I took my golden slippers out on a walk, and they loved it! The stunning sand dunes really created a unique feeling to it all! We saw a lot of Estonian couples on the beach and realized that the city would have been a paradise with a special someone. However, this trip was meant to be a girls' trip and we had tons of fun!

On Sunday we didn't really have time to do anything else than finish packing, have some breakfast, do some quick cleaning and then head back to Tallinn by bus (two hours), lunch at Tallinn and then travel back to Helsinki by boat (another two hours). Since everything went so well, and we had wonderful weather during the ferry trip, even the last day filled with traveling was excellent!

Thank you Pärnu, thank you Estonia! We had a wonderful time. I will remember Pärnu as a sunny city with kind people, a lovely beach, and great memories!

Source

Getting back to work the following day was something completely different. Let's just say that it wasn't easy. In some miraculous way I made it through the week and since my first official two-week-long holiday started on Friday, I'm off again! Can you guess where I'm going this time?