Our guests from Estonia had to change their plans to fly out of Thessaloniki via Prague to Tallinn because of the air traffic chaos due to the Icelandic volcanic ash. Both of them work at a public university in Tallinn and have to be back at work in the middle of this week but this may be unlikely to happen as they decided to travel with buses and trains to reach Estonia. Even though the Estonians are hardworking folks, they do have a saying which goes something along the lines of "work is not a rabbit to run away from you"...as in, relax, it will always be there. Sounds more Balkan than Baltic:)

So once their tickets to Belgrade (first on the list of many cities they'll travel through to reach Tallinn by ground) were bought on Sunday morning, Hanna and Mirjam did some Skopje exploring on their own, visiting the Mother Theresa Memorial House and the Old Train Station (the most dramatic witness to the Skopje 1963 earthquake). We then met them for beers at a terrace in the old part of Skopje, next to the Kale fortress. During their week-long stay in Macedonia the girls sampled all of our local beers, trying to select their favorite (for us, Skopsko wins every time...)
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(left to right) Elena, Hanna and Mirjam and their beers...
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How do you say cheers in Estonian? Terviseks!!!!... Yeah, I know, it sounds like something else! :)

So, Mirjam and Hanna arrived on Saturday afternoon bringing us some very cute and tasty gifts…. Like this box of Estonian Chocolate Buttons (or Šokolaadinööbid).
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Kalev's Šokolaadinööbid
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So we’ve been maintaining a google map of the locations of all our couchsurfing friends…we typically like to do some research about the countries/cities our guests come from before they show up at the Skopje bus/train station. So as I was looking up Tallinn and Estonia in general, and placing a flag (yellow one, below) on our CS map, I realized that, look at that, Tallinn is in fact the northernmost city we’ll have had visitors from (once our guests arrive).
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Another interesting fact we’ve found out prior to our guests’ visit is that Estonia declared its independence the same year Macedonia did (1991).  So there it is, our first thing in common with our future friends Mirjam and Hanna.
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