Everyone should be able to walk into the forest from where they live. Tallinn is luckily quite a small city compared to some other capitals and nature is never too far off. Yet it can be far (as I discovered this week) if you don’t own a car or can use the public transport (which by the way is free). So I’ve been doing some pretty long walks this week to get into the woods during the lock-down.

I walked another 30 km this weekend just like last week and discovered more of the Pirita river valley. It’s not very attractive where I am based right now, but it gets lot better in about 2 km with high river banks on both sides and pine forests along the river banks. Watching wild ducks practising fly-bys along the river valley was not what I expected to see in urban environment.

It’s not all amazing, I’ve also seen lot of rubbish and neglect in these few days – it is still a city and the nature gets the impact from densely populated area. Many people have not been respectful of social distancing and the car parks are full despite of the lock-down.. But across the river Pirita forest’s intertwining tracks were still quiet in most parts and less impacted by the hordes in the valley.

Local walks in the woods have definitely made my week and I also finished the ‘greener and healthier walking app’ design prototype I’ve been working on for the past week or two for my Coursera project. This was my final submission and I’m quite happy how it turned out (below). If anyone would like to try, the interactive version is in Visme as well.

As it has been pretty quiet over here I’ve decided to take a two week break and hope things pick up again when I resume working. 🤞