Seeing the Sights: Rakvere

With the long, holiday weekend, we decided to leave Tartu a bit. Today's trip was to:

 RAKVERE!

Modern Architecture

We started at the medieval castle that sits on the hill in Rakvere. This area takes its name from the word "ox," so has this very large ox statue near the castle, overlooking the city. 

Aforementioned castle

Learn a bit of sword fighting in the castle's main hall.

All kinds of swords cover the walls: Spanish, Viking,
one-handed, two-handed, rapiers, cutlasses, etc.

The museum in the castle had weaponry and armour from a number of periods. You could pull them down off the wall and feel the weights for each of them. (My dad and Mr. Barnett would have loved this place.) The whole castle had a very child-friendly feeling, which is perfect for me. :) Tobi watched as I opened every unlocked door, climbed through every passageway, played with all the knights' training equipment, and put this helmet on. 

 There's this super old-looking chest in with the armour, and (being a child) I had to know what was inside...

 That is not original.

In Tobi's words, "The original Lego." Hard to see from this angle, but this is not a ninja throwing star, but a foot trap of big spikes. 

Among the knight training equipment was a wooden horse. Of course I sat on it. And I danced with a wooden sparring machine. Then, as we're walking around, this happens:

It was from a different angle, so we couldn't quite tell what it was, so Tobi says, "The goat just exploded." At that moment, it was totally believable. I mean, a moment of thought clearly makes you realize it's a canon, but a puff of smoke over the goat pen... of course the goat had exploded. 

There's a room of torture devices (that we didn't go into as there were a bunch of people in there), and then this torture chamber. I walked in a ways and Tobi didn't follow, saying he'd wait outside. That is clue #1 something weird was going to happen. It was dark, as I'd expected since we'd been into another of the castle's rooms. There were tiny dark doorways with a single light shining on... I'm not exactly sure because it still wasn't bright enough to determine what was in these tiny spaces. There were sounds being pumped into the room meant to add to the creepiness of the experience. After walked around a doorway to the main portion of the room, there was an entrance to another room. Above the fake walls (found out it was made of styrofoam when I tried to lean against one), I could see a fake bat, some spider webs, and all the signs that this was a bit haunted-house-esque. There was already enough atmosphere that someone was going to jump out at me, so I bowed out.

All in all, a very fun and cool day. I was like a kid in a medieval candy store. It was fantastic. Why does the US have more epic castles that let me climb on, around, through, and under things? I didn't get a chance to fire an arrow (the man running that section wasn't there by the time we went to do it), but I'd love to do that all the time? Our museums don't fire canons? All for putting more epic castle museums in the US, say aye!