Tallinn, May 2022 — Where It Started

I booked the Airbnb on a Tuesday. One month, Narva Mantee, Tallinn, Estonia. I had always known I wanted to travel — that vague, persistent feeling that the life I was living wasn't quite the right shape. But it was May 2022 when I found out that travel wasn't just something I wanted to do. It was something I needed to do.

The apartment was on a long, straight road that runs east from the old town. Nothing glamorous about the street itself — tram lines, Soviet-era blocks, a few cafes. But it was mine for a month, and that felt like everything.

I didn't have a plan. I walked. I found the old town, which is one of the best-preserved medieval centres in Europe and somehow still feels lived-in rather than museumified. I found the Butterfly Lounge, which became a regular stop. I found that I was capable of walking into a room full of strangers and starting a conversation — something I hadn't been entirely sure about before I left.

One night I met a group of people at the Butterfly Lounge. We ended up at someone's apartment. I walked home at 8am as the city was waking up, and I remember thinking: this is what I came for. Not the party specifically. The feeling of being somewhere completely new, with people I'd never met, having a night that couldn't have happened anywhere else.

I took day trips to Tartu, Estonia's university city — quieter, more local, a completely different energy. I went to Pärnu, the beach town where Estonians go to decompress. I took the ferry to Helsinki, which is two hours across the Baltic and a completely different world — more expensive, more design-forward, the Scandinavian aesthetic in full effect. Standing in Helsinki was the first time I really understood what I was chasing with the style side of this project. The way people dressed there wasn't about fashion. It was about function and intention.

I came back from that month with a few things I didn't have before. Confidence, mainly — the knowledge that I could go somewhere alone and not just survive it but genuinely thrive. A clearer sense of what I wanted the next few years to look like. And a deep appreciation for the European approach to life: slower, more intentional, rooted in place and history in a way that's hard to find elsewhere.

That trip is where CityboundNomad started. Not as a brand or a project, but as a realisation. The cities, the style, the freedom — they were always connected. It just took a month in Tallinn to see it clearly.