«It's so romantic, it's so romantic.»
Some people have told me this book is romantic and maybe it is: a young lost American falls in love with an intriguing Estonian journalist and embarks on a journey that restores his faith in himself and the world. I agree. It is romantic.

But it was never easy. A foreigner arrives in the middle of a dark winter and must survive in Estonia, the least fortunate Scandinavian country, a land where people eat blood sausage and jellied meat, drink warm bread, and are always on time; a place where every family is haunted by the past and is struggling to catch up to the present.

Over one year, so much happened in this tiny land that it stopped being foreign. Estonia and I became intimately acquainted. Inseparable. And in the end, I came to love it, and I loved it even when they did not want to let me back into their country.