Around the Heart in Eleven YearsA Travel Memoir
In this frank, self-confessional travel memoir, Estonian bestselling author Epp Petrone goes looking for lost faces and memories and along the way must deal with the baggage she left behind.
At twenty-four, the aspiring writer abandons her safe domestic life and high-paying career to follow an eccentric merchant around the world. On the road she finds a mix of exotic men, nomadic philosophers, wandering minstrels, kindred souls, unusual friendships, hard times, and lost children. All of it is captured in her precious journals – journals she leaves behind with an old Spanish sea captain who promises to wait for her.
A decade later she decides to go back to retrieve her memories, but in order to get them back, she first has to reckon with her past. The stories here weave into stories, they take readers around the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, across Russia to Central Asia and the Middle East, from asylums to jails, arms factories to aquariums, and open-air markets to apocalyptic battlefields where the secrets of survival are revealed.
My EstoniaPassport forgery, meat jelly eaters and other stories
“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 to their country.
Justin Petrone
My Estonia 2Berry Junkies, Nordic Elves and Real Estate Fever
The year was 2003, the country Estonia. Great changes were blowing across this small land perched in the fringes of the north – a vote to join a union of European nations, a blizzard of Western consumerism, a feverish demand for real estate. Bankrolled by Scandinavian moneymen, it promised to draw a sheet over the corpse of the socialist economy and make everything shiny and new.
While Estonia pondered its fate as a new member of the glittering West, I wrestled with my own fate as a husband and father to be, at the age of 23. I had been drawn to northern Europe by its gem-like allure but now had to deal with the permanence of my decisions. I was being pulled apart, tugged back and forth between this land of forest people who were hard to be friend and the needs of my own big Italian-American family. As the days grew crushingly short and the polar night set in, a tense debate between destiny and free will stormed within me.
Was this what I had wanted?
Justin Petrone
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