Beautiful Girls: Ede, 1999

In the summer of 1999, mere hours after my high school graduation, I caught a plane to Estonia to see my pen pal Ede. After spending a few days in Tallinn, we went to a little coast town, Haapsalu, where she was an intern at the local newspaper (that’s why she was on the phone a lot). We stayed in old Army barracks that were totally run down and hung out with other journalists in the evenings. The newspaper took advantage of their foreign guest (me) by launching a little summer series in which Ede and I tested several restaurants, trying to make sense of the menu and pretending not to understand any Estonian at all. Ede consequently published crushing reviews of all the places that gave us a hard time and didn’t speak English. It was a great summer.