Owlspotting

A couple of weeks ago I found myself drooling at the thought of an American hamburger. One of those that require you to handle ground meat, assemble the patties, grill them (in a pan will work just fine), slap a piece of cheese on them and so on. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore. I […]

Perusing the drafts folder in my e-mail, I came across an excerpt from Svetlana Boym’s book, “The Future of Nostalgia.” I met Ms. Boym, a Harvard professor, in Boston a few months back and we chatted over coffee about nostalgia, its post 9/11 manifestation in the West (her book came out just before and she […]

The booming sound of the giant speakers was pounding us all. I’ve been tortured by concert speakers before, but the warm butter way in which the violin layered itself over the bass sent chills down my spine. People all around me were waving their arms in the air and jumping, their feet touching the pavement […]

My friend Andrei is an awesome photographer. I just thought I’d share that bit of info with you today. You can see a slide show of his work on diversity in mid-Missouri (where we both went or still go to school) here.

Sometimes the comments one gets on a blog should be stand alone posts. Like this one: I am ZAhoor from a Group of company based in DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES. Our company is looking for BARTENDERS, professionals and entertainers from ROMANIA for a 7 star hotel project. I am confident you will be able to […]

Romanian cities didn’t use to have suburbs or much of anything resembling living spaces on their outskirts. The outer ring was the land of giant factories, the heartland of soulless production, where metal once ruled and now rusts in peace. As metal rusts on one edge of town, metal gives birth to new neighborhoods at […]

My Bucharest apartment is (still) largely empty. I barely have any clothes here, I am using kitchen utensils borrowed from my friends, and I live by the “3 things you buy first in a new apartment” list: an excruciatingly large amount of chips (because cooking this early on is out of the question), bedding (there’s […]

“Romania is the country where queuing is for idiots,” Karla writes on her blog. Navigating ques in Romania takes a particular degree of rudeness that foreigners, or us, Romanians returning from abroad, find puzzling and more irritating than locals do. Karla’s anecdotes are funny and revealing. Last summer I got into a similar fight at […]

A little more than six months ago, Lavi coined the phrase “life 9,” to describe a series of decisions she decided she had to make: find a job and a place to live. “Life 9” is “viata 9” in Romanian, which, when the number is spelled out reads “viata noua,” which also means “new life.” […]

Originally published December 2004 in Vox Magazine. === The Intercontinental Divide I had not seen my mother in 314 days since we parted outside her apartment in Targu-Mures, Romania. But on the night of June 4, when she burst through the door of a New Orleans hotel room for our reunion, it seemed as though […]