I am no longer writing on Transylvanian soil. On Saturday, I turned in my keys to my landlord and hauled an entirely unmanageable amount of luggage on a series of trains to Austria with my grandfather.
My departure was in many ways, very anticipated. 9 months is a long time to be apart from family and friends. I dearly missed my college friends and my siblings and parents. I've been looking for jobs back home (haha, what a joke...), and making plans for the post-Romania future.
However, the last few days before my departure were rather tinged with nostalgia and some wistfulness. On the one hand, I know I had a lot of frustrations here; I used this blog as a source to vent about them. On the other hand, I've realized there's a lot about Romania I can't help but still love. I was editing a paper I wrote, and I found again how interested I still am in the subject I've been researching. In saying my goodbyes, I realized how fond I've become of friends I made here. Though any 'official' modes of getting anything done here is pitifully lacking and inefficient, if you ask friends to help you, they, and their entire families and networks, will do anything to help you. In a wistful mood, I saw the Romanian countryside and could excuse the messiness as rustic-ness, saw peasants working in fields as a romantic pastoral scene rather than the backbreaking, un-modern work it is, wished we were riding in an older Accelerat train rather than a modern, climate-controlled Rapid....
I'll still be posting more, some last posts that have been let slip by as I was busy in the last month or so, and also some more post-Romania thoughts... but I write now from the Alps, not the Carpathians.....
La revedere, Romania... pe curind.
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