Confessions of a Scrooge
For most of my adult life, I have absolutely despised Christmas and the whole holiday season. As a child, it was a bit different because my maternal family are Jewish, so I grew up with Channukah. While my cousin, who had wanted to become a rabbi instead of an attorney, would become angry with his wife for serving green and red Jell-O (“They don’t make it in white and blue!”) and would seethe as me and the other kids sang Christmas...
Embracing the mundane
We tend to be rather adventurous, always looking for something new to experience, or a new area to explore. Generally, when we first arrive in a new place, we drop our stuff off wherever we’re staying, and we hit the road to explore. We are coming up on our 2nd month in Romania, and most of that time has been spent in one city. In reviewing our last year, that’s the longest we’ve spent in one place since the oasis in Morocco a year...
Visiting Europe via Romania
If you’ve been following our time in Romania, you know many of the reasons why we love it here and think it would be a good base. I wanted to highlight a bit more about using Romania as a travel base, however. Romania is in a great location in Europe. While its position being surrounded by other countries wasn’t always a good thing in its past, it offers some advantages in the present day. One of which is being served by many low-cost...
What’s Next?
As we’ve been reexamining our plan for a long-term base, it’s been a bit of a challenge. We really love Romania, and when I think about what’s next, I go back and forth. But we have some upcoming travel that puts us in a prime position to explore other options, so I feel like we need to do that at a minimum. After spending the last 2 years in places that really didn’t care too much about the Christmas holiday, or even New Year’s, we...
Why Romania?
Some people have been surprised about our choice of Romania for a long-term base. Surprisingly, most of them have been locals. They are pleasantly surprised we’re here exploring and even more shocked when they hear we’re planning on being here for a while. I’ve been tempted to try to start taking photos of people’s face when I tell them we’re considering being here for possibly a year or two. It’s kind of entertaining. Even our cabbie...
