Nostal'giia

Even though I moved back to DC over six months ago, I'm still not done unpacking some of the boxes that came out of storage. Last night, in one of them, I happened upon my old journals from the years 1997-2001. Paging through them, I found that while there are, of course, some bad memories from those years, there were also a lot of entries that made me laugh out loud or resurrected a visual memory. Probably my favorite memories are from the summer of 1999, when I visited Moldova for the first time for a rather unsuccessful study abroad program. While I didn't learn much Moldovan/Romanian, I did have the incredibly good fortune to meet Lorina, and that very summer we undertook our first of many trips together - to Cluj, via Iasi, in Romania. Following is an entry written while we were passing through Iasi on the way back to Chisinau:

8/12
Breakfast coffee at the Iasi McD's -- a cockroach scuttles across the floor, beggar kids bum a cup of water from the cashier before she shoos them away, and some weird American-type (not me) can't stop his head bobbin' to the groovy beats of the McMusic. But I am feeling fine because my face and head have just been washed and blow-dried in the cleanest bathroom I've seen in quite some time.

Note - this was probably the only time we entered a McDonald's on the whole trip, just so people don't get the wrong impression about how we roll...