Author: Conrad
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Push off
“don’t go where the path may lead, go instead where the is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson The day has arrived at last. We’re all packed, and at the weight limit with all if our bags. The next hurdle is the trip itself. This isn’t one of those cross-country, eight hour…
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Ooh ooh! Pick Me!
Vio told me this story today over coffee: “A teacher took out a picture of a family and laid it out in front of her students. One of the children in the photograph had a different color skin than the others. A little boy yelled out, ‘I know why! That kid is adopted!’. And the…
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Impatience as Self-Preservation
People who know me know that I tend to make decisions relatively quickly. Whether it involves what apartment to rent or whether to propose marriage to the woman I had just met, I’ve been resolute. Some might say rash, but it’s worked out so far. I’ve been thinking about why that is recently, and I…
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Thoughts of Packing
As it’s only two-and-a-half weeks until we leave, we’ve begun packing. This is a different type of packing than we’ve done before though. Of course there is the various collection of laptops that we’ve been asked to carry back for friends and family, but that’s normal. We’re not moving permanently (yet!) but we are intending…
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Expectations
We’ve been been talking about living in Cluj almost since we met in January of ’07, and since then, I’ve been dreaming about what might be the best-case scenario for our life there. Of course, over the past seven years, those dream situations have changed and evolved. First, when I decided to change careers from…
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Cluj & Heritage
We are not the first American/Romanian couple to meet and fall in love, nor are we the first within our church. The third in fact, and not the last. We jokingly call it a tradition and playfully hint to the high school boys that they should go to Cluj after graduation to find a wife,…
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That Elephant
Vio talks about the sharing she did last Sunday, but doesn’t really convey the gravity of the situation. The church we go to has what they call “Body Life”, where people in the congregation volunteer to stand up and share with the rest of the people what is going on in their lives and what…
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My Beginning
I met Violeta for the first time in January 2007 when I was working as a consultant for a friend’s new coffee venture in Cluj. I had only been there for a week at that point and was still finding my bearings both with the new language and the role I was to play in…