Expat In Romania

G (who asked that I don't use his real name) and I met this past summer when he was visiting Romania. We talked over drinks and I was struck by his keen sense of observation about the way things are going in Romania.When I sent him the following list questions, he didn't shy away from formulating very pointed answers, and I'm grateful for that.   1. You moved away to Australia as a 6 year old. Do you remember what you first liked about the new continent, and what you missed about Europe? I moved to Australia when I was 7.5 – left Romania when I was 5. I spent a year in other European countries where my parents both worked as Engineers before we eventually received permission to migrate to Australia. Before leaving, we had been living in Germany for almost two years, where I had finished kindergarten and first grade in primary school. I had friends the...

It's always a pleasure to see a new email message from somebody who's been reading this blog. In this case, the message came in from a reader who first contacted me last year. He moved to Canada quite a while ago and settled in the Northwest Territories. He wanted to respond to the previous post on Rosia Montana, but given the length of the reply, I've asked him to allow me to publish it as its own post. He asked me not to share his name, but outside of that, I'm copying it verbatim. (Edit: In Romana mai jos) Hello Matt, Here we go again: Rosia Montana. I got involved in this project about four years ago. I had had phone interviews with radio stations in Bucharest; I published several articles in two or three magazines in Bucharest. I hosted, guided and loaded up with data and portable computer equipment one “Romanian explorer” as the Romanian media called her: Uca Marinescu. Perhaps the name rings a bell. Anyhow she never got back to me; there was no feedba...

I recently found an essay of mine on U.S foreign policy entitled "The Disparities on Vietnam". The 'disparities' referred to events leading up to intervention and the eventual withdrawal from Vietnam as presented by the US State Department on one hand, and the authors of Rise to Globalism on the other. As part of his comments, the professor wrote this at the end: "There may be only One Truth out there somewhere, but humans being partial, having limited sensory arrays and all that, I suspect that the closest we'll get to sneaking up on said truth consists in comparing versions with a will to cancelling out the nonsense and synthesizing what remains, rather than a Best Version Takes All sort-of basis. But then, you do the cancellation thing, you do it with logic and do it beautifully...If it's a tad grim, so is the reality it depicts." I can't promise it won't be grim, but this is my take on the truth about Rosia Montana. My only goal is ...