Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? (Should old friends be forgotten and never remembered?) Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And auld lang syne? (Should old relationships be forgotten, and the time we shared long ago?) For auld lang syne, my jo, For auld lang syne, (For the sake of old times, my dear, for the sake of what has been,) We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, For auld lang syne. (we’ll still share a drink of goodwill for the sake of old tim

For a long time, I accepted the New Year the way most of us are taught to: a clean line between what was and what might be, a moment of collective pause followed almost immediately by the expectation of renewal. We count down together, turn the calendar, and wake the next morning in a year that has somehow been declared new. I have always liked the ritual more than I believed the story behind it. There is something lovely about gathering with friends at a threshold, raising a

I learned this morning that I may be living among remnants left by the children who followed the Pied Piper and disappeared more than seven hundred years ago. The streets I walk through in Brașov, the old walls and churches, and the fortified villages scattered across Transylvania belong in part to a world built by German-speaking settlers who migrated east during the Middle Ages. And the leading historical explanation for one of Europe’s strangest medieval mysteries is that

For most of human history, eating together was not merely symbolic. It was practical. Anthropologists use the term commensality to describe the practice of eating together, but communities did not need a word for the material relationships surrounding a meal. Food had to be grown, gathered, hunted, stored, preserved, prepared, and distributed, and very few people could accomplish all of that entirely alone. Harvests failed. Winters came. Animals had to be slaughtered and pres

Immigration is often framed as a decisive break, the before and the after, but that framing hasn't matched my lived reality. What I have experienced instead is a long, unsettled middle. An experience where one foot remains planted in what I lost (or still attempting to untangle from), while the other figures out how to step into a life that is still forming. This in-between space is not dramatic or cinematic. It is quiet, demanding, and persistent. It follows me through ordin

People often ask why I chose Romania, and I always have trouble giving a short answer because there wasn’t one reason. It was the result of a lot of research into what actually makes a country livable: safety, political stability, cost of living, healthcare, immigration, infrastructure, and the realities of daily life. But I was also looking for somewhere I could imagine genuinely enjoying my life. I cared about landscape, seasons, history, culture, community, and whether I t

There is a kind of quiet in northeastern Romania that winter seems to make larger. Snow absorbs the ordinary sounds of a village, fields narrow beneath the cold, and the year appears to be drawing inward. Then, in the final days of December, that stillness can break open with drums. You hear them before the bears arrive, the beat traveling through streets and courtyards, followed by bells, whistles, shouting, and the movement of people toward the sound. Then come the enormous

I’ve been carrying a heavy mix of emotions lately. Back home, in the streets where I grew up, innocent and hardworking Mexican immigrants are being taken into big unmarked trucks — disappeared under the cover of night. Families are left wondering where their loved one is and if they will ever see them again. Dreams are erased. People who have built lives among people they thought were friends are treated like they don’t belong anymore. Watching those videos makes something in