The day after my final class in Bucharest, I headed to Israel for a long weekend. There are direct flights from Bucharest (and Cluj) to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. Flight time is less than 2 ½ hours, and my roundtrip aboard discount carrier Blue Carrier cost $140. No visa is required for Americans; however, passport control…

Zăpadă is the word that I learned this morning, as it dominated everything said and seen on the television. We had a lot of zăpadă this week, particularly last night—enough that flights were delayed and cancelled, streetcars bogged down, and taxis careened into each other. No doubt other Romanian rarities occurred, but these are what struck me…

For the past two days, I’ve had the honor of serving on the Commission’s Selection Committee, which determines which senior scholars Romania will send to the U.S. during the upcoming academic year. Our committee was comprised of four voting members: two Romanian Fulbright alums (one from the arts/letters and the other from the sciences), a Romanian staff…

For my two-week Christmas break, I spent the first back home in Georgia (USA) and the second visiting three former Yugoslavian countries: Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia. My primary reason was that I had served for three years on a national Fulbright selection committee for the Balkans, yet I hadn’t visited all of my assigned…