From East to West: Turmoil and change

From East to West: Turmoil and change

In my previous blog posts I’ve mostly focused on my travel and adventure episodes from my young adulthood, which for me were the highlight of those years. However, I’ve also sporadically mentioned that these were not great years for me. Today, I wanted to briefly retell my story from those years and the life changing decision I was about to make, which also inspired the name of my blog.

After graduating from university, my dissatisfaction with my country and surroundings only grew with each passing year. Each trip abroad I was fortunate enough to go on, would only reinforce my desires to leave Romania behind more and more. For years I kept trying out various ways of finding work abroad, either through contacts, or constant job applications. Despite my efforts though, by 2014 it had become clear this wasn’t going to work.

I ended up working for a Romanian oil and gas exploration company in the south of the country. The job wasn’t easy and the pay was laughable. However, I tried to make the best of it and put on a positive attitude. That lasted about a couple of days into my first shift.

My “lovely” work site sometime in autumn 2014

Now I don’t want to get into the details of all of my gripes with the company and my time there, but suffice to say, this half-year stint only served to amplify my already highly negative feelings towards everything around me.

The winds of change

Finally, by the start of 2015, I had decided that I was going to try a new approach to leave. I was ready to go back to school and thus, began a personal campaign of relentless university applications across Europe. My main target country was Norway, which had left e tremendously positive impression on me when I visited it a couple of years prior. I’m pretty sure I sent out an application to every Norwegian university I could find. However, I was not going to limit myself to just one country. My war on stagnation had begun and my barrage of applications was going to blanket the continent!

My cat as I was telling him of my glorious plans to break free and escape

A couple of months into 2015, I parted ways with my employers in a fairly explosive telephone conversation. Although that unfortunate moment of emotional meltdown left a very bitter taste in my mouth and a dent in my wall, I also began feeling surprisingly relieved. Like some invisible chains shackling me down were starting to break. Within a few days I somehow managed to find a freelance writer gig for an upcoming travel-tourist website. Ironically the pay was almost similar to my previous shitty field job, while the work routine was incomparably better. This little job would end up being a life saver in the months to come.

A surprising outcome

Amid my application frenzy in early spring, friends and family sometimes pitched in with additional ideas for places I could try to apply to. One of them came from the most random of sources: a former work-colleague of my mom’s, who had a son that had moved to Denmark a few years earlier. I knew little to nothing of Denmark apart from its common history with and proximity to Norway. So I applied to a couple of Universities in Denmark too. Although my hopes and dreams still laid with Norway, I was going all in. Something surely had to work out!

As the application deadlines for each university went by, I began receiving the decisions day after day, rejection after rejection. I wasn’t phased anymore. “Reject me all you want, I will never give up!” – became my new attitude. A couple of weeks in, all of my Norwegian applications had been rejected. Yet in the email sea of hopelessness, two shining jewels emerged out of nowhere.

I made sure to re-read these emails multiple times to be certain I wasn’t misreading something, but the message was true and clear. My applications to the Masters programs at the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark had been accepted.

My soon to be new home: Copenhagen, Denmark


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Odyssian

An adventurous soul in a never ending quest to find home.