My Life

Back in Lovely Chisinau with New Adventures Waiting

Wednesday morning, I flew back to Chisinau. After a very intensive week in Stockholm, I was a bit sad to leave and felt like I could have had a few more days there, to spend more time with my family and friends and to fix with my apartment, which is a bit of a mess after the renovation of our building this spring. But once I arrived in Chisinau, I was really happy to be here. I guess the fact that it was 30 degrees and the sun was shining when I got off the plane helped a bit, but I was also happy to get back to my little house and to walk through beautiful Chisinau the short way to my office. (No, I am not a workaholic. I came back a day later than planned and therefore worked the second half of the day.) And I really longed to see my friends here again. In the past few months, I have really felt like I have my home here and I was happy to come back.

But I only have a few more weeks here in Chisinau before it is time to leave for good. Yesterday, I got the final confirmation that my transfer to the World Bank HQ has been approved, and I will most likely move to Washington DC in the beginning of October. Even though I have known about it for quite some months now, I did not want to write about it here before it was final. And now it is confirmed. It is for real! And yet, it seems a bit like a dream! Before I leave Moldova, I will travel to the Balkan for my new assignment. (I will work mainly with Balkan countries and with countries in Central Asia, along with a few other countries.) And next week, I am meeting Jessica in Bucharest and we will travel around Romania for a few days and then she will come back to Chisinau with me. I am SO looking forward to her coming here!

But leaving Chisinau will not be easy. When I moved from Rome, I was quite ready to leave. This time it is different. I can think of at least a dozen different reasons, from my work situation at FAO and the contracts that I had there compared with my employment here, to how different it is to be a foreigner in these two countries. Or it is simply because I am getting older and am less restless (something I am quite happy about actually – the latter that is!). Regardless of why I have felt so comfortable here, I will miss Moldova very much! My two years here were in many ways very different from what I thought they would be, but I have learned so much –in my work, from the people that I have met, and about the region.

At the same time, I am of course extremely happy about the opportunity to get to work at the HQ and excited to get to work with new countries, and I will be forever grateful to everyone in my surrounding that has supported me. Especially to my supervisor who suggested that I would try to come over and work with him in DC instead and who then made it happen. I hope I will manage to meet his expectations over the next year. If not, these three years will have been a fantastic experience and will probably have opened up many opportunities for me in other places, so I am not so worried about the future. Right now, I am just enjoying the moment – my moment!

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