Expat life in Moldova

I’m having a bad expat day. My mind is blank, I can’t write, my Romanian language lesson is a disaster, and the taxi driver tries to kill me.

My store of expat life patience is exhausted. It’s not only the chicken, the water, the electricity, the tiny fridge, the heat, the dull knife, the lack of kitchen drawers, the dead rat in the garden this morning, but . . .

Locked out, barefoot and phone-less, in the hot sun, on the balcony of a new apartment where you don’t know a soul. Not good.

Jet-lagged, I’m in a restaurant on another continent, sipping wine. No sleep in two days, a woozy vision of a semi-naked nymph . . . where am I?

Something creepy happened to me while I was innocently living the expat life in Moldova a few years ago. Yes, Moldova is a country. The capital is Chișinau (I thought…