"Life in a foreign country is a dance of submission and resistance. Self-knowledge comes in small repeated shocks as you find yourself giving in easily, with a struggle, or not at all. What can you do without? What do you cling to?"

From Expat: Women's True Tales of Life Abroad

Never in my life has this rung so true as it has in these first few days of adjusting to Bucharest. Every day I am bombarded by dozens of new traditions, mindsets, cultural quirks and culinary specialties. The struggle of seeing Bucharest as it is, and not as I had imagined it would be, leaves me exhausted each night as I collapse on my couch/bed.

Yes, I can deal with "showering" by holding a hose over my head in a bathtub with no curtain. I am actually quite skilled at it after living in Austria for a year. But will I ever get used to the brown, lukewarm water that runs for the first five minutes every morning?

I can eat mysterious meatballs and yoghurt that tastes, rightfully so, like the cow it came from. Years of refusing to give my dad the satisfaction of a reaction as he tried to gross me out anytime I ate new things has given me an uncanny control over my gag reflex. But the fish canned in its scaley entirety in some sort of tomato sauce just about did me in. Thank the Lord for Pepto Bismol!

Every morning when I wake up the street vendors are advertising their goods in their sing-song chants, and a buggy, pulled by an old grey horse and filled with what looks like garbage to me, but who knows, makes its lazy way down Strada Vintila Mihailescu. Every morning Nicoleta crossed this street to buy bread from the corner convenience "shack." The bread is kept in a plastic box, covered by a towel, and everyone digs through to find their perfect loaf. One of those things I'm giving in to with a struggle.

Getting anywhere is a total test of agility. The "gliding" technique we learned in Viet Nam—walk slowly and steadily and the cars, motorcycles, etc., will go around you—comes in handy when crossing the streets here. The metro system is the most confusing I've ever seen. The underground lines try to be color coded, but I've seen the M3 in red, orange and yellow. And, each direction of each line is called either "Linie 1" or "Linie 2." I know they're trying to be helpful, but "Linie 1" means underground line 1 to me, so when I am looking for M3, which was yellow but is red in this station, and all I see are signs for "Linie 1" and "Linie 2," and nothing for M1 (which I just got off of) or M3 (which is supposed to connect at this station), well you can imagine my frustration…not to mention the amusement of the commuters watching me wander back and forth in a trying-to-look-not-lost sort of way.

This minor fiasco happened on my way home after going to the Fulbright Commission and meeting Mihaela, my supervisor. The office is quite large, and the walk to it from the metro station is along the edge of Parcul Kiseleff, a huge city park. Mihaela and Cecilia are two lovely, warm-hearted and giggling eastern European ladies who gave me a warm welcome "to our land, and to our hearts." I am looking forward to working with them.

As Samuel Johnson said, "The point of traveling is to correct our fantasies through reality. Instead of imagining the world as it could be, we see it as it is."