Often we get tired and nervos when we don`t get the things that we really want.

When I came to Bucharest, in my teenage years, my mom always used to say that living in Bucharest will be like a jungle: you will choose if you want to just survive or if you really want to live to the fullest. She also used to say that “Eat or be eaten!”. This one is a little more harsh, I know 🙂

Both of them seemed to me like so far away, maybe untrue, until I came here and faced the reality.

Passing through difficult times in high school, with no daily phone calls like nowadays , because it was extremely expensive to call to Moldova, often me and my dorm buddies, used to buy Romtelecom cards, for 10 lei, and call our families once a week, on Sundays, like there was a really celebration of family time.

Sadly, the 20 min included in the phone card, were very little for the things that we wanted to tell them.At school, bullied by colleagues because of our accent, our way of acting or thinking, often we just got along only with “our people” like we used to say. My classmates, always used to ask: “Do you have a TV there in Chisinau?” or “Do you have internet there?” and so on.
Maybe there were just joking, but for sure it didn`t felt like this as a teenager.

   There are many stories that I consider now, some lessons of life.

One of them was when I have realised how cinical some people can be: There were some girls that had relatives that were priests, and considered themselves as the “Christian girls of the dorm”. On Saturdays and Friday nights they were crawling drunk as crazy to get on their feet, in the dorm room, and on Sundays mornings they were becoming suddenly very religios and judged other girls that didn’t went to church every Sunday, like them.

My worst years in Bucharest were in high school: me and my best friend at the time, Anastasia, were always seen as the nerds of the class and/or of the dorm. We almost never went to parties, we never got drunk, we were too serious to be living in a dorm, although everyone respected us, we didn`t belong among them, “The chosen ones”

The big exam was knocking at our door,”The life exam”, as we call it, and it was a year that even though I hate math, I had to pass the exam. In order to do that, I had to study like crazy, a subject that I hated. At the same time as my roommates went to the park, to parties, getting drunk, I was trying very hard to “put math in my brain”

And then the big day came: most of them didn’t pass the exam, not only the first time, also the second. Many of them did not pass it at all. They just gave up.

Years passed by, and some of my colleagues, were apologising to me, for behaving in such a stupid, childish and awful way. Let`s face it, so may high schoolers are bullies, but so few of them are admitting that.