Day 4: Kristiansund

Day 4: Kristiansund. When we were kids, and later teenagers, spending our summer vacations in the countryside, in Corod, one of the biggest joys for me and my sister Aurora was seeing our dear cousin Ancuța again.

One of the core memories from back then: our parents would go over what foreign languages their offspring had picked up at school, and encourage us to talk to each other in English, in the back seat of a Dacia 1300. "Come on, Ancuța, say something in English!" "See, she knows English too!" "Octavian, go on, talk to Ancuța in English!" And so on…

Ancuța was probably the first person I ever had a conversation with in English, long before I met a native speaker for the first time. Our parents were skeptical: were we really conversing? I mean, actually exchanging ideas and information? Or just mimicking what we'd picked up from movies or the radio and TV. We could have been speaking complete gibberish for all they knew — how would they have told the difference? They'd studied Russian in school, of which they'd retained exactly three phrases: "Ya tebya lyublyu" (I love you), "davai pistoletu" (hand over the gun), and "konets filma" (the end of the film) — phrases I heard said ironically so often as a kid that I still remember them too.

Today we met again and, as always, talked in English. We speak Romanian too, gladly — no airs about it. In a parking lot we even got excited and waved smiling at an RV with Brașov plates that then pulled up next to us, and we traded a few admiring pleasantries with them, a family of adventurers, about how far they'd made it with their camper.

It wasn't an RV that took us far, though — it was English. I wonder if our parents would still have encouraged us to learn it, if they'd known just how far it would take us. How different we'd become from them — and from the versions of ourselves who never would have learned English, but might have stayed closer to home.

For us, English was the first step out of a world where we cousins met summer after summer to pick grapes or hoe the corn, into a world where — well, here we are — we work from home, roam the planet, and get by just as well in almost any functioning corner of it.

Just not in the corner where we actually learned it.