Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: Listening to Romanians
Chapter 2: The Romania You Don’t Know
Chapter 3: Beyond Communism

  • “We’re waiting for you”
  • Kiss my hand!
  • Wave it or wear it?
  • Fast track to high tech
  • Why Orthodoxy is important in Romania
  • How Orthodoxy survived Communism
  • The religious revival since 1989
  • Oh, please pardon my English
  • The spies and the spied-on
  • All politics is local
  • Something to chew on
Chapter 4: Living in “The Paris of the East”

  • Surviving urban renewal, Ceausescu-style
  • Nixon, Castro, and Pillar 23
  • A Romanian view of Americans abroad
  • Let’s drink to that!
  • God’s love, good doctors, and anti-retrovirals
  • Generation X in the Balkans
  • Standing in line for no reason
  • Post-Cold War frostbite
  • Rome vs. Romania: 1054 and all that
  • Pope John Paul II and us
  • The Pope and the Patriarch
  • Welcome to Romania
  • Resting in peace
  • We’re not on Plymouth Rock anymore
Chapter 5: A drive in the Country

  • Where are the speed cameras?
  • Are you a football fan?
  • Sheilah’s Renault meets its maker
  • How the Boy Scouts survived Communism
  • Houses of aluminum foil
  • Christmas in the Carpathian Alps
  • Skiing under Communism
Chapter 6: The Good King

  • The King and Queen would be pleased to join you for lunch
  • Want ad for a monarch
  • Crown prince promoted, demoted, promoted again
  • Plotting a coup when you’re the king
  • “Then the Russians walked through”
  • Ex-king still looking for work
Chapter 7: Inside Transylvania

  • The Dracula who drew blood, the Dracula who drinks blood
  • Mysterious origins of the legend
  • Dracula as George Washington
  • Visiting the Holy Land … of Unitarians
  • That Romanian work ethic
  • “How many attack helicopters would you like?”
  • How Romanian monks saved a civilization
  • This just in: Hungarians at peace in Romania
  • This country has changed
  • Who wouldn’t want a German to be your mayor?
  • Coming for orphans, staying for families
  • Bram Stoker came and the Germans left
  • Coming to Aiud … to prison
  • Staying in Aiud … for Europe
  • Breaking up (state property) is hard to do
  • Teaching at Maryland, living in Timisoara
  • Last time we didn’t go to Cluj
    • Chapter 8: Deep in the Heart of Romania
  • Why American flyers know Ploiesti
  • Down in the mines
  • Why they stayed under Communism
  • A daughter’s choice to leave after Communism
  • Romania 2.0
  • Fast food and fast deals
  • Mother-in-law of the year
  • How Romania shrank state firms … without layoffs
  • The bishop of finance
  • Central banker shoptalk with Alan Greenspan
  • Are foreign children a national security priority?
  • Taking an American to lunch
Chapter 9: In the Mountains of Maramures

  • Can jelly donuts kill?
  • The cabbage cure for fractured joints
  • “Christ is risen! Truly, He is risen!”
  • Remembering the Holocaust … in Elie Wiesel’s hometown
  • The memorial to arrested thoughts
  • Lessons after the Revolution
  • Earmarks for God’s work . . . and His workers
  • What the Communists did well
Chapter 10: It’s Moldavia, not Moldova

  • How well does your priest sing?
  • Here today, tomorrow in Focsani
  • Steel city, Romania
  • Heh, heh, heh
  • The Americans have come—to a July Fourth picnic near you!
  • Heavenly monasteries, down to earth
  • Art as religion and as history
  • Ducking behind the angels
  • A weed in the garden of socialism
  • Fighting pre-revolutionary battles
  • Mennonites in Moldavia
  • Roma in Romania
  • Poles in the unmelted pot
  • This year in Iasi
Chapter 11: The Blue Danube and the Black Sea

  • J.R. and Southfork Ranch on the road to Constanta
  • Building the canal
  • They call it Romania for a reason
  • From Pikesville to Constanta
  • Ciao, Romania
  • The Turks who stayed
  • If it’s Tuesday, we must be in Istanbul
  • Women’s health, local politics
  • From Communist boss to “Mayor Friendly”
  • Her Highness
Chapter 12: Back in Europe

  • Why are Romanian gymnasts so good?
  • Studying in America, returning to Romania
  • Transplanting a dream
  • Building a better Romania
  • Making up is hard to do, too: The Plaza of Reconciliation in Arad
  • Baptists in the Balkans, rebuilding the social ministry
  • Five faiths in five hours
Chapter 13: Living in the Balkans, in the Shadow of the Kremlin

  • Would NATO bomb Transylvania?
  • Kosovo: the war next door
  • “Live from Bucharest!”
  • Joe Biden in Byzantium
  • Violating Yugoslav airspace . . . with truth
  • Why Romania supported NATO in Kosovo
  • Miloševic on trial
  • Romanians abroad—outside the country, inside the culture
  • Leaving Moldavia, entering Moldova
  • Travels with Radu
  • Caring for the Jewish heritage
  • Good fences, good neighbors, good borders with Ukraine
  • Are the Russians coming—on Monday morning?
Chapter 14: Why Romania Works

  • The economic boom of the last decade
  • 1989: Not the start of history
  • Is Romania a democracy?
  • Nineteenth-century incomes, twenty-first-century skills
  • Romanian model of ethnic relations
  • Romania’s European future
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