Thursday, Twice

Bucharest 9:30 → Atlanta 19:45 — same day, a new world

August 6, 2026, departure day. We left Bucharest at 9:30 in the morning. We landed in Atlanta the same evening, at 19:45, after seventeen hours of travel, a layover in Istanbul, and an ocean between who we were yesterday and who we’ll be tomorrow. We left on a Thursday morning. We arrived the same Thursday. If you do the time-zone math, we landed about seven hours younger. In a completely different world.

They say you don’t really leave on the day of the flight, but the night before. You look at the suitcase sitting half-packed on the floor, and the list in your head refuses to end. Four months in two suitcases. Everything you take with you has to fit into two 23-kilogram bags – and once you start packing, every kilogram becomes a choice.

But the hardest thing to leave didn’t fit in any suitcase.

Messi, checking whether there’s room for him too.

What we leave behind

Eliza și Vlad

Albert și Maxi

Then came the long part: the layover in Istanbul, the hours in the air, that little map on the screen with the tiny plane crossing, slowly, an entire ocean.

The journey

We didn’t leave Bucharest alone – Oana, a colleague from Iași, traveled with us. And in Atlanta, Billy was waiting for us – the driver who would take us to Athens – along with two more colleagues we were only now reuniting with: Petruța and Cristian. All at once, we were no longer two friends alone at the far end of an ocean, but a small group of Romanians gathered under the same new sky.

We still had an hour and a half of driving ahead of us to Athens – and, guess what, in the rain. Our first American rain. But the real surprise wasn’t outside, it was inside: the car was freezing, the air conditioning running constantly, on full blast. And so, on our very first evening, we learned our first lesson about America: here, the fight against the heat outside is waged with an AC that never turns off.

And now?

This is how it begins. Not with a grand, solemn plan, but with two tired friends, four suitcases, and that strange, beautiful feeling that life has just turned onto a new road.

The views expressed on this blog are our own and do not reflect the official position of the Fulbright Program, the University of Georgia, or USAMV Bucharest.