Noatalgia trip: a 'family' reunion in Moldova — theguardian.com

It was the summer of 1993. I left behind undergraduate life at Leeds University to teach English in a country most people had never heard of, and to live with a family I had never met. In Chisinau, capital of Moldova, the air was heavy with the smell of wild flowers and debate over the perestroika reforms unfolding before my eyes. The Avdeev family took me into their simple Soviet-block home and treated me as their own. Mother Natasha and father Sasha became surrogate parents while Tanya, then 10 years old and the main English speaker in the family, was an adopted sister. I remember joining Natasha in the bread queue, trips to see the emaciated animals at the zoo and summer nights spent drinking absurdly cheap red wine in the bar of the Soviet behemoth Hotel National.

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