Hello, I'm Andreea.

I was born in 1990 in Timișoara, as part of the first generation after communism. As the youngest child in a Romanian family, I entered a world that had already carried so much long before I found words for it myself.

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I was a child who waited.

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A child who sat at kitchen tables asking questions that had no answers.
A child who learned to recognize her mother’s voice not through closeness, but through a telephone line.

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My childhood is tied to summers that felt like promises. To farewells that were never explained. To a normality in which absence was part of everyday life, without ever truly being named.

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In the early 2000s, Europe began opening its first doors to Romanian workers. Spain, Italy, and Portugal were looking for seasonal laborers, caregivers, inexpensive labor. Hundreds of thousands of parents left — not out of a thirst for adventure, not out of escape, but out of responsibility. They did not want to leave. They wanted to be able to stay. For their families. For a future that did not seem possible at home.

At the time, I understood none of it.

Today, at 36, I am beginning to grasp how deeply those years are inscribed in us. How migration was not merely an economic or political event, but an emotional engraving. How it reshaped family bonds, formed identity, shifted trust, and even influenced our ability to allow closeness or endure distance.

I know this much: I am not alone.

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There were many of us. A quiet generation, rarely told, almost never named, and yet unmistakable in its inner inheritance. It is from this awareness that this project was born.

“Where the Oranges Blossom” is more than a personal blog. It is a space of remembrance and an archive for stories that long had no place. A place where migration is not negotiated as success or failure, but understood as a human experience, with all its ambivalences, ruptures, and quiet forms of love.

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What I want to show the world is a perspective that is often missing: that of the children. Those who stayed behind. Those whose lives were shaped by decisions they did not get to make. I write about migration not as the movement of labor, but as the movement of relationships, emotions, and inner landscapes.

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This project gathers personal memories, biographical fragments, and the voices of others who recognize themselves in these lines. It understands itself as an open archive, as a starting point for dialogue, exchange, and visibility across countries, generations, and lived experiences. Not loud, not accusatory, but precise and human.

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I do not write to provide answers, but to open spaces.
Spaces for memory.
Spaces for recognition.
Spaces for stories that connect.

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“Where the Oranges Blossom” — that is where the Europe of my childhood began.
And here begins the attempt to give this part of our history a place.