Returning to Bucharest: What Travel Reveals About Identity, Ambition and Change
- Angela Soltan
- Nov 18, 2019
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 27
“Traveling solo does not always mean you’re alone. Most often, you meet marvelous people along the way and make connections that last a lifetime.”
– Jacqueline Boone
Some places remain connected to an earlier version of us.
We may remember their streets, buildings and cafés. But beneath those memories, something else remains: the person we were when we first arrived there.
I returned to Bucharest in 2019 after an absence of ten years. My relationship with the city had begun in 1997, when I was 27 and had recently been appointed country representative in Moldova for an international organization based in Paris.
I was ambitious, excited and determined to prove that the young woman from a small and barely understood country could move mountains.
Bucharest became one of the first places where that version of me stepped into a larger professional world.
The young woman who wanted to be ready for everything
Twenty-two years before my return, my husband and I climbed into our turquoise Lada and drove the 450 kilometers from Chișinău to Bucharest.
We had not planned the journey for long. In Eastern Europe in the 1990s, planning could sometimes feel like an optimistic theory.
The border between Moldova and Romania had reopened only seven years earlier. We had visited a few places in eastern Romania, but Bucharest was new to us.
A meeting had been organized with the Secretary General of the Union Latine, colleagues from Paris and the organization’s Romanian team. They were gathering in the Romanian capital, and I was expected to join them in my new role.
I wanted them to know they had made the right choice.
For five years, I had studied foreign languages, French civilization and literature at the State University of Moldova. During university, I began teaching Italian in a primary school and occasionally working as an interpreter.
In the first five years after graduation, I taught French civilization in higher education, became a mother and began my first PhD.
After spending a year and a half at home with my daughter, I started teaching French at the Alliance Française.
I felt capable of doing almost anything.
I wanted to speak every language I had learned. I wanted to travel, work internationally and meet people whose worlds had previously existed only in books.
Looking back, I can also see something I could not name then: capability had already become closely tied to readiness.
I did not simply want to do well. I wanted to anticipate every question, contain every emotion and leave no room for anyone to doubt that I belonged.
The language that became a palace
My French was excellent, and I was proud of it. But French was more than a professional skill. It had become an inner refuge.
It was my imaginary palace: ordered, elegant and full of possibility. A place where I could temporarily escape the instability of Moldova in the 1990s and the complexity of an identity shaped by Soviet, Russian, Moldovan and Romanian histories.
In French, I knew who I was. Or at least, I knew who I could become.
Language can do this. It does not simply allow us to communicate. It can give us access to an identity that feels safer, freer or more coherent than the one available to us elsewhere.
My French was both a tool and a form of self-construction.
It helped me enter rooms that once felt unreachable. It also helped me hide the anxiety I carried into them.
Entering a larger world
After six or seven hours on the road, we parked our turquoise car in front of a grand hotel on Magheru Boulevard.
I tried to behave as though elegant hotels and international meetings were entirely familiar to me.
By then, I had already travelled twice to France — an unusual opportunity for a young woman who had grown up in the Soviet Union. I had learned how to look composed even when I felt uncertain.
In my family, emotions had not been particularly welcome. I had become skilled at filtering what I revealed.
That afternoon, I met the colleagues who would shape an important period of my professional life.
Claudine, who oversaw projects in Moldova and Romania, questioned me in her aristocratic French. Could I really understand the needs of the people our projects were intended to serve? Could I shape the organization’s work accordingly?
Her questions were demanding, but her eyes were warm and quietly humorous. Much later, I realized that something in her reminded me of my grandmother.
Elisabeth, director of the cultural program, brought warmth and laughter into the room through her Brazilian French.
Philip, the Secretary General, watched carefully and asked occasional questions. He seemed particularly impressed that our small Soviet-made car had carried us all the way from Chișinău.
Marius, director of the Romanian office and a member of the Romanian Academy, observed the young woman from a country whose identity remained mysterious to many outsiders — and, at times, to its own citizens.
I was at least half the age of everyone in the room.
Yet by the end of the meeting, I knew something had shifted.
I had passed an invisible threshold. I had not simply been assessed. I had been welcomed.
When encouragement changes the direction of a life
That meeting began a new period of education: learning, taking risks, making mistakes, adjusting and trying again.
I was given responsibility, but I was also given encouragement.
For someone who had recently been told, “Now that you have a child, let your husband work. Why do you need to invest in your career?”, that encouragement mattered profoundly.
It did more than support my work. It expanded the future I could imagine for myself.
We often speak about confidence as though it is created entirely from within. But confidence is also relational. Sometimes it grows because someone sees our capacity before we have fully learned how to hold it ourselves.
Bucharest became associated with that expansion.
It held the memory of becoming visible in a larger professional world.
It also held the beginnings of patterns I would understand only much later: the pressure to prove, the habit of concealing uncertainty and the conviction that being highly capable was the safest way to belong.
Historic street close to the Cismigiu Garden and to the venue of The Power of Storytelling conference..
Returning to the city and to myself
When I returned in 2019 for The Power of Storytelling conference, I came without the dense agenda that had shaped most of my earlier visits.
There were no project meetings to lead and no presentation to deliver.
For once, I could experience Bucharest without needing to perform inside it.
That changed the journey.
I walked through the small streets unfolding from Calea Victoriei. I discovered cafés, theatres, bookshops and restaurants through friends who had built lives in the city.
My school friend Mihaela, now a respected doctor, introduced me to the warmth of Journey Pub.
Corina and Liliana, experienced leaders in media development in Moldova, shared some of their favourite places, including the French Revolution caffe and the POINT theatre.
Through them and through Tatiana Țîbuleac’s award-winning novel I discovered a theatre adaptation of The Summer When My Mother Had Green Eyes.
We left carrying the particular silence that follows a story that has reached somewhere words cannot immediately follow.
The Bucharest I remembered was still present, but it had been polished, restored and rearranged.
Art Nouveau buildings stood proudly beside dark, neglected structures inherited from another political and architectural era.
The city did not hide its contradictions. Perhaps that was part of why I had always found it so compelling.
What cities reveal about change
Calea Victoriei appeared as a patchwork of eras and stories.
Some buildings were luminous. Others remained stained by time. Beauty and neglect stood beside one another without resolution.
Cişmigiu Gardens felt almost suspended.
Black and white swans moved behind a green fence. Older couples carried years of memory through the park. Young families seemed to soften their pace under the gentle October light.
The scene made me think of Lake Geneva, where swans and other birds move more freely among people. I found myself wondering why the fragile and beautiful sometimes seem to require stronger protection in the part of the world from which I come.
Perhaps vulnerability needs protection everywhere. But cultures, institutions and individuals do not all learn to protect it in the same way.
Some use care.
Some use control.
Many of us confuse the two until experience teaches us the difference.
The instinct to rescue
For the first time, I took the bus from the airport into the city.
A young man sat in front of me. He looked uncertain and asked a question in English with a strong French accent. I switched to French.
He was from Lyon and traveling alone for the first time to attend a gaming competition. His phone battery had died. The display and announcements on the bus were not working reliably, and he could not identify his stop.
I checked the address and realized that we both needed to get off at Piața Romană. At the time, I felt the familiar satisfaction of being useful.
Over the years, I have learned to notice that feeling more carefully.
Helping is generous when it is chosen.
It becomes costly when it is automatic, when we feel responsible for resolving every uncertainty simply because we are capable of doing so.
One of the most important shifts in self-leadership is learning that we can remain caring without becoming responsible for everything around us.
The capability remains.
The compulsion softens.
What the journey finally showed me
On my final day, I sat at the French Revolution patisserie with an amandine and a view of the elegant Le Bistrot Français across the street.
I wanted one last taste of the Bucharest I had rediscovered: layered, beautiful, imperfect and full of stories.
Later, on the airport bus, an older homeless man struggled to board. He cursed the driver, the passengers and perhaps the city itself. Eventually, he sat down.
People turned their heads and shifted uncomfortably as the smell surrounding him travelled through the bus.
I remembered the Bucharest of 1997, when rubbish filled parts of the streets and packs of homeless dogs were a familiar sight. I did not remember seeing homeless people then.
Cities improve unevenly.
So do societies.
So do lives.
Some parts are restored and illuminated. Others remain neglected, carrying the consequences of histories no one has fully repaired.
Returning to Bucharest reminded me that personal growth is rarely a clean transformation from “before” to “after.”
We carry earlier selves with us.
The ambitious young woman who arrived in a turquoise Lada is still part of me. So is the woman who learned to hide uncertainty, prove her value and solve problems quickly.
I do not need to reject her.
She gave me courage, mobility and a life much larger than the one others had imagined for me.
But I no longer need her to remain permanently braced.
Travel can offer this kind of self-coaching.
A place reflects back not only what has changed in the world, but what has changed in us.
Bucharest allowed me to meet a younger version of myself again — with affection, gratitude and greater clarity.
I could honour the ambition that brought her there without continuing to carry all the pressure she believed ambition required.
That may be one of the hidden gifts of returning:
We discover that the places we once loved still remember us. But they no longer require us to be who we were when we first arrived.
A question to carry with you
Is there a place that still holds an earlier version of you?
What strength did that version develop and what pressure no longer needs to travel with you?
Questions this story may raise
How can travel help us understand our identity?
Travel takes us outside the roles and routines that usually organize our lives. Returning to a meaningful place can be especially revealing because it allows us to see both what has changed around us and what has changed within us. Places often hold memories of the ambitions, adaptations and identities we developed there.
Why can returning to a familiar place feel emotionally significant?
A familiar place can reconnect us with an earlier version of ourselves. We may remember what we wanted, what we feared and what we believed we had to prove at that time. The experience can bring gratitude for the strengths we developed while also helping us recognize pressures or patterns we no longer need to carry.
What does this have to do with self-leadership?
Self-leadership includes understanding the strategies that helped us succeed and deciding whether they still serve us. We do not have to reject our earlier ambition or capability. We can preserve the strengths while releasing the constant readiness, self-protection or pressure that once powered them.
Ambition Without Exhaustion is not about becoming less capable or less committed. It is about recognizing which inner strategies helped you arrive — and deciding which ones should accompany you into what comes next.
If a transition, role or familiar way of succeeding no longer fits as it once did, a Strategic Reset Conversation offers a private space to examine what is changing and what your next step may require.
Free, private, 30 min. You will leave with more clarity.
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