In this book I take stock of certain things that I’ve learned as a Romanian expatriate over the course of eight years of living and working in several European countries, from the bohemian Czech Republic to the high-tech, ultra-digitised Estonia. If I were to summarise my entire expatriate experience in a single word, the word of choice would be “awareness” since this is what I regard as the foremost achievement of my years of working abroad: the internal shift toward new levels of awareness, a shift comparable to the transition from sleep to wakefulness