“To me, this is heaven on earth! Eleven years I have been at this job,” I said to a renewed acquaintance I barely knew, one cool January evening a few years ago. I was referring to my experience over the past eleven years, divided primarily between “foreign” locations and life above the clouds. I have visited so many wonderful places and cultures and had the fortune of meeting a significant number of intriguing individuals. Sure, I have had to spend a considerable amount of time aboard an airplane, 37,000 feet closer to the heavens. This may not sound like paradise, you might be thinking, however working the flights, I am not stuck in a seat for hours. I am able to move about, talk to people and occupy my time. Not only are my journeys around this earth paid for – I get paid for taking them! 

Twelve years earlier, at an ambitious age of discovery, I went on a cruise. Call it fate, call it coincidence (or “synchronicity “, as I prefer to call it), call it whatever you like, but this was the catalyst to which a new chapter in my life was set in motion. On that boat I met a girl that at the time was herself on her 12th year working for an airline. As she was talking, shining lights of excitement in her eyes, telling stories of far away countries, my mind was active with intrigue and possibilities. All those places and all these travels tantalized my imagination with visions of my old and dear childhood dreams. The dreams to explore our beautiful planet and fly over borders free like a bird.
As a child growing up in Romania, the opportunity to travel the globe was not a viable option. As I said to my partner and co-editor, “I never imagined growing up that I would be able to travel like this. In Romania’s communist years we could not dream to cross our own country’s borders, and telling others of wanting to see the world would have been a laughing matter to many, if not even a dangerous affair.”

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