When Margo comes to town!

A few weeks ago, our awesome friend Margo came to visit! She was one of Jesse's classmates in law school but we all immediately hit it off, so she has to be friends with all of us now 😉

She's living in Alaska this year, which means she basically lives as far away from us as possible. To get here, it took 4 planes, 2 trains and 2 days! So it was a pretty intense ordeal. But we were so glad she decided to come! (I believe her rationale for coming was "When is the next time I'll have an excuse to go to Moldova?" Which, you know, is pretty fair.) 

Her being here was both super weird and super normal (you know how you are so used to seeing someone in a certain circumstance so when you see them somewhere else it is sort of odd?) But the more I thought about it, the less it was weird that Margo was here in Moldova and the more it was weird that we live in Moldova 😄

While she was here, we tried to show her all our favorite places around town--all of the best parks, museums, and food! 

Also, Margo shared the photos she took with me before she left, which was great for two reasons: 1) Her phone camera is legit and mine is terrible and 2) Because it means there are actually pictures with me in them on my blog! (But really this is pretty rare) So I'll be using a lot of hers (and some of mine too, so Margo can be in some of the pictures!) 

I feel like this picture of Jesse gesturing wildly at the mammoth kind of sums up everything about Jesse. 

The kids absolutely loved hanging out with Margo, in part because she sat and built awesome lego creations with them, and because she is just great. 

I really liked these pictures Margo took of the four of us walking one day:

I made sure to take Margo to Valea Morilor on Sunday, so she got to see the incredible amount of brides there taking wedding photos (did we count 5? 8? Now I can't remember. A lot!)

Also at the park, there were hundreds of these incredibly loud frogs. We could hear them from a ways off, and once we were up close they were so loud they hurt our ears!

We did SO much walking while Margo was here--I think there were at least 3 days where her Fit Bit said we walked more than 8 miles! It's funny--I can't remember ever having walked that much in the US (once we walked 6 miles in D.C. but that's the closest) but 8 miles didn't even feel that strenuous here, because I'm so much more used to walking. 

Trees were blooming in the Dendrarium and the weather was pleasantly cool (or, as Alaskan Margo put it, pretty warm), so we spent a morning hanging out there as well. 

And, of course, on the last evening we made sure Margo got some cantaloupe ice cream! 

We tried to take a group selfie before Margo left, with limited success. I love how Margo looks the same in all of them and then the rest of us are all making different faces. 

I'll have one more post tomorrow about a fun outing we went on while Margo was here, but I'll go ahead and say now that it was so wonderful having Margo here. We were so glad she was willing to come across the world to see us! Jesse and I are both pretty terrible at keeping in touch with friends, and I've been worried about losing some of the incredible friendships we had in Ann Arbor to time and distance. But even though we hadn't seen Margo in a year, we picked right back up where we left off. It was so, so wonderful. 

Thank you for the visit, Margo!