Author: plutoman

plutoman

I'm an English teacher in mad-as-a-box of-frogs Romania. Hope you like my blog! ✌️

Life :) - Other sports - Poker

This age thing

April 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I Skyped my aunt and uncle who live in Woodbury, just down the road from my parents. My aunt had just had her birthday and was recovering from a fall at home that had left her with two broken ribs and a punctured lung. My uncle, who is a year older than Joe Biden, has clearly slowed down a lot from when I saw him at my brother’s wedding and then here in Timișoara. His mannerisms and sense of humour were still there, but he didn’t say a lot. My aunt, though she’s aged physically, is still as sharp as ever. I don’t know where they’ll go from here. They’ve got a huge house and many acres of land which used to be (still is?) their business. This age thing, dammit.

I finally made some progress with Barclays yesterday. I got quite a bit out of the Scottish guy on the phone. They’d sent me at least one letter that had gone to my old address. They also sent me a letter earlier that day requesting even more information, despite all my efforts. He assured me that this letter had gone to the right place. The guy was able to tell me what my URN was – this is a clearly vital six-digit number without which I won’t see a penny. I still need to get an authorised proof of address – a bank statement or power bill – but when I ask any of the notaries in town to give it their seal of approval, they won’t have a bar of it. I explained that over the phone, and he said that my other option is to get the British embassy in Bucharest to approve it. Perhaps common sense will prevail and Barclays will bypass this step, but I wouldn’t, um, bank on it. I might well have to trek all the way to Bucharest. I don’t have a car (yet).

The second day of final-round qualifiers in the snooker didn’t quite match up to the first – there were more one-sided matches, and even someone who pulled out due to palpitations supposedly caused by the Covid vaccine. Matthew Stevens (one of the stars back in my day) wasn’t far off making it, but he lost 10-7 to David Gilbert. The real drama came in the match between Joe Perry, who comes from Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, and Mark Davis. As well as both being veterans of the game, they’re good mates. At 9-9, Davis had cleared the first four colours and needed a testing pink to qualify for the Crucible. Because his ranking had fallen, his place on the snooker tour also depended on the win. He missed the pink and left it over the pocket for his opponent. Perry potted it, of course, and then faced a long black for victory. It sailed into the top corner. Perry made it to the Crucible, and in doing so cost his friend his job. Yeesh. The tournament proper, with the all-time greats like O’Sullivan and Selby and Higgins, gets under way tomorrow.

Today I read about a barn fire on a Texas dairy farm that killed 18,000 cows. The sheer numbers are hard to believe. There are no regulations on fire safety in these sorts of farm buildings in America because, heck, cows are just stupid animals. The more I think and read about the treatment of livestock the less I want to consume it. If I didn’t live in Romania, where it’s quite hard to survive without meat especially in winter, I’d consider going vegetarian.

I haven’t mentioned poker for ages because I don’t play much these days. I did have a notable tournament yesterday, however. In the no-limit single draw I finished on the wrong end of a heads-up battle that seemed interminable. Of the 701 hands I played in the tournament, a whopping 347 were heads-up. I made $29 but the payouts were top-heavy and I would have made double that if I’d won.

Life :) - Other sports - Photos

Silver jubilees, good and bad

April 13, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

My work volumes are way down as we approach Orthodox Easter which is a massive deal here. People here know that “normal Easter” is the week before (at least this year it is; it all depends on moon phases and such like) but they assume that we push the boat out with lavish traditional Easter meals like they do, and are quite underwhelmed when I tell them about chocolate eggs and hot cross buns and, um, not much else. Where I come from, the big attraction of Easter is simply the four-day weekend.

This week has marked the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, one of the biggest good news stories of my lifetime. Although the tensions are still bubbling under the surface, all that senseless violence that I remember growing up – usually accompanied by that bastard Ian Paisley’s rasping voice – came to an end. At the same time as the agreement was signed, we had severe flooding. The water came up our garden, as it had done in 1987 and again in 1992-93, but this time it was literally an inch or two from coming in our house. We had no power for at least a week, maybe two. The people around the corner weren’t so lucky and had to vacate their homes for months. While the flood waters were still receding I went on a field trip to Dorset, close to where my brother lives. I started university a few months later in September 1998, the same month that my brother joined the army. In January 2003 we had more flooding. At that point I was still scrambling around trying to find work after finishing university the previous summer. In March, with great relief, I started a poorly-paid job – a real job, nonetheless – at a water consultancy in Peterborough, and one of their projects at the time was designing an embankment to hold back the flood waters in St Ives where I grew up. The bank was duly built in 2006, although I don’t know if it will cope in the long term with the ravages of climate change. If I could wind back the clock I’d probably choose to stay in Peterborough, and in that job, instead of joining my parents in New Zealand.

The chat with my cousin last Friday was interesting. She said that neither of her two older boys, who are now both at university, drink alcohol, and that’s apparently not unusual. How times have changed. At university in the late nineties the social pressure to drink was enormous. Lad culture was at its peak in the nineties – you saw it everywhere, in football (which had become massively popular), on TV, and especially in comedy. Many young women embraced it; the word “ladette” was even bandied about. Admittedly this was the UK, but I don’t think New Zealand was much different. A less laddish culture is probably something we should celebrate, but its screen-heavy replacement isn’t much of an improvement. By the way, my cousin finds my parents’ latest property escapade even less understandable than I do.

I played pool with Mark on Sunday. As I expected, I was bloody awful. I potted one or two nice balls but really I was just guessing as to where to strike the cue ball. I had a special knack for potting the white, often without contacting any other ball. Mark wasn’t fantastic either, but he was better than me, that’s for sure. It was kind of fun to try something different. We each had a beer and shared a pizza. It’s quite a good set-up there; as well as a few pool tables they have one snooker table, but I think I’ll stick to watching that game.

Yesterday I watched 16 snooker players vying to reach the biggest event in the game. There’s a YouTube channel dedicated to this final qualifying round. There were so many close matches; all eight of them went to at least 10-6, and two of them ran to a deciding frame. The most dramatic of all was the Thai player Noppon Saengkham’s 10-9 victory over China’s Zhang Anda, which was decided on the final black. With only the black remaining, a snooker table seems impossibly large. I was glad Saengkham won because I remember him from last year’s World Championship in which he seemed a thoroughly nice chap. (Zhang might be equally nice, for all I know.) There was also a crazy finish to a match where the pink and black were tantalisingly over the same corner pocket with no other balls remaining; the English player Jordan Brown, trailing 9-7, had to contact the pink without potting the black, or else he was out. Eventually he missed the pink entirely and his Chinese opponent booked his place. The Chinese players obviously couldn’t speak English because they didn’t give interviews. Today 16 more players will go through the ringer.

I went to the local produce market this morning. An hour from now I’ll be seeing the four twins; I feel hopelessly underprepared for that.

Here are some pictures from one of the parks in town on Monday, and also the delapidated stadium next to the market this morning. The local football team Poli Timișoara played at the stadium until it was closed in February 2022; aptly the floodlights failed in the very last game, and Poli forfeited the match.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The new religion

April 9, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Where I come from it’s Easter, but in Romania, where the Orthodox church dominates, we have to wait a week.

My teaching volumes were down last week, mainly because of the girl who has gone to Dubai and the 20-year-old guy who told me he “couldn’t see me again”, quite possibly because I argued with him about his favourite topic – cryptocurrencies. (A misnomer if ever there was one. They aren’t currencies at all.) Crypto is nothing short of a religion in Romania, but if you don’t have a willy, or if you do have one but it’s over 35 years old, you’re highly unlikely to be an adherent.

This morning I had a 7:45 start for my online lesson with the woman who lives near Bucharest, then it was off to Dumbrăvița for maths with Matei. My route goes past one of Timișoara’s many second-hand clothes shops – there are always hordes of people outside waiting for it to open at 9:30 – then I pass the tram cemetery full of rusty Ceaușescu-era hulks, then I go over the railway line. The crossing is at the 571-kilometre post but I don’t know what it’s 571 kilometres to. Bucharest, which would make sense, is less; Constanța, by the Black Sea, is certainly more. The crossing is dangerous because often the lights flash and the barriers go down but no train appears for several minutes; drivers often give up and turn back, while bikers and pedestrians go round the barrier. Then of course eventually the train does come. There are flowers outside the crossing.

Yesterday I had a long Zoom chat with my cousin in Wellington. Her two eldest sons are at university. I saw the youngest one (going on 15) who plans to join the police. We talked about the fallout from the pandemic and I mentioned that I used to watch Dr John Campbell’s Youtube channel. In fact I watched it near-religiously in the early headless-chicken days; I found his videos informative, unbiased, and a voice of calm. Around Christmas 2021 I felt I’d gleaned all the information I needed from his channel, so I stopped tuning in. Since then, unbeknown to me, Campbell has gone off at a sinister tangent, peddling misinformation about vaccines and drugs like ivermectin, and falsely saying that Covid deaths have been inflated. What a shame.

The temperature plummeted in the early part of the week. On Tuesday we had unseasonal snow and howling winds. Out of my window I can see an aerial that wobbles if a bird lands on it; in the strong wind it was swaying madly and I wondered if it would come crashing down. I live in one of the blocks in the background of the photo below. The aerial is atop a corner shop (dairy in New Zealand); next to that is some cosmetic place and a popular bar (known as a birt here) where the locals sit outside. On the right is a street with two slightly different names.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up with Mark. Our plan is to play pool or snooker at a hall not too far from where I live. I haven’t done that for ages. I was always so hopeless, and although I liked snooker, I never enjoyed pool very much because it was always dominated by extroverts and drinking and flirting. Right now, the qualifiers for the World Championship are going on – a ten-day do-or-die marathon where players have to negotiate as many as four best-of-19-frame matches to book a place at the hallowed Crucible. I’ve been dipping into some of the commentary-free matches. Stephen Hendry fell at the first hurdle. He was barely a shadow of the young whippersnapper who utterly dominated the game back in the nineties.

The centre of town last Sunday
Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

A few tips

April 3, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching a YouTube video on tipping in the US. It was already way out of hand when I visited in 2015. Waiters, who for some bizarre reason are exempt from minimum-wage laws in states that have a minimum wage, behaving like performing seals, and all that unnecessary time-consuming awkwardness. But at least then I paid cash for virtually everything and didn’t have to cope with the guilt-inducing touch screens that have proliferated since then, often at places where people aren’t providing a service at all – they’re just doing their jobs. My cousin who lives in the US said he was once so appalled by the service at a restaurant that he manually entered a $0.01 tip on one of those screens. The solution to all this “tipflation” is obvious – stop tipping entirely, pay staff what they deserve, and incorporate that into the price of the food or whatever else you’re providing. In an otherwise good video, they got one thing badly wrong: they said the word “tip” stands for “to insure promptness”. No it doesn’t. It doesn’t stand for anything; it’s just a word. Not every short word has to be an acronym. Incidentally, I often use “tip” in my lessons as an example of an English word with several meanings.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open during last night’s snooker, where commentators gave their tips as to whose cue tip would be the steadier and who would be tipped out of the tournament, his career perhaps headed for the tip. The semi-final between Shaun Murphy and Mark Selby went to a deciding 19th frame; I only found out the result (Murphy won) when I got up this morning. After reading and grocery shopping, I met the English lady in town. After a lesson on Tuesday in which I struggled to teach pronouns to a beginner student, because they work differently in his native Romanian, I suggested that we sit down together and get a handle on these damn Romanian pronouns once and for all. Every solo attempt I’ve made so far to properly learn them has ended in failure. So we had coffee in Piața Unirii and we went through the accusative and dative pronouns. The third-person accusative pronouns are gender-dependent but the third-person dative ones aren’t, and that’s just the start of it.

We had mild weather today and it was busy in town. Some tourists are now making their way to Timișoara, perhaps to see what the “Capital of Culture” fuss is about. I was struck by a young couple carrying backpacks and dressed in clothes of every colour of the rainbow; not so long ago that was commonplace, but now there’s a certain drab conformity in what young people wear.

I had a good session of tennis this evening. Domnul Sfâra, now 88, was there. My partner commented on how good his reflexes were for a man of his age. The diminutive Domnul Sfâra was on the other side of the net, and we won 6-2 6-2.

After 32½ hours last week, I’m expecting something lighter this week.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

A life of slime

April 2, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a wet, miserable day. After my first outing on the tennis court last Sunday, you could forget it today. It’s been a real mixed bag – only 3 degrees and sleet on Tuesday, but beautiful yesterday.

Life with my sinus problem ain’t a whole lot of fun. I haven’t had one of those excruciating headaches since December, but the low-to-medium-level pain (like I have right now) is unremitting. Blowing my nose eases the pain; often I only have to tap the right side of my nose and a jet of colourless slime shoots out of my left nostril at a rate of knots. Sometimes I don’t even know where the gunk has gone. Dad said it’s in Embarrassing Bodies territory – get on TV and maybe I could be sorted. Whenever I blow my nose during our Skype calls, Mum says, “I hope you don’t do that in your lessons.” I do try to tone it down, but what about me, Mum? She’s more bothered that I might briefly annoy my students than she is about my pain. I shouldn’t be surprised. Dad suffered from terrible migraines when I was growing up, and Mum’s sympathy cable was permanently unplugged. The only emotion she showed was anger. What will they think of me if we don’t show up to Jackie’s party? Or if I turn up alone? Thankfully Dad’s migraines are fewer and farther between these days.

On Monday I managed to catch my brother on WhatsApp when my nephew was up and about. It was great to see him grinning away on his playmat, but my brother and his wife are struggling with lack of sleep. My brother looked whacked. In the middle of my call, my sister-in-law’s parents showed up to provide some respite, but I could tell my brother would have preferred it if they’d stayed away. I don’t envy him one bit. Some time ago he said it’ll be a “one and done”, but we’ll see. This morning I read an article about only children. They’re selfish and spoilt according to the stereotype, but people with siblings can sure as hell be selfish and spoilt too.

Last night I had an interesting lesson with the Romanian guy who lives in London; he now has two sons. He’d just made a trip back to Romania, and said he felt a sense of greyness on his arrival back in the UK. I know exactly what he means because I’ve felt the same thing many times. That journey from the airport; the grey M25 and M11 with an equally grey sky overhead. He said that people in Romania were happier despite being poorer. That was something I noticed on only my second evening in Timișoara. It was a sunny Sunday October evening and I was walking along the road from the guest house to the university campus to grab some dinner. I passed a constellation of ugly communist-era blocks of flats which had a park outside, full of basic play equipment and half a dozen cheap-looking ping-pong tables. Kids were playing, people were walking their dogs, and all the ping-pong tables were being used. I was amazed how happy everybody seemed. I got the same feeling last night – another sunny evening – when I collected my 15 litres of water; not much money but a real sense of community. In contrast, when I have my lessons in well-to-do parts of town where Porsches abound, there’s no sense of community at all.

This afternoon, in one of those well-to-do areas, I managed to convince my 15-year-old student that a haggis was a hedgehoggish creature that inhabits the Scottish highlands. We read an article on Haggis scoticus from the Daily Record. Then I asked him to check the date on the article, which was 1st April 2021.

Last Sunday I had a wander through the woods with Mark and his two dogs. It was great to be out in nature and to hear the hammering of woodpeckers and humming of insects instead of the rumble of traffic. One thing I love about Timișoara is how easily you can escape from urban life.

The culmination of the snooker season is upon us once more. The sport is going through a rough patch with several Chinese players having recently being banned for match fixing. I also wonder where the fresh new faces will come from: it seems to be a middle-aged man’s sport. Is whiling away hours in a snooker hall, rather than on TikTok, even something a teenager would do these days? At the moment the Tour Championship, featuring the season’s top eight players, is in full swing, then later this month it’ll be the big one – the World Championship, the one event in the game that dwarfs all others.

I’m currently reading The Twisted Ones, which (unsurprisingly) is a horror novel. The author is Ursula Vernon, who wrote the book under the pen-name T. Kingfisher.

Language teaching - Life :)

Conversation Club

March 26, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Our clocks have just gone forward and later today I’ll be playing tennis for the first time this year. Before that I’ll be meeting Mark in Dumbrăvița – I expect we’ll have a walk in the woods with his two dogs.

Last time I forgot to mention the English Conversation Club which took place last Saturday at the elderly English lady’s apartment. She and her Romanian friend (who speaks extremely good English) had decided to resurrect the club after about a decade. There were about ten of us including two teenagers who had been dragged along by their mothers and didn’t say much. People brought food; I made a cottage pie – I would have made a shepherd’s pie, but lamb is hard to come by in Romania. I felt at ease there, even when I made a hash of explaining something to the group in Romanian. I think it was the word “gossip”. Apart from us two native speakers, people spoke English at wildly different levels, so it was suggested that (if the group expands) we split into two. Next time we meet, which – frustratingly – won’t be until 13th May, I’ll give a presentation on New Zealand. It was great to see a social event succeed in the world of TikTok and ChatGPT, and nice to know that social events in which I’m not hopelessly intimidated actually exist. I got a new student out of the meet-up – we met for the first time yesterday. Her level is close to zero. She has four kids, aged 23 and younger, and she was born in August 1981. Yikes.

Life :)

A two-speed city

March 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Just before I got to this afternoon’s session with the four twins, a slightly wizened older guy asked me for the time. Două fără cinci, I said. Five to two. On most of my bike ride I’d been pondering ChatGPT, cryptocurrency, NFTs (whatever the hell they are; perhaps they stand for nothing fucking there), TikTok, people jetting off to ghastly Dubai (the 16-year-old girl I teach is about to do that), a World Cup in Qatar, and Saudi Arabia’s insane Line megacity proposal. They all seem part of the same sinister juggernaut. It was refreshing to see someone a million miles from all of that, someone without so much as a phone. In fact there are a lot of phoneless “what time is it?” people all over the city, a place that operates on two speed settings. You often see both speeds cheek-by-jowl, for instance at Piața 700 which is a bustling outdoor market flanked by kiosks selling various burgers and snacks and cups of coffee. Probably cigarettes, too. Beggars hang around there, then clamber on the tram, then hang around somewhere else that’s full of people. But just metres from the market and kiosks are five glass office buildings, all housing management consultancies and other multinationals. The difference is striking.

On Saturday morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. My maths lesson with Matei got cancelled, so I had a look at the car market at Mehala on my way (sort of) to my English lesson with Octavian. I didn’t get anywhere near actually buying anything, but at least I got an idea of what’s out there. I’m only prepared to spend €4000 (£3500; NZ$7000) – absolute tops – and it needs to be something easy to maintain. The big selling point appeared to be the number of airbags a car has.

A Ford Focus, complete with ten airbags

Next to the car market was the normal Mehala market where I got my bike from. There are loads of tools for sale; in fact before big hardware stores like Dedeman became commonplace, markets were just about your only option if you wanted to buy tools. These markets have a very Romanian feel about them; there’s always the unmistakable waft of mici.

I watched some of Boris Johnson’s lengthy hearing into all those socially undistanced gatherings that took place during the pandemic. As an English teacher I found myself seeing past his probable lies to focus on his upper-class pronunciation of certain words. Necessary, with only three syllables – nothing between the s and the r. Circumstances with a reduced third syllable. Transcript with a long first vowel. Room with the same vowel as foot. These are all features that I don’t have in my fairly nondescript standard British English, and they scream “I went to the right school”.

In this morning’s lesson, my student suggested that the pandemic was all a media beat-up. He was amazed to hear my view that more should have been done to stop the spread initially.

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Fractionally better

March 16, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to Mum again last night. She looked much better. I fear though that she’ll stagger from one bout of stress and misery to the next, at least until the house business is sorted. I also had a chat with my brother. We talk at least once a week. During my first few years in New Zealand, contact with my brother was extremely rare. I often didn’t know what continent he was on. Now he’s much more settled – he has a half-in, half-out relationship with the army – and with me being much closer geographically, we’re in touch far more often. Plus, he used to verge on being a dick. The dick days are well and truly over; he’s turned into a really nice guy. At the moment he’s pursuing a university course, and I’ve been amazed by his level of motivation. Where has that come from? Right now he’s in the middle of an assignment where he has to calculate financial ratios from real-life financial statements, and I’ve been helping him, though I lost interest in all that stuff ages ago.

I should be able to get a Romanian driver’s licence. I’ve made an appointment for 3rd April; there will be some medical hoops to jump through, one of which involves standing on one leg for a period of time. Sounds like fun. I’m a bit wary though of getting behind the wheel for the first time in 5½ years. I’d like a car to be able to travel around Romania – there’s so much to see that I’ve so far missed out on; I’ll still use my bike to get around the city.

Today I’ll give my weekly maths lesson in Romanian. I’m going to do a session on fractions. It’s apparent that both my maths students have no real concept of a fraction, even if they may (at times) know how to magically manipulate them. For them, halves and thirds and quarters are brimming with mystique, and the intrigue only deepens when algebraic fractions come into play. For me, simple fractions are an extremely natural concept – heck, I even used one in the previous paragraph – even if something like 8/13 is hard to get a handle on. When I was at school, I learnt fractions before I learnt decimals, and that made sense. A quarter – one of four equal slices of a pie – is a more natural concept than 0.25. But I see a generational difference here. When I was growing up, fractions were commonplace. Road signs showed fractions of a mile. (In the UK, I think they still do.) Dad ordered glass for his paintings with the dimensions in fractions of an inch. Now though, we’re bombarded by decimals and percentages, and anyone growing up in a purely metric country like Romania doesn’t see a fraction from one month to the next. On a similar theme, Matei sniggered a little last Saturday when he asked me for the time and I told him it was “ten to twelve” so we didn’t have long left. Why don’t you old guys tell the time properly?

In my online English lessons I’ve been making good use of a YouTube series called Streets of London, in which a youngish guy called Pablo Strong interviews pedestrians at random. He homes in on the interesting characters. Can I ask what you’re up to today? Do you mind if I ask what you do? What makes you happy? What would you say to your 16-year-old self? Fascinating stuff, and hours of off-the-cuff English for people to get their heads around.

Spring has begun to, well, spring. Such a shame I can’t look out the window and see all the greenery start to appear in the park. In ten days our clocks will go forward and people will be milling around in the central squares, taking advantage of the longer evenings. On my bike ride with Mark last Sunday, we saw several people gathering urzică, or stinging nettles. The local markets are full of them right now. People make tea from them, whip them up into smoothies, mix them with eggs, and all sorts. They’re a Romanian superfood.

This has been one of my better weeks of late. My working memory was shot to pieces; holding down a normal office job would have been a near-impossible task, just like it was at times in Wellington. Let’s hope I can stay like this.

Family - Life :)

When brave-face mode is deactivated…

March 14, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I Skyped my parents on Sunday night. Mum looked horrendous. She had that stony-grey look on her face that she always has after an argument, probably because she’d just had an argument. But she was also clearly sleep-starved, and she was suffering from the neck pain that has been bugging her for months if not years. Only two people on the planet, Dad and me, ever see her like this. With everyone else, including my brother who’s like married and stuff, she snaps into brave-face mode. They recently got a letter from Barclays saying they’d be closing their account just like they did to mine, so that didn’t help her mood, but so much of this is caused by their house. Hassles and challenges and regrets that will only ever end if they sell the place, and then what? During most of the pandemic, when they still lived in the large but practical house that they built in 2004, things seemed to be on a nice even keel. And now this. It’s all so upsetting.

On Sunday morning I met Mark – the English guy – and we went down the bike track to La Livada, just past Sânmihaiu Român. We had a beer – at 11:30 – and a bite to eat. I had a goulash, which was tasty and had more of a kick than usual; I just wish it could have been bigger. The hot bread was the most wonderful bread I’d tasted in years and I’m not kidding. We talked about the varied challenges of teaching. At his private school, where the fees are an arm and a leg, a major problem is horribly spoilt kids. We saw a cyclist whizz by with a camera attached to his helmet; Mark called him a spaceman. Mark reckoned he saw a jackal, which looks like a cross between a wolf and a fox, when he was walking the dogs recently – this was funny because he used not to believe in the existence of jackals. (There is also a British military vehicle called a Jackal, which my brother knows perhaps too well.) We had a coffee at Porto Arte, the place I’ve been to a dozen times or more, then we parted ways. He and his girlfriend plan to leave Romania in June 2004.

Yesterday was quite productive, much more so that my culmea day of a week earlier. I turned up to the Direcția Fiscală, the place where you pay all your local bills and fines, only to find that it had moved to the mall. Ugh, not again. It must have only just moved because other people were doing the same as me. Someone piped up that if you’re just a person and not a company, you can go to any post office instead of the damn mall, so I went to the one round the corner. I wanted to know what was happening with my rates. Why hadn’t I received a bill? I was armed with a cash-stuffed envelope, because I never know if anyone will accept cards. The lady at the desk found me immediately on her system, and said I owed 227 lei. That’s about £40 or NZ$80. “Is that for the whole year?!” I asked in disbelief. Yes. Forty quid. I’d brought all the cash I had, which was at least ten times that. Part of living in Romania, as an outsider, is not knowing how many digits you’ll have to pay for something. Take train tickets. Opt lei, vă rog. Sorry, eight? Really? To get all the way from here to here on the map? Then the next day I’ll have some medical procedure which will be nouă sute și ceva – nine hundred and something – and my reaction is wha-wha-wha-fa-fa-fa.

After paying that shockingly small bill, I met the English lady who’s been helping me with the dictionary, then went to Piața Unirii to pick up my translated electricity bill, then had my ciorbă – a beef and bean soup – at the market, where I also bought a block of cheese. The cheese woman wanted to know where I was from – I could tell that “no, I actually live here” didn’t fully compute with her. When your rates bill is only forty quid, it starts to compute a bit more. I had four lessons including a fairly productive one with the single pair of twins, then I set about getting all my Barclays bits together. That meant a load of tedious scanning and PDFing, and after having to start all over when the page timed out – how aggravating – I managed to send them all the documents online. What will happen next is anyone’s guess.

I’m in a much better place than even three days ago, and let’s hope I can stay that way. To see Mum like that is a real worry though.

Life :)

Culmea

March 13, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been another week of lurching, hour-by-hour, from just about coping to being someone people would cross the street to avoid. There’s a word in Romanian, culmea, which doesn’t easily translate into English but conveys the idea of a limit or crossing a line. For instance, the guy who took me into the mountains in his car last September had me momentarily worried when he pretended to drive off without me, after we’d stopped for a coffee. He said that it would be culmea if he left me on the side of the road.

On Monday I faced culmea at the immigration office. I was unusually free of lessons that morning after someone had cancelled, so (after sleeping terribly) I got to the squalid office at 8:20, ten minutes before it opened, to try to get the address changed on my residence card. Dozens of people were already in front of me, young Indians mostly, many of whom had camped there since midnight. Seriously. They had drawn up an informal ordered list so they wouldn’t all lose their places in the queue when they went out for a pee behind the building. I realised after some time that EU citizens were allowed to jump the queue, and I blagged my way to the front – after all, I’m able to live in Romania because I was an EU citizen when I arrived. The officer at the desk – the only person, when there needed to be at least six – gave me a form to fill in, but told me in no uncertain terms that I’d have to join the back of the queue, so I did, and spent the time on my phone, staring at maths problems that I could use in my lessons. At 12:30 I’d nearly reached the front of the queue when the office closed. I practically shouted at the officer. What time do I have to arrive, then? Four in the morning? Three, two, one? I said the masculine doi for two when it should have been the feminine două. I would turn up at any hour if I knew it would solve my problem – getting my money back from Barclays, which is what this is all about – but as it might not make the blindest bit of difference, I don’t think I’ll bother again. The angst isn’t worth it. (So much of this shite – account closures, being stuck all morning in a queue that goes nowhere – is down to sodding Brexit.)

On Wednesday I got my bike fixed – that wasn’t cheap but I didn’t mind too much because I rely heavily on my bike, then on Friday I felt particularly low. Should I leave Romania? Sell my flat? Is there really any point in doing anything at all? After my morning lesson I had my appointment with Enel, the energy company. Making an appointment, which takes time in itself, was the only way I could talk to them without being stuck in a queue for hours. I wanted them to give me a copy of my bill that was authorised or notarised or whatever the word is. The rather unhealthy-looking man who served me was pleasant, unlike the woman next to me who treated her customer appallingly. In the meantime a large bloke lumbered in and launched into a wild tirade over something to do with his bill; his booming voice cut through the entire cavernous room. I got handed a bill and went to Piața Unirii to find a qualified person to translate it into English. It should be ready tomorrow.

When I got home from seeing the translator I thought, shit, I’ve got to get a grip here. Part of the problem is I’m spending too much time in my flat. Unlike in my old place with the view of the park and the trams and all that life, when I’m inside now I’m really inside. The nearby market is a lovely place for watching the world go by, so starting from tomorrow I’ll go there for lunch whenever I can, grabbing a bowl of soup and some bread from one of the kiosks, or whatever else takes my fancy, instead of just making sandwiches at home. The small expense will be worth it. Then I thought, right, driving licence (or driver’s licence – I never know which to say). Get my own set of wheels, push off for a day or two, wouldn’t that be great? With a bit of luck (I mean that literally), I might be able to get a Romanian licence without having to take (another) test. Just imagine, after all these years of not driving, having to take a test in Romanian. Virați la stângă la capătul străzii. În următoarea intersecție, virați la dreaptă. That would be culmea for me.

One big problem for me is lack of sleep. This sinus or headache problem, call it what you will, is keeping me awake at night and it isn’t going away. I’ve made another appointment with the neurologist for 8th May.