Author: plutoman

plutoman

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

Family - Life :) - Music

They don’t know what day it is

December 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night I met Mark (the teacher at British School) in the main square, where it was pretty busy. Unlike last year, the Christmas market is in full swing, although they’ve spread things out a bit more this time, presumably so that Covid spreads out a bit less. We met so that we could watch a colleague of his play a band that was appearing on stage. Eight o’clock came and went, but there was no sign of him or his band. At close to nine, I asked Mark if he’d got the right day, then he checked and saw that it had happened the night before. I’m pretty sure his Romanian colleague did indeed tell him “Sunday”, but Romanians confuse Saturday and Sunday all the time, while Tuesday and Thursday are one the same thing to them. We got some food from the market and then had a beer in a pub called Scotland Yard.

There’s an eight-part Netflix series called Flavours of Romania, recorded in 2017, which does a brilliant job of showcasing the country. I’m so far half-way through. In each episode, British writer Charlie Ottley travels through a region of the country on his motorbike, bringing the beauty of Romania out in vivid technicolour, without glossing over its major problems. Episode four was on Moldova, and I just loved Catinca, the woman who made pastries and lived next door to Casa Popa, a museum in the village of Târpești. She’s one of those warm-hearted people you find all over the country, especially in rural areas. They keep their traditions alive. (Unfortunately, lately this has included a disdain for modern practices such as vaccination.)

About my brother’s lack of interest in my life in Romania, I think it’s the place more than the person. Romania does that to people. If I lived in Germany instead, he’d have a lot more to say I’m sure, and he’d have almost certainly visited me. I have a lot of admiration for my brother. He’s had a fulfilling career lasting almost a quarter-century, doing something out of my worst nightmares. He’s got a nice house, a lovely wife, a great bunch of friends, and he’s altogether a good bloke. I do wonder what he thinks of his big brother though, now that I’ve ended up here. (I think he’s genuinely happy that I’ve “found myself” here, even if perhaps he can’t understand why.)

The world darts championship is back on. I haven’t watched any of it. It must be a fantastic super-spreader event. Yesterday I read that Andy Fordham, one of the most recognisable figures in the game (he was over 30 stone at one stage, and drank unbelievable amounts), had died last summer at the age of 59.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Split Enz and Crowded House of late. The Finns have godlike status in New Zealand, and you can see why. Here’s Neil Finn’s extraordinary version of One Step Ahead, which he played in Auckland a few years ago.

Here are some of those cards I bought at the market yesterday, including a William Tell card:

Family - Life :) - Photos - Poker

My brother and typical Timișoara

December 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I called my brother on Friday night. As usual, I found it easier to talk to his wife than him. He’s never really liked talking on the phone, and we live very different lives so it’s like he doesn’t know what questions to ask me about my life, or perhaps he just isn’t interested. Come to think of it, I don’t remember him ever asking me about the food I eat, or the people (big and small) that I teach, or how I communicate, or whether the city has trams or buses, or what the local beer is like and how much it costs, or how to pronounce the name of city, or anything. So even before Covid arrived, I never pressed him to come and see me here. I have an inkling that if he were to come here, he’d ask me what the hell I was doing in this shithole, and strongly suggest that I move to St Ives. My sister-in-law would probably like it, though. I shouldn’t be too hard on my brother. He probably thinks I don’t show much interest in his life either, because when it comes to his working life, I really don’t know what to ask. (With my sister-in-law it’s easier. She sorts people’s feet out.) My brother had been stuck in the Brecon Beacons – the same place as he did his SAS selection seven or eight years ago – so it was good to see them both at home.

I played four poker tournaments last night. After bombing out of the first, I had thumping big stacks – simultaneously – in all the next three. The session was shaping up to be something big, but I ran into some choppy waters, and in the end I only doubled my total buy-ins of $15, taking my bankroll to $1277. (My best run came in Omaha hi-lo where I finished 14th out of nearly 700 entries.) It was a long session, and I couldn’t face playing again today as I’d planned, so I went off to Flavia market for the first time in ages. Half a decade ago I went there a lot; it was a good place to pick up some much-needed winter clothes. Then I always took the tram, but this time I cycled. It was a few degrees warmer than in that harsh first winter. Today I didn’t buy anything except a pack of Hungarian playing cards (I’ve no idea how to play with them) and two langoși, which are also Hungarian imports. Langoș is deep-fried flatbread. I bought mine at a stall where they were rolled, fried and served by three women; I had one with cheese and the other with jam. There was quite a queue for them. As I ate them, a man relieved himself in the open. There was a loo nearby, but I guess he wanted to avoid the one-leu charge. The market, just like the one in Mehala, is a fascinating microcosm of Romania. The mici, the beer, the langoși, the second-hand (and fake designer) clothes, the bits of machinery, the people shouting. And today, even a goat. I don’t know why they call it a goat because it doesn’t look anything like one, but it’s a Christmas tradition of grown men dressed in a colourful costume, dancing and drumming and whistling. It isn’t music, it’s a din, but they still expect money.

The inside of a place I looked at last week
If I owned this car, I’d call it Delilah
Anti-communism signs on the 32nd anniversary of the end of communism in Romania
Buying property - Coronavirus - Language teaching - Poker

Merry and bright

December 17, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a very long phone conversation with my friends in St Ives – the couple who came to Romania in 2017 – as the Omicron variant rips through the country just in time for Christmas.

An interesting day today. After two early-morning lessons, I had another look at an apartment. Fortunately the bike shop was on the way, so I took it in to have a new inner tube fitted. (It was the valve after all, not a puncture, so I didn’t risk changing it myself and buggering everything up. I’ll pick my bike back up tomorrow.) The apartment was right next to a pizza place. It was on the fourth floor of another liftless block, and that basically made it a non-starter. I took off my shoes when I went in, and the diminutive man who owned the place gave me some size-six slippers to wear. In the living room was a bar which was stacked with top-shelf liquor. For guests only, he said. The apartment was fine, as was the area with its pleasant little grocery shops and shoe repairer, but without a lift it just isn’t an option.

I had two more lessons when I got back. One was with a twelve-year-old boy; at one point I explained to him what Brexit was. He didn’t seem a fan. “But why would they do that?” That’s a very good question, I said. He’s learning French as well as English, and he got full marks on a recent French test. I explained that he’ll still be able to live and work in France. In one of my morning lessons I explained the meaning of “merry”. It’s a fun word, and it’s a shame we don’t use it more, outside the set phrases “Merry Christmas” and “the more the merrier”, and the odd occasion when we might say that someone got a bit merry last night. That made me think of the origin of Merryland, the name of a narrow street in St Ives with a pub on it. Cool name, and something I’d like to have in my address, but where did it come from?

Three poker tournaments yesterday. I felt all at sea in my first tournament – Omaha hi-lo – and it made me think that the win I had in that discipline last week must have been a tiny flash in an enormous pan. I never have the slightest clue what anyone else has, and in poker that’s obviously a problem. Then came single draw, in which I ran hot at the beginning and amassed a hefty stack, only to finish ninth for a small profit. Finally, I played pot-limit badugi, where I rode my luck at one point to rocket into the chip lead. With three remaining I was in second place, ahead of a short stack, but I was dealt a pat 98 and had no choice but to get all my chips in against the leader with a 66% chance of winning. I lost and I was out in third. Still, not a bad morning, and after a slightly barren patch, my bankroll is back up to $1260.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Maths teaching

Maths and the reality of Covid

December 12, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had my first maths lesson with Matei this morning, and also my first face-to-face lesson of any sort since September. The back tyre on my bike had a slow leak, and I arrived with only a minute to spare. It was good to see Matei, who now has a mop of long hair, rather like me. That’s pretty unusual for a 13-year-old in a fairly conservative country like Romania. We sat down – I had a comfortable but very impractical chair for teaching – and did some geometry problems. These were only 2-D, and no trig, so it didn’t matter that my maths was a bit rusty. Matei understood it all fine, but his weakness, I feel, is a lack of mathematical sense (or reasoning), and that’s difficult to teach. For instance, there was one question where he had to calculate how many 20-centimetre-square tiles you need to cover a floor measuring 20 by 5 metres. A simple problem, and he understood how to get the answer, but he couldn’t instinctively tell that it was a big floor, the tiles weren’t much bigger than his hands, and you’d therefore need lots of them. He also did what many not-great-but-not-terrible maths students did even back in my day, which was to reach for his calculator at the first opportunity. (I mean, 84 divided by 4, c’mon!) He goes to British School which follows the British system – all his lessons, except for Romanian and Spanish, are in English – so there were no language issues to worry about for either of us. It’s quite different from the Romanian system, and that’s the whole reason they contacted me instead of a Romanian.

In the middle of our lesson, Matei told me all about his father, who nearly died in autumn of 2020. The three of them – Matei and his parents – all came down with the disease; his father was the worst by far. He spent at least three weeks in hospital, requiring oxygen, and still needed an oxygen supply when he came home. At the worst point, he only had use of 30% of his lungs. Matei told me the common story of someone who gets a bit sick, then improves, only to find a day or two later that he can hardly breathe. The awful part was that his family couldn’t see him of course; they relied on FaceTime. Thankfully he made a full recovery – it sounded like it was touch-and-go. He’s in his early fifties and is carrying quite a bit of extra weight. Matei expressed his anger at anti-vaxers; I completely agreed with him (obviously, if you’ve been reading my blog).

When we got to the end of my lesson, I panicked. Where’s my phone? I couldn’t see it anywhere. I had a long and painful trip back on (and off) my bike, not knowing if my phone would be there when I got home. But it was. Phew. For some reason (being in a rush, mostly) I never took it off the charger. As for my bike, I hope it’s a puncture and not the valve, because taking off the back wheel on that thing is a complete nightmare – the gear hub and the brakes are in there, and it has a chain case. If it’s a puncture I can repair it without taking the wheel off at all.

This October was Romania’s deadliest month since World War Two, according to the official figures that have just been published. That includes March 1977, when there was that massive earthquake, and December 1989, when the revolution took place.

On Thursday I read this piece on Stuff (a New Zealand news site) about the plight of earthquake-prone building owners in Wellington, and thought how good it is to be out of that. Just think of all the meetings and emails and body corporate politics. I don’t get my rent anymore, but I don’t get any of that drip-drip-drip of unremitting powerlessness and desperation either. I was extremely lucky to come out of it as well as I did. The comments (there aren’t many) on the article aren’t too sympathetic to building owners. The only comment I agree with is (currently) the last one, saying that earthquake strength testing, and the rules around it, are a complete sham. (The NZ property market is a sham too. That’s half the reason so many people buy crappy properties in the first place, because that’s all they can afford. It would be better for the country in the long run if the whole thing would burn. Any party that proposes policies to at least singe it would get my vote.)

Yesterday morning I spoke to Dad, whose eye was running at the time. He had his other eye operated on in the UK in the mid-nineties, so that it wouldn’t run, but since the other one started running he’s just lived with it.

I’m still full of cold, though much better than a week ago. (These things never pass quickly for me.) I was going to join Mark (the teacher) on a road trip tomorrow, but the forecast is for rain and maybe snow, so we’ll probably meet up for a drink in town.

Life :) - Poker

Under the weather

December 9, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Just a quick update from me. It’s been a tough old week so far, as I’ve been battling a cold and all the sinus pain that has come with it. Monday was particularly bad; the last thing I wanted to do was teach. We’ve had grim weather too. I suppose it is December.

The only bright spot has been poker. I’ve had five top-five finishes since the weekend, including a win in a Omaha hi-lo tournament that came out of the blue – I’ve struggled in that game, so much that I still have a negative return despite that exciting victory. Two of my other high finishes (a third and a fifth) came in five-card draw, which is a new game for me. My bankroll now stands at $1258.

I can’t wait to get rid of this cold which has left me sapped of energy.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

Not fit for much

December 6, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got a cold, again, though this one is worse. My left sinuses are killing me, causing my eye to puff up slightly, and I’m inhaling steam to relieve the pain. It’s about time I got myself a neti pot. The only good news is that I slept very well last night – when was the last time I got nine hours? – so I felt more refreshed this morning. Today is a lazy day – add the rain to the pain, and I’m not fit for much other than online poker. I played three tournaments this morning, making two final tables in which I finished fourth and fifth. My bankroll is $1208.

I had a funny week of work. My brand new student, whose Skype name was something like (but not quite) “madi96”, didn’t show up. I don’t want be generationist, but those young people, dammit. Millennium Man, who started with me a few weeks ago, has given up on me too, without saying anything. On Thursday I started with the eleven-year-old twins, and the boy never showed his face for the whole 90 minutes. He said his camera wasn’t working, but I wasn’t too sure. I asked him to sit next to his sister (whose English was impressive), but he didn’t want to. On Friday I had a bad lesson with the seven-year-old girl in Germany. We normally have two half-hour sessions (on Mondays and Fridays), but last week she started swimming lessons on Mondays, so we had a full hour session on Friday. Bad idea. She was bored in no time. How many more minutes? Um, forty. She was clearly expecting a number like three. When I asked her a question, she didn’t even say yes or no, I just got grunts. Hunhnuh. So what do you want to do? I don’t know. Are you bored? Hunhnuh. Please make it stop.

I’ve been getting messages and phone calls from the father of Matei, the boy I taught for two and a half years. “Don’t forget about us,” he texted me this morning. Now he wants me to give Matei (aged 13½) maths lessons. The only time I ever taught maths was in Auckland in 2010. He wants lessons to be face-to-face, not online. (He and his family are all vaccinated.) I can do it I suppose – probably on a Saturday, and I won’t be playing tennis on that day until the spring – but it’ll takes me half an hour to get over there on my bike, so they’ll have to pay for it.

Mark, the guy who teaches at British School, invited me to join him on a road trip, but I simply couldn’t take him up on that offer. I’ll poke my head out the door now, despite the grim weather. That’s as far as I’m going.

Coronavirus - Life :) - New Zealand

Someone please pull the plug

November 29, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tonight’s tennis was cancelled because the courts were wet following overnight rain; my next outing won’t be until March. I suggest to my singles opponent that we go out for a beer at some point, and he called a friend who (after he’d been to church) picked us up, and in the end there were six of us (and a dog) who went to a bar that served Hungarian beer, including an older couple who joined later. We all needed our Covid certificates. Everybody was really nice, but we were there for what seemed an eternity. Almost two whole football matches played out on the TV, and there was a gap in between. (Poli Timișoara scored twice in the last ten minutes to come back and beat Steaua Bucharest 2-1, then the depressingly rich Paris Saint-Germain also came from behind to beat Saint-Etienne 3-1. I’ve been to Saint-Etienne.) I hit the social wall pretty damn fast in my own language, and in Romanian that happens even sooner. Some interesting conversation, though. One woman said that the five glass monstrosities next to Piața 700 are the ugliest buildings in Timișoara, and it’s hard to disagree with that. One of the guys, the driver, smoked a pipe. The dog really got off on the nicotine. The driver had three beers before getting back in the driver’s seat; the limit in Romania is nil.

We’ve now got the Omicron coronavirus variant to contend with. It appears to be a different beast to anything we’ve seen so far, with dozens of changes to the shape of its spike protein. We can be sure that it’s more transmissible than the previous versions including Delta, but we don’t yet know if it makes people more sick. The WHO skipped over two Greek letters (Nu, because calling the super-scary new variant the Nu variant would have been slightly ridiculous, and Xi, which would have been hilarious but they couldn’t call it that).

My aunt, who visited Timișoara after my brother’s wedding, and whom I’ve always had a lot of time for, has now ventured deep into the rabbit hole of Facebook, sharing any anti-Jacinda material she can get her hands on. Last week she sent my parents a video of a woman’s crazed rant about the supposed damage to the country’s economy that the Covid restrictions are doing. I have no problem with the rant itself. The woman is entitled to her views, even if they’re crazy. The problem is that the bile she spouts is spread throughout her band of followers (like my aunt), people who agree with her already, and they think it’s great. She isn’t changing anyone’s opinion. All she’s doing is making people’s opinions more entrenched, and that’s dangerous. My aunt has sent my parents several Facebook links along the same lines. Dad emailed me to say that Mum might be slowly disappearing down the rabbit hole too. None of this stuff is unique to the political right; I remember “Fuck John Key!” circulating when I lived over there. This morning I listened to part of Kim Hill’s programme where a woman (who was brought up in China) explained why we still don’t know whether the coronavirus arose zoonotically or if it escaped from a lab. She then said that she was lambasted on both sides for her balanced views, and her personal safety was threatened on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikBloodyTok, I wish we could nuke the whole lot.

Yesterday I tried a new fruit for the first time. I bought some scorușe from the market. They’re soft, brown, and a bit smaller than a golf ball. They taste a bit like pears, but with some extra tang, and their texture is mushier. They’d probably go well in a pie. I might make a pie with quinces and scorușe and see what happens.

Friday was a crappy day. We had awful weather, and I had a terrible headache which left me sapped of energy even when the pain had subsided.

I watched the first episode of Squid Game yesterday. Whoa. Not sure I want to watch another.

Buying property - Language teaching - Music - Poker

We all need a lift

November 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a new and interesting discussion topic in this morning’s lesson: golf. My student lived and worked in the UK and still does a lot of business with corporate Brits. Football is their biggest small-talk topic; golf is number two. It’s amazing quite how much jargon there is in the golf world, and how many normal everyday English words take on a different, specific meaning on the course: club, drive, rough, bunker, eagle, and so on. Oh, and bogey. The sport is almost non-existent in Romania, and his knowledge of the game was unsurprisingly similar. We happened to talk about this as Mum was coming to the end of a four-round golf marathon. I suspect she’ll tell me how it all finished up when we talk tomorrow.

I had a look at another flat on Monday. It was in the same block – the delightfully named U4 – as the two apartments I viewed last Friday, but you access it via a different entrance. Just like the place I owned in New Zealand, this flat is on two floors – but unlike the Wellington flat which took up the bottom two storeys, this place is on the fourth and fifth floors, and the lack of a lift is a deal-breaker for me. Not for me exactly – I’d manage – but when you’re trying to run a business, liftlessness is a serious minus. What a shame, because this spacious apartment otherwise had a lot to recommend it. There were balconies on both floors. Everything looked much sturdier than I’d seen in previous viewings. The build quality seemed to be there. I’ll have to keep looking.

Poker. Another tournament win yesterday, my third in eleven days. It’s been feast or famine this month, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Three wins and little else besides, and you’ll do much better than a string of 7ths and 11ths and 16ths, which is more the norm for me. This latest win came in no-limit single draw, and I was extremely lucky to reach the final table, let alone run out the winner. I played four tournaments in all yesterday, including an attempt at pot-limit five-card draw (high), which came to a screeching halt when I ran my pat queen-high straight into a pat threes full. I spent some time on Tuesday working out an equivalence between very strong hands in badugi, five-card draw and deuce-to-seven lowball; in big-bet draw games, it’s vital to know just how strong – probabilistically – your hand actually is. I made $62 overall yesterday; my bankroll is now up to $1194.

My favourite album right now is the one Romanian folk-rock band Celelalte Cuvinte (which means “the other words”) put out in 1987. Listen to it here.

New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Tennis at various levels

November 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a beautiful cloudless Sunday in Timișoara. I met the British teacher guy in town, where it was packed. The police were trying to enforce mask wearing. We sat outside at a restaurant in Piața Unirii. I only had a beer – I’d already eaten – while he had a sizeable beef salad.

Yesterday I played tennis with that same guy. This time the games and sets came thick and fast, even though we had some long rallies, and from my perspective we finished up at 2-6 6-2 6-2 2-2. In the first set I really struggled on my serve and didn’t come close to winning any of my service games. When your serve isn’t functioning, the rest of your game can often fall apart too, and that’s sort of what happened. Also my opponent was playing well; when he’s in the zone there isn’t an awful lot I can do, serve or no serve. I just have to try and weather the storm. I did bounce back and he started to make more mistakes. An interesting moment came on my opponent’s serve at 0-4 and 15-30 in the third set. He whammed down an ace out of nowhere, and that gave him a visible confidence boost. I did however take out the set on my fourth opportunity – a real bruiser of a final point to conclude the longest game of the day.

A world away from Parcul Rozelor where we played yesterday, there have been two good developments in professional tennis. First, Chinese player Peng Shuai. Her disappearance, after she accused the ex-vice-premier of sexually assaulting her, has been deeply troubling. In a breath of fresh air, players (current and former) and the tennis organisations have spoken out against China. The ATP and WTA have threatened to pull their (highly lucrative) tournaments out of China. The second item of good tennis news came when the Australian Open organisers said in no uncertain terms that it’s no jab, no play, no matter what your ranking is or how many titles you own. Things might get interesting then for Djoković who holds nine Australian Open titles – he’s unvaxed as yet, as far as I know.

When I spoke to my brother yesterday he had a cold. That’s such a rarity for him (unlike me), but there are so many bugs going round in the UK at the moment.

I had four of the most uninspiring poker tournaments I could imagine last night. Got absolutely nowhere in any of them. I shouldn’t complain too much after my two recent wins. My bankroll is $1132. Tennis will soon pack up for the winter and I’ll have less work over Christmas, so I’ll probably get to increase my volume a bit.

Yesterday I read an article about Wellington’s many chairlifts that carry people up hillsides to their (often very expensive) homes. The lifts themselves cost a bomb to install and maintain. They’re a visible part of the landscape around Oriental Bay. Just seeing an article about Wellington did make me slightly homesick (or something-sick; nowhere counts as home for me).

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - New Zealand - Other sports - Tennis

The benefits (perhaps) of big sport

November 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got tennis this afternoon, straight after my lesson with the young couple. It’ll probably be singles again with that super-fit guy. We chatted after last weekend’s game, and he attributed his fitness in part to growing up (and going to school) under communism in the Nadia Comăneci era. Sport was a top priority then, as it simply wasn’t when I grew up in the UK, and isn’t now in 21st-century Romania. Sure, we all did gymnastics and swimming and team sports, but unless you were one of the best at football or cricket, we were pretty much going through the motions. I know I was. We certainly didn’t have scouts visiting schools to eye up the best young talent, as they did in Romania. I was, however, exposed to a higher-priority regime when I spent those six months in New Zealand as a nine-year-old. There were inter-school tennis competitions, inter-school athletics competitions, and cross-country runs. I participated in all of that and hated the lot, even tennis, a sport that I otherwise liked.

I saw two more flats yesterday, both in the same block in the Fabric area, which is to the east of where I live now. The block was designated U4, as in “U4 me”, but I don’t think those places were quite for me. In Romanian, U4 is pronounced “ooh patru“. They weren’t bad apartments at all, but do I know what I’m taking on here? I left feeling more confused than anything.

After my Moderna booster, I felt fine for the rest of the day, but at night I got the shivers and slept no more than three or four hours. The next day I felt a bit tired and groggy, but soon I was back to normal. Some short-term grogginess seemed a small price to pay for the level of protection that the extra jab should give me, especially seeing that I’m in Romania where getting a severe case of Covid is a riskier proposition than it would be in New Zealand, for instance.

Mum and Dad missed out on seeing their one-in-800-year near-total eclipse of a blood-red moon. It clouded over at just the wrong time. I had a chat to them this morning. All is well there, although they have taken on a pretty big project with their new house. I also spoke to my brother, who was on his own – my sister-in-law was attending a conference in Liverpool.