Author: plutoman

plutoman

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

Life :)

The big four-oh

April 21, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Forty. I’ve made it. I’ve had a fairly busy day of birthday phone calls with people in New Zealand and the UK, mixed in with a pair of lessons. I even got a knock on the door from the chap on the sixth floor – he handed me what looked like homegrown apples, some sarmale and more pască. Bizarrely, he also gave me a pair of trousers that he said were too big for him.

After last night and this long weekend in general, it’s pretty clear that Orthodox Easter is a really big deal for Romanians, and something that they find hard to let go of, lockdown or not. Older Romanians, even more so. I’ve had eighty Easters goddammit, and I’m gonna have my Easter even if kills me. Last night they told me that grocery shopping is a three-hour round trip from them. I’ll do it for you in a fraction of the time, I said. But they didn’t trust me to get “the right stuff”. I trotted off to the supermarket this morning, masked and gloved, but it was closed for Easter Monday.

I can make no complaints about the weather for my lockdown birthday, a day when US oil prices dropped below zero. They are paying you to take it away. Oh, and I just tried on those trousers, for a bit of a laugh. They’re enormous, and far too short.

Coronavirus - Romania

Dangerous dessert

April 20, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

At around six I called the elderly couple on the sixth floor, so I could pop up there and give them a box of chocolates. If I happen to have pre-symptomatic coronavirus, I probably gave them that as well. That would be terrible. The lady answered and said she’d call me back when she was properly dressed. All I wanted to do was leave the chocolates outside their door. I’d just finished my dinner when she called me back. I went up there, was invited in, and there was a table laid out. Oh no. What do I do now? I ended up eating some pască (which is a Romanian sweet bread filled with raisins and other fruit) and two big pieces of something like a rum baba. It was lovely to eat some typical Romanian Easter food, and it was good to speak Romanian, but I couldn’t relax. All I could think of was the bloody virus. I really should have made it clear on the phone that I wouldn’t be coming in. People have picked up this thing from courier deliveries, and here I was sitting with a couple aged nearly 80 and 90, both with a list of medical conditions as long as my arm, for more than an hour.

The couple are quite religious and have been on pilgrimages to Israel. When I mentioned that tomorrow was my birthday, the woman talked about all the round numbers. Yes, tomorrow there will be zeros everywhere I look.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Photos

Shockingly normal ⁠— what’s going on in the UK?

April 19, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Nearly 900 deaths were added to the UK figures today, just like yesterday and the day before. Nine hundred. Nine Hillsborough disasters. A dozen Grenfell Towers. Every day. Granted, some of the deaths, perhaps 100 a day, are people who die with Covid-19 rather than from it, but there are also vast numbers dying in care homes who aren’t being counted. The daily tally of people dying from Covid-19 is surely well over 1000.

Those numbers are terrifyingly high. But what really shocks me is how normal this seems to have become over there. What has happened to the country I was born and bred in? How has life in the UK become so cheap, all of a sudden? How has being unable to breathe and drowning in your fluids, while your family can’t even say goodbye to you, become so acceptable so quickly?

Here in Romania we’ll be in lockdown, with armed police, until mid-May at the earliest. I’m glad of that. I agree with whoever said that lifting the lockdown now would be like flushing half your antibiotics down the loo because you’re feeling a bit better, and anyway we’re yet to even properly reach the “feeling better” stage. A huge hole was blown in my teaching hours in mid-March, but my volume is starting to pick up. Yesterday I had that lesson with Cosmin’s friend – it was probably as good for my Romanian as it was for her English. Now she wants a lesson every day including weekends (after all, what is a weekend now?). She should improve quickly.

It’s my 40th birthday on Monday. Yikes! All this social distancing means I won’t be having the massive rip-roaring party I would have had otherwise.

Timișoara really is beautiful in spring, and here are some more photos of the bits of Timișoara that I’m still allowed to set foot in.

Coronavirus - Music - Politics - Scrabble

Work slowly picking up

April 17, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tomorrow I should have four lessons. I’ve picked up another student, a woman who is friends with Cosmin, the ex-student of mine who recently contacted me. She called me today and she spoke so fast that I had put all my concentration into understanding her. I was very stuttery in reply. The difference in speed and clarity between people is vast – Cosmin, for instance, is much clearer and more deliberate. This woman said she’ll need to start from zero, which probably means she knows only 10,000 words and seven verb tenses.

Yesterday I switched on the radio and just caught the incredible last minute or so of a song I recognised but couldn’t put a name to. They played it right to the end. Then this morning I remembered it was Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It’s just a beautiful song, and that synthesiser solo at the end takes it into the stratosphere. Hats off to Radio Timișoara for playing it and not cutting it off. I read that Greg Lake wrote the song when he was twelve. Sadly, both he and Keith Emerson died in 2016, leaving only Carl Palmer, the staggeringly dynamic drummer.

This afternoon I bumped into the woman who lives next door but one. She told me to be ultra careful because of all the people heading out to get supplies for Orthodox Easter. She was glad that Romania is not (yet?) at the levels of Spain or Italy, and was open-mouthed when I told her how many people had died in the UK. Yesterday I saw Bogdan, who lives on the second floor. He invited me over for birthday beers today, but I had to refuse.

Some figures from John Campbell’s latest video make the UK situation all the more alarming. There are considerably more additional deaths (i.e. deaths in excess of the average for the time of year) than there are deaths caused by Covid-19. That might be because some people are dying of coronavirus without being diagnosed, but it’s quite possible that people are dying of other causes because they are no longer receiving due care and attention, and if that’s the case it’s terrible. As far as I know, deaths in care homes still aren’t being included in the UK total. Common sense would suggest that the death toll is very high in care homes – they act as a petri dish for the virus.

Mum seems to have fallen out with her younger brother. He came to my brother’s wedding two years ago and then had a dreadful time with a bowel cancer operation that went horribly wrong. He’s also a Trump supporter who watches plenty of Fox News, and that’s where they fell out. When she told him to stop watching that piece of shit, he put the phone down on her. I don’t blame Mum, who after hearing over and over again from her brother how wonderful Trump is, finally snapped. Trump is a total arse, who in a parade of total arses manages to have no redeeming features whatsoever. He is quite simply all arse, and if you’re supporting him right now when far too many Americans are dying, that says quite a bit about you.

Finally, I played a game of Scrabble this evening for the first time since June. I was abysmal (which would have made a nice bingo). In the same vein, I played hangman with one of my younger students on Tuesday, the best we could on Skype. He found a site called something like “really hard hangman words” and gave me yachtsman. I got there, but heck, those five consonants in a row had me, um, all at sea for a while.

Coronavirus

Chart chat

April 15, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m now pinning the chart to the top of the blog, rather than redundantly posting successive graphs every day. Don’t know why I didn’t do that from the start. And another thing: the counts, in particular the case counts, are going up by now small percentages each day. That’s a good thing on the face of it, but whether it’s due to the lockdown, lack of testing, or both, I don’t really know. It does mean that from now on there simply isn’t space to put the counts for each and every day on the graph. I’ll make sure the latest counts are clearly visible, however.

No real news, but I’ve been busy with Serbian and working on the book, with two lessons thrown in. A pretty good day, even if the temperature has plummeted.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :)

Stop watching the news. You’ll feel better

April 14, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

After only sleeping four hours last night and then falling foul of supermarket regulations, it hasn’t been a bad day at all. I was in the aisle with the canned and jarred fruit, when a security guard introduced himself formally with his surname first, and told me I was breaking the rules by having a backpack over my shoulders. That’s after the security woman last week explicitly told me it was OK. This man (55-ish, short and stocky) seemed new there, and I think he just wanted something to do. Everything was fine in the end, but after that incident I really just wanted to leave, and of course I couldn’t – I had to stock up for the week. I only just had enough cash to pay for my groceries. I’ve got so used to having bundles of the stuff that I didn’t even think. Good job I’ve managed to put a bit away in my Romanian account for a rainy day, because this is a deluge.

Lack of sleep seems to be a problem for a lot of people right now. One of my students called me to postpone our lesson scheduled for this evening because he said he’d hardly slept and felt like a zombie. I was happy to reschedule for tomorrow. So just one lesson today. That was the one on FaceTime with the ten-year-old boy, and it went great. We played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? for the first time. That’s been a hit almost universally.

I did two hours of Serbian today and only half-followed the news.

The number of confirmed cases in Romania rose to 6633 today. That’s also the name of the ultra-marathon that Tibi Ușeriu won and wrote a book about – I got the book as a Christmas present. The number 6633 comes from the fact that the event takes place around the Arctic circle, at a latitude of 66 degrees and 33 minutes north.

Here’s the latest graph with a newly-extended x-axis. I’m just glad it wasn’t the y-axis that I had to extend first.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Biology lessons

April 13, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Boris Johnson is out of hospital, and I’ve just watched his video address where you could see he’d been through the mill. He especially thanked one of his nurses who was from New Zealand. Invercargill, in fact. It’s great that he made it, but I’ve seen all sorts of crap in the British press like “The health of Boris Johnson is the health of Britain itself.” Nauseating stuff. In fact the British press as a whole during this pandemic, with the exception perhaps of Channel 4 News, has been bizarre.

John Campbell’s Youtube videos have been a mine of information for me. It helps that Mr Campbell is clearly a good egg. I’ve learnt all about the benefits of vitamin D to the immune system, and hence why black people might come off worse from the virus because the extra melanin in their skin reduces their production of vitamin D from sunlight (as well as significant socioeconomic factors and increased comorbidities, of course). Although I’m white, I am now taking vitamin D tablets every morning. He’s also adamant about what we should be taking whenever we get a fever. Nothing. Anything such as paracetamol or ibuprofen will certainly reduce the fever and make us feel better, but the fever is our body’s natural response and helps us fight the virus. Cold-blooded creatures like lizards, when they contract a virus, will move to the sunlight if they can, to raise their body temperature. The other negative knock-on effect of medicating to lower a fever, is that because we artificially feel better, we do more, expending vital energy.

I had a surprise text today from Cosmin, an ex-student of mine I last saw in 2017. He wished me a happy Easter. I think he was a bit surprised to learn I was still in Romania. He had plans to move to Australia – I wonder what happened.

The wonderful weather continues. Here’s the chart and my latest picture of the cathedral. I must have posted so many on here.

Romania coronavirus 12-4-20
Cathedral and Timisoara sign
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Photos

Spring under lockdown

April 12, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I called my aunt this morning. She told me that her dog had been put down yesterday. She couldn’t even be there while it was put to sleep. All very sad. She’s been on her own since my uncle died in 2002, and her dogs have always been a lifeline.

This morning, after hearing that Anak Krakatoa had erupted, I read about the Year Without a Summer. That was 1816, the year after Tambora erupted, the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history. This year looks like being summerless for completely different reasons.

Last night my UK-based Skype student predicted increasing casualty rates in Britain and even more draconian measures, just as people might want them to be relaxed. He said too many people were ignoring the rules. For some unknown reason we ended up talking about crumpets, as in the food item. He told me he picked up a packet of these mysterious floppy cakey things after arriving in the UK, but he wasn’t a fan. Apparently he ate them untoasted, unbuttered, un-anything, so no wonder they didn’t quite do it for him. To be fair, how would you know? (It’s always amused me that spectrum has crumpets as its anagram.)

The official death toll in Romania is approaching 300. Here is the latest graph, followed by some pictures of Timișoara in spring under lockdown:

Romania coronavirus 11-4-20
A helpline for over-65s without support
The shoes have walked
The half-attached sign warns people over 65 not to leave their home
This is a lovely notice on a nearby perfume shop. “Take care of each other, stay healthy, and we’ll meet again when this craziness is over.”
Coronavirus - Writing a book

Inadequacy and bleakness

April 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a hopelessly unproductive day. In fact it’s been pretty shitty all round. I felt an enormous (and familiar) sense of inferiority when I met very briefly with the Romanian teacher. I couldn’t figure out how Zoom, this new thing, worked, and I could sense her exasperation when we resorted to using Skype instead. “Skype?! That’s fifteen years out of date.” Well, bugger you. I don’t live in your world of giving lectures and presentations to hundreds of people at a time, and going to Prague and Milan and wherever the hell else. I lead a basic life. She was very tired and I was glad when we ended the conversation. All those hours I’d spent working on that book had pretty much been a waste of time.

The UK death toll increased by nearly a thousand today, but the headlines were Boris, Boris and more Boris. Countries with very advanced healthcare systems all over Europe have been floored by this. Mass graves are being dug in New York. Worldwide, deaths are now officially in six figures, although in reality they have been there for some time. There is grimness almost everywhere you look.

We’re still getting amazing weather and the trees have burst into life with vivid green foliage. It’s Good Friday, or Big Friday as they call it here, except that Orthodox Easter, the one most people celebrate in Romania, is next weekend. No Easter market of course this year. Hopefully there will be a Christmas market. Will this be over in eight months? Today is also my parents’ 44th wedding anniversary. Just imagine being stuck with someone for that length of time. It sounds impossible. And now they really are stuck with each other.

Here is the latest graph:

Romania coronavirus 10-4-20
Coronavirus - Family - Language learning - Politics

In the danger zone (which is most of the world right now)

April 10, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to Mum and Dad again this morning. They’re in New Zealand, one of the few shining beacons in a dark world, where (amazingly) new recoveries outnumbered new infections in the latest figures. They live in a pretty isolated part of an even more isolated country, and they’re coping well with the lockdown. But they’re scared shitless about me.

After talking to my sister-in-law last night, I felt sorry for her. She has to attend two hospitals (in Poole and Bournemouth) and see private patients. Lots of old people, who she could be infecting without knowing it. She can’t get tested unless either she or my brother shows symptoms. For the second day running, around 900 new deaths were recorded in the UK.

Today has been Romania’s deadliest day so far. The numbers have been surprisingly stable to this point, but the coming weeks are scary, in spite of the lockdown which must be helping greatly. I also wonder how many people these official figures might be excluding – Romanians have a habit of avoiding hospital if at all possible, and I imagine many have died at home. One bright spot is a jump in the number of recoveries.

The highlight of today was perhaps the chat I had with the lady who lives next door but one from me. She said my Romanian was “admirable”, then the next minute I said I had barrels of water in my bag. I forgot that big water bottles are bidoane, and said butoaie instead. Too many B-words, in both languages. She expressed a love of British culture, “but I don’t like the French”.

Plenty of political news amid all of this. There’s a new Labour leader in the UK (good), the Democratic nominee has been decided (good, but they all need to get behind him), and in more good news, it looks like Boris Johnson will be one of the lucky 50% who survive their stint in ICU with coronavirus.

The latest graph:

Romania coronavirus 9-4-20