Author: plutoman

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

Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

I have to do this

June 6, 2016 by 0 Comments

On Friday I went to the theatre at Bats, a Wellington institution that, to my shame, I hadn’t been to before. I never normally have anyone to go to the theatre with, and unlike the cinema, I wouldn’t go by myself. I saw Love and Information with the bloke from the tennis club and his brother who had come over from Singapore. The play was weird. It flitted between dozens of seemingly unrelated scenes with no discernible plot. I think the play was about the sheer quantity of information, some of it deadly serious, some of it less so, that gets thrown at us almost constantly in the digital age we live in. We can’t possibly take it all in. Each piece of information, each tweet, each Facebook message (I guess, I don’t do Facebook) has an implied “you’re supposed to care about this” tacked on to the end. But we can’t care about it all. The trick in the digital age is deciding, out of every ten pieces of information chucked at you, which seven or eight to ignore. The star of the show for me was an old guy who in some scenes had dementia, and at one point hilariously described online sex as “virtual and great”. In one scene somebody rattled off umpteen words for “table” in various languages and I was disappointed not to hear the Romanian word masă.

Yesterday I went on a walk around Island Bay with a Meetup group. It was a beautiful afternoon and we had great views including of the South Island. Wow, what a difference. A few weeks ago a walk like that would have been a serious struggle. Even walking up the stairs was an effort. It’s great to have my physical energy back. I noticed the difference again today on the tennis court. My play was still very scratchy and I still had problems on serve, but at least I could move to the ball. One of the women who ran the English teaching course in February was there.

Someone recently put me in contact with a Romanian woman, and I got to speak with her yesterday. She seemed very nice but wasn’t really able to help me, mainly because she’s been out of Romania for such a long time. I think she thought I was nuts. She certainly managed to sow a few seeds of doubt in my mind. Should I even be doing this? She said it would be daunting for me because I don’t know anyone over there. But I think of the alternative – team meetings, strategic goals, service level agreements, performance reviews, desk moves, restructures, playing the pretending-to-care game where the avoidance of bad outcomes is the best possible outcome – and daunting doesn’t begin to cover it. And if I only ever went to places where I knew people I’d hardly go anywhere. (The possibility of long-term isolation is something that concerns me, I’ll admit that.)

Last Thursday we had our latest body corp meeting about seismic strengthening. We didn’t make all that much headway. There are so many decisions to make – what percentage of new building standard to strengthen to, when to have the work done, whether to employ a project manager or facilitator, and how to apportion the costs. The fact that these decisions depend on each other to an extent makes it especially hard. On the matter of dividing up the costs, I was amazed at the number of people who wished this to be done equally between the apartments. “We’re about fairness and equity here.” So am I, but an equal allocation is surely unfair, inequitable, and plain wrong. Some of the upper-level apartments have almost twice the unit entitlement of my apartment and the others on the lower floors, which means they’re almost twice the size and are worth nearly twice as much. Nobody would seriously suggest that someone who owned two apartments should pay the same as someone who owned one, would they? Would you like to pay the same income tax as your boss? This reminds me of the Poll Tax in the UK in 1990. It led to riots and the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.

I haven’t seen any of the French Open because I haven’t found a stream that works. Muguruza’s win over Serena last night didn’t surprise me that much. People forget that Serena is in her mid-thirties, and Muguruza has looked the goods for a while. I predicted the Spaniard to win the title in an email to a friend when they were playing the third round, but unfortunately I forgot to place my $20,000 bet. There’s a lot riding on the men’s final. Djokovic is surely the favourite to complete his career grand slam but I certainly wouldn’t write Murray off.

Language teaching - My big plan

Into focus

June 1, 2016 by 0 Comments

Having this place to myself again is making a huge difference. I can relax! I’d almost forgotten the meaning of the word. It’s also brought my upcoming move into sharp focus. I’m really doing this.

Why am I doing it? Because I can. And because nothing good will come out of persevering with the alternative. I’m convinced of that. Why Romania specifically? Well I fell in love with the language almost the moment I clapped eyes on it, and gosh, the country is still so unspoilt, so wild, so raw, and that really appeals to me. Not that I’ve been there yet, unlike my parents, who are there now. They’re in Timișoara and tomorrow they’ll be taking a six-hour bus ride to Sibiu which, judging from the pictures I’ve seen online, is incredibly beautiful. They say the architecture in Timișoara is wonderful but many of the buildings are in fairly dire need of some TLC. Most people they’ve met can speak English but are some way from fluency, and that’s good for me if I intend to teach it. I keep seeing “danger maps” where Romania is coloured yellow or orange, a notch above Bulgaria and Hungary in the danger stakes and, for that matter, a notch above the US, where an average of 36 people were killed by guns per day last year, excluding suicides and accidents. My parents said they’ve yet to feel under the remotest of threats.

My English lesson on Monday went reasonably well. I spent some time on minimal pairs, words that differ from each other by only one sound. For the long a / long i pairs I gave him lake/like, bake/bike, race/rice, hay/high and tail/tile, with accompanying pictures. He was fine with these, with the exception of tail/tile where he struggled to hear the difference between the two words. Learning another language helps me empathise with him here, but doesn’t help me get across the difference. Next week I’ll revisit those two words and say them very slowly. We also talked about football, in particular the Champions League final. I was pleased that he referred to the football vocab sheet I’d made for him.

I put my EU referendum voting paper, which was something of an IQ test, in the mail today. (The fact that I thought it resembled an IQ test probably says a lot about my IQ.) It’s fairly obvious which way I went. Which way the referendum will go is far from obvious.

Life :) - Tennis

I still don’t get it

May 27, 2016 by 0 Comments

My parents just FaceTimed me from Desenzano del Garda in Northern Italy, where they’re staying for my cousin’s wedding which takes place in a few hours. Last night there was a big pre-wedding do which Dad said I would have absolutely hated. He’s absolutely right. You travel half-way around the globe to stay in such a beautiful place, only to be stuck with all those people! What a waste! I’m so sociable, aren’t I? I made a list a few years ago of five things I really just don’t get, of which weddings was one.

Simona Halep’s third-round match at the French Open starts in 15 minutes, and I hope I can watch that with Romanian commentary. I’ll then see Andy Murray’s match with Ivo Karlovic if I hold out that long. Tomorrow (forecast to be a wet and horrible day) I’ve got a property manager coming over to assess my apartment.

The prospect of doing something I want to do feels, well, amazing.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

Humming

May 21, 2016 by 0 Comments

The last few days I’ve been humming. During the day everything has been beautiful, amazing, wonderful, and at night I’ve hardly slept. On Thursday, after my fifth night in a row of sleeping for a couple of hours max, I decided to take a sick day, only my second in over two years there. It was the perfect day for it, the sun was shining and my flatmate had moved out the day before. I walked around my local area for two hours or so, wide-eyed, taking photos of beautiful trees and houses that were now so much more colourful than I remembered. Other than that I gave the bathroom a good clean (it needed it – my flatmate was a rather aggressive user of the toilet) and studied some Romanian.

I’ve now got my Google set to Romanian: the “I’m feeling lucky” button is now “Mă simt norocos” and if I search for Sibiu I get aproximativ 32.100.000 (de) rezultate in just 0,57 secunde. The same goes for Google Maps, Google News and Google You Name It, everything is in Romanian including all the suggested search terms and my supposedly tailored results. As anti-Google as I can be at times (they are so pervasive), that’s pretty cool. There’s also a social network, Google Plus, which I’ve joined. It’s much smaller than Facebook or Twitter, with “only” a few million active members. I find the network part of Google Plus as confusing as hell (and of course all the terminology and help pages are in Romanian for me), but what I like about it is that it’s great for viewing and sharing photos, and I’ve spent hours staring at colourful photos of Sibiu and elsewhere. I might even post some photos of Wellington at some stage, and I’ll post the link here if that happens. I’ve even got an animated Romanian flag as my mascot or avatar or whatever you’re supposed to call it. I had to find one that wasn’t so fast as to drive everyone batty and to re-order the frames so that the first one looked nice (sometimes you only get to see a still photo and it defaults to the first frame). Yeah, working with animated images, or GIFs, is fun.

romania_done

 

I think what’s made me hum is the realisation that I’ve got so much freedom. I can be who I want and for years I didn’t even know it. Isn’t that something? Billions of people around the world don’t have that. In my own country we do pretty well in the freedom stakes, but so many of us are constrained by the situations we end up in. Take my boss. He plans to move house soon, but can’t move more than a mile or two because his three kids would have to move to a different school otherwise. He works extremely hard and his mind works extremely quickly but to me, as I watch him shove TV food down his throat while he rushes from one bullshit meeting to the next, none of it seems worth it. I used “TV food” there because of something I saw on a train in America. The guy in front of me in the food car dropped an armful of processed crap on the counter, and the bloke behind the desk tried to stop him from buying it: “You don’t want to be spending eighteen dollars on all that TV food.”

It would be criminal for me to waste this freedom I have. I haven’t got a two-mile radius dammit, I’ve got a great big map. My train itinerary which will cover some of that map is likely to be:

  1. London to Paris via the Eurostar, 2½ hours;
  2. Paris to Munich, humming along at 200mph on a double-decker train (Seat61.com tells me to get a top-deck seat for the best views), 5¾ hours;
  3. Munich to Budapest overnight, 9¾ hours, and I’ll have a few hours to look around Budapest when I arrive;
  4. Either Budapest to Timișoara, 5 hours, arriving in the evening of day two, or Budapest to Sibiu, 10 hours (why so much longer I have no idea), arriving in the early morning of day three.

Without Seat61.com I don’t know where I’d be.

A week ago yesterday I had my performance review, the last one that will matter in my current job (and I’d prefer not to ever have another job where they’ll matter). I got through it OK, and that felt pretty good. The same evening I went to a regional tennis awards presentation. Someone at the club nominated me for an award for those nine consecutive singles wins I had, but there wasn’t much chance I’d ever win it. Most of the prizes went to the elite players who already win heaps of awards anyway. The best moment of the evening was when a bloke of about eighty, who had done so much work organising competitions over decades, was recognised with the volunteer of the year award; it brought a tear to his eye.

Talking of freedom, having this apartment to myself again, and the freedom that gives me, feels incredible.

Language teaching - My big plan

I can (almost) properly plan my dream now

May 17, 2016 by 0 Comments

My flatmate moves out tomorrow. I can’t believe I just wrote the last sentence. The last four months have taken quite a heavy toll on me – lack of energy has been an almost constant problem – and I’ve got a lot to pack into the next four.

My parents took off this morning. They’re away for ten weeks and will spend time in the UK, Italy and Romania! They’ve got four days each in Timișoara and Sibiu, with a train ride in between. I can’t wait to get FaceTime calls from those places. (For my birthday last month my parents gave me an iPhone 4 which they bought on TradeMe but it’s turned out to be unusable as a phone because it’s locked onto some mystery network. And, not to be ungrateful or anything, the screen is too small for 2016. I can still use FaceTime though as long as I have wi-fi.)

I still haven’t decided which city in Romania I’ll live in, although Timișoara is in the lead. I have decided however to take the train from London to get there, to make the experience as awesome as possible. Taking a train trip across Europe is a dream to me. I still have to figure out the best way to do it, with some help from Seat61.com.

My student pulled out of his English lesson yesterday, two hours before I was due to give it. He said he had to go to a friend’s party. I asked if he would reschedule for later in the week but he gave a firm no to that. That’s the third time he’s missed a lesson, if I include the one scheduled for Easter Monday. I’m not that happy with him. Is he just feigning interest? I think it’s human nature to a degree that you don’t value things you don’t pay for. Dad has always said that about giving paintings as presents. Maybe a small charge of $5 a lesson would be better, with a three-strikes-and-you’re-out-style policy for people who don’t show up without good reason (and parties don’t count). I suppose such a policy goes against the ethos of the organisation. It’s frustrating because I really want to do this. Last Tuesday I rushed into town to go to the resources library to pick up some material for last night’s lesson that didn’t happen. I spoke to a Czech lady who works there. She speaks almost perfect English and knows exactly what sounds students find difficult depending on where they come from. I thought, I wish I could be you.

I used a very famous baseball phrase in the preceding paragraph. The Red Sox are red hot right now. Sizzling. Offensively (and it feels weird to use that word in the American sense) they’ve been just about off the charts and it’s been a real team effort.

I played some bad tennis again on Sunday. I was sluggish, as is the norm of late. Afterwards I chatted to a guy whose exploits at the poker table put me firmly in the shade. I also had a meal – again –  with the gay bloke of about my age (or so I thought) who figured I was gay until I told him otherwise. As usual he only ate half his meal. He’s 41 as it happens, and had stomach cancer in 2008, so that explains his eating habits. He’d been given a 20% chance of survival. His story was inspirational.

New Zealand has been in the international news for the wrong reasons, with soaring property prices pushing both buying and renting beyond the means of many, forcing them to sleep in garages or cars. It makes me feel pretty guilty about being so desperate to be by myself.

Language teaching - Life :)

On the up

May 10, 2016 by 0 Comments

After six days of feeling run down, I’m suddenly feeling really good.

We had our first post-restructure team meeting today. That meant a new team. Prior to the meeting I didn’t even know who was in my team, or why. That’s probably bad. On Friday we visited a water treatment plant, in a beautiful location it must be said, not far from work, and not far from where I used to do some of my day tramps before tennis sort of put paid to them. Even though I was feeling like crap, it was great to get out of the office. We even got to go on a jigger – a small train – that runs alongside a water pipe through a two-mile-long tunnel. That was a lot of fun. Unfortunately most days at work (such as today) aren’t like that. The highlight of today, undoubtedly, was the ten minutes I spent at the language centre at lunchtime – I dashed in there to get some material for my student. The staff were so helpful – they even knew which sounds people from Burma tend to struggle with.

Last night I tried to stop my student from calling me Teacher – endearing as it is – and asked him to call me by my first name instead. It’s commonplace in NZ even for schoolchildren to call their teachers by their first name. My mum has always asked her kids to address her in the traditional “Mrs Smith” way, even in NZ, and asks their parents to do the same. I’m with her on this. Teachers should be respected.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Tanking

May 9, 2016 by 0 Comments

The last few days I’ve had a cold and almost no energy, but I’ve still shown up to work because that sure beats the alternative.

I played tennis on Saturday morning against the guy I narrowly beat in round one of the club champs. This was part of a round robin singles competition that I wish I hadn’t committed myself to. I lost in three sets, 7-5 3-6 6-2. I led 4-2 and 40-15 in the first set but chucked in six double faults (count ’em!) in that god-awful game, quite a feat when you think about it. I still got within two points of what was a dreadful opening set from both of us. We both improved in the second, and when I won that set I expected to carry some momentum into the third, but not a bit of it. I had nothing left in the tank. My opponent sensed this and hit drop shots to good effect as I tried to defend from behind the baseline. He served well in the second and third sets and his win was well deserved. I was glad to get off the court after a match that took 95 minutes, give or take.

Fatigue has been a huge problem for me ever since my flatmate moved in, and I hope I can get an energy boost when he moves out in eleven days (count ’em!). He has been exhausting. He’s not a bad person by any means, but he needs to learn when to leave people alone. My previous flatmate (in 2014) could certainly be a pain in the butt too, but I felt I was helping him get some stability back into his turbulent life and that made me feel good. He’d made some bad decisions and had got involved with the wrong people, but giving people another chance is part of what makes a good human being. I don’t feel anything similar towards my current tenant.

I gave my English lesson tonight. We worked on the forms of the verb to be (I am, he is, etc.) and the contracted forms (I’m, he’s, etc.). I decided to leave it there rather than go on to the negative forms and I’m glad I did. I’d have only confused him. I got him to talk about his new painting job and we made basic sentences about his colleagues: I’m from Myanmar; He’s from New Zealand; They’re from Vietnam. Getting him to pronounce it’s was a battle; I don’t think the ts combination, which is common at the end of English words, exists in his native tongue (and I wouldn’t know where to start with a word like exists). He said he wanted to practise reading so I’ll get him a simple story book for next week’s lesson.

A Tame Impala song came on the radio tonight. I only recently saw the name written down for the first time. A-ha! A non-wild antelope. All this time I thought it was two people’s names, Tame and Parlour. Jack Tame is the US reporter on One News, and there was a footballer by the name of Ray Parlour, so it seemed plausible to me. Tame Impala are similar to MGMT, and I like them just as much. I should probably see them live some time, and make sure I listen to the whole show.

Life :) - Other sports

It’s not just me

May 3, 2016 by 0 Comments

On Sunday my flatmate invited me to see The Big Lebowski at one of his Meetup groups. I went along purely to see the film – I had no interest in dressing up in a Jeff Lebowski bathrobe or doing anything remotely social. I’m not sure the film quite deserves its cult status but it’s clever in many ways and is certainly worth seeing. But afterwards people discussed the movie (I just wanted to go home) and my flatmate became political and controversial and strident, as he does, and then I realised something. Look at their faces. You’re pissing other people off here. It’s not just me.

I’d come to just about tolerate my flatmate, mainly because he said he’d be out by the end of May. Without that light at the end of the tunnel, it’s likely I’d be in a pretty bad way by now. But at the weekend I thought, shit, I’ve had enough of this. I really want you out of the picture. And what if you decide not to leave?

And that’s exactly the problem. He’s always in the picture, front and centre, commentating on and making his opinions known about just about everything he sees and does, and wanting to involve me in the process. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would find this tiresome.

Then yesterday something happened. Someone in Liberia had offered him a job. He was booking his flights to New York where he’ll spend a month before going to Africa. He commentated on the online booking process for a good half-hour – “no I don’t want to book a luxury hotel”, “why on earth would I want to buy travel insurance from you?” and so on and so forth. His commentary was music to my ears. He leaves the country on 8th June and will move out, I hope, two weeks earlier. Then I can get on with my life again.

Yes, Leicester City really are the Premier League champions. That’s just staggering. The upper reaches of British football are so money-driven, and such a closed shop, that something like this is pure fantasy. But it’s real and I have no idea how. The format of the Premier League makes it extremely hard to fluke. Any of football’s cup competitions are flukeable. A baseball World Series certainly is. Even a grand slam in tennis is flukeable to a degree. But the Premier League? Leicester must actually have been very very good. How they got to be so good with such limited resources is a happy mystery.

Talking of baseball, the Red Sox have won seven of their last eight games including a three-game sweep of the Yankees and have a narrow lead at the top of their division, but there’s an awful long way to go. Gosh I’d love to go back to Fenway some time – that was awesome.

Life :) - Tennis

Let this be over

April 28, 2016 by 0 Comments

My flatmate keeps acting as if he’s here for the long haul, so on Tuesday I asked him about his exit date which he previously said would be late May. He then talked pompously about his connections in Liberia or whatever African country it happens to be, and when I interrupted him to ask how any of that was relevant, he got angry. He did mention a date eventually: 1st June, which is a Wednesday. I don’t believe him. I think he’ll try and stick around for what will be a really long Queen’s Birthday weekend, and beyond. In the meantime, as I remind him of the date, the tension between us will only ramp up.

He’s always there, and I can always feel that he’s there. That’s why I don’t look forward to weekends, even normal-length ones. I prefer being at work where I don’t get hassled as much. The highlights of the week for me have been sitting on a bench at lunchtime, overlooking the sea, while trying to follow baseball on my phone. A year ago I never imagined I’d be doing that. We’ve had beautiful autumn weather all week.

I’m still going to marimba lessons. These are very enjoyable, if not quite as much as fun as during the first term when the resonators were always attached. Last night I found out the name of the seed-filled gourd that is used as an instrument in marimba music. It’s a hosho, which is a Zimbabwean word that sounds Japanese. Until last night I thought our teacher was saying “listen to the whole show” which I took to mean “pay attention to everybody’s parts, not just your own”, but all this time she’s been saying “listen to the hosho“.

They’ve started up a round robin singles competition at the tennis club. On Monday I got thrashed 6-0 6-2 in 45 minutes by probably the best player in the competition. It was just what I expected; I’m a shadow of the player I was six months ago, and he took me apart, accelerating through the ball on both sides and hitting inches from the junction of baseline and sideline with alarming regularity. I also averaged about two double faults per game. OK, the sun didn’t help me at one end, but in October I might have served two double faults in an average match. I got on the board early in the second set, much to my relief, but once that set started running away from me I thought, please, just let this be over. That’s just what I’m thinking about my flatting situation.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan

Romanian commentary 8 (it’s happening!)

April 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

The timing of all these long weekends has been bloody terrible. I wish I could have saved the days up until my flatmate moves out. He should be out before the next three-day weekend, Queen’s Birthday, but I’ve a horrible feeling he’ll try to extend his time with me. That will be the last long weekend before I go away on 27th September. Yes, I’ve now booked my flight (a one-way ticket, how exciting is that?) so it’s happening! I plan to spend a few days in the UK before heading to Romania.

Yesterday I met up in town with the Romanian lady who my cousin knows through work. This was awkward, first because I didn’t know what time she wanted to meet so I had to hang around for hours, and also because she had somebody with her. Still, we got a chat a fair bit. She was very nice but she gave such a glowing description of Romania, especially the part of Transylvania that she hails from, that I didn’t know what to believe. She even spoke longingly of her childhood under the Ceaușescu regime.

I did get to speak some Romanian. She tried to get me to improve my pronunciation of the â or î vowel, which I mentioned before on this blog as being difficult because we don’t have even a near equivalent in English. It’s especially difficult when followed by i such as in pâine and câine, or in words that also contain the ă vowel such as sâmbătă, săptămână and smântână. I’d better make sure I try smântână. I was also struggling with rău, său and tău.

Another major sticking point for me was possessive pronouns. I wanted to say “my brother’s cell phone” which is celularul fratelui meu. Needless to say, that isn’t what I said. When you want to talk about an item that belongs to someone, you have to articulate it, i.e. say “the phone” rather than just “phone”. In this instance you do that by tacking ul on the end of celular. As for “brother”, which is frate, you need to articulate that and change it to the genitive case, because something belongs to my brother, and that gives you fratelui. Without the case change it would just be fratele, obviously. You finish with the masculine singular version of “my”, which is meu. Simple, right? If it was my sister’s cell phone instead, it would be celularul sorei mele. The last word, mele, is the feminine plural version of “my”, even though I’m only talking about one sister, because you always use the plural when dealing with feminine nouns in the genitive case. I mean, c’mon, everyone knows that. So, yeah. All this articulation and case changing on the fly, when you’re also trying to process what someone has just said to you, is a feat of mental gymnastics, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to master it.

She compared my attempt to learn Romanian with her experience of learning English. She said she was struck by how much “fill” English speakers use in speech compared to Romanians, and how she struggle to distinguish the fill from the content. I can believe that. I use “I mean”, “y’know”, “like”, “basically” and “I reckon” and numerous other fillers all the time. And they serve a really important purpose. Contrast “Don’t park here!” with “Y’know, it’s probably best if you don’t park here, yeah, [points] somewhere over there would be just fine.” In English, not using those fillers gives one’s speech a sharp, icy quality. A few times my flatmate has said things to me in a way that comes across as rather twattish, and it was only yesterday that I figured out why. He uses very few fillers; he’s a “Don’t park here!” kind of guy. He spends a lot of time during the day editing Wikipedia articles about armies and battalions, and it’s as if he doesn’t switch off from that mode when he’s talking. And he talks a lot. He also makes jokes, that I don’t think are nearly as funny as he thinks they are. So I find interacting with him more exhausting than with the average person, and believe me, I find average tiring enough.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople was simply brilliant. To call it a classic Kiwi film doesn’t praise it enough. It made me laugh, it made me emotional, it made me feel good inside.  I loved the scenery, I loved all the main characters, even the CYFS lady who I loved to hate. I really hope this film makes a splash internationally as it surely deserves to.