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According to the radio, Saturday was the feast of St Peter and St Paul. I had a simple coffee at Prigor, then went to Șopotu Nou to start a hike that would go to Lacul Dracului – the Lake of Hell. Just before Șopotu Nou there was a flimsy suspension bridge over a river. I’d be hot and tired after the trek, and if I crossed the bridge there’d be a nice place to sunbathe after a paddle in the water. The bridge did look very dodgy though; it made me think of old cartoons where the thing gives way slat by slat, domino-like.

It was a hike of 7 or 8 km from Șopotu Nou to the lake. The track was signposted surprisingly well for Romania, there wasn’t another soul around and the sun beat down on me. At 11am it was already 30 degrees in the shade. I thought about Michael Mosley, the journalist who died in the blistering heat of a Greek island while hiking alone in early June. Is this wise? I crossed a sturdier suspension bridge, passed another disused mill, and descended a steep slope to arrive at a spellbinding turquoise abyss surrounded by gnarly rocks. There marked the start of Cheile Nerei – the gorge of the Nera river. I met some actual people there. They were surprised that I did the trip alone – dangerous and boring, surely. After eating my lunch by the river, I headed back. Thankfully it had clouded over. Climbing the slope was easier than coming down; the return trip was speedier than the trek to the lake.

I did cross the flimsy bridge, very gingerly. I went for a dip, finding an eddy in the surprisingly fast-running river, but didn’t exactly sunbathe for long as there was no sun and thunder rumbled in the distance. A bit later, the thunder having passed, I stopped in the village of Dalboșeț for a coffee and an ice cream. (Villages often have one or more of what you’d call a dairy in New Zealand.) This piqued the interest of certain older locals (there aren’t many young ones) who asked me in their palatalised way whether I liked the village. I entered some other villages with the intention of taking photos, but there were eyes on me, often from several directions all at once, from the moment I stepped out of the car.

I had a shaorma at Prigor – this was much better than the pizza I’d had the night before – then went back to the guest house. By this time a troupe of ten-year-olds had arrived for their camp; they were staying in huts outside the main building where I was staying. I’d have liked to watch the football but the TV in my room (the only facility it had) didn’t seem to have the channel. Germany’s win over Denmark, in which a torrential storm stopped play for 25 minutes, would have been worth watching. Last night England came back from the brink to defeat Slovakia in extra time; I missed that match too.

In the morning it was time to check out. I was glad to after certain guests (or were they the owners – I couldn’t tell) were being far too loud far too early for a Sunday morning. I had my second coffee of the day at one of the betting shop cafés in Bozovici, just so I could use the loo there. Where it comes to loo availability, Romania is at the other end of the pipeline from where New Zealand sits.

On the way home I stopped at Cascada Bigăr, no longer the same after its collapse of three years ago, and then (by a happy accident) took a different route through Anina and the large town of Reșița. I’m already thinking about my next trip, which will likely be to Maramureș in a couple of weeks, and how I should prepare for my next solo hike.

It looks like I’ll have some work over the summer, through a firm that is struggling with demand for English speakers. I was apprehensive about this at first, but a phone conversation today has put me more at ease. More work is nearly always a good thing.

On my last day in New Zealand, it’s currently 21 degrees. The perfect temperature, and not something I’d bargained for when I packed those winter woolies. I can hear the bellbirds in the garden. This morning I had a decent walk up the Downs with Dad. I’m very impressed by my parents’ fitness. They walk most days, and Mum also has her golf and occasionally her tennis. In Geraldine you’re not restricted to walking on the flat, and they take advantage of the undulations to get their heart rate up. On our way back we bumped it my cousin’s daughter, Kylie. I remember when she was born – probably in 1988, during the height of Kyliemania. She was a very good rugby player, and now she’s got four kids. I really am in the crawler lane, aren’t I?

Dad got an email this morning to say that his sister had been admitted to hospital. Just for one night I think, but the email was devoid of any hows and whys. Dad spoke to her at the weekend. She was depressed and hadn’t got out of bed or eaten proper food for ages. Dad tried to give her some advice to help her break the cycle, but he got “you don’t know what real depression is like” and there was nothing he could do.

A long, arduous journey awaits, including an eight-hour stay in Singapore – one of the better airports to spend eight hours in. I suffered very little from jet lag when I arrived in NZ – I doubt I’ll be so lucky when I get back to Romania.

My parents’ place today, with some building work in the background

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.

I’m writing this from a garden of an apartmenty kind of guest house in Vatra Dornei. I’m making my way through my first can of Beck’s. I’ve just had a chat with the very pleasant lady who owns the place. It’s a beautiful evening. I thank my lucky stars that I’m not in Timișoara where it continues to be inhumanly hot.

I’ve had a nice time away. A quiet time. I stopped in Iași (four nights), then Gura Humorului (two nights). I’m spending three nights here, then I’ll move on to Vișeu de Sus (where they have the narrow-gauge trains), then I’ll make my way home. Somehow. Hopefully.

I’m getting to know Romanian trains pretty well. And monasteries. I’ll write a lot more when I get back.

Today is my brother’s 40th birthday. He’s not a big one for milestone celebrations, but I hope he’s having a few mates round for a barbecue or something simple like that. (Luckily for him, he’s not totally locked down like I was.)

Last time I touched on the nominative (subject pronouns) and the stressed version of the accusative (direct object pronouns). These are used in sentences like She works for me and I played with her, and work pretty much the same as in English.

Now I’m going to deal with the unstressed accusative pronouns. These are used in sentences like she saw him and we took it and, famously, I love you.

Here are the unstressed accusative pronouns in Romanian:
mă: me
te: you (singular)
îl: him
o: her
ne: us
vă: you (plural)
îi: them (all male, or a mix of genders)
le: them (all female)

All of these are different to the stressed versions, but just like with the stressed versions, the he/she and them pronouns are gendered. (That’s important, because the unstressed dative pronouns, which I’ll discuss later, aren’t gendered; that confuses me.) In a usual affirmative sentence, these pronouns normally go before the verb. Here are examples of all these pronouns in the present tense, including I love you:
(Tu) mă crezi: you believe me
(Eu) te iubesc: I love you
(Noi) îl găsim: we find him
(Eu) o sun: I call her
(Tu) ne părăsești: you leave us
(Noi) vă mulțumim: (we) thank you
(Ea) îi ia: she takes them
(El) le pune: he puts them

Now, sometimes these pronouns change when they interact with other words, such as the auxiliary verb of the compound past tense, which is the everyday tense used to talk about the past in Romanian. Here are the same sentences above, but in the past tense:
(Tu) m-ai crezut: you believed me
(Eu) te-am iubit: I loved you
(Noi) l-am găsit: we found him
(Eu) am sunat-o: I called her
(Tu) ne-ai părăsit: you left us
(Noi) v-am mulțumit: we thanked you
(Ea) i-a luat: she took them
(El) le-a pus: he put them

You can see that in the past tense, hyphens appear, some of the pronouns are contracted, and o (her) moves to after the verb. Here are some examples with other tenses:

Îl voi da bomboanele: I’ll give him the sweets
O vei găsi?: Will you find her/it?
N-o făceam: We didn’t do it
Nu-l vedeau: They didn’t see him/it

In less formal situations, the negative nu causes vowels to be elided; nu o becomes n-o and nu îl becomes nu-l. This happens outside the world of pronouns too – nu am becomes n-am, for instance.

Another common situation occurs with the imperative, when you tell someone to do something. The pronoun always goes after the verb in this case. Here are some examples of this:

Sună-mă: Call me
Las-o: Leave/let her/it (somebody or something feminine)
Fă-o: Do it
Întreabă-l: Ask him
Ascultați-ne: Listen to us (when you’re telling multiple people; for a single person it’s ascultă-ne)
Mănâncă-i: Eat them (carrots, for example, because they’re masculine)
Ia-le: Take them (books, for example, because they’re feminine)

The imperative form of leave or let is normally lasă, but the final ă is elided when it comes up against the o. I heard las-o recently on the tennis court. A young girl hit a ball that was clearly going out, but one of her male opponents hit it before it bounced, to be “nice”. She then said las-o să cadă, or let it bounce (literally let it fall). I sympathised; she was far too good to need that sort of help. Ball in Romanian is minge, which is feminine.

Next time I’ll deal with the tricky little word pe.

This morning I wondered why men who run market stalls in Romania, and probably elsewhere, have such huge hands. Being able to pick up great handfuls of strawberries gives you a competitive advantage over those who can’t? Seriously, two men in a row today had absolutely enormous grubby mitts.

It’s one of life’s mysteries, just like Romanian pronouns. Today I’ll tackle some of the less horrendous aspects, and then go from there.

The nominative (or subject) pronouns are the easy ones. In English, these are I, you, he, she, it, we and they, and here are the Romanian equivalents:
eu: I
tu: you (singular)
el: he
ea: she
noi: we
voi: you (plural)
ei: they (either all male or a mixture of male or female; Romanian is sexist)
ele: they (all female)

There’s also dumneavoastră, the formal you, but let’s not go there. I discussed that monstrous pronoun a month ago here.

Notice that there’s no it in the above list. That’s because in Romanian, everything has a gender. A wall is masculine, a table is feminine, and a chair is masculine when you have one but mysteriously changes sex when it teams up with other chairs. My students sometimes struggle with the idea of things being genderless, and refer to inanimate objects as he or she in English.

Another thing to note is that Romanian is “pro-drop”, meaning that you don’t need to use the subject (i.e. the nominative pronoun) with a verb. If I want to say I serve, I can say eu servesc or just servesc. (I can also say servesc eu; in Romanian it’s OK to stick the subject after the verb.) The subject is mostly unused, but it is used for emphasis. For instance, I might say Eu servesc? or Servesc eu? on the tennis court, to ask if it’s really my turn to serve. Note as well that, unlike in English, questions in Romanian are formed in the same way as statements. That aspect of the Romanian language is therefore considerably easier than its English counterpart; my students have ongoing battles with the do and does and did and is and are and have and has and had of English questions. Another reason you might use the subject with a verb is that for most verbs, and most tenses, two of the persons have the same form. In my serve example, servesc could mean both I serve and they serve. Mănâncă can mean either he/she eats or they eat. Am jucat can mean either I played or we played. So if it isn’t clear, adding the subject can avoid confusion.

So far, so good. Now we move to the accusative (or direct object) pronouns. In English, these are me, you, him, her, it, us and them. The accusative pronouns come in two flavours in Romanian, stressed and unstressed. They’re both common, and I’ll deal with the easier stressed variety, which is used after verbs, first:
mine: me
tine: you (singular)
el: him
ea: her
noi: us
voi: you (plural)
ei: them (all male, or a mix of genders)
ele: them (all female)

Guess what. With the exception of me and the singular you, these are identical to the nominative pronouns. Here are some example sentences:
(Eu) vin cu tine: I’m coming with you.
(Tu) vii cu mine?: Are you coming with me?
(Noi) mergem fără el: We’re going without him.
(El) merge fără noi: He’s going without us.

With this post I’ve eased into Romanian pronouns, and next time I’ll deal with the (harder) unstressed accusative pronouns, which are used before verbs.

A short one tonight as the late March snow comes down. Seasons are messed up. Everything is messed up. The US president is seriously messed up and is singlehandedly killing thousands with his crassness and ignorance.

We, as humans, were shockingly unprepared for this. To be honest, I think I did OK. I mentioned the possibility of my parents’ travel plans being put in jeopardy on my blog post of 4th February (which could even have been the 3rd; this blog is still set to New Zealand time). I started using coronavirus articles in my lessons on 31st January. But last night my student told me his multinational company did nothing noticeable in preparation until two weeks ago, when they finally figured it wasn’t going away. No wonder we’re dealing so badly with climate change.

Almost 800 cases in Romania now – another big jump – and eleven deaths. We now have the army out in force as well as the police – cars are being flagged down as I write this – and from tomorrow we’re basically only allowed out for food and medicine, while over-65s will only be permitted to do even that between 11am and 1pm.

A common symptom of the virus, and for some people the first symptom, is loss of smell. So that’s another one to put on my list.

Yesterday I called my parents to find out Dad’s result. Surely it would be fine. According to the specialist, there was a “90-something percent chance” that his bowel polyp was benign. Dad thought he’d have already heard if something was up. When I got through on FaceTime, Mum had just had a haircut. Her hair is now shorter than mine, and Dad said it looked a bit mannish. Then came the news. “I’ve got bowel cancer,” Dad said. “You won’t be seeing us this summer.” Mum had already cancelled their flights to the UK, scheduled for next Monday.

I hadn’t prepared myself for this news. I thought he’d be clear, but Dad’s life has been put firmly on hold. None of us know where this will lead. Yesterday I looked up some statistics from the NHS: 77% of male bowel cancer patients survive the first year. So, you’re saying there’s practically a one-in-four chance that my dad won’t see out the next 12 months?! My instincts are that he’s caught this early and it’s entirely curable, but as yet, we don’t have the slightest clue. News like this forms a line in the sand. If I see a timestamp on an email or a text message, I’m thinking, was that before or after I heard about Dad’s diagnosis?

Seventy, or thereabouts, seems to be a black spot for cancer. Mum’s eldest brother D died of lung cancer a month before his 70th birthday. Another of her older brothers, M, had just made it to 70 when he died from cancer of the oesophagus. Her younger brother G, who has survived his mishap following his bowel cancer operation, turned 68 in April. G may now need kidney dialysis. Dad will be 69 at the end of June.

I was very much looking forward to spending time with the family. The plan was to go Wales for Mum’s 70th birthday next month, and then for my parents to come over to Romania around 1st July, where we’d spend a few days exploring the cooler north of the country. Meeting my parents off the plane or train is such a lovely thing. But that’s all gone out the window. I might end up making a solo trip to that part of Romania instead, and then travelling to Montenegro by train in August. I’ll have to see.

Life goes on. Teaching is much the same, which is a good thing. The wet and stormy weather – in its fifth week, with no end in sight – is still baffling everybody here, and the pubs and bars and restaurants in the centre of town are losing out.

There have been some engrossing matches already at the French Open, which is a nice escape from everything else. I particularly enjoyed last night’s match between two Frenchmen, Benoît Paire and Pierre-Hugues Herbert. Paire won in the end, 6-2 6-2 5-7 6-7 (6-8) 11-9. I was impressed by the court coverage and creativity of both men, and the match showed why it’s generally a bad idea to leave a match early. I bet plenty of people headed for the exits after the second set, and missed a treat. It also showed me why we don’t need tie-breaks in the final set, least of all on clay, where breaks of serve are more common. But sadly we might be witnessing the last-ever major tennis event without final shoot-outs.

After yesterday’s bombshell, everything is now up in the air.

On Sunday morning my parents rang with some grim news. My uncle G, Mum’s younger brother, was in intensive care. G is less than two years younger than Mum; he came to my brother’s wedding last year in his first trip to this side of the world. Earlier this year he’d been diagnosed with early-stage bowel cancer. He’d responded well to chemo and his prognosis was good. At the end of last week he had an operation to remove the cancer, but it went horribly wrong. My parents tried to explain what had happened. They fitted a stoma bag which came undone and leaked, causing toxic shock and even a heart attack. He was given antibiotics but didn’t respond. Mum thought about making a trip to Palmerston North to see him but he wouldn’t have recognised her. I got an email from Dad this morning with better news – he is now lucid – and I obviously hope he’ll pull through without damage to his heart or kidneys.

Last week, just before this all happened, Mum was telling me about G’s son – my cousin – who had just booked a trip to Madrid to see the Champions League final between his beloved Liverpool and Tottenham. He was planning to go for just four days. Bloody ridiculous, I thought, to go all the way from Wellington to Spain (you literally can’t go any further without leaving the planet) just a game of football between a load of foreigners. He’s since told my mum, “that’s nothing now”.

My own dad is having treatment tomorrow. After a check-up on his colon they found a polyp which in all probability is benign, but he’s having surgery to remove it. That has put their trip to the UK next month in some doubt. I’m about to give him a call to wish him all the best.

Yesterday I got (and deciphered) the results of my CT scan, that were of course all in Romanian. There are certainly issues with my maxillary sinuses not draining properly, but there was no indication of what I should do next. I guess I need to see the ENT specialist again; it’ll be good to have a piece of paper to present him with.

We’re in the midst of a spell of ugly weather, probably the longest in my 2½-plus years here. It’s making getting to lessons – for both me and my students – that bit more awkward.

The weather is good for Scrabble. I got in twelve games over the weekend, losing just two. Unusually for me, I won some very close games, three of them by six points or fewer. One of my losses was also by just six points; my opponent was somebody who liked to fish off (or even exchange) a single tile, taking a big points sacrifice, in the hope of drawing a bingo. It’s something I rarely do. In my other defeat I felt I made a big tactical blunder. I had a small lead, but my opponent then played POSTING as a bingo, stopping one square short of the triple word, and setting up a big hotspot for an S, which I didn’t have. On my next turn I set up a second high-scoring spot, thinking I would be able to take one of the two available. But that was extremely risky, because there was no guarantee I’d be able to use either of them. My opponent instead took both (aided by a blank), scored heavily again with his next play, and I was suddenly a long way behind. This is still all a learning process. The good news is I’ve finally got my threes pretty much down pat. That took a while.

On Wednesday morning I popped over to Mum and Dad’s apartment: they were about to vacate it. They packed their bags and went down the stairs, while I took most of their baggage with me in the lift. When I reached the bottom, or thought I had, the doors wouldn’t open. In fact I hadn’t reached the bottom. I was suspended two feet off the ground floor. None of the buttons did anything, with the exception of the alarm button, which made a noise but nothing else. Oh shit. I was talking to Mum and Dad, who were safely on the other side of the doors. I could see three phone numbers; I called the first of them. I got through at the second attempt. “Do you speak English?” Normally I positively refuse to speak English in Romania, but this situation was hardly normal. The lift rescue guy didn’t speak English though. “What’s it showing?” he asked me in Romanian. What’s what showing? “Er, 67?” The lift seemed to have a number. “No, on the screen.” When I explained that it was a big C, not a little C, he was able to do something from his end, and I got out alive. I’d only been in there a few minutes, not enough time for all the possible nightmare scenarios to play out in my head. I honestly expected that, at best, somebody would have had to physically extricate me, and I’d have been stuck for half an hour or more. Mum said I handled it well but was a bit “clammy”.

Excitement over. We then waited, and waited, for the door-to-door minibus to take us to Belgrade. We wondered whether it would come at all, but it did, an hour late. I enjoyed the bus ride, and crossing a frontier into uncharted territory is always exciting for me. We were stuck for 40-odd minutes at the border. Eventually, after passing some pleasant Serbian villages, we arrived in the bustling city. Our apartment was on a street called either Skadarska or Skadarlija, but finding it was another matter. No signage. Nobody there. No way into what we thought was the correct building. All our tempers were starting to fray. One of the residents arrived home; she let us in and pointed us in a general downstairs direction. In the basement we found two apartments. One would be ours; the other was owned by an elderly man who spoke little English. My phone didn’t work in Serbia, and Mum was out of credit on hers. This off-the-grid situation would later rear its ugly head in an even bigger way. The man kindly rang the owner of our apartment. She came over and finally we were in.

The apartment was pretty poky for three people, and lacked basic amenities like doors that shut properly and more than ten sheets of loo paper. The first evening we had dreadful pasta meals in a nearby bar; it seemed they hadn’t received a food order in over a month. We were staying in the bohemian quarter, but if it was really bohemian there wouldn’t have been signs everywhere to tell us. Instead it was just a street full of touristy restaurants. At the end of the street, however, was a wonderful market, even bigger, better and cheaper than the ones in Timișoara. We didn’t buy much – Mum, as always, was in charge of the money and reined us in whenever we tried to splash out on half a dozen apricots. We did however have some extremely strong cups of coffee there.