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Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Time for a trip?

July 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad have been back in New Zealand a week, but when I spoke to Mum on FaceTime she looked pretty much zombified. My Wellington-based cousin and her family had been staying there (a base for their skiing) so my parents weren’t really able to recover from their jet lag.

The last two weeks I’ve only just crept over the 20-hour mark and that’s likely to drop further as people take holidays. I’m tempted to go to Belgrade (again), and from there go on a very spectacular train journey to the seaside town of Bar in Montenegro. It would be an unforgettable experience I’m sure, and one that doesn’t come with a high price tag.

With my reduced workload I make the effort to study Romanian for an hour a day, usually first thing in the morning. It’s helping. There’s a site called Context Reverso, which gives words and phrases in context, with their translations, and I’m finding that invaluable. I’ve also started to learn Serbian, which is a totally different animal from anything I’ve attempted before, and I intend to write about that next time.

The weather here has been iffy of late. I wanted to have a good go at fishing at the weekend, but my attempt was severely curtailed. Fishing and lightning really don’t go well together. If I ever do catch a fish, I’ll be sure to post a photo here.

I watched the absorbing final round of the Open golf yesterday. Absorbing because the course, the wind and the final-day pressure made for a tough combination, even for the world’s top golfers. I was probably in the minority who didn’t want Tiger Woods to win, although I enjoyed seeing him out there. I was rooting for Tommy Fleetwood, ‘cos he’s cool, but when he dropped out of contention I was happy to see the uber-consistent Francesco Molinari claim victory in a ridiculously crowded field. The tournament was played at Carnoustie, famous for Jean van de Velde’s meltdown on the 72nd hole in 1999. The scenes, accompanied by Peter Alliss’s commentary, were quite extraordinary. The Frenchman won, but then he didn’t.

I’ve got back to playing online Scrabble again. Five games since Saturday; three losses. In game one I lost by just four points on a ridiculously blocked board, which I struggle with. I still think I made a tactical blunder towards the end. In the second game I learnt my lesson and sacrificed points to open the board up. This felt like a well-played game for me, and I won by 78. Game three: I got both blanks simultaneously, but plenty of crap to go with them. My solitary bingo wasn’t enough and I lost by 43. Game four: my opponent drew both blanks and very quickly made two bingos (they all play so damn fast, probably because the play much more than me, so a lot of the time they’re on auto-pilot). I made a bingo myself and started to close, but my opponent scored well on his final moves to beat me by 73. Game five: I was lucky to draw both blanks, eventually cruising to a 114-point win thanks to two bingos.

Other sports - Tennis

It’s all over!

July 16, 2018 by 0 Comments

No, I’m not leaving Romania or anything that ridiculous. But the month-long sport-fest finally came to an end today. It’s been a nice distraction, I must admit.

France won today’s highly entertaining final of a marvellous World Cup. One of the goalscorers, Mbappé, has such a fun name to say and even type. It reminds me of a certain Hanson hit from the nineties. Four members of Pussy Riot invaded the pitch early in the second half. I wonder where they are now. Even the presentation at the end provided drama: it was absolutely teeming with rain. Putin was duly provided with an umbrella, while Macron and Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic (the Croatian president, who was decked out in national football attire) were left to soak. Croatia played very positively throughout the tournament and will have won plenty of fans. So France have now won two World Cups in my lifetime, as have Germany. And Brazil. And Italy. Argentina and Spain have won one each. Hang on, so that means I’ve lived through ten World Cups, so I must be nearly f… Oh shit.

To be honest though, over the last few days, my sporting mind has been in London. The later stages of Wimbledon were staggeringly good. I didn’t see it all, because I have to work occasionally, but I did pretty well. Much better, certainly, than I ever managed when I lived in New Zealand and it all happened at night. Anderson’s crazy 6½-hour semi with Isner was much better, and less serve-dominated, than some people made out. I was just the bit after 11-all in the fifth (admittedly quite a long bit!) that started to become monotonous as both players were holding with ease and not doing a whole lot else. Anderson was clearly the fresher of the two players as the fifth-set game tallies hit the twenties, and his improvised left-handed forehand while down on the ground was the killer blow in the end. Wimbledon will quite possibly change the rules in time for next year to prevent a 50-game final set from ever happening again. I’ll write another post on that topic specifically. Then came the other semi, itself an epic at 5¼ hours, which was played under the roof and spread over two days. It was probably the best match at Wimbledon since that final ten years ago. At 8-all in the final set, my parents phoned me from their hotel room in Singapore. They were stopping over on their way to New Zealand (they’ll now be on the plane). Mum is quite a big Djokovic fan and she was following the live scores on her phone, in the absence of tennis on their TV. I commentated the best I could (which isn’t very well) for what turned out to be the dénouement.

Predictably, Anderson was buggered today, after playing a stupid amount of tennis to get past Federer and then Isner. Although he found a second (third? tenth?) wind as the match progressed: he suddenly started to produce on his first serve and forehand, and Djokovic did extremely well to prevent a fourth set. Anderson came across as a thoroughly nice bloke, and is now firmly on the tennis map, even for fairly casual fans. Yesterday’s women’s final was a little disappointing, with Serena spraying errors everywhere, but she was so gracious in defeat and Kerber equally so in victory. Kerber was unbelievably consistent – only five unforced errors in the match, according to Wimbledon’s (possibly generous) stat-keepers. I even saw the men’s doubles final last night: extra drama was provided when they closed the roof between the fourth and fifth sets. The Kiwi Michael Venus came oh so close to grabbing a Wimbledon title.

So that’s it. Back to reality, and it’s just as well that’s not too bad these days.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

It ain’t coming home

July 13, 2018 by 0 Comments

It’s staying right where it is. Football, I mean. I had a lesson last night from 8 till 9:30. The semi-final started at 9, and as both my students are big football fans (and play regularly), we decided to watch the start of the match. They predicted 2-0 and 2-1 England wins, while I picked a simple 1-0 England victory. After five minutes that was on the cards; England dominated the first half-hour or so and could easily have led by more than one goal. But in the end, after 120 minutes and an inexplicably long final period of stoppage time, they were beaten by a better side. Oh well. Making the semis, even with a kind draw, is no mean achievement, and hopefully it’ll be seen as such when everyone has calmed down a bit. England still have to play the third-place play-off (which, in Romania, they call the “little final”). Before last night’s match I would have picked France to be champions no matter who they faced in the final, but now I’m not so sure. I don’t expect Croatia to be hindered that much by having to endure all those extra time periods, effectively a whole game more than France have played.

If one or two of Colombia’s penalties had been placed an inch higher or to the right, England’s campaign would undoubtedly have been seen as a failure. Knockout football often hinges on such tiny margins. Grand slam tennis, on the other hand, can sometimes be a bit more clear cut. The scoring system tends to magnify small differences between two players, especially in the men’s game where they play best of five sets. Roger Federer cruised through his opening four matches, for the loss of 8, 9, 10 and 9 games. Yesterday, in his quarter-final with Kevin Anderson, he won the first set 6-2 and negotiated a tricky tie-break to win the second set. Anderson’s chances of coming back were incredibly slim. But he did. Even after facing a match point. I was glad to see a “Fedexit”, mainly because I really can’t stand his Wimbledon fan base, who are often disrepectful to whoever happens to be across the net from their hero. I also enjoyed Nadal’s match with Del Potro, where he just squeaked out a win in another marathon encounter. In three days Wimbledon will be all over, and my rekindled interest in sport will be snuffed out.

This morning I had a lesson with a guy who comes from Italy originally but has lived in Romania for 15 years. We talked about bike usage, or rather the baffling lack of it. Timișoara is almost dead flat, and almost perfect for bikes. But you don’t see very many of them. He said that in Romania, riding a bike is (increasingly) an admission that you’re a failure. Successful people drive cars. He told me about his friend in nearby Arad, who works in a fairly senior role in a large company, just 500 metres away from her home. Sensibly she cycled to work, on a smart and expensive retro-style Pegas (a revived Romanian brand, which in Communist times was all you could buy here). But she was told to drive instead, because her bike (any bike) didn’t project the right image. That attitude is what’s sending the planet to hell in a handcart.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Sport that matters

July 9, 2018 by 0 Comments

Twenty years ago I’d have just about watched televised coverage of two flies crawling up a wall, but in recent years I’ve gone off most sports. The dominance of money, and changes to society, have made the whole experience of watching sport less interesting to me. Who wins hardly matters. But as Wimbledon is in full swing and England have made the semi-finals of a World Cup for the first time since I was ten, now is a bit of an exception.

Yesterday, while battling an intense headache caused by my right sinuses, I watched Simona Halep – French Open champion, let’s not forget – lose in freakish fashion to Su-Wei Hsieh of Taiwan. She led 5-2 in the third set, but after Hsieh had held authoritatively in the next game, the remaining four could all have gone either way. But they all went Hsieh’s way, including at 5-4 when Simona had a match point. Hsieh was one hell of a tricky customer, playing two-handed on both sides. She was a far cry from the kind of ball-basher Simona is more accustomed to. Incredibly, nine of the top ten women’s seeds are out of the tournament. Serena Williams is still there, and so are Kerber and Ostapenko.

From the tennis I switched over just in time to see England take the lead against Sweden, and they ran out comfortable winners. England’s campaign has already been quite something. Suddenly there’s a sense of real optimism: “It’s coming home!” In the bread shop today I met an American who has a Romanian wife. As soon as he realised I was English he mentioned the football. I talked to Mum yesterday about the heat wave they’re experiencing in England, as their team progress through the rounds in Russia. She said that should they win the World Cup, the summer will become the stuff of legends. “Do you remember the Summer of ’18?” Mum and Dad will be back in New Zealand by the time the final kicks off.)

Today has been a day of sport-free bliss: a rest day at both Wimbledon and the World Cup. I spent most of the day creating a new board game for my younger students (well it’s not new at all: Dad came up with the basis for it circa 1993), reading a book by the frog pond, and sheltering from a storm.

Five lessons scheduled for tomorrow.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Vară în Timișoara

July 2, 2018 by 0 Comments

It’s not a bad day to be in Timișoara. The temperature has dropped into the very pleasant low twenties. (That’s only a reprieve, surely.) Earlier this afternoon I was in Piața Libertății, reading the start of Tender Is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald, when a man in his sixties came up to me, impressed that I was reading a book in English. Then the mayor, and presumably his wife, walked past. They were eating an ice cream. Walking alongside the School of Music at the northern end of the square, on the other side of the tram tracks, I was treated, as always, to the sounds of vigorous practice in just about anything you can strum or tinkle or blow into.

I read that the boats (vaporașe) on the Bega, which they were trialling when I arrived here 21 months ago, will finally be put into action. There had been some bureaucracy emanating from Bucharest that threatened to put the kibosh on the whole thing.

This morning I had a lesson with my Italian student, taking my total for the week to 20 hours. After all those interruptions, I’ve lost some momentum, but I’m relatively confident I can build it again, even if August (the big getaway month) is only one month away. As my student and I completed an IELTS writing exercise, I saw the man with no legs ride his hand-cranked wheelchair to the cathedral, park it beside the steps, and painstakingly clamber up all twelve of them. For god’s sake (literally), can’t you build a bloody ramp?! Some things about Romania make me angry.

My student was disappointed that France beat Argentina yesterday, citing the number of black and Muslim players in the side. How bigoted. He also unashamedly cheats in his exams. But he has a lot of lessons with me, so I don’t complain too much. Friday was my best day of the week – four lessons, including one with three people. For that lesson I sat on what is probably called an ottoman, because I only have three chairs.

The World Cup continues to delight. Both of yesterday’s matches were crackers. Long may it continue, while the spectre of 2022 looms darkly in the form of Qatar Airways advertising hoardings surrounding the pitch. From a personal viewpoint, there is some well-founded optimism this time in the England camp. For once they have a non-Delboy-like manager with a good tactical brain, who hasn’t had to be imported from Sweden or Italy. On Tuesday they face Colombia, who (like four years ago) have been one of my favourite teams so far. I’d quite like to visit Colombia, if this 1997 video of the song Demons by Super Furry Animals is anything to go by. In the same original group as Colombia, I was disappointed to see Senegal go out by virtue of accumulating two more yellow cards than Japan, after both sides had amassed four points, scored four goals, conceded four, and shared four in their head-to-head encounter. Yellow cards are dished out too subjectively to be a good tie-breaker. If some sort of play-off game is unfeasible (and I don’t totally believe it is), flipping a coin might actually be better. As for the Mannschaft, which still sounds like part of the male anatomy, they just weren’t quite good enough. The victims of very un-German complacency, perhaps.

Fishing. One day I’ll know what I’m doing enough to spend a pleasant, relaxing morning by the water. One day I’ll even catch a fish. But today is not that day.

Life :) - Other sports

Last gasp

June 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

Wow. I’ve just watched Germany get out of jail against Sweden. With only ten men and staring probable elimination in the face, a jaw-dropping last-gasp free kick winner from a crazy angle on the edge of the box means they’ll make it to the knockout rounds now in all likelihood. I felt sorry for Sweden.

For me, this feels like the last-ever World Cup, so I’m trying to enjoy it. Everything is wrong about Qatar, the hosts in four years’ time. Then in 2026 the competition will expand to 48 teams, planned to be drawn into 16 mini-groups of three. Too many teams. Terrible format. Just ugh.

During tonight’s game the Romanian commentators kept referring to the German team as the Mannschaft, which sounds pretty funny in English. Sometimes they would put it into (I think) the genitive case: mannschaftului. Plenty of other languages have borrowed this German term (it probably sounds very German), but curiously the Germans don’t use it themselves: for them it just means “team”. Or rather, they didn’t use it until after they won the last World Cup. They then rebranded the national team as Die Mannschaft for marketing purposes, capitalising on the popularity of the term in other languages. This reminds me of the term Bahasa, which some English speakers use to refer to the Indonesian language, presumably because it sounds cooler than “Indonesian”. But in Indonesian, bahasa just means “language”.

I should have mentioned that on Tuesday night we all tried a papanași, a quite wonderful dessert that’s a bit like a rum baba, but without the rum, and bigger. Delicious, and well worth the long wait before we eventually got it.

Tomorrow morning I’ll try my hand at fishing, without Dad’s help. Who knows if I’ve rigged up my rod in a way that it won’t all fall apart.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

How low can you go?

February 19, 2018 by 0 Comments

Not much news since my last post. I’ve had 98 hours of teaching over the last three weeks. It’s a challenge coming up with new and interesting material for my students each time, especially now that my preparation time is limited. This morning I described the business of whether to use gerunds or infinitives after certain verbs as BBI: Boring But Important. Yesterday I had the usual business of my ten-year-old student asking me at regular intervals what the time was so he’d know how soon he could get rid of me.

There was another school shooting in America last week. Seventeen people dead. It’s all messed up there on so many levels. And now we have Trump tweeting that if the FBI had spent less time on the Russia inquiry they might have stopped the shooting. How low can you go?

I spoke to my brother tonight. He got completely the wrong end of the stick when I said I’d like to do something other than teaching. It was my own fault – I meant to say that although I enjoy my work immensely I’d like the occasional day off to travel and do other stuff. At the moment I have some lessons every single day. I will have a short break in early April as I spend a few days in the UK.

I’ve watched snatches of the Winter Olympics (officially the Olympic Winter Games, which doesn’t sound right to me). I read something online which suggested that much of the success of the luge is down to the name. Luge. It’s almost onomatopoeia. Wouldn’t it be fun to do the luge in Cluj? (Have you ever watched – or, heaven forbid, done – double luge? Now that is a weird event.) Several of my students, or their kids, have gone skiing in recent weeks, often in Austria. Yes, my students tend to have money.

I played four games of Scrabble this evening, winning three by margins of 157, 171 and 201, and losing the other by just five points. My scores ranged from 422 to 492. My favourite word was COMiX, making CRAP at the same time, for 65.

Life :) - Other sports - Romania - Tennis

Mehala

August 22, 2017 by 0 Comments

We hit 36 degrees on Saturday, but it’s felt just the slightest bit autumnal the last two days thanks to a welcome drop in temperature and a fresh breeze. Yesterday I went to a market in the west of the city called Mehala. That “meh” combination, which is also found in Mehedinți (the name of one of the counties I visited with my parents) has an Arabic feel to it. “Meh” is, of course, now a word in its own right, thanks (probably) to The Simpsons. It can be both an interjection and an adjective. Mehala has a large car market but also a section where bikes, tools, second-hand clothes and other odds and ends are sold. One of my students told me about the market, turning the word Mehala into an English verb meaning to swindle: “I got Mehala’d.” With that in mind, I didn’t buy anything, not even from the very aggressive teenager trying to sell me sunglasses. It started to spit with rain, so it was all hands on deck for the stallholders. That green three-wheeled truck was incredible – I’d never seen anything like it. The market is also a popular spot for blokes to have a beer or two, although most places in Romania fall into that category. There was mici sizzling away on huge barbecues, and I even had some mici, though to be frank I find it pretty meh. I learnt that the local bike gang isn’t called the Red Devils, but the even more demonic Red Evils. The picture of the Trabant is from Baia Mare.

By my count, I put 483 flyers in people’s letterboxes yesterday, and walked about 13 km. I got another thousand flyers printed off today and visited a new language school; the bloke there was impressed with my Romanian or was just being polite, I couldn’t quite tell. I doubt they’ll have any work for me.

Simona Halep was taken apart by Garbiñe Muguruza in the final in Cincinnati last night; this was yet another missed chance for Halep to become world number one. She has an unfortunate habit of playing within herself in big matches. While that was going on (and long after it had finished) I watched the Red Sox beat the Yankees on a live stream. For some reason I’ve got back into baseball again. There are so many nuances to the game I don’t yet understand, but watching the Red Sox might help there: they’re unusually patient with the bat by 2017 standards, happy to work the count (I hope my terminology is right) rather than relying on the big hit. Unfortunately Romania is in a terrible time zone for watching baseball.

I spoke to Mum on FaceTime this morning. It was good to see her looking brighter. She wanted to read something out to me that she’d unearthed on the internet, and for a few heart-stopping moments I thought it might have been this site. Instead it was from the “court” section of a local UK newspaper: my brother’s ex-fiancée had been convicted of assault and tagged for four months. Mum likes to semi-cyberstalk her instead of just consigning her to history.

This morning I called Bazza for his 62nd birthday. I knew he’d appreciate that. He seemed fine.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Win, lose … or draw

July 10, 2017 by 0 Comments

Last month a team which, for marketing purposes, has “New Zealand” in its name, won some weird hybrid sailing–cycling event in Bermuda (!), part of which is called the Louis Vuitton (!) Cup. Undoubtedly millions of Kiwis took the marketing bait and got right into it, unable to take their eyes off every tack and gybe and pedal, even though very few of them could spell or pronounce Louis Vuitton.

Yesterday the Lions tour concluded. I didn’t watch that either but it seemed altogether more wholesome than the Battle of the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody deserved to lose and nobody did lose. How fantastic is that? I find it a little odd that so many people can’t accept draws in sport. In a timed sport, a draw is always a possibility, and I don’t see the problem with that. Why is it so vital to crown a winner by any means possible? Of course there are exceptions: in a knockout competition somebody has to be knocked out, and some sports are structured so that a draw is impossible, such as…

Ah yes, tennis. Isn’t it great to be watching Wimbledon again in the daytime and in summer? And filling in a drawsheet with all the winners and losers and (partial) scores. The men’s draw has been intriguing, the women’s fascinating, and while the commentary on Eurosport has been lightweight at best and simply awful at worst, it’s been great to see all these new players in action.

Dad had an exhibition last week; he’s had shows at that gallery since the mid-eighties, only the gallery is no longer in St Ives but somewhere out in the wops. He sold three paintings (out of thirty) on the night and has sold a fourth since then. I remember when there’d be three paintings unsold on the night. It ain’t like the old days. Dad was lucky to be born when he was. Without the opportunity to pursue his passion, I dread to think what might have become of him.

For me, work is frustratingly sporadic right now. In the height of summer, people’s minds are elsewhere.

Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

Nothing to fear…

November 8, 2016 by 0 Comments

My room is in a hotel loft. It’s not what you’d call spacious. But it’s miles better than what I experienced with my flatmate in the first half of the year. Coming home from work and sitting in the car for ages until I finally steeled myself to go inside my own home. Lying in bed and seeing every possible hour tick by on my digital clock: the zeros, the ones, the twos, the threes… My living circumstances had an enormous effect on my move to Romania: I’d planned to join Skype groups and really ramp up my Romanian learning but that soon went out the window.

Just when I was getting fed up of having a shaworma every night, I’ve been given access to a kitchen, so I plan to actually cook something tonight. My life will soon become that little bit cheaper and healthier.

People have been saying I shouldn’t worry about the US election, because Donald Trump (or Darth Trump as I’ve been calling him) probably won’t win, and everything will turn out fine even if he does. I’m not sure on either count. On the first, there are about fifteen additional sources of uncertainty this time compared to 2012. And on the second, it doesn’t seem long ago to me that my brother served in the totally unnecessary and terrifying Iraq war, which probably would never have happened if Al Gore had got in. Yes I’m worried, and I’ll be getting up at 2am to watch the results come in on Romanian TV.

The All Blacks lost to Ireland in Chicago, their first loss to Ireland ever. It’s been quite a week for sport in Chicago, what with the Cubs winning. Now I find myself watching handball and volleyball on TV. I like trying to figure out new sports. (Volleyball I have at least some clue about, but handball…)

Did I really just feel an earthquake?! Are they following me?

Update: No it wasn’t an earthquake. They’re pretty rare in this part of the country (but fairly common in the south-east).

This comment for me sums up the US election (except the idiotic part; that’s part of Trump’s shtick):

This election must be so tricky for our US cousins.

On one hand, there is a racist, misogynist, inarticulate, ignorant, homophobic, bullying, sexual abusing, idiotic, populist, inexperienced, hateful fascist.

On the other hand, is an articulate, experienced politician who sent e-mails from the wrong server.

Such a tough one. Dunno how our US friends will know which to choose.