International travel

International travel - The UK

As I was going to St Ives…

August 9, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday morning I was woken by a four o’clock alarm. The start of a long day. I got a taxi to the airport. Flights to Schengen destinations now leave from the fancy new terminal, leaving just a tiny number (like mine) to depart from the old one. The attention-grabbing split-flap departure board has finally succumbed – it was still there but totally blank. The whole place was eerily quiet. As always we were held in an inhuman pen-like room before it was time to board. The flight was uneventful; I even managed to doze a bit.

At the other end the e-gates weren’t working so we all had to be processed manually. I had a wait for my coach, so I got a £4.20 coffee from Caffè Nero. The lady asked me if I wanted chocolate sprinkled on it. I might as well, I said. (At that price you take whatever you can get.) Then I thought, how would I say “I might as well” in Romanian? I’d have come out with the equivalent of “Why not?” or even a simple yes. Even though I get by in Romanian, it’s like having one hand tied behind my back.

The bus station outside the airport terminal consists of 18 bays, with buses (or coaches, as they say) going in all directions. A short, stocky, bearded, heavily tattooed guy of about thirty seemed to be running the show. He wore an orange hi-viz vest. He could handle any question about any bus going anywhere, with handy gesticulations and the odd sympathetic “sorry, mate” thrown in. He had a ticket-issuing machine strapped to his waist, and also transmitted information to his colleagues (some hi-vizzed at the station, others in the terminal) via both a phone and a walkie-talkie. “Victor Zulu Foxtrot [referring to the bus’s number plate] has just pulled in.” I got the impression he’d been doing this since he left school. I thought, this bloke is worth his weight in gold. We’re still a very long way from AI replacing (properly) someone like him.

Our bus driver was cheerful; he introduced himself as Pat. Midway through the journey to Cambridge he had two problems at once – a door that didn’t shut properly and a road (the A602) that was closed by the police. Pat spent some time communicating with HQ about the door issue but fixed the problem and after taking a detour we arrived only half an hour late. The trip only cost £10. My subsequent bus to St Ives cost just £2. Very good value. Measures were put in place in 2022 to help with the cost of living; poorer people use buses disproportionately.

St Ives is quiet, a much nicer temperature than Timișoara, and generally an enjoyable place to spend a few days in the summer. I had a nap in the afternoon and woke up pretty discombobulated. Where exactly am I? I have internet access here in my parents’ apartment – I’ve managed to get the password from the people who live above. I don’t know how much longer Mum and Dad will keep this place. Having the internet meant I was able to give two online lessons in the evening. When they were over, I could hardly believe it was still the same day that it was when I set off.

I don’t plan to do much. I won’t be seeing my brother or my university friend. Sadly I don’t even have my aunt anymore. I’ll go for the odd bike ride, do some reading, catch up with my family friends (gently suggesting they come to Romania for a second time), and probably make a trip into Cambridge which will only cost £4. Not doing much is basically the whole point.

Thinking about the title I’ve given this blog post, I’m reminded of a maths test I was given at the age of six. The teacher, Mrs Stokes (who sadly died very young of cancer just a few years later), read out the ten questions. For one of the questions, we had to solve the riddle “How many were there going to St Ives?” I tried to calculate 7 × 7 × 7 × 7 by hand and missed the next few questions entirely.

International travel - Language learning

Travel and language — part 2 of 3

September 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was already going to talk about this topic – Why is it that most people can’t write anymore? – but ten minutes ago I got this automated out-of-office email from a Barclays employee:

I am now out of the office untill 2/10/23 and your email may not be responded to.

I will endevour to response to your email upon my return

Bugger me. Even “your email may not be responded to”, while correct if you allow “may not” to include probabilities of 0%, sounds pretty terrible. I’ve had a few emails from this lady now. She’s one of the more helpful members of Barclays’ staff, but she doesn’t have the faintest scooby when it comes to the English language. Even activating spellcheck, which she does sometimes, doesn’t come close to hiding that fact. You see this crap every day and everywhere, even from – especially from – people who handle really important matters, such as your money. For instance, the woman who runs Dad’s gallery in Geraldine – bringing in a tidy 48% commission – sends him emails that are beyond abysmal. Being utterly shite at using your own language used to be at least some kind of barrier to attaining money, status and power. Not any more. Social media must be partly to blame, as it is for most things. Barf out a couple of lines that you don’t even look at, then press “send”. Voilà.

Many of the people I worked with at the insurance company in Wellington were dreadful writers. They had all the fancy phrases down pat – furthermore, in the interim, core deliverables – but they could never get the basics right and couldn’t properly express themselves. Then I moved to the council and the water company and something extraordinary happened. People there could write. I could logically see why. The sort of person who works with drainage systems, and maybe even enjoys going down the odd manhole occasionally, might also be the sort of person who reads Terry Pratchett. Or, for that matter, reads at all. A career-obsessed, KPI-focused middle manager at an insurance firm, maybe not so much.

I’m still watching those MIT linguistics lectures. Such bright minds, and such good humour too. If the students are any barometer of America’s future, the country should be in safe hands for the next couple of generations. If only that were the case. (Also, it’s Boston. I was lucky enough to spend over a week in that amazing city in 2015. When the professor makes references to the T – the city’s subway system – or other Bostonia, he brings back happy memories for me.)

I wasn’t going to mention Māori again, but I stumbled upon this photo I must have taken at Tekapo. The quality isn’t what it could be.

If you look closely you can see some Māori words. Glass is karāhe, recycle is hakurua, and rubbish is rāpihi. What’s going on here? Well, two of the three words (karāhe and rāpihi) have been taken from English and then transmogrified into something acceptable in Māori. By acceptable, I mean adhering to the rules of how Māori words are formed. Māori has only ten consonant sounds (h, k, m, n, ng, p, r, t, w and wh) and five vowel sounds (a, e, i, o and u), while English has way more than that (about 12 pure vowels, 7 or 8 diphthongs, and 24 or so consonants). Then there’s the question of phonotactics, which means what sounds can go where in a syllable or a word. For example, swift is a word in English. Twift and slift and swipt aren’t words, but they could be, because they follow the rules of how English sounds fit together. But srift and swifk can’t possibly be words, because even though you could pronounce them without too much difficulty, you just can’t have sr or fk together, except in compound words like classroom. Swifl can’t be a word either, because although the fl combination is fine in lots of places, is isn’t OK at the end of a word. English therefore has various restrictions, like all languages do, and that’s phonotactics. Māori has much stricter phonotactics than English – all clusters of two or more consonants are banned, and all words must end in a vowel – as well as a much more conservative inventory of sounds in the first place, and that all means that if you want to Māorify an English word, you’ll have to do a lot of messing around with it.

Take rubbish (rāpihi). It’s interesting they had to resort to an English loan word. Doesn’t Māori have a way of expressing “unwanted thing”? Whatever, that’s what they did. There are no voiced consonants in Māori (except the nasals and w), so b is replaced by p, its unvoiced counterpart. Sh is a sibilant – none of them in Māori – so that gets replaced by h. The short u vowel in English is converted to a, which isn’t far off, and made long probably because it’s stressed in English. Then the vowel i is added so as not to break the no-final-consonants rule. For glass (karāhe) the change is even more dramatic. Two extra vowels need to be added. The puzzling thing for me is why karāhe gets a final e while rāpihi gets a final i. Does the difference come from the fact that the h in karāhe originates from an English s, while the h in rāpihi comes from an English sh? (If they’d gone for the American English trash instead of the British rubbish, what would the Māori version have been? Tarāhi?) Then there are names. Rōpata (the Māori version of Robert) gets an a at the end. Wiremu (William) gets a u. Who decides this stuff? Finally there’s hakurua. Recycle. It looks like a real Māori word, unloaned from anywhere. But what does it actually mean? I’ve googled it and keep coming up blank. A mystery.

That was supposed to be the end of me talking about language, but it definitely isn’t I’m afraid.

International travel

The trip back — part 2 of 2

September 10, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I Skyped Mum and Dad from Singapore, still less than half-way to my destination. Then my mind turned to food. I was peckish and had seven more hours to kill at the airport, plus I wanted something for when I got to Budapest because it was anyone’s guess how long it would take to get home from there. Luckily Singapore has food courts on the upper level. These consist of about a dozen stalls, mostly serving Asian food. To order your chosen dish, you select a stall and meal on a central machine and wave some plastic. The machine then spits out a ticket with a number. When your number pops up on a screen, you go to the stall to collect your meal. I had a beef brisket soup which I greatly enjoyed. At $12 in the local currency (NZ$15 or £7) it was far from the rip-off I’m used to at airports. Next to the stalls was a 7-Eleven supermarket, and a $10 note – the only local cash I had – was enough to pay for some sandwiches and cakes and a bottle of ice coffee. Just around the corner was the butterfly garden, a welcome change from duty-free stores and pulsating video screens. At 32 degrees, it was hot out there, and I was glad I didn’t think of venturing into the city. Besides, I was hopelessly tired. My flight to Istanbul was still far in the future – beyond the reach of the departure boards – but I figured out that Terminal 1 was where I needed to be. I took the Skytrain from the vastness of Terminal 3, and lay out on several chairs in the surprisingly quiet Terminal 1 until it was time to board. If you have a long wait between flights, Singapore is easily preferable to the heaving nightmare that, say, Heathrow would be.

It seems to go on for ever
Water is ‘air’ in Malay/Indonesian. Not confusing at all.

The third leg of my journey took eleven hours. I don’t remember much of it – that’s a good sign. I grabbed occasional 15-minute naps and watched (and enjoyed) Walk the Line, the documentary about Johnny Cash. At Istanbul I had a tightish turnaround, and unlike on my outward journey, I had to go through security. (There’s no rhyme or reason to whether or how security screening takes place, or whether you have to remove your shoes or dispose of your empty drink bottles.) Once again my departure gate was at the end of the terminal and my flight was flashing red on the board by the time I got there. I shouldn’t have panicked; with my baggage in the hold, they won’t simply take off without me.

My boarding pass for my fourth and final leg showed 5B – B for bugger. With letters later in the alphabet you’re never quite sure where you’ll be sitting – it depends on the seat configuration of the aircraft – but when you see B, you’re pretty much certain to be sitting between two other people. Not that it mattered on this flight, a short hop, or so I thought. Seats 5A and 5C – just behind the small business class compartment – were occupied by two Romanian women of about 30 who were having a good old chinwag. I plonked myself in between them and they continued to chat. “Do you know each other?” I asked in Romanian. Yes. “Would you like to sit together?” No. We’re happy like this. Er, but maybe I’m not!? They carried on chatting and even held hands across me. Much to my relief, I saw that the man in 5F had two empty seats next to him, so I sat in 5D, and before long we landed in Budapest. No next flight for me anymore. Phew!

There was just the small matter of getting home. I’d arranged what I thought was a bus a few days earlier. I was able to communicate with the driver using the airport wi-fi, and he picked me up shortly after I’d got my suitcase off the carousel. It turned out to be a car, and at this point I was the only passenger. He sped off along the motorway. At Cenad, just over the border in Romania, he picked up a young Italian guy. The Romanian part of the drive was picturesque. The driver wasn’t a great observer of the two-second rule and please don’t overtake here, but at least that meant I got home quickly. He dropped the Italian guy off in the middle of Timișoara, at a cost of 100 lei, then dropped me off at my door – the trip set me back 200. It was quarter to two in the afternoon when I got home – a 3½-hour trip. If I’d taken the train – a slightly cheaper option – it would have been four or five o’clock, and I’d have needed a taxi or a tram at this end. Avoiding all that hassle was well worth it.

So now I’m back. I’ve had a letter from Barclays – a real human wrote it – saying that they sent me a cheque back in June that I’ve never received. I haven’t properly digested the letter; I’ll need to call them tomorrow. I’ve slept quite well, but I expect I’ll have a hard time not drifting off early this evening. I’ve made two trips to the supermarket and this morning I walked to the market, passing the small bars – birturi, the man on the yellow tricycle, and the graffiti spelling out Panda and (in English) Don’t grow up – it’s a trap. It’s about 30 degrees and it’s forecast to be like this for another three days. My first lessons are tomorrow.

International travel - Tennis

The trip back — part 1 of 2

September 10, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m back, groggy but just about in one piece.

On Friday we were almost out the door when the man who owned my parents’ property in the nineties decided to drop in. It was the first time they’d met this British-born chap who liked to talk, mainly about the work he’d done on the house. He was happy somebody had bought it – its fate otherwise would probably have been demolition and three townhouses plonked on the section. Despite the delay – over half an hour – we set off to the airport in plenty of time. The fish and chip shop at Rakaia had closed down, but crisis was averted when I saw “CHIPS” through the window of a café-type place in Dunsandel. We had very good fish and chips – my last for some time – for just $9 each. We then got lost on the way to my Jucy Snooze place near the airport. I half-hoped we’d never find it and I could somehow stay in New Zealand, but no such luck. Jucy Snooze ($43 a night) consists of “pods” of eight enclosed bunk beds. After checking in on a touch screen, I walked past a pod full of teenagers – Aussies probably – swigging beer from cans. Please don’t let there be seven of them in my pod. When I found my pod – this was 8pm – it was empty. I heaved my heavy suitcase into an upper locker and did the horrible bit – saying goodbye to Mum and Dad. The bed was comfortable. In fact the whole set-up worked very well. There’s a common room with a kitchen and a pool table which was still in use at 3:30 am, after I’d managed to get some kip.

The old Rakaia post office, shortly before sunset

The airport was a ten-minute walk from Jucy Snooze. My flight plan was beyond the capabilities of the machines, so two experienced and very helpful humans executed the complicated check-in procedure using a black screen that reminded me of those old mainframes I used to make changes to insurance policies, back in a previous life. I had to prove that I lived in Romania and had the means to get there from Budapest. My suitcase was barely half the 30-kilo limit on the way out. Since then I’d added a painting Dad had done of Piața Traian in Timișoara, an old camera of my brother’s that must have been expensive, a pair of navy Doc Martens I bought in Birmingham in 2002, some more shoes, half a dozen books, and other assorted paperwork. Now I was over by 1.3 kg. They said they’d wave it through, but staff at other airports might not be so lenient, so I moved some books into my hand luggage and I was good to go. My flight was at 6am.

The flights to Melbourne and Singapore were uneventful. We flew over the centre of Melbourne – the brilliant Queen Victoria Market and so many places to play and watch sport. Not far from the centre was an enormous cemetery. On the second flight I started watching Everything Everywhere All at Once but gave up on it. To my surprise, I was able to watch live tennis. The end of Coco Gauff’s victory over Karolina Muchova was spectacular. After Gauff had already had five match points, the pair concocted a spellbinding 40-stroke rally which Gauff won to set up another match point. Both me and the guy next to me (he was watching on his screen) applauded. Gauff duly closed out the match on the next point. Then came the second semi-final between Madison Keys and Aryna Sabalenka. Keys led 6-0 5-3, but Sabalenka used her great power to produce the goods at just the right time and win by one of the weirdest scores you’ll ever see in tennis – 0-6, 7-6 (7-1), 7-6 (10-5). I felt sorry for Keys who even led 4-2 in the final set and didn’t do much wrong. Sabalenka, who will be a well-deserved world number one when the new rankings come out tomorrow, forgot that the final tie-break was first to ten and thought she’d won when she reached 7-3. Fancy that, you’re the world’s best player and you don’t know the rules. In a slight upset, Gauff came from a set down to beat Sabalenka in the final. I didn’t even think about watching that match – I was too busy sleeping.

Family - International travel - Photos - Poker - Tennis

Countdown mode and memories of Singapore

October 17, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s only three days till I go away, so I’m on full don’t-forget mode now. I will forget something, though, I always do. I’ll be taking my laptop with me so I can give lessons when I’m away. Which lessons, I’m still not sure at this point, because Friday is normally a busy day for me but I don’t know what time my parents plan to get to my brother’s place on that day. Perhaps after this length of time I should prioritise family rather than work, I don’t know.

Last time I mentioned that my parents had spent two nights in Singapore on the way to the UK. In January 1987 we spent four nights there on the way back from our six-week stay in New Zealand. Back then I got very excited by anything big and futuristic and technological, so Singapore was fascinating to me. We stayed on the 20th floor of the 21-storey President Merlin hotel, Mum and my brother in room 2014, Dad and I in 2015. In the morning we would phone each other. There were malls everywhere, rising to six or seven storeys, full of shops selling gadgets that were unimaginable back home. Sports shops were everywhere, and we picked up my first proper tennis racket. I remember a cheap hand-held LCD racing car game where nobody could ever get more than 13 laps no matter how hard they tried. As for the food, my memories are hazy, but I clearly remember the time Mum ordered bee hoon for us all in a massive ground-floor food court, not having the foggiest clue what we’d be getting. It turned out to be some noodley dish which we all had great difficulty physically eating, and two Chinese girls had a good laugh at us from an upper-floor balcony. I remember Chinatown, where my parents bought various figurines that they probably still have today. It was a few days before Chinese New Year – the Year of the Rabbit was coming up, as it will be again in a few months – and there were parades with dragons. Most of all I remember the durians – large spiky smelly fruit. Like really ponging something nasty. On one day we took the boat over to Sentosa Island, but apart from the cable car I don’t remember that too well. All in all we had a great time because it was all so different from what we were used to. I visited Singapore once again in 2008 but it had changed. Obviously I was no longer a kid, so that sense of wonder had gone, but the malls seemed to have been taken over by designer clothes stores, the sort that you find at airports. Travel is going in that direction in general; with globalisation, places become more and more samey.

Chinatown, 2008 (including durians)

I played reasonably decent tennis at the weekend. The 18-year-old lad was there for both sessions, and he’s improving at a rate of knots. Mindblowingly fast. Two weeks ago he was playing cricket shots, had no backhand to speak of, and could barely get a serve into play. All very standard for someone who had hardly held a tennis racket before. Now he can reliably get his serve in, can rally from both wings, and is very tactically aware. All from just a few hours on the court. He’s clearly an all-round natural sportsman. To get to his level took me many many hours on my own, hitting against a wall, or rallying with my parents in the garden. Being anywhere near an actual tennis court would have been disastrous for me initially.

Poker. Another win on Saturday night, and this one (pot-limit badugi) kept me up until after two in the morning. I ran well and crucially collected bounties with regularity along the way. As we got short-handed I amassed a huge stack and was able to run over the table. Heads-up lasted two hands. My reward for winning and collecting so many bounties was a rare three-figure payout; I made $101 for my evening’s work – that was very nice indeed.

Family - International travel - Language teaching - Photos - Poker

Hand-wavey

October 14, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My work volumes are back up again. Six lessons scheduled for tomorrow. Last night’s student is at a basic level and I explained to him that you sometimes need to double the final consonant before adding the -ing ending. I normally leave it at “sometimes” unless they ask, because the rule is a little tricky to explain, especially when I have to do it in Romanian like last night. The rule goes like this: If the original word finishes with a single vowel followed by a single consonant, and has final-syllable stress (or only has one syllable), and it doesn’t end in w, x or y, then you double the last consonant before adding -ing, otherwise you don’t. And in British English we make an exception for words ending in a single vowel plus l – we double the l no matter where the word stress goes. My explanation got pretty hand-wavey I must say. (The same double-letter rules, by the way, apply to other suffixes too, most notably -ed but also -er, -y, -age, -able, and probably some others I’ve forgotten.) On Tuesday I had my first lesson with the tennis guy, which was mostly conducted in Romanian. This morning I had my first session with a woman in her thirties and that went pretty well – I could tell that she really wants to learn and would certainly care about where to put double consonants and the like if that subject came up. She’s at about a 5 on my 0-to-10 scale, plenty good enough to get by in English.

Mum and Dad have now landed in the UK. One week till I see them. They called me from their hotel room in the Bugis area of Singapore. (I wonder, how do you pronounce Bugis? Mum goes with /ˈbʊgɪs/ or /ˈbuːgɪs/, but for all I know it might be /ˈbʌgɪs/ or /ˈbuːdʒɪs/ or, who knows, a French-style /byʒi/.) It was a good idea for them to break up their journey with a stopover. (I have very fond memories of our four-day stay in Singapore in 1987. It was fascinating for a little boy.) Their trip was not without incident. Mum’s hand luggage tested positive for explosives (!) in Christchurch, and that meant that their suitcases had to be hauled out of the aircraft hold and tested. Mum’s elder brother had taken them to the airport, and he sometimes keeps fertiliser in the back of his van. Traces of fertiliser (you can make bombs out of that stuff) probably got onto her bag and triggered the alarm. My parents also had a load of convoluted Covid-related form-filling on their arrival in Singapore – just what you need after a ten-hour flight. I hope they’re now in St Ives and in some comfort. It’ll be quite something to see them again after what feels like an eternity.

I’ll be visiting the UK again in what feel like increasingly dark times for the country. Liz Truss’s government is historically unpopular because it’s historically crap, although Johnson wasn’t really any better. There are no maps or plans that make any sense. Winter is coming in more ways than one. People will die of poverty.

I’m finally back to winning ways in poker. I’ve played two tournaments since I my previous post, and I was victorious in one of them – the no-limit single draw. I had a lot of fun during that win, which netted me a $48 profit. At one stage there was someone at the table who didn’t know the rules, and an English guy (a decent player) tried to exploit him by calling with a junky hand, only to see the clueless player turn over a proper hand. The English guy recovered from that to make it all the way to heads-up against me, and all the time there was good-natured chat between us. I took a 2½-to-1 lead into heads up, then my nice opponent came back and took a healthy chip lead, but I was able to turn the tables again and take the win after 3½ hours and 432 hands. My bankroll is $1043.

On yesterday’s bike ride to Sânmihaiu Român
Family - International travel - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

They’re off!

October 10, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents are currently on Singapore Airlines flight 298, an Airbus A350 registered 9V-SMM, and right now they’re passing by Fitzroy Crossing in north-western Australia. Flightradar24 is a great tool.

Mum and Dad will spend two nights in Singapore before flying to London, and a week after that we’ll all meet up as a family for the first time since Christmas 2018.

Last night my brother told me about all the messy midnight interludes that are suddenly a feature of his life. We then talked about our cousin – the 52-year-old daughter of my aunt whom I saw in August – and the fact that she hasn’t seen her mother in three years. Just imagine. You live in Somerset, four hours’ drive at the most from your isolated and vulnerable mum, you don’t make the trip in all that time, and somehow you think that’s OK. Just how? I know there was the small matter of a pandemic, but she wasn’t exactly dying to hook up with her mum on Zoom. People are crazy. Talking of crazy cousins, I have a cousin the same age as me in Wellington. I went to his wedding in 2012. He has two daughters; the youngest is probably five or six. He’s a big fan of Liverpool, and in 2019 his beloved team reached the Champions League final in dramatic fashion. So what did he do? Fly to Barcelona at the last minute to watch his team play Tottenham. You literally can’t get any further: if you could tunnel down from Wellington through the centre of the earth and back out the other side, you’d end up in Spain. He didn’t have a ticket for Camp Nou – that would be one thing. No, he watched the match on a big screen, then flew back home. Months later he broke up with his wife.

I played tennis twice at the weekend. On Saturday I went to the pub by the river afterwards. It was surprisingly empty for such as warm evening. It seems we haven’t still fully recovered from Covid and now we’ve got a whole load of other crap to worry about like skyrocketing energy bills and bridges being set alight in our vicinity that people want to save their money. The price of eating and drinking out has shot up too; in a classic case of shrinkflation, the beer glasses in this place are 20% smaller than they used to be. I don’t eat much meat these days normally, but the meal I had was a plate of traditional Romanian food, and was necessarily extremely meaty.

A guy from tennis is starting lessons with me tomorrow. He did mention it ages ago, but because he’s anti-vax and knew my diametrically opposed stance on the issue, I thought that might put him off. We’ll have the lesson online. More and more people are choosing to have their lessons online even if they live in Timișoara. At this rate they’ll render my new teaching room redundant.

Poker. I played seven tournaments at the weekend and got nowhere; my bankroll is now $996. Two of those were hold ’em which I hardly ever play. My poker dream is that GG Poker, the site that has now overtaken Poker Stars as the market leader, will one day add a bunch of other games to match the variety that Poker Stars offers. If that happens, I’ll be off to GG like a shot with four figures to play with.

International travel - Photos - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 5 of 5

August 14, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I managed to pack a reasonable amount into ten days in the UK, and enjoyed my time there. Whether I could live there again is a different story. I’d find the sheer number of people suffocating, and how could I earn enough to afford it? I was lucky this time to save money by not paying for accommodation. The best part for me was escaping the heat. The ten-degree drop in temperature gave me a new lease on life. Not feeling fatigued all the time was a bit of a novelty.

I remember when Stansted was a relaxing little airport, in sharp contrast to the behemoths of Heathrow and Gatwick. Now it’s up there with the giants. But even though it’s now a stress-inducing monster, arriving three hours before my flight (as Ryanair had told me to do) was overkill. I had no bags to put in the hold, so I went straight through to security. The departure lounge was jam-packed, and there’s only so much time you can spend staring at bottles of gin. My plane to Bergamo took off an hour late. I’m always amazed by how fast the ascent is; you’re up into the clouds in no time. I had a window seat, and the scenery was very pleasing on the eye, especially on our descent when we flew over the beautiful towns and villages of northern Italy. By the time I checked into my hotel, I was starving. I had a kebabby something or other, and a beer, in a little courtyard. I liked being outside on such a balmy evening, but my ankles got bitten to shreds by mosquitoes.

The next morning, after a big breakfast, I took the train into Milan – about a 50-minute journey. It pleased me that in Italy, just like Romania and most other sensible countries, a return ticket costs twice a single and there’s a clear relationship between the distance travelled (which is printed on your ticket) and the price. In the UK, train fares are inscrutable and invariably ridiculously high. Apart from the short hop from Cambridge to Stansted, I didn’t dream of taking a train in the UK. On the train to Milan a policeman asked me to put on my mascherina (why isn’t it just a masca?), but I didn’t have one. I’d almost forgotten that this was ground zero, the unfortunate epicentre of the pandemic in Europe, where it was headless-chickens territory in early 2020. The nice policeman gave me a mask and I was fine.

We soon pulled into the lovely central train station which was one of my highlights of Milan. Otherwise I found the city a bit disappointing. I’m sure other people would love the place, but there wasn’t much for me there. I wandered from the station, through a nice park and into the Brera district. I then found myself in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the arcade where you find all your Gucci and Prada, and which spills out into the big tourist draw card of Piazza del Duomo. The massive Duomo is spectactular of course, but I didn’t feel a thrill at seeing it, probably because it’s so ridiculously popular. I liked climbing up to the rooftop, and later I went inside the cathedral and then underground where you can see the remains of the Baptistry of St John, which was built in the fourth century. It was a hot day, and after also visiting the museum I was quite happy to leave Milan and get back to Bergamo for a pizza. And a pee. I remembered when I previously visited Italy in 2010 that toilets were thin on the ground, and that hadn’t changed.

The long list of archbishops of Milan

A digital gizmo that mimics the look and sound of the old split-flap displays

My flight was just after ten the next morning, so I had my breakfast at seven, checked out, and got the bus to the airport. My plane, a Boeing 737 Max, left on time. I noticed that the word Max wasn’t visible or audible anywhere, probably because they knew it would freak people out – the aircraft suffered two fatal crashes in 2018 and ’19, after which they were grounded worldwide for a while. FYI, if you see or hear the numbers 8200 on your plane, it’s a Max and you can officially freak out.

By mid-afternoon, after stopping at the market on the way, I was back in my flat. I’d spent two weeks in rich countries, specifically rich parts of rich countries; that marked quite a contrast to the place I now call home, even though it’s not exactly poor. I liked having real fruit and vegetables again, that didn’t come in a tray, weren’t identically sized and shaped, and weren’t barcoded. I felt that the UK had gone the way of America, where “fake food” was rampant.

My teaching volumes have dropped in the few days since I got back. It’s peak getaway time.

Family - International travel - Photos - Tennis - The UK - Travel: Europe

Getting away — part 1 of 5

August 11, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a while, but after two weeks away, I’m back.

On the Sunday before I left, I felt a sense of foreboding about my trip that I can’t remember feeling before. Things were bound to go horribly wrong. I played tennis that evening – singles once again – and finished (from my perspective) at 6-3, 6-3, 2-4. In the first set I led 5-0 with a set point in the next game, then my opponent started to play. At 5-3, 15-15 (shit! I’m going to lose this set now, after being up five-love), Domnul Sfâra arrived, and that perhaps knocked my opponent off his stride just enough for me. Tiredness, that near-permanent fatigue I’d been feeling, really hit me towards the end of our session. Monday was a busy day of lessons and goodbyes and finding some gender-neutral shoes for the new addition. I wasn’t able to get the made-in-Romania shoes delivered in time, so I bought some Reebok trainers with a friendly face drawn on the tongue; the woman at the checkout asked me if they were for a cat. And then I was off.

I had tons of time for my flight, but needed it all. When your previous flight was in a different epoch, expect the unexpected. I wore a mask to be on the safe side, mainly because of my heavily pregnant sister-in-law. At the airport I met a Frenchman in his seventies who had arrived too early and was in a state of anxiety and confusion. I empathised with him; the airport was full of information that was out of date or misleading or only partially correct. Signs abounded pointing to destinations that you could fly to from Timișoara ten years ago, which might as well have been the Eocene. Timișoara still has one of those delightful split-flap displays which are a dying breed. Whenever a flight takes off or lands, everything has to move up a row, and there’s something poetic about watching all those letters and digits flickety-flack into place every few minutes. If nothing else, the flick-flack noise attracts one’s attention like no video board ever could, unless it is designed to mimic the sound. (In Milan I saw a video board that did just that.) Anyway, I tried to help the Frenchman, apologising for my broken French. Once through security (and yes, I’m almost guaranteed a pat-down of some sort) we all had to stand on the staircase for what seemed like hours. I realised I’d become almost allergic to crowds.

We were delayed by an hour or so, but the flight itself was uneventful, and soon I was in the afternoon heat of Bergamo. I eventually gave up on finding a bus to my B&B on the outskirts of the city, and took an expensive (by my standards) taxi instead. I spoke some simple Italian with the taxi driver, making four languages for the day. (There was no point speaking Italian with virtually anyone else. In that part of northern Italy, it seemed anyone under fifty had more than a decent command of English.) The woman at the B&B was very pleasant. The place was like a farmhouse on the edge of the countryside, and it was popular with cyclists. I slept well but still felt tired the next morning. I had a hearty breakfast (I always appreciate that second B), called my parents, sent my brother a birthday message for his 41st, then made it up the hill to the very picturesque old town. I walked up the famous bell tower, eschewing the lift, making sure I’d reach the top just before the half-hour bell tolled. However, on reaching the top I’d forgotten all about that (this wasn’t the last time on my trip that I felt my age) and I got quite a shock two minutes later. Bonngg!! For a couple of hours I wandered around the old town, or high town as it was otherwise known, grabbing the odd coffee and gelato. I was grateful that it wasn’t so hot. I walked into the new town but found surprisingly little of interest there, so then I trekked back to the B&B.


The next morning after another breakfast where I had the works, I checked out of my relaxing accommodation and got a free bus ride to the city centre because I couldn’t figure out how to pay. I read my book – Anxious People by Fredrik Backman – by the fountains near the railway station until the dot of twelve when sprinklers for the plants suddenly came on and got me soaked. I soon dried off, and I was back on the bus to the airport. Bergamo Airport is modern and surprisingly big, considering the small size of the city. Evidently they’ve turned Bergamo into a hub of sorts. There were automated Covid-hangover toilets that barred you from entering at a certain level of occupancy. I thought I had ages before boarding, but I had an unexpectedly long hike to reach my gate. Two hours later I landed at Stansted, where my brother and sister-in-law picked me up in her almost-new Mazda, which must be a work car. (I panicked initially because we couldn’t find each other and every minute was precious. The parking fee – already exorbitant – became stratospheric after 15 minutes.) It was a real pleasure to see them again, and in three hours on the M-something and the A-something I was at their new house just outside Poole. My brother had changed – mellowed – since I saw him previously. I gave them the trainers which they put in the baby room next to the cot and pram and car seat and who knows what else.

International travel - Life :) - Politics

Getting away

June 30, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just booked some flights. Four of them, in fact. It wasn’t a simple process. “Oops, something went wrong.” Important yellow buttons disappeared from my screen at will. There were endless pop-ups asking me to tack on this or that, and I wasn’t allowed to just ignore them. Sometimes a circle just went round and round and round and never did anything. After booking Ryanair flights from Timișoara to Bergamo and then on to Stansted, I’d planned to return directly to Romania with Wizz Air, but it was cheaper to go back via Italy with Ryanair. If I’d realised that, I’d have booked two return flights rather than four one-way ones and cut out some hassle, even if there’s no price difference. So I’ve got northern Italy to look forward to, not just the UK (where I’m likely to get caught up in airport hell). I’m flying out on 26th July and coming back on 9th August. My brother will have some time off work then, and hopefully I can also see my friend in Birmingham.

Ferdinand Marcos Junior has been elected as president of the Philippines, replacing the tyrant Rodrigo Duterte. How could the son of a dictator, who was removed in a revolution, get elected in a landslide? As the reporter explained on the news this morning, it’s a combination of endless horseshit being pumped out on social media, and the country’s shockingly low education level. A deadly concoction, literally.

There was a time when I’d grab the old small TV with the bunny-ears aerial from my room and take it downstairs so I could watch Wimbledon on two channels at the same time. It was the most important thing going on in my life, and I wasn’t even involved. Now it’s just there, going on in the background. There have been some great matches already, but for whatever reason I can’t quite get into it.

My two teenage students had just got the results of their “national evaluation” Romanian and maths exams when I saw them yesterday. One of them got an average of 9.4 out of 10. The other got 9.95 in maths, but seemed almost dumbstruck to only get 8.3 in Romanian, and has already lodged an official appeal. They’re the “haves” of the Romanian education system, and are under pressure to succeed, to go to the best liceu, from their parents and the society in which they live. It would be interesting to meet some of the have-nots.

One of my new adult students has just started a job at Ikea, after a long stint with Renault. Last time he read out Ikea’s mission statement to me. “To create a better everyday life for the many people.” Sorry, what? For the many people? Is that supposed to be English? How did that ever get past the first round? Type “for the many people” into Google, and all I get is Ikea.

I’m trying not to melt today.