As my work hours are getting longer again, my posts are getting shorter.
This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle in Woodbury (the ones who visited me in Timișoara). She had a lot to say; he didn’t. She said they’ll be putting their property on the market. Time to pull the plug. Though with my uncle starting to lose his memory, I wonder how much a totally alien home might mess him up.
Today marks the eighth anniversary of my arrival in Romania. I’ve spent 18% of my life here. Yesterday I met Mark in town. We talked about a lot of teaching, mostly. But also his three children. And how much we both still like Timișoara. If only it wasn’t so hot in summer, this place would be just about perfect for me.
This was from Saturday. I still haven’t been invited to a Romanian wedding. The more I hear about them (400 guests? Lasting three days?) the more grateful I am.
A statue of Adi Bărar, guitarist for Timișoara band Cargo. It was put up just three weeks ago. Bărar died in 2021 after getting Covid.
Glory to God. Read the Bible every day. In Recaș yesterday.
This dog just wouldn’t budge, no matter what. I even took a video of cars swerving around it. At Bazoșu Nou yesterday.
Musafiri means visitors. It’s a word imported into Romanian from Turkish, just like dușman (enemy), macara (a crane that you lift things with), mușama (oilcloth), and hundreds of others. And in a pretty rare event, I actually had some musafiri last weekend.
At 6:30 pm on Saturday, after a solid day of lessons, my university friend (let’s call him Jason) arrived in a campervan with his girlfriend (let’s call her Marianne) and her parents. They (or specifically her father) had driven all the way from Paris, stopping in Normandy, Germany, Austria and Hungary on the way. They came up to my flat. We chatted and eventually ate (I was getting hungry). I spoke mostly English, peppered with some French. Marianne speaks English at a native level, while her parents speak just enough to get by. Her parents’ intrepid travels made for some interesting conversation. They drove to Iran in 2019, got stuck in Turkey during the early stages of Covid, and even took the van to Russia after the war started in 2022. The mind boggles. I put Jason and Marianne up in my larger bedroom, I slept in the small one, and Marianne’s parents slept in the van in the car park.
Marianne, only 33, was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. With all her treatment, she understandably gets tired easily, so we took things pretty slowly. We made a late start the next morning, taking the tram into the centre of town, arriving at the Orthodox cathedral while Sunday mass (which takes hours) was still in full swing. The four of them found this a quite incredible sight, as I did myself the first time. (As I lived practically right by the cathedral, I quickly got used to it.) Marianne wanted to check out all the souvenir shops. Her other big thing was cats. She’s a cat obsessive. Timișoara is awash with cats, so she was in heaven – my apartment block’s cat-heavy car park was a rich source of photo opportunities.
We went to Porto Arte, the bar and restaurant by the river. The weather was excellent and the bar was doing a good trade – the bell, which rang every time a new food order came in, was going incessantly. From there we walked through the three main squares. They were impressed by the architecture. Jason and Marianne said the city centre was much cleaner than Birmingham’s – I found this comment rather alarming. Birmingham, like so many other British cities, is in a right mess. We went to the Bastion which had a newish tourist office that was informative even for me – it showcased the attractions of Timiș as a whole, not just the city. We sat in a nearby bar, inside to get out of the heat. (Marianne seemed quite sensitive to it. It’s just as well she didn’t come a month earlier.) We took the tram home. Marianne lay on the bed while Jason and I chatted. We covered some interesting subjects, such as the standard of maths teaching.
At around 7:30 we made our way to the Timișoreana beer factory, just a few minutes’ walk from my place. Unlike the previous two times I’d been there, all the action was in the outside area. I suppose it had been winter the other times. It was somebody’s 50th birthday, so we were treated to a rather loud rendition of De Ziua Ta by the Romanian band 3 Sud Est. There was also, surprise surprise, a cat among the tables. We ate and drank. Marianne’s parents struck up conversation with anybody and everybody they could find. Then a card game came out. A trick-taking game like euchre, this game used a special pack with pirate and mermaid cards as well as numbered cards of various coloured suits. There were no teams; the five of us played individually. The game’s big thing was that rather than trying to win as many tricks as possible, you had to predict how many you would win after seeing your hand, then try and hit that exact number. What’s more, players bid simultaneously. The game progresses over ten deals (only one card per player in the first round, increasing by one with each round). I was nowhere near winning, but it was an interesting game nonetheless.
Jason and Marianne parted ways from her parents, who were up early the next morning for the next leg of their van trip. Jason and Marianne rose rather later, and luckily I had no lessons until 1pm. I took them to the train station and said goodbye. They were heading to Budapest, then on to Croatia where they would finally fly back to Birmingham. Throughout the afternoon and evening (I had five lessons, finishing at 9:30), Jason updated me on their delays. The train was almost two hours late leaving Timișoara, then they had another hold-up at the border. It was close to midnight when they got to Budapest.
Having visitors seemed to make me feel better. It made me tidy this place up, for one thing, and added a more general sense of purpose to life for that short period. Since then it’s been a tiring few days. Right now we’re nudging 30 degrees – very warm for late September.
Some big news: Mum and Dad have booked their flights to Europe. They’re flying to Munich and then to Timișoara; they’ll arrive on (I think) 8th May. They’ll maybe spend two weeks with me before heading to the UK.
The US election is just 39 days away. The polls (for what they’re worth) are close. Some people have already voted; early voting started last week. The stakes are extremely high.
I said last time that seasons in Romania change with a sudden bam!, and what a bam! this has been. Its real name is Cyclone Boris (yes, these things have names now) which has dumped months of rain on us in a few days. In the county of Galați in the east, flooding has claimed six lives. I wonder how many Romanians died from the heat waves that immediately preceded all of this. Climate change is real. On a personal note, I haven’t minded the deluge. I feel I’m built to handle it, in a way I’m simply not with the extreme heat. Yesterday I met Mark in town. I got there early. Piața Victoriei was almost deserted, lockdown-like, so I could take in the architecture without worrying about bumping into people. We ate at Berăria 700. Obviously we didn’t sit outside as we normally would. Inside means you’re in part of the old fortress, which has a real cosy feel about it.
In town yesterday afternoon
Work is getting back to normal, though it’s a different normal. So many kids now. They all want (or their parents want, let’s face it) lessons just after the school day finishes and it’s impossible to accommodate everybody.
Part of a lesson on Friday
Last week I heard some dreadful news. A 17-year-old student of mine (we started when he was just 11) has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. His mother messaged me with the news. His English is excellent; he’s come on in giant leaps in the six years I’ve spent with him. He wanted to be a pilot. We often discussed planes, routes, accidents and incidents. Sometimes I’d talk about planes that I flew on as a kid, such as the three-engined DC-10. This diagnosis has surely scuppered his plans. For someone so young (and he had an old head on young shoulders) it’s so sad.
I saw snippets of last week’s presidential debate. Kamala Harris performed very well. She knew what buttons to press. The “rally size” button was particularly effective. She made Trump seem even more egotistical and unhinged than usual. Trump went on about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating cats and dogs. That was the clip played around the world. What didn’t get so much airtime was his admiration of Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. I doubt many in the US would even have known who Orbán was. But it certainly got some attention here in Romania. The prospect of Trump getting back in again is scary as hell. Harris needs to get herself out there more. More rallies, more interviews. She’s shown she can perform. Just seven weeks to go now. (I’ve just seen that apparently there was another attempt on Trump’s life while he was playing golf, though it didn’t get nearly as far as in July.)
Yesterday I saw my nephew on a WhatsApp video call with my brother. It was his second birthday. There were balloons and streamers and all sorts. Mum and Dad are now serious about a trip to Europe, probably next May. So that’s good.
A bit more positivity from New Zealand this morning. I got to see my nephew who is a very bright little boy indeed. He loves playing with toy cars, especially old British ones like Morgans, apparently. Then Dad said, “We’d better get onto booking our trip as soon as they’re gone,” meaning a trip to Europe. If they’re serious about ever seeing their younger son and grandson again, they don’t have a lot of choice. Dad’s been ill for too long for it to be a virus, so he’s been put on antibiotics. Mum, who I’m sure is greatly enjoying spending time with her grandson despite the stress, seemed to like my pictures of Slovenia.
After our Skype chat, and before my four lessons, I met Dorothy in town. We talked about how Romania is, slowly but surely, heading in the right direction. Every week I see a building being renovated or a bike rack conveniently added or an intersection modified to make it that little bit safer. Romania’s economy has grown substantially in the time I’ve been here. People are earning more in real terms. Unlike some of its neighbours, Romania has become considerably more stable. It’s still very imperfect – those imperfections really came to the fore during Covid – and I worry that Romania’s urge to modernise will compromise its natural and man-made beauty, but there are reasons to be optimistic.
I’m off to Vienna in under 36 hours. I’ll have three passengers, one of whom I’ve never met in my life. I have no idea how this will all pan out. I’ll reveal all in my next post.
Update: One thing that hasn’t noticeably improved since 2016 is Romania’s level of customer service. This morning I waited 45 minutes to withdraw some euros from my bank account. The woman at the desk (when I finally got there) must have had some pretty rigorous training. Never look at the customer or change your facial expression in any way. If the customer asks a question, remain silent. If he or she repeats the question, respond in an exasperated tone but whatever you do, never fully answer it. Consult your phone five times per minute and your smart watch ten times per minute.
The US Open is under way. I read that Birmingham-born Dan Evans came through the longest match in tournament history in the first round, beating 23rd-seeded Karen Khachanov in 5 hours and 35 minutes. Incredibly he was 4-0 down in the fifth set, but then won six games on the spin. He’s now a 34-year-old veteran; I saw him in Auckland when he was still a teenager. At only five foot nine, he’s struck me as a cross between Lleyton Hewitt and a typical British lad who never stops being a lad. A few years back he got a one-year ban for taking cocaine.
Yesterday was my birthday, after which I felt more clueless than ever. It started off normally, with Matei – his maths exams imminent – tapping away furiously on his Casio to solve the diabolical enigma of ten divided by four. It carried on in pretty standard fashion too as I had 3½ hours of English with the brother-and-sister partnership. Then I cycled to Parcul Rozelor where I sat for a while before playing tennis with Florin. I didn’t play well, with the exception of my defence which kept me in it. Once again I had the wobbles, especially on serve. I won the first set 6-3, a score that flattered me. In the ninth game I led 0-40 and eventually won it on my third attempt following the longest rally of the day – a point I was well out of at one stage. I was 3-2 up in the second set when time ran out.
Then it was off to the riverside bar with Florin who talked to me (or at me) for the duration of the walk. A drink or two and a bite to eat, then home. That’s what I’d gathered would happen and what I’d mentally budgeted for. There were rather more friends and friends-of-friends than usual, and we sat inside rather than outside, but that was no cause for alarm. Someone – I can’t remember who – gave me a bottle of wine for my birthday, the second I’d received that day. Then small bottles of homemade țuică (plum brandy) and cognac and vișinată (cherry liqueur) started appearing, and out came shot glasses. Always good to try this stuff. Apart from the shots I had a single beer, and sarmale and mămăligă to eat. With my batteries just about dead and half the people already gone (some had started while we were playing tennis), I decided to head home. Right, can I pay? After some confusion over who and how to pay, a figure of 300 was mentioned. Sorry, what?! That happened to be exactly what I’d earned from my lessons that day. I ended up paying just 70 lei. Then Florin spent several minutes explaining there had been some cultural misunderstanding, as he put it, and when I said that all I’d expected was a beer and some basic food, he said “that isn’t how it works in Romania”. Well last weekend it was, so what do I know?
Baffled, I cycled home. I watched some snooker – last year’s champion Luca Brecel lost 10-9 to David Gilbert after being 9-6 up and twice having the table at his mercy. I didn’t sleep much with all that “business” going around in my head. Plus I had a hangover, my first in several years. I’d planned to go on a road trip today, and eventually did in the afternoon. I visited Charlottenburg, a village settled by Germans (as the name would suggest) in the 18th century. The dwellings are all in a circle, making the place more striking from the air than the ground. From there it was a short hop to Buzad where Dorothy has her house. I can see why – it’s extremely beautiful. That patch is hillier than most of the surrounding area, making it more picturesque. Sadly it has seen a huge drop-off in population like so much of rural Romania; cats, dogs and domestic birds must outnumber humans there in 2024. Driving on those potholed roads was rather taxing given the fug that I was in, though negotiating the city and its sneaky one-way system was far worse.
I was in contact with Florin’s wife today. I said I’d pop over and give her some money to make up for the “misunderstanding”. She then said it had nothing to do with money, so I don’t even understand what it is I don’t understand. Times like these make me think I must be autistic. She was lovely though, and put the blame for whatever it was squarely on Domnul Sfâra, the 89-year-old man (!) whom I used to play tennis with. “It was all his idea, and he didn’t explain anything.” I didn’t feel comfortable blaming him – if by some miracle I make it to more than twice my current age, I very much doubt I’ll even have ideas, let alone be able to articulate them.
Our Romanian teacher sent us a long film showcasing “legends” that arose during the so-called Epoca de Aur, or golden age, meaning the final years of communism. (It was anything but golden.) It was a good watch. I was particularly amused by the story of Ceaușescu’s picture in a major newspaper in which he appeared alongside the (taller) French president. The photo of Ceaușescu was edited at the last minute, putting a hat on his head to give him some extra inches and make him look more statesmanlike. Unfortunately the editor forgot about the hat in his hand.
A word on my brother’s graduation. Hats off (!) to the announcer who read out a hundred or more multi-barrelled African names with hardly a stumble, before alighting on my brother’s group. He must have practised. It reminded me of a radio ad from 2000 where someone had to say the names of the Samoan rugby team. Have a break, have a Kit-Kat. Fifteen Samoan names would have been a breeze compared to what this guy had to contend with.
Birmingham drew 0-0 at basement-dwelling Rotherham yesterday in a match that was interrupted for half an hour by a medical emergency in the stands. Because Sheffield Wednesday won during my road trip today, Blues are now in a precarious position, back in the bottom three with only two games left to play.
13/4/24: Domnul Sfâra, Florin, and a plate of spratA flashback to the 70s for those who remember themCharlottenburgSpot the catA totem-pole-like “have a safe trip” sign on leaving Buzad, and my Peugeot with its pommy plate.
Good news – my brother and his family are going to New Zealand in August for three-and-a-bit weeks. They’ll come back just before my nephew turns two and the fare whops up. I spoke to my sister-in-law about it on Friday, just after they’d booked the trip. (She’d had to get the green light from her boss.) She was apprehensive about flying so far with her son, a placid little chappy though he is. Will the trauma of it all mess him up? I was roughly the same age as him when Mum took me – and my tiny brother – to New Zealand in 1982. The mind boggles. My parents are paying for the trip (“well I hope so,” my brother said, “because we can’t afford it”). That’s what living in the UK in 2024 with a sodding great mortgage does to you. Mum made the trip in ’82 (a similar cost in real terms) without batting a financial eyelid. They were living – pretty much – on just the unpredictable income of my father. Crazy, isn’t it?
They should have a nice time. The house will – I hope! – be finished, so Mum won’t be worn out and highly strung and miserable (let’s be honest) like she was when I was there. At any rate, even if she was under stress, she’d take great pains not to show it, unlike with me. I get the real deal. They’ll see a lot of Mum and Dad – if my parents had come to the UK, that might not have been the case – and there will be happy times as the little one is passed around various aunts and uncles.
A fairly standard week of lessons for me. On Saturday I had eight hours, including four of maths. With both my maths students it was the same story. Determine what the problem is and how to solve it, then do your calculations, not the other way round! There needs to be a maths equivalent of “aviate, navigate, communicate”. And jeez, when you’re 15 years old, dividing 35 by 7 doesn’t require a calculator. I wish someone would invent the shockulator, a calculator that administers electric shocks that increase in voltage the easier it gets to do the problem in your head.
On Wednesday I saw the ENT specialist again. We did the whole thing in Romanian this time. He put that probe up my nostrils. Stop flinching! Stop tensing up! Well I’m trying, but it bloody hurts! After then sucking the wax out from my ears (plenty of it), he gave me a prescription for some nasal spray that will last me two months, if that. I’ll probably wait until the long hot summer when I’ll need it the most.
Yesterday I went a different way on my bike. The wind made it slow going. I rode past the factories, some still in operation, others not, to Moșnița Nouă. When I went there six years ago for a lesson it was a village. Not any more. I wouldn’t want to live there.
Muzicorama – the nightly music programme on local radio – sadly finished last September, not that I got many chances to listen to it. The host, Bogdan Puriș, still does his show on a Sunday morning, and yesterday there was certainly an eclectic line-up. Four consecutive songs (saved on my Shazam) were Hey Matthew by Karel Fialka (1987), Bats by the Scary Bitches (2009) (because the lyrics mention Transylvania?), Come Down Jesus by José Feliciano (1971), and This Wheel’s On Fire by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity (1968).
Lately I’ve been listening – a lot – to David Bowie’s 2002 album Heathen.
I’ve just read that Kelvin Kiptum, marathon world record holder (2:00:35) died in a car crash yesterday. The Kenyan was only 24. At such a young age for a marathon runner, he would have had many chances to go under two hours. Tragic news.
Spumotim, which I think is still up and running. They make polyurethane foam products. (Spumă is Romanian for foam.)As much of this colossal abandoned factory as I could get in the camera lens
Mum and Dad called me again from Hampden yesterday. It was a relief to see a smile back on Mum’s dial. She’s always more relaxed down there, away from what is now (let’s not mince words) a shithole. Mum seems strangely magnetised to that dreadful place which they should stay away from as far as humanly possible until the building work is completed.
Yesterday Dorothy messaged me to say there was a vinyl and book sale on at Scârț. Sounded good. Sale wasn’t quite the right word though – some of the LPs were really quite pricey. I picked up five second-hand records for a total of 300 lei (just over NZ$100 or £50): Selling England By the Pound by Genesis, Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel, 18 by Chicago, Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre, and Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits album. That’s a start; I just need an actual record player now. Oh, and I bought one book for 5 lei: H. W. Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, in Romanian.
Four English lessons today. I started at 8am with my Bucharest-based online student – I found out today that he’s only two months older than me – who wanted help with adverbs of manner and uncountable nouns, among other things. I was in contact with the east of Romania again for my second session, this time with a 35-year-old woman. She said that if her six-year-old son (her only child) doesn’t get what he wants for Christmas, he’ll make his disappointment very obvious. He’s still very little, I said, but by twelve he’ll have learnt to hide it. You can’t always get what you want. She said, no, he won’t do that when he’s twelve because I’ll have told him to fight for what he wants. If he doesn’t like something, even a glass of juice, I want him to make his feelings clear. I still remember at seven or eight telling a family friend that I didn’t like some juice – probably something Ribena-like – and wouldn’t drink it. My grandmother told me I was already too big to act in that way, and I think she was right. Little Vlad (I don’t think that’s his name) has the pleasure of going to intensive after-school classes, which include nine hours of English lessons a week. Right Vlad, I’m going to make you work stupidly hard, and in return you get to be total dick. That’s the modern way, it seems. She earns well by working extremely hard at an investment bank, doing something that I would find utterly pointless.
In between my first two English sessions was the Romanian lesson, which was mostly spent discussing the downfall of Ceaușescu during an unseasonably warm few days in the lead-up to Christmas 1989. Our teacher was 20 at the time; I would have guessed several years younger. Yesterday the song Timișoara, produced by Pro-Musica in the wake of the Revolution, came on the local radio. It starts with a few bars from the Romanian national anthem and turns into something spine-tinglingly powerful. I recommend that you watch the video. My third English lesson was with a 17-year-old girl who came to my place. We went through some B2 Cambridge papers. I struggled to get her to write anything. In the end she wrote about her “happy place”, the mall, but didn’t even say much about that. My final lesson was the twins who live near Piața Verde. Because it was our last meeting of the year we had an extended Bananagrams session, which is always fun.
The World Championship darts. It’s back on again. Though the game is skin-deep compared to the multi-layered wonders of snooker, this tournament can be worth a watch because it’s the pinnacle of the sport. If you can get past the tedious football-style chants, you find an event filled with personality and drama. I’m a big fan of the format which, like in snooker, is a straight knockout and calls for matches of increasing length as the rounds progress. In the pre-Christmas phase, matches are best of five sets. The top players only need one win, and anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, to book their place in the post-turkey stages. Yesterday I saw a great game involving the Canadian player Matt Campbell. He was two sets up and had multiple opportunities to win the match in three. His Filipino opponent Lourence Ilagan took advantage of his reprieve to tie the match at 2-2, only for Campbell to storm through the fifth in some style. After Christmas the matches are best of seven, and in the new year they get longer still, culminating in a best-of-13-set final. Update: I’ve just seen Man-Lok Leung of Hong Kong (he goes by Hugo) win an absolute belter of a game against Dutchman Gian van Veen, coming from two sets down – and missing no end of chances – to win 3-2 in a joyous finale. He fired a whopping eleven 180s and was a very popular winner. A Kiwi by the name of Haupai Puha – he lives in Wellington – is on next, but it’s bedtime for me.
I’ve just spoken to all the family. First I Skyped Mum and Dad. Mum had that pissed-off look. I didn’t entirely blame her. While she’d been painting the ceiling, Dad had been watching YouTube videos about Covid vaccines. The vaccines were useless according to the latest video he’d watched. “He’s a very creditable, highly qualified scientist.” Sure, he’s got a list of qualifications as long as your arm, but that doesn’t mean what he’s saying is true. At all. In fact you see people weaponising their qualifications all the damn time. YouTube is great if you want to find good music. Likewise if you want to know how to make sarmale or put up bookshelves or even solve quadratic equations. For “information” about Covid vaccines and treatments though, you should probably give it a pass. There’s a lot of nuance about the Covid vaccines. Maybe they were pushed out too soon. Some vaccines were clearly better than others. (Um, the Chinese one, anybody?) Side effects were real, to the point that maybe for a fit young person it was just about worth chancing their arm on getting the virus, from an entirely selfish perspective. The efficacy of booster jabs – fourth, fifth and beyond – is debatable. But to say that the vaccines were a waste of time is quite clearly ridiculous, when all the data points to vaccination massively reducing mortality. The more shocking a YouTube video is, the more eyeballs it gets, and that’s pretty much the story. Dad wants me to watch this latest (long) video, and I suppose I’ll have to, just to humour him.
After Mum and Dad, I spoke to my brother. He, his wife, and his son have been under the weather lately. The little chappy has had a bout of scarlet fever, which sounds like something from the Middle Ages. They’re almost recovered now though. My brother is going to St Ives in the next few days. It seems Mum and Dad have now considered paying for them all to come out to New Zealand (maybe after a comment I made, who knows) – that would be fantastic if it happened.
Yesterday I had four lessons – three in Dumbrăvița, then an online session with the chap in London. My first session was maths with Matei. He’d been learning some basic stats and had no problems that I could see. At the end of the session, as I’ve done the last few weeks, I gave him a few short multiple-choice questions on a variety of topics, mainly to get his mathematical brain working. They’re designed to be answered in under a minute. One of them was this:
He stared at it for a good five minutes, maybe more. He eliminated A (“it can’t be smaller than 36”) and D (“too big”), but was unable to choose between B and C. The question clearly says (perhaps unfairly) that you can’t use a calculator, though I don’t think it would have helped him. If I was tackling this question, I’d immediately see that 75% is three-quarters. If 36 is three-quarters of our number, then 12 is a quarter, so I’d just add on 12 (the remaining quarter we need) to get the answer. It would take me ten seconds or so, without any recourse to algebra. Just for a laugh, I gave Mum that question on our Skype call this morning, without the four options. She got the answer impressively quickly, using the exact same method that I did. As soon as I read out the question, Dad blurted out, “is it a hundred?”. Ha! But how do I teach the method that Mum and I use? Between us we’ve been fiddling with numbers for over a century, and in that time we’ve developed all kinds of hard-to-teach tricks and time-savers that we use without even thinking about them.
After Matei I had English with Octavian. We looked at yet more poems by Ted Hughes, such as The Thought-Fox, a poem about writing a poem. By the time he does his IGCSE in the summer, he’ll be beyond sick of Ted Hughes’ poems. I wish I could focus on his pronunciation, which could be greatly improved, rather than poetry which while interesting is of far less long-term benefit. Then came his little sister – after last week’s horse-heavy session, this time I gave her loads of sheets with dinosaurs. Next time she wants stuff on Christmas. When I got home I had my online session – we went through two articles, one on AI, the other on consumerism.
Friday was Romania’s national day, and a much warmer day than we’ve had of late. I met Dorothy in the centre of town – my old stomping ground – and we watched the parade of military and emergency vehicles. Unlike previous parades, this one was disappointingly short. When I sent my brother the pictures of the vast crowds, he likened it to Red Square victory parades. In truth there was little of that kind of vibe, but in Ceaușescu’s time they were just like what you saw in Moscow, or what you see now in North Korea. When the parade was over, I suggested to Dorothy that we walk through Central Park as I did countless times when I lived there. We walked by the busts of the great and the good of Timișoara – all men – and read some of the inscriptions. Some of them were ex-mayors. Many of them were writers. One was Béla Bartók, the famous Hungarian composer, who had links to Timișoara. When we reached Ioachim Miloia’s bust, I noted that he was my age now when he died. Look what he accomplished in that short time!
An art-history guru, a library founder, a writer on all matters related to local history, and painter who helped to restore numerous churches in Timișoara and its environs. And then look at me! Wouldn’t it be nice to say I’d accomplished something? Dorothy was taken aback by my comment, and I explained that I’d probably feel quite different if I had a family. My biggest accomplishment is, without a doubt, coming to Romania and making a life for myself here (and having a job where I help people, at least in a small way). In early 2015, a few months before I started this blog, I had the realisation that nothing would happen unless I did something drastic. Visiting the US that year – seeing the big wide world out there – gave me the impetus to actually do it.
Here are some pictures from the parade. The main square is being done up nicely.
Lots of biking this weekend. This morning I met Mark at his place in Dumbrăvița and we cycled to the (relatively) nearby village of Covaci, then into the countryside, through fields of wheat and barley and rapeseed (though that had been harvested). As I realised we were at the highest point of a câmpie, a plain basically, I was reminded of Haddenham, a large village in Cambridgeshire and perhaps the highest point in that very flat county. (The Blossoms and Bygones open day held every May in Haddenham was really quite wonderful. The vintage cars, the traction engines, seeing horses being shod, trips on horse-drawn carts, going up the church tower and water tower, and best of all, cheap cakes and biscuits. This event seemed to run out of steam around the turn of the century, and Wikipedia tells me that it finished for good in 2013.) We saw two foxes and a hare (hares can run at around twice the speed us pathetic humans can) as well as several storks, and the puddles (of which there were many) were teeming with froglets. And, as always in Romania, so many insects. My old city bike, as opposed to Mark’s newish hybrid bike, coped OK with the narrow dirt tracks. Even on the paved roads there was gloriously little traffic; it was great to be away from the noise of people and their machines. We came back via another pleasant village named Cerneteaz (pronounced “chair-net-yazz“, or close to that; click for a late-eighties flashback) where we had a packed lunch. Traditional Romanian music was playing; we both agreed that we quite liked it.
Made from mud and glass bottles, it’s supposed to be like this
Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei, who had just got a D grade in a test at school. That disappointing result was little to do with him and a lot to do with his teacher who hadn’t really done her job properly. Her explanations had clearly been superficial, so no wonder when she dumped a demanding test on her pupils, they were mostly at sea. Matei showed me the unprofessional-looking test which had been cobbled together from at least four different past papers. The worst part was the marking scheme. Not every mark on every past paper is worth the same. One two-hour paper might carry 100 marks; another two-hour paper which has just as much stuff in it might only have 60 marks. If you’re going to just smoosh different papers together, you have to adjust the marks up and down accordingly. You’d think a maths teacher might have figured that out. After seeing Matei I met Mark at a restaurant called Astur, just off the main street of Dumbrăvița. Unusually there was a large, nicely mown beer-garden-style outdoor area. I was hungry so I had a carbonara and a beer as we sat in the full glare of the sun. (The tops of my legs certainly caught it.) As we were about to leave, my brother surprisingly called me and showed me my nephew, now closing in on nine months old and a different person from the previous time I’d seen him. He’d just uttered his first word: cat. He and the cat are best mates; they spend many hours in close proximity. It was a bit awkward to talk, so I called my brother back in the evening after tennis.
Mark and I soon parted ways, and I cycled to Giarmata Vii to look at yet another Dacia, this time a bright blue one from 2005. It was going for 1500 euros. It had one or two small spots of rust, and only had two weeks left on its ITP (MOT in the UK, or WOF in New Zealand). The owner took me for a ride around the village, and it seemed fine. I don’t know what to do. On Tuesday I looked at another car that seemed fine on the surface, but I found out that it had been in a crash that damaged both the right doors and the pillar and cost a lot to repair. At this rate, buying a car is looking as hard as buying a flat was. (I still have awful flashbacks to that meeting in the lawyer’s office on 5/5/22. My stress levels were off the scale.)
On Friday night I had my lesson with the guy who lives in London. He’d recently been to Alton Towers. I went there twice, in 1999 and 2003. The more famous rides, such as Nemesis, and Oblivion which was brand new in ’99, are still running. He’d also been back to Romania with his family to attend a wedding. They stayed in a hotel which he’d booked on booking.com. The hotel was dire and he duly left a one-star review. The hotel owners then tracked him down, found where he works in the UK, and gave his company a one-star review. What bastards. After he read articles about Boris Johnson and Philip Schofield, he said he’d read The Noonday Demon, a 2001 book about depression that I’d been meaning to get hold of. He said his wife suffers from depression but is denial of it. We had a very interesting conversation about the subject, in particular the number of people who are affected indirectly.
Tennis. I played last night for the first time in two weeks. I played with the teenage girl; her father and 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra were on the other side. We won 6-1, 7-6 (7-5). The local tradition of swapping the side you receive from with your partner every second game is weird and against the rules of tennis, and gets very confusing during a tie-break. Our first set point at 6-3 in the tie-break was the most incredible rally I’ve been involved in for some time; the fact that a near-nonagenarian was also involved made in even more remarkable.
It’s 24 degrees as I write this – a perfect temperature. Soon we’ll have the strawberries and cherries and big juicy tomatoes and I’ll hardly have to visit the supermarket. Can’t wait.
First thing yesterday morning I worked on my Romanian. I must do this regularly. We’ve had two lessons so far using an intermediate textbook and they’ve been great, but as I tell my English students, it’s what you do outside your lessons that really counts. Learning all the little fiddly bits that you have to weave into your expressions to say who did what to whom is a real challenge to me, probably because of how my brain works. I can remember actual words because they have a shape to them. For instance the word morman came up in our last session. It means a big physical heap of something, and was a new word for me. There are many ways of making a visual or sound-based connection between the word and its meaning: mormânt means “grave” (as in a burial place) in Romanian, there’s Mormon, there’s mammon, there’s marmot, there’s moșmoană (a brown Romanian fruit that you see here in December) and so on. The possibilities are just about endless. But with these little bitty bits, there’s nothing to grab hold of. It’s a bit like the time I tried to learn Chinese – everything there is shapeless utterances – or the 1300-odd three-letter Scrabble words which turned my brain into mush, even though I had an easier time with the longer words. When it comes to Romanian, I’ve just got to keep at it, not shy away from using the fiddly stuff in speaking, and accept that I’ll make mistakes.
After making up a bunch of Romanian sentences, I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița. He got 81% on the homework I set him the previous week, and that made me happy because I don’t exactly make it easy for him. At one point I explained the different sets of numbers – natural numbers, integers, rationals, and reals – and he wanted to know if pi being irrational meant that you’d eventually get a million ones in a row or, if you convert numbers into colours, the Mona Lisa. I love those questions. I told him that no, pi being irrational doesn’t necessarily imply that, but most people think you will indeed get what he suggests, though there’s no proof as yet.
When the maths was over I had a bite to eat, then a more nondescript two-hour English lesson. Then I met up with Mark, and his two dogs, on the edge of the wood near his home. It’s amazing how much the wood teems with life considering its closeness to a main road. We saw two hawks swooping, you could hear a cuckoo in the distance (you could almost never do that in the UK), and there was the constant satisfying croak of frogs. We stopped for a beer at the nearby bar where we chatted about how cool Romania is, and then I cycled home.
I’ve been thinking about why I chose Romania to live. Some of it was the language. Băieții? What madness is that? I need to immerse myself in it. Now! But a lot of it was the undeveloped nature of Romania relative to other options I might have had, for instance Poland. I knew that Romania would be more raw, it would be rustier and flakier, the markets would be more pungent, the cobblestones would be super cobbley, my bike trips would be bouncy. Romania would engage my senses more than other countries I might have settled in; it would much better for my mental health than somewhere all done up and pristine. And precisely because it was less developed, I’d be almost the only native English teacher here so I could teach how I wanted. I could be totally in charge. My only real disappointment has been how little I’ve managed to travel around the country, and that’s why I’m looking at ads for 15-year-old (or more) Skodas and Golfs and Dacias. To see the country and engage my senses further.
If I do get a car, I’ll have to go through the registration process which means a shedload of paperwork and a new set of number plates. For a small fee you can choose the three-letter combination at the end of your plate; there are 99 plates for each combination in each county, except in Bucharest where there are 999. I often find myself weaving through such delights as FUK, ASS, HIV, and DIE, sometimes all in a row. It seems anything goes here, as indeed it should. I think there are banned combinations, but if you’re willing to pay enough for, say, SEX, you can probably get it. (I did see it one time on the road.) I’ll have to think what I should get, if I don’t decide to just get a random plate. There’s no way I’ll get anything based on my name, even though I like my initials. Yesterday I saw parked car with a local plate that I hadn’t seen before: ROM. I’m sure it’s on the dodgy list because “rom” means gypsy in a load of languages. Some years ago, Romania even changed their official country code (used in the Olympics, for example) from ROM to the nonsensical French-based ROU, because they were fed up with the association with gypsies. “Rom” is still used in a lot of company names, however, and all ROM means to me is Romania, the country that has already given me so much. Heaven knows where I’d be if I hadn’t come here. If I do get a custom combination, it’s certainly on my shortlist.
When I browse cars online, I narrow my search quite substantially, but it’s amazing what comes up that fits my criteria, like a 1986 “Mr Bean” mini, advertised as such. (Mr Bean has a kind of cult following here.) The big surprise was seeing this 1962 beauty, which my brother, an off-road vehicle recognition guru, identified as a Soviet GAZ. (Apparently it’s not a GAZ – it’s Romanian-built, but based on the GAZ.) He said he’d love one. I suggested I buy it and drive it to the UK, and he could pay me back. It’s asking price is €4500, or about £4000. Honestly with how tricky it has become to fly there, that might be my best bet if I want to see my brother and his family.
Update: Some more thoughts about Romania. When I arrived, there was political turmoil: fallout from the Colectiv tragedy and all the business with Liviu Dragnea and the prison pardons which prompted huge numbers of Romanians to take to the streets during my first winter here. Some of what I’ve seen here since then is maddening. I’ll never get used to the indiscriminate dumping of rubbish everywhere. Just ugh. The low vaccine take-up cost thousands of lives and nobody seemed to care. But – touch wood – Romania is extremely safe, especially my city, and mostly the country just goes about its merry way, unlike (obviously) some of its near neighbours.
The word rom in Romanian also means rum, and they’ve taken advantage of the double meaning to name a popular patriotic rum-flavoured chocolate bar:
Here’s the petrol station near me that also has rom in its name:
To illustrate what I was saying about those number plates, this was outside the tennis courts this evening:
And here’s a much nicer picture of the Bega this evening:
I look forward to posting more pictures when I get this car and start travelling around. Sorry this ended up being such a long post.
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