Romania

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

This is fun

November 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

I gave my first English lesson last night. The guy picked me from the hotel and we had the lesson in some kind of hall. His wife told me on the phone that he needs to know the rules. Rules? Wow, where do I start? Because I’m a native speaker, I don’t even know half the rules, and every rule seems to have just as many exceptions. I found a really good web page that gave a comprehensive guide to the different present tenses in English (I watch, I am watching, I have been watching, and so on) and figured that would be a good start. But it wasn’t. When I went through various examples of the present continuous tense in use, he was presently continuously bored. At the half-way point of the lesson I wisely ditched grammar rules and spent the next 45 minutes having a chat. He had a good handle on grammar, but as he said, he lacked the confidence (and experience) to apply the rules in conversation. That’s a pretty familiar feeling to me. His English wasn’t bad – I’d put him at a 5 on a 0-to-10 scale – but he made classic mistakes that a lot of second-language speakers make, such as overusing “many” in place of “a lot of”, or mispronouncing certain words. He also came out with a fair bit of Romanglish such as “there exists a company…”. The “highlight” was when he talked about a “dessert” in Serbia. I asked him what it was made out of. Chocolate? Cream? Strawberries? I might have to try it if and when I venture over the border. “Sand,” he said. “Many sand.” Overall the lesson, or at least the second half of it, was encouraging. Next time he wants me to go over hard-to-pronounce words like “thieves” and “south”.

Later today I’m helping a younger guy prepare for an IELTS exam, assuming he agrees to the price. Just from our phone conversation I’d put him at an 8 (at least) on my scale, so this is a bit daunting for me. What can I actually do to help him? In a year’s time, sure, but I’m totally green right now. He said that five years ago he scored 108 in a TOEFL exam (he pronounced it “one-oh-eight”, a good indication in itself that he can do the English thing). I said, wow, that’s impressive, without having the foggiest clue what the score meant. It’s out of 120, and you need 110 to get into Oxford, so 108 is actually pretty good after all. Since the exam he’s lived and worked in the US, so it’s a fair bet that he’s improved since then. Again, I wonder just what I can help him with.

Last night somebody else texted in reply to one of my ads. His or her English was better than perfect. It was quite possibly the first time in fifteen years that I received a text with a semicolon in it, and what’s more, he or she used it correctly. This person says he or she doesn’t require any further training in English, but would like to meet me and show me around the city. Cool.

I’m loving this! It is a bit frightening at times, but completely overhauling my life, which is pretty much what I’m doing here, is bound to be scary. It’s totally mad that I’m doing this, but totally awesome, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. When I walk around Timișoara I now feel much more comfortable, as if I’m part of the city, as if I’m just another of the thousands of small business owners here trying to scratch out a living. And like them, I now have my own homemade signs. As well as the Big Ben ads, I’ve made (but haven’t yet put up) ones with the word Timișoara spelt out in colour with landmarks and symbols from the UK and America: the McDonalds logo for the M, the London Eye for the O, Big Ben (again) and the Empire State Building for the two I’s, and so on. I’ve also got Donald Trump ads and Simpsons ones (where I’ll ensure that even the tear-off bits are in Simpsons-style writing) in the pipeline. That’s all appropriate now that as a species we might as well be living in an episode of the Simpsons after everything that’s happened in 2016 (more about that in my next post). But even the effort of putting up ads around the city, and trying to find the end of the sellotape in the dark, has been kind of fun, because there’s a purpose to it all.

I just hope I don’t have to leave. That would be terrible.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania - Tennis

A great opportunity

November 21, 2016 by 0 Comments

In Romania, anything UK or English language-related is incomplete without a picture of Big Ben. My Romanian–English dictionary has one. My packet of Earl Grey tea has one. Any self-respecting English teaching advert clearly needs to incorporate one. So I found a picture of Big Ben, showing one o’clock as it happens, and added the slogan “Now’s the Time” at the top. Then I wrote some blurb in English that sort of implied that I’ve been teaching for ages. I said I was after intermediate and advanced students (not that I have anything against beginner students; it’s just that they’d probably be better off with a Romanian teacher until I can get my Romanian up to speed). I found a cheap photocopy shop, printed off forty copies with those tear-off strips of paper at the bottom, and started sellotaping them to bits of Timișoara. This morning I was in the middle of putting up an ad (the 25th? 30th?) when my phone rang. It was an older bloke. I asked him what his current level of English was. He said he didn’t speak any English at all. And he wants a lesson tomorrow at 11am. Oh shit! I really will have to wing it tomorrow, won’t I? Actually I’m not thinking ‘oh shit’ at all. I’m thinking this is a wonderful opportunity. A dream come true almost. But yes, teaching somebody English from scratch will be a challenge. It’ll help me improve my Romanian if nothing else. (I know, technically Big Ben is the large bell, not the tower or any of the four clocks.) One concern I do have is about security. Putting ads up everywhere screaming that I’m from the UK does make me a bit of a target. I’m not in Wellington. I’m not in St Ives. I’ll have to be careful.

When I got off the phone this morning I thought, how cool is this? This is fun, this is exciting, and if I could get a few more takers… Man, this is what I dream about. Being my own boss, helping people, roaming around town, getting my lunch from market stalls, and at weekends taking a train to Belgrade or Budapest or Békéscsaba or wherever takes my fancy. Freedom, dammit! Freedom from having to play a role, which is always so exhausting for me. I’m a long way from achieving that freedom, but I might yet manage it. There aren’t many native English speakers in Timișoara, and for the most part they aren’t as crazy as me: they had jobs to go to when they came here. So I might not have a whole lot of competition. One thing’s for sure: I love this city and have no intention of leaving any time soon. I still have some things to sort out with immigration to ensure I don’t have to.

I see that New Zealand has its own version of Donald Trump. He goes by the name of Brian Tamaki. Two years ago he was the subject of an argument I had with my flatmate, who said he was an upstanding citizen who does a lot of good in the community, or something to that effect. I said he should be in jail.

I’ve had one eye on the final of the tennis from London. Andy Murray has just beaten Novak Djokovic in two sets, a well-deserved victory in what was a shoot-out for the year-end number one spot. Yesterday Murray played a remarkable match against Milos Raonic, winning 11-9 in the third-set tie-break. He’s had a fantastic second half of the season, winning Wimbledon and Olympic gold. Murray always impresses me in his interviews with his appreciation for the game and his recall of matches. In a way that shouldn’t impress me – tennis is, like, his job – but some players are pretty hazy when it comes to the finer points. I was supposed to be playing tennis today, not just watching it, but that might have to wait.

A train crash in India has killed 120 people. I read that almost 15,000 people die in Indian train accidents each year.

Life :) - Politics - Romania

Mum, and trying to settle in

November 12, 2016 by 0 Comments

Mum is in Central Otago on a four-day golfing trip. That gave me the opportunity to talk to Dad last night. Properly. We talked about Trump (good lord!), Brexit (again, agreeing on just about everything even though we voted differently), Leonard Cohen (Dad was quite a big fan), the restoration of Dad’s MGA, the quite magnificent swarm of starlings I saw in town the night before, my challenges here in Romania (there are many), and so on. We talked for an hour and a half and it was great. Most importantly, we talked about Mum. On the train from Deva to Sibiu I received an email from Dad in which he said that life at home was becoming uncomfortable due to Mum’s high stress levels. I replied, including a short paragraph about Mum: “When anything slightly annoying happens, Mum always has to raise the stakes and make the atmosphere unpleasant. It’s all so unnecessary. She’s completely unaware of what she’s doing. Of course if you tell her that, things get very ugly indeed.” Dad read my email out to Mum, omitting that paragraph, but she knew Dad’s password and she read it herself two days later. I phoned them from Sibiu just after she read it and she wouldn’t speak to me. Dad said he forgot to delete the email. I didn’t regret writing what I did, or that she read it, but I still felt sick and didn’t sleep much that night.

I love Mum to bits. That should go without saying. She’s done a heck of a lot for me over the years. But that doesn’t mean she’s perfect. She’s always had a short fuse, and as Dad and I agreed last night, it’s got even shorter of late, to the point where she creates a perpetual state of tension and gloom. If Dad checks the mail and finds a brown envelope, he’s loath to show it to Mum because he knows it’ll set her off. Somebody at the golf club will provoke her one minute, someone at the church group the next, her next-door neighbour the minute after that. They travel overseas a lot but almost anything can go wrong when you’re travelling, and with Mum, the slightest thing can trigger the switch. The episode just before I left where she almost break-danced would have been funny if didn’t reveal that she has a fairly serious problem. And you absolutely can’t talk to her about any of this. Dad can’t. I can’t. Nobody can. In fact it’s very hard to reason with Mum about anything. You might as well reason with Donald Trump (who, thankfully, Mum can’t stand).

Mum is 67. She could easily (and hopefully will) be around for another quarter-century, as her own mother (who had the same short fuse) almost was. She could easily outlive me. We’re in for a lot of screaming and shouting, and perhaps break-dancing, in the meantime.

At times I get down too. Yesterday I walked seven or eight miles trying to find supermarkets where I could put up ads for teaching. I found two, but haven’t had a bite yet. Perhaps I never will. It was a sunny day, I saw some parts of the city I hadn’t seen before, I had a pleșkaviță and two langoși for lunch at Piața 700, so things weren’t too bad. Autumn has been a lovely time of year to see Timișoara. But my confidence is low, I’m struggling to meet people, and at times it feels people are actively trying to avoid having anything to do with me. Learning Romanian has been interesting, in the same way that learning Ancient Greek would be interesting, and so far it’s been about as much use. But I need to keep going, I need to get up early, to walk those eight miles in the sun or the rain or (give it a month) the snow, in the hope that something will happen. It will take time, but I have time. I also want to start writing a book I’d planned to write years and years ago, because I now have time.

I also need to spend less time on the bloody internet. The US election was a huge moment in modern human history, and it’s hard not to read what everybody is saying about it, but gosh all those news sites are a time-waster. Then there’s Facebook. The people at that language school said I should have a page to help me promote my teaching. Not a bad idea, so I set one up, this time in my real name. But I really can’t be arsed with it. I’m interested in engaging with people about 30% of the time and with dozens of people all at once about 0% of the time. I messed around with one or two settings to reduce the creep factor, and I didn’t even provide my email address, instead signing up through my Romanian phone number which is almost a blank slate. I certainly didn’t say which school I went to; why on earth would I suddenly want to connect with my classmates from 20-plus years ago?

I’ll cover the election properly in my next post. Hillary Clinton is currently about 600,000 votes ahead. There are still a couple of million to count but I think she’ll be fine.

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.

Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

My cup of tea

November 5, 2016 by 0 Comments

I’ve been in Romania almost a month and haven’t had a single cup of tea yet. Well actually that’s not quite true. I’ve had the odd herbal or fruit infusion, with ‘odd’ being the operative word, but not a single cup of NBT: normal bloody tea. But today I was in Auchan, a large French-owned supermarket, and I found a packet of Earl Grey with a picture of Big Ben on the box. Hooray! I haven’t had a cup yet because I haven’t been given access to the kitchen yet, but give it time. (I know, when in Romania and all that, but a cuppa is a fairly basic human need.)

The marketing manager at the “promising” language school asked me what I do in my spare time. I mentioned tennis. He said he played too, and added that he was “really good”. I said that in that case he’d probably thrash me. He then said that he was carrying some excess weight. Then he talked about learning English. “I didn’t learn much because the teachers were poor. I was the best in my class though, and always got ten out of ten of course.” He said Timișoara had much more to offer culturally than either Bucharest or Sibiu, and of course he was born in Timișoara. He described my Romanian as “very poor” before upgrading it to just “poor” on the evidence of about ten words in total. If you multiply his ego by about twenty you get…

Donald Trump. The US election is just four days away, and as I’ve said before, Trump could easily become president. Only it’s even more likely now. FiveThirtyEight are saying he has a 35% chance of victory. The odds and the map are changing all the time as new polls come in, and it feels more relevant to me than on previous occasions because I’ve actually been to America. (It’s 14 months since I was there. Campaigning had already begun. The whole process is a disgraceful waste of time and money.) I see both North Carolina and Florida have flipped from pale blue to pale pink in the last few minutes. Trump is still behind Clinton by about three points in the national polling average, but (1) that gap could close before Tuesday, (2) even if it doesn’t, there could be a modest polling error, and (3) he could conceivably lose the popular vote by a point or more and still win the election; the Electoral College favours him. So in other words, it’s on a knife-edge. I wonder if their estimation of Clinton’s chances – roughly two out of three – is a touch on the high side. If you’re 4-3 up in a set of tennis, you’ll win about two out of three times. (I’m assuming here that you have a 50:50 chance of winning each point whether serving or not – a reasonable assumption for me, but not for, say, a Wellington regional player, and certainly not for the marketing manager of that language school before he put on those extra kilos.) But imagine you’ve been 4-1 up and have lost the last two games. Momentum is against you; the trend is not your friend; your opponent, like Trump, has the wind in his sails. I think that’s the situation Clinton is in.
My cousin, who I met in upstate New York last year, is contemplating leaving the country if (in his words) the idiot wins.

The Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years (!), and even then they almost let it get away. By all accounts Game 7 was one of the great baseball games and the Cubs’ win one of the great moments in baseball (maybe American sport in general, but my knowledge of the other three major American sports verges on non-existent).

The markets in Timișoara are fantastic (I’ll talk about them in another post) but the one in Oradea, near the fortress where I stayed, still wins.

Life :) - Romania

Why am I doing this?

November 4, 2016 by 0 Comments

On Wednesday I went back to the hotel I started off in. I didn’t know whether the manager, the boss, really wanted to see me again. I can’t quite make her out. The rooms here have names, not numbers. She said my room was called something like Dali or Dally and was on the first floor. I found an empty room called Darling (of all things) with the key in its lock, and even saw a map showing no other rooms beginning with D. It must have just been her accent (her mother tongue is Hungarian). I piled my junk into the Darling room and went back downstairs. I was told to be careful with the skylight. Skylight? It turned out there was a Dali room, not far from Darling, but the map only showed a few rooms. (Room numbers are a great idea, aren’t they? Big businesses, especially really unfriendly ones, love to name their rooms. One company I worked for had ghastly names like the Synergy Room. Even after years, people still couldn’t remember that the Synergy Room was the second room past the lift on the fourth floor. If they’d just called it 4B, which is a much nicer name anyway, life would have been easier for everybody.) So I had to swiftly move all my stuff, some of which I’d already unpacked, from Darling to Dali. I certainly couldn’t dally. The Dali room, where I’ll be staying until 2nd December, is bigger than I feared it might be, but doesn’t have the facilities I was promised (I need to ask about that). It does have a TV however.

On Tuesday I visited six language schools in the city. I received a very positive response from the first one. They currently have no native English speakers among their staff, and before they’d even looked at my CV, they wanted me to run conversation classes with their advanced students. I sat down with two of their senior staff for 45 minutes. They want me to promote myself, and to be honest that’s not something that comes easy to me. I also received advice about accommodation in Timișoara. It seems I’m better off using Airbnb instead of renting an apartment where I’d likely face a 25% price hike as soon as I open my mouth. All in all, things sounded promising.

Sometimes, when I’m buttering bread with my penknife or finding somewhere to put the soap so it won’t slide off, I wonder why the hell I’m doing all of this. But then I think I could be in some god-awful meeting in the Synergy Room.

International travel - Romania

Rifts in Romania

October 30, 2016 by 0 Comments

My train from Arad (with its clean, modern station) to Timișoara was remarkably cheap: just under NZ$3 for an 80-minute ride at a leisurely pace. I was in a compartment with a man and a woman, both in their late fifties, who were having a vigorous debate about life since Ceaușescu. They disagreed vehemently on just about everything, except that things had gone backwards. I wasn’t able to follow the ins and outs of the discussion and certainly didn’t add very much to it. Much is made in both New Zealand and the UK of a generational divide, and there’s no doubt it exists. Some younger people in Britain wouldn’t even talk to their parents after the Brexit vote. But in Romania the gap is as wide as, well, as the one between a Romanian train and the platform. It’s massive, thanks to the 1989 Revolution and the sheer speed at which the internet spread here. And at 36, I seem to be living right on the fault line.

So here I am. This hotel isn’t far from the place I stayed in on my arrival in Romania (and will go back to on Wednesday), and is therefore within striking distance of perhaps the only laundromat in a land of 20 million. “Wash and dry in one hour!” If only. I had to wait for all the intimidating young people with their fancy phones to finish their loads first, while feeling the pressure of more intimidating young people desperate for me to finish mine. Getting my washing done was twice as costly as the train ride. The bottle of red wine I bought today was somewhere in between.

My hotel room isn’t great. The bathroom smells, despite strips of paper declaring that it has been dezinfected. (That’s similar to another mangling of the English language I see at train stations: reziduary waste. Where they got that from I have no idea. Simply “waste” or “rubbish” would have done the job.) There are large yellow signs next to the plug points saying “230 volts”; I clearly need to take extreme precautions before plugging anything in. My bedside lamp is purely ornamental. I haven’t got a fridge. And worst of all, I only have two towels instead of the customary six or eight. How will I cope?

The taxi driver in Timișoara asked me “Numero quattro, si?” Getting to the point where people think I’m Italian when I speak Romanian is what I call progress. But at the hotel I didn’t do so well. It’s a typical story. I field the first two or three simple questions, then I get a wall of words thrown at me, almost as a test, which I fail miserably, and any further words I receive are in English.

Only ten days until America goes to the polls. This is not a done deal, folks. The race has tightened perceptibly in the last three days or so, and now the FBI is investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails again. I’ve been on the losing side in every election or referendum I’ve cared about since Obama was re-elected four years ago, and the stakes then weren’t anything like they are now, so I must say I’m a little nervous.

International travel - Life :) - Romania

My new home

October 29, 2016 by 0 Comments

There’s definitely been an upswing in my mood since I last wrote. I persisted with the woman at the hotel in Timișoara, and she replied properly, giving me some advice on dodgy Romanian landlords and basically telling me to knock on the door of every language school in the city. She offered me a small room in the hotel for 250 euros a month (just NZ$400) including expenses, and I accepted for one month. I’m going to Timișoara tomorrow but will be staying at another hotel for four nights before moving into what I expect to be little more than a cubby-hole, though I will have a shower, a fridge and basic cooking facilities. So Timișoara will be my new home for the foreseeable future. I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite city of those I’ve visited – that would be a toss-up between Sibiu and Oradea – but it’s where I was lucky enough to make a connection. Because it was the first place I visited in a country I was very much looking forward to seeing, everything all seemed new and exciting there, a bit like Boston did when I went to America last year. And just like Boston, I spent long enough there to at least sort of get to know it. It’s nothing like Boston though, let’s face it.

Arad, where I’m staying now, isn’t far from my new home and in some ways it’s a smaller version of it. I like it. Today I visited the water tower, partly because of a tip-off I got from someone in Bucharest that it would be interesting and its owner doesn’t speak much English. The water tower was built at the end of the 19th century and hasn’t been operational for 60 years. It now functions as a five-storey museum, showing the history of the city, some artwork and the fire and water services. You can enter the tank at the top through a hole which has been cut out. The owner explained the history of Arad to me and then let me get on with it, but after I came down we had a 15-minute chat in Romanian, my longest yet. If only I could manage that every day. They had a wine festival in one of the main squares. I only had one glass of mulled wine and (for the first time) some sarmale. I’ve been having a few tummy troubles and didn’t want to push it.

Yesterday’s near-three-hour train journey from Oradea, which cost just 18 lei (NZ$7 or £4), was interesting to put it mildly. The guy opposite me had a BO problem and fidgeted constantly. The guy across the aisle drank beer from a 2.5-litre bottle and some clear liquid, which I soon found out to be palinca, from another big plastic bottle. Behind me was a large contingent of gypsies, the equivalent I guess of a whanau. One of them, a girl of five or six, walked up and down the train, saying “Da-mi un leu” or “Give me a leu.” One leu isn’t very much, but it’s the principle I don’t like: a child learns at a young age that you obtain money by begging. The guy with the bottles wanted to talk to me. He didn’t make a lot of sense. I wasn’t sure whether that was a language barrier or a three-sheets-to-the-wind barrier. He offered me some palinca – heaven knows where it had been – and I settled for just a capful. The train stopped at numerous towns, villages, hamlets, rusty signs…

I can bring up maps on my phone, but I struggle to get an idea of scale in a completely unknown place, so last night I dragged my suitcase and carried my other bags more than a mile from the station to the hotel. Tomorrow I’ll get a taxi for the return trip.

One thing Romania is not is boring. It’s raw, it’s unsanitised (not like that), it brims with life. And now it’s my home.

International travel - Romania

Isolation

October 27, 2016 by 0 Comments

Recently I’ve bemoaned my failure to converse in Romanian. But today I realised that I haven’t properly interacted with anybody in any language for some time. It’s either five days or eight, depending on what you count, and it’s starting to get to me. Isolation was my number one fear. Even I need human contact from time to time. It’s not that I’m staying in my room, though I felt like it today. I’m just not meeting people. It hasn’t helped that I had half a bottle of cheap Romanian red wine last night and it gave me a headache.

Oradea, where I am now, is a reasonable size, with a population of around 200,000. It’s close to the border with Hungary. And it’s beautiful. The central square (Piața Unirii, as always), the main street (Strada Republicii) and numerous surrounding buildings have had a lot of money spent on them, most of which has come from the EU. Some are still being worked on. Probably the most famous building, the Palace of the Black Eagle, is very pleasing to the eye. A decent-sized river, the Crișul Repede, wends its way through the city. (The Daily Mail would probably like to run a story on how much EU money has been spent on this obscure place in Romania with accompanying pictures comparing Oradea with, say, Great Yarmouth on the east coast of England. Or at least they would have done before the EU referendum.)

My hotel is built into the fortress which is in the shape of a five-pointed star. My room is enormous. And breakfast, while not quite as good as in Cluj, certainly isn’t bad. I’m sold on Romanian breakfasts now.

I wish I’d seen Oradea earlier on, because now I’m beginning to flag. I’m taking the train to Arad tomorrow and will spend two nights there before going back to Timișoara where all I’ll have to sort out is a new life. Shouldn’t be too challenging.

Ten hours is a long time to spend on a bus, as I did between Bucharest and Cluj. I paid 103 lei for the privilege, including one leu each time I needed to pee.

International travel - Language learning - Romania

I’m sorry I haven’t a Cluj

October 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

This is my last evening in Cluj, or to give it its full name, Cluj-Napoca. Cluj rhymes with “luge”. My hotel is on Strada Căii Ferate, or Railway Street. But what’s up with that name? Railway in Romanian is cale ferată, literally “iron road”. (The French term, chemin de fer, means the same thing.) But we want to say “Street of the Iron Road”, so we need to articulate the noun cale (“road”) and put it in the genitive case which indicates belonging. Cale is irregular, and it turns out the articulated genitive form is căii. As for the ferată (iron) bit, well that’s an adjective, and because cale is a feminine noun that we’ve just put in the genitive case, we need the plural form of that adjective, and that’s ferate. Got that? Good.

Yes, Railway Street. So I’m very close to the station, and that means it gets a bit noisy. It’s also rather warm in here, but less so than when I walked in and the heater was fully on. The fridge was switched off when I arrived and I haven’t tried turning it on because the wiring at the back looks potentially lethal. I’m enjoying the breakfasts here: lots of salamis and other cold meats, cheeses such as feta, eggs (either boiled or scrambled), and vegetables such as tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Yeah, I know tomato is a fruit. Not an English breakfast, not a Continental breakfast, but a Romanian breakfast. I’ve had much the same everywhere else, but it’s tastier and better presented here.

I like Cluj, and wish I’d come here straight from Sibiu instead of going to the capital. In some ways it’s better than Timișoara, a similar-sized city. The clock has been advanced ten years. The trams are more modern (Timișoara, I think, had cast-offs from Germany), the buildings in better condition, the main park that little bit tidier. I read that Cluj is the coolest town you’ve never heard of, and while it’s got a cool name that makes the awful title for this post possible, I’d still say Timișoara is cooler. It’s got all that street art that Cluj doesn’t appear to have, it’s more random, it’s more raw. But if you want to know whether something is cool or not, I’m probably not the man to ask.

Cluj is the capital of Transylvania and possibly the cultural capital of Romania. So you get lots of theatre, opera, and all that stuff. Today (Sunday) there was an interesting craft market, aimed in part at tourists.

I wish I could spend longer here, but I feel I want to get down to business fairly soon. Tomorrow I’m taking a three-hour train trip to Oradea where I’ve booked three nights. From there I intend to spend two nights in Arad before settling in Timișoara.

I emailed the woman at my hotel in Timișoara, the one who said she was impressed with my Romanian, chatted to me for ages about language schools and a property boom in the city, then gave me her business card. I wrote my email partly in Romanian. It wasn’t a five-minute job. Neither was her reply. It must have taken her all of 15 seconds. She just said she’d pass my details on to one of her contacts. She hit the ball to me, I returned it, and then she just whacked it over the fence for the neighbour’s dog to chew on. Game over. I don’t have all that much human contact, and while that might have been the most important chat I’d had all month, she might have had half a dozen just as important (if not more so) that same day. Or she might just have been busy. Making human contact.

Our bus got stuck in traffic and the journey from the capital took a few minutes under ten hours.