by Travelling by bus is not the sexiest mode of transport, and so it proved yesterday. My taxi dropped me off at one of Timișoara’s bus stations in the pouring rain. I stood in a packed waiting room, hoping I’d eventually board the correct vehicle. The bus was small. It left on the dot of 1pm, as scheduled, but at 1:05 there was a loud ‘clunk!’ that came from underneath. We made a detour to the garage and the problem was fixed relatively quickly. As we travelled through the countryside, visiting small towns and villages, I marvelled at the beauty of it all. The ornate patterns, the bright colours, and yes, the buildings in a state of disrepair. The beaten up old Dacias, the faded, half-peeling hand-painted signs: I love all that stuff. At Lugoj a bunch more people got on and suddenly the experience wasn’t much fun at all. The bus was heaving. We arrived in Deva at 4:45; the trip had cost me just £6, or actually £7, hang on a minute, £8. Sorry, I’m trying to keep up with the plummeting pound but I can’t type fast enough.
Deva has been a bit disappointing, truth be told. The weather has been dull. This morning I took the cable car up the volcanic hill to the old fortress, and that was great. I didn’t at all mind that hardly anybody else was doing the same thing. I enjoyed the view of the town, which splits in two: a pretty part and an ugly one. As I walked down from the top of the hill I saw narrow streets full of beautiful, and often quite creative, houses.
Eating out is nerve-racking. (Should there be a W in that? I’m never sure.) I tentatively order something in Romanian, the 20-year-old replies in English, I persist with Romanian, but give up in the end, wondering why I’m even bothering. Tonight I went to some fast-food joint in the pretty part of town. “Ten minutes,” he said. “Please sit down.” Gah, stop it! When it came to the fillings, he said “tomatoes” and then “varză”. Cabbage, I said. You don’t know the word for cabbage, do you? Until you know the English words for all the fillings, you bloody well speak to me in Romanian. “Ardei”, “ceapă”. See, you haven’t a clue, and you’ve been learning English for how long?
It dawned on me today that my endeavours to learn Romanian, as an English speaker, are of the order of ten times harder than the other way round. Romanians are small malleable children when they begin learning English. They aren’t hard-wired 36-year-olds. They have almost limitless resources at their disposal, including all their classmates who are doing the same thing. And you can’t get away from English. There’s so much of it, wherever you look, that you can’t help but learn some. In bricks-and-mortar Romania, all content, all substance, is pretty firmly in Romanian, but so much of the embroidery is in English. At the laundromat all the instructions on how to use the machines were in Romanian but dotted around were slogans in English like “Wash all your worries away”. English songs, movies, TV, you can’t avoid it. And then the online world, where so much actual content is in English, is another matter entirely.
All of this makes me fear for the long-term future of languages like Romanian, and gives a sense of the uphill battle I face going the other way. I think the people at my hotel in Timișoara saw that and recognised that I’ve achieved a fair bit, considering. I felt buoyed after that conversation the last night I was there. Maybe this English teaching in Romania ridiculousness is actually going to happen.
Tomorrow I’ll take the train to my next stop. I’ve got high expectations of you Sibiu, so please don’t let me down.
Update: A bear that was on the loose in Sibiu has sadly been shot dead after a failed attempt to tranquilise it.