Romania

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker - Romania

Happy Easter

April 22, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My birthday – another one – was on Wednesday. It was just a normal day for me; I didn’t even see anybody face-to-face except when I looked at yet another apartment. (That decision isn’t getting any easier. I’m glad it’s now the long Orthodox Easter weekend, so agents are unlikely to hassle me for a few days.)

Yesterday I had my last lesson with a 16-year-old girl. Her mother had contacted me the day before to say that it would be the last one. We’d had some good and productive sessions in the last few months, so seeing the clock tick down on our final meeting was rather sad.

The weekend before last, I went to Lake Surduc with Mark (the teacher) and his dog (or really his girlfriend’s dog). It’s funny how I see him quite often but haven’t seen his girlfriend since around Christmas. She probably doesn’t like me. I can imagine their conversations. “I suppose you’ll be seeing your mate this weekend, then.” “I might do.” “God, he’s so boring!” “He isn’t really. And you don’t exactly like trudging through mud, do you?” Maybe she’s just very conscientious and spends her Sundays making lesson plans for the following week like my mother used to do. Anyway, Surduc is about an hour’s drive away. I’d been there once before, when my friends from St Ives came over in 2017, but we didn’t stop apart from to ask locals if there was any nearby accommodation. This time they’d clearly had a deluge of rain overnight – it was extremely muddy. There was no path around the lake, so you had to clamber through the adjoining wood. There were plenty of ups and downs. We passed shepherds on their small farms, and at one point we were met by six menacing dogs that had come from the farm below. On the shore of the lake we saw dozens of four-pointed (tetrahedral) seed pods that looked like medieval weapons. These came from water chestnut trees. We also saw some rather large shells. I had to cycle to his place in Dumbrăvița and back, and I later played two sets of tennis, so I managed to burn off some calories that day.

Some of those spiky seed pods
A shell and a muddy Doc Marten

Today is Orthodox Good Friday, or as they call it here, Vinerea Mare (“Big Friday”). I’ve just had a lesson with a lady in Bucharest, and I’m about to try and make a Romanian-style marble cake, following a video on Youtube (in Romanian) that has had ten million views. Easter is a much bigger deal here than in most of the English-speaking world, and it seems relatively free of commercialisation. It’s a family occasion, with a lot of traditional food. It’s the only time of year that Romanians normally eat lamb – as well as roasting the meat, they use the innards to make drob, a kind of loaf that also has an egg inside. There’s the usual sarmale and salată de boeuf, then for dessert they have various cakes including pască, which is made with sweet cheese.

After a nice run of final tables (but no wins, dammit) I withdrew $1375 from my PokerStars account. Of course I didn’t quite get all of that because they hit you with a withdrawal fee and an exchange rate margin that adds up to nearly 5% (or at least it did in my case). I’ve now got $719 sitting in my account. Maybe I should have withdrawn the whole lot and ended this unproductive distraction for good, but the SCOOP tournament series is coming up soon, so I thought I’d at least try my hand at that.

This was the scene outside my window last night, following a screech of tyres and metal. I don’t think anyone was badly hurt.

Life :) - Romania

Pipe Day

October 8, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s Pipe Day today, the one day every year that you start to hear the hot water gurgling through the pipes that run from top to bottom of this apartment block, marking the beginnings of winter. It will probably be my last Pipe Day. I’ll miss this place when I leave.

It’s also the fifth aniversary of my arrival in Romania.

Life :) - Poker - Romania - Tennis

Blunders and bikes

August 24, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

After my lessons on Saturday I met up with Mark, the teacher from the UK. He’s just starting as a music and ICT teacher at British School where his wife will be teaching English. He said that they’ve so far been wined and dined and given the red-carpet treatment. They’ll certainly be wanting something in return. I’m sure I would crumble under the weight of all that expectation, not least from the parents who are paying top dollar (or euro, or leu) to send their kids there. Mark and his wife are in a different financial league from me. On Saturday we drank in the beautiful Piața Unirii at places I wouldn’t dream of going to normally. He seemed impressed with my command of the local language as I ordered drinks. He’s also clearly impressed with Timișoara, and Romania in general, although he wasn’t a fan of Bucharest. He said (and I agree) that most Brits’ preconceived ideas of Romania are founded on nothing but ignorance.

On Saturday evening I played tennis for 90 minutes. Another geriatric player has joined the fray. This bloke, I later found out, once played for the Romanian national rugby team before emigrating to the US. He’s now 79 and back living in Romania. When he heard that I was British, he introduced himself to me as Simon and we had a bit of a chat in English. Now he plays senior tennis competitions. Yesterday he told me about a match he’d played that morning, which he lost in a third-set tie-break – a real third set, none of that ten-point shoot-out crap. I could tell he just felt good about being out their competing, win or lose.

When I got home from tennis I fired up some poker tournaments. At a very late hour I made a horrific blunder in a pot-limit badugi tournament. I was chip leader with 13 players remaining, but inexplicably got all my chips in the middle against the second-biggest stack with a marginal hand, and that left me nearly chipless. I was extremely lucky to finish sixth after that, but that was still a far cry from where I could and probably should have ended up. I made $24 from that tournament, taking my bankroll to an even $900, but I was still reeling from that awful decision, which was all the more frustrating given how well I felt I played in the rest of the tournament.

I dragged myself out of bed yesterday morning and staggered off to the market at Mehala to look at bikes. And guess what, I bought one. It’s a seven-speed racing bike, from the nineties I think, and it’s in very good nick. It’s bigger than my other one which was a tad too small, and it isn’t fitted with tyres that give me an allergic reaction. The make is Union; I still can’t tell if that’s German or Dutch. It cost me 400 lei (£70, NZ$140) and I’m happy so far with my purchase. It should make a big difference to my life. I just need to make sure it has a damn good lock.

Today I’ve struggled to stay awake in the hot weather – the temperature is now forecast to drop. Tomorrow I’ve got four lessons. After they finish at 9:30 I’ll play one of the $11 WCOOP (World Championship of Online Poker) tournaments, so it could be another late one. No lessons on Wednesday morning, thankfully, or I wouldn’t be playing it at all.

The Covid numbers in Romania are climbing again. This Delta variant is an altogether different beast, as even New Zealand is finding out.

Coronavirus - New Zealand - Romania - Tennis

It’s collapsing all around us

June 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The cathedral bells rang out in earnest this morning. What for? It’s the Feast of the Ascension in the Orthodox calendar. As I write, some kind of parade is about to begin on the steps of the cathedral. Someone is testing the microphone: “doi, zece, doi, zece”. Where I come from you go “one, two” and perhaps “three”, but Romanians say “two, ten” instead. No idea why. (Update: A brass band has started up.)

Last time I neglected to mention the role of religion in people’s attitudes to the pandemic and the vaccines. The impact is huge. A prime example here is No-Vax Djoković, a devout adherent to the Serbian Orthodox church, which is very similar to the Romanian version. Both Britain and New Zealand benefit from being increasingly secular countries. (Djoković had a battle on his hands last night against the impressive Matteo Berrettini, but survived a hiccup in the third-set tie-break to edge through in four. They started the match at 8pm local time; the spectators were forced to leave during the fourth set to avoid falling foul of the 11pm curfew. That was bizarre.)

I had a lesson this morning with a woman who caught Covid in early April along with her husband and small son. They’re still all suffering from memory loss, fatigue, and a succession of colds. Scary stuff.

In some sad news, the Bigăr waterfall, which I visited with my parents in 2017, collapsed on Monday evening. It was a popular tourist attraction, enhanced by being slap-bang on the 45th parallel north (the opposite of which might be familiar to certain readers of this blog). The weight of moss and the build-up of limestone caused it to give way.

21st June 2017

I see that Auckland has leapt to the top of the ranking of the world’s most livable cities, with Wellington in fourth place. I’m not quite sure who’s measuring this. Lack of virus obviously comes into it, but last time the I visited Auckland I was sorely disappointed. A soulless city, with house prices beyond livability for most.

On Tuesday I got my first haircut in eleven months. A good job done. My next chop might be ages away.

Books - Life :) - Poker - Romania - Writing a book

Hristos a înviat

May 3, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The vagaries of the Julian calendar, the spring equinox and phases of the moon mean that today is Orthodox Easter Sunday. Sometimes it falls on the same day as what they call Catholic Easter (and what I would call “normal Easter”), sometimes it’s a week later, and sometimes (like this year) it’s a whole month later. Easter is big in Romania; I’d call it a tie between Easter and Christmas for which is most important here. Last night the tennis-playing couple (who live next door but one) gave me some salată de boeuf which, despite its partially French name, contains chicken rather than beef. They also gave me an egg painted the traditional reddish-brown using red cabbage, and invited me to “knock” it with another of their painted eggs. The “knocker” said Hristos a înviat (“Christ has risen”), then the knockee became the knocker and said Adevărat (“really”). Although I was unaware that it was a game, apparently I won because my egg remained almost unscathed through all the knocking.

At quarter past midnight I was woken up by the Easter vigil service at the cathedral. A huge throng of people with candles spilled out in front of the cathedral as a sermon played over the loudspeaker, much of which I actually understood. I wonder how many of those “vigilantes” picked up Covid. There have been services and processions and bells ringing out all this long weekend. I missed my first two Romanian Easters because I went to the UK. Then last year the restrictions meant that everything was far more muted. That leaves 2019, and I think I must have slept through the vigil service that year because I don’t remember seeing it. My blog posts from two years ago aren’t helping me. Just like last year, the Easter market has gone by the board, but they’ve Easterised the end of the square where I live, as in a normal virus-free year.

I still watch John Campbell’s informative Youtube videos on coronavirus, but I’m less dedicated than I was. After I watched one of his videos last week, Youtube suggested that I watch a different one from a American medical doctor and religious nutcase, called “Why I’m not taking the vaccine”. It had three times as many views and likes as Campbell gets (and he gets a fair few), and it attracted a long stream of comments saying that the deep state are trying to force us to take the vaccine and I’m not having any of it. I’m defiant! Six hundred thumbs up. Many commenters referenced the Bible. No Covid vaccine! Matthew 7:25 says so! I really doubt that the Gospel of Matthew said anything about vaccination or herd immunity. (I picked that verse at random; it happens to be about floods and storms, not a pandemic, but I’m sure you could find a connection there if you really wanted to.) Covid has been an eye-opener. I knew we had fake news and echo chambers, but here we have millions of people, some in positions of authority and influence, willing to dispense with the truth even when it comes to matters of life and death. I’ve even seen this in my own brother. A supporter of Brexit and the Tories, he’s happy to divorce himself from the reality that the British government have done a breathtakingly shitty job that has cost many thousands of lives unnecessarily, just because it’s his team. It’s become just like football.

I’m two-thirds of the way through Inocenții, a Romanian book that one of my students bought me for Christmas. It took me a while to get going, mainly because the language is hard. But I’ve made some headway finally. It’s all about a woman’s childhood in Brașov in the sixties, the early Communist period. The book is full of humour, though it certainly has its dark moments too. I’ve been jotting down words I don’t know, including some that I’ve come across before but forgotten, so I can look them up later. I think it’s the sixth Romanian book I’ve read.

Poker. Lately I’ve been playing tournaments exclusively. I’m at a bit of a standstill, with a run of tournaments in which I’ve either just missed out on or just made the money. I’ve been persevering with Omaha hi-lo, with little joy. Unlike the other games I regularly play, I can’t hand-read in Omaha hi-lo. That’s partly because the tournament buy-ins are tiny and people play any old junk, even hands that are real disasters like the 9993 that someone raised pre-flop with this morning. My bankroll is $661, although I expect that to drop a few dollars when I play the fixed badugi this evening. Pessimistic I know, but that tournament with its eight-minute levels plays like a turbo, especially in the early stages, and most of the time you’ll fail to make the money no matter what you do.
Update: As expected, that tournament was a waste of time. The game is played with three draws, but if I’d had ten I still wouldn’t have hit anything. Bankroll now $655. (I don’t exactly risk much of my bankroll in these tournaments.)

I’ve gone back to the dictionary part of the book I was writing, after losing heart when that Romanian teacher decided she had better things to do than help me. I’m now on the letter R, and I hope I can make some more progress this week.

The cathedral at 12:15 last night
Just after 4pm today
Life :) - Romania

I’ve had ANAF of this

February 4, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The immigration office is supposedly open from 8:30 till 10 (to drop off forms and pick up permits and what have you) and between 2 and 4:30 (for “information”). Yesterday was Wednesday, the only weekday I’m free in the early morning, so I went along there to see what I needed to do. At 8:25 there was already a virus-friendly queue inside, so I stood outside while some of the people in the queue magically disappeared in one direction or another. I then made my way into the immigration room, which has small offices off to the side. A uniformed man in his thirties with two gold stars on each shoulder was being rude and aggressive to another Romanian man who was trying to get a work visa for an employee. Then he said sarcastically to a woman, “Can’t you read that sign?!” God, I’ll have to deal with you in a minute. When it was my turn, I asked what I needed, and he said he didn’t really know but asked me to come back in the afternoon. He was calm. I went back after my lesson in the afternoon, with various paperwork that I thought might be handy. Then he was back into full arsehole mode. “Why are you so angry with me?” he asked me in English. What? I’m just asking you a question. In fact you seem rather angry with me for just being here. “Wait outside!” When he asked me to come in, he was relatively calm again, and spoke in Romanian. My Romanian by this point was pretty hopeless because his attitude had frozen me on the spot. He told me to visit ANAF, a government department which deals with tax and stuff, to get (and pay for) public health insurance, which is mandatory for all non-EU citizens living in Romania. I’ll also need proof of my address here (hard to get – I don’t receive any mail) and other bits and pieces.

This morning it was off to ANAF, a huge building next to Piața 700. I found the right entrance (eventually); there was hand sanitiser and a temperature scanner on the way in. The place was bewildering. Then I had to press a button on a keypad from a choice of at least ten, depending on what service I required. Buggered if I knew. I pressed one at random. Out spat a ticket. Go to desk 9. The ticket also told me there were two people waiting in front of me. Where’s desk 9? I could see 1 to 5, and a whole load of desks without numbers. I walked round the corner, where there were another bank of desks numbered 1 to 5, and more unnumbered ones. Then I saw that the other desks did in fact have numbers, but in an almost invisible font. The lady at desk 9 told me to go to some other desk that really didn’t have a number. Or an occupant. An older woman was waiting in front of me. “I can’t stand here for an hour,” she said. “And get Covid,” I said. While we were waiting, a man was madly filling printers with paper. These places get through forests. The walls were covered in signs in English that said “wireless free”. Just as well, because I’m allergic to wireless. It makes me come out in hives. Then I saw that the three desks nearby had signs with different letters of the alphabet. One of them had something like B, I, N, Q, P, U, W, S. I’m guessing that if your surname began with any of those letters, you went to that desk. Why were they seemingly random and not strictly in order? And that go-to-the-right-desk system can’t work with the letter system, can it? Maybe if you press a certain button it then asks you for the initial letter of your surname. God knows. Then I noticed that only 25 letters were accounted for among the three desks. If your name began with J, you were out of luck.

We’d almost given up when a man of about 55 appeared. He dealt with the woman quickly, then it was my turn. He was extremely friendly and seemed to understand exactly what I needed. My Romanian was no obstacle. He used the “tu” form with me, which in that sort of environment is a bit like appending “mate” to sentences in English. He printed out what I need, though I had to ask what this insurance actually covers me for, and then had to pay for it (nearly £300) at another desk. In 2017 I talked about “flashing orange men” on this blog – things I see that would confuse the hell out of me in any language – and there were plenty of them at ANAF, but at least I got that job done, and I hope it will satisfy the bloke with the stars on his shoulders.

Life :) - Poker - Romania

Another bad day for Romania

January 30, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tragedy has struck Romania yet again. At around five o’clock this morning, four people burnt to death in the hospital in Bucharest. (Update: a fifth person later died.) This has happened just 2½ months on from the fire in a Covid wing of a hospital in Piatra Neamț, which cost ten lives. On TV this morning the scene looked so bleak, with the burnt-out husk of a Third World-looking hospital wing while snow was falling all around. There will be plenty of words now. They’ll say it’s human error. Maybe someone plugged the wrong thing into the wrong thing. But they’ll do bugger all to ensure that someone plugging the wrong thing into the wrong thing doesn’t mean that people die. All that making sure costs money that has been siphoned off by god knows who. And they don’t seem to bother with smoke alarms here, let alone sprinkler systems. In the UK, there were campaigns to get everybody to fit smoke alarms back in the eighties, but in many ways the eighties haven’t yet arrived in Romania.

My poker experiment hasn’t been going so well of late. My bankroll has dipped from $224 to $166. I’ve been running like crap, that’s all there is to it. That happens. Maaaybe I’ve been calling down too much – at the stakes I’ve been playing, people bluff only rarely. The biggest problem is that I’m not able or willing to play that much. I work most evenings (the best time to play), and I don’t fancy gawking at a screen for hours when I do that in my job anyway. I’ve got a free day tomorrow (unusually), so I might fire up a few tournaments and see what happens.

I’ve had things to sort out to finalise the sale of my apartment in Wellington. On Thursday I had to call the IRD. Hearing Salmonella Dub while I was on hold really took me back. It’s all so Kiwi and cosmic at the same time. It’s been scorching over there. Mum said that Temuka hit an infernal 40 degrees on Tuesday.

Last Sunday the temperatures hit the teens here in Timișoara, and there were loads of people milling about. If it wasn’t for the masks, you wouldn’t have imagined there was a pandemic. Hmm, this is a cool place, isn’t it? I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather live at the moment. I mean central Wellington is fantastic, but if you have the sort of job where you’re stuck in an out-of-town office, there’s kind of no point in being there. I only just found out that the column in the centre of Piața Unirii commemorates the plague that hit the city in 1738-39, killing one in six residents.

The monument to those who died in the plague over 280 years ago
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Why didn’t he tell me?

December 9, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

The busker outside has just been playing La Fereastra Ta (“At Your Window”), an early-eighties hit by Cluj band Semnal M. I remember hearing it when I listened to Romanian radio online in the months before coming here, and trying to make sense of the lyrics. In my letterbox I’ve just had a note telling me I have to pick up a small package from the post office. I was hoping it would be the books Mum ordered for me, but I think that because it’s “small” it’ll be the CD I ordered off Ebay: Mwng from Welsh band Super Furry Animals. The whole album is in Welsh. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. (I also bought one or two items of clothing on Ebay, but they seem to have vanished into thin air.) Talking of music, the Kinks song Apeman came on the radio a few days ago. A great song which expresses how I feel about 21st-century life, even though it came out fifty years ago. Leave modern life behind and massively simplify everything. In some ways, that’s what I’ve done. A funny thing though – they bleeped out the first word of “fogging up my eyes”. It does sound suspiciously like “fucking”, but in reality it isn’t, and at any rate I’ve heard expletive-laden songs in English on the radio here which have been left uncensored.

Romania’s parliamentary elections have produced a split decision. The PSD (clear winners last time) are the biggest party again, but with a far smaller vote share this time, and it looks like they’ll be locked out of a coalition. The forward-thinking USR-plus (who were in third place, and may form part of government along with PNL who finished second) came top in Timișoara. There’s also a new party on the scene called AUR (which means “gold”); they’re anti-lockdown, anti-mask, and anti even thinking Covid is real. AUR got 9%, nearly twice the threshold for entering parliament, in a shock result. My student last night said they only did so well because of their shiny name. Turnout was abysmal, even considering the pandemic: only about a third showed up. And we’re currently rudderless. Ludovic Orban, the latest prime minister in a long line of them since I washed up in Romania, has quit. We still have a president, though.

After my two tricky lessons last night, finishing at 10:15, it was a great pleasure to talk to the woman who lives near Barcelona this morning. The woman I saw last night at seven is always so vacant. The lights are on but nobody’s home. What am I doing wrong? Help me! When I gave up on grammar exercises and asked her about her Christmas plans, she mercifully turned her dimmer switch up a notch or two. Then it was the poker guy with a big-stack ego. He’s so bloody good and knowledgeable about everything and loves saying so. I had 90 nauseating minutes of that. (Apart from those two students, everybody else I have is great, so I can’t complain.) The woman in Spain told me she didn’t like weddings. Join the club, I said. (Except my brother’s.) I bet loads of people don’t like weddings but don’t dare admit it.

I’ve been scouring statistics about verb tenses. (That’s the present perfect continuous.) There are twelve tenses in English, and I’ve been teaching them, concentrating on what I think are the most important ones. In speaking, more than half our verbs are in the simple present. (Not the present continuous, which some Romanians use continuously. That’s far less common.) About 20% of what we say is in the past simple. When we write a story, we’re generally writing about the past, so the percentages tend to flip. In my last blog post, which included an account of a tennis match, roughly 60% of what I wrote was in the past simple. All the stats I saw online confirmed what I thought. Five tenses are important enough to warrant serious study, including the problematic present perfect. Another three are useful once you’re at a pretty decent level. As for the remaining four (like the past perfect continuous – “I had been waiting at the station all day”), you can get by perfectly fine without them.

I spoke to my brother last night. They were in the middle of laying their parquet flooring. Eleven hundred strips of wood, each requiring two screws. It looked like painstaking work. My sister-in-law should get a shot of Pfizer any minute. I recently had a strange dream about my brother, although he wasn’t actually there. No, he’d gone to the moon (!) and Mum was naturally worried about him. Why didn’t he tell me?!

Coronavirus - Romania

Dangerous dessert

April 20, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

At around six I called the elderly couple on the sixth floor, so I could pop up there and give them a box of chocolates. If I happen to have pre-symptomatic coronavirus, I probably gave them that as well. That would be terrible. The lady answered and said she’d call me back when she was properly dressed. All I wanted to do was leave the chocolates outside their door. I’d just finished my dinner when she called me back. I went up there, was invited in, and there was a table laid out. Oh no. What do I do now? I ended up eating some pască (which is a Romanian sweet bread filled with raisins and other fruit) and two big pieces of something like a rum baba. It was lovely to eat some typical Romanian Easter food, and it was good to speak Romanian, but I couldn’t relax. All I could think of was the bloody virus. I really should have made it clear on the phone that I wouldn’t be coming in. People have picked up this thing from courier deliveries, and here I was sitting with a couple aged nearly 80 and 90, both with a list of medical conditions as long as my arm, for more than an hour.

The couple are quite religious and have been on pilgrimages to Israel. When I mentioned that tomorrow was my birthday, the woman talked about all the round numbers. Yes, tomorrow there will be zeros everywhere I look.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

The latest fodder

March 1, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’d only just hit “Publish” on my last post when I got an audible red alert from the Biziday app, its highest level of notification. Coronavirus had hit Timișoara. Predictably, the affected woman had travelled from Italy. So far there’s little sign of panic here beyond the occasional face mask.

This morning’s student told me he now wants to move to the UK. It might not be the cure-all that he expects. He comes every Saturday, and at the end of today’s session he correctly pointed out that it was his fifth meeting with me this month. He’ll have to wait 28 years to have the pleasure of seeing me five times in February again. I have vague memories of a maths lesson 28 years ago today (yes, a Saturday – my school was decidedly weird) where my teacher said something about the palindromic date: 29/2/92. I have much clearer memories of 29/2/16 – flying from Timaru to Wellington after I’d seen my brother and future sister-in-law, wandering through the airport at the other end, and feeling sick because there’d be no escape from my flatmate when I got home. It shouldn’t have been anything like that horrible, but it was.

I had a busy evening yesterday: a lesson with the two boys in Dumbrăvița, then a session with the 18-year-old girl in Strada Timiș, then just enough time to have a late dinner before my Skype lesson, which finished at 10:30. With the young woman I played perhaps my favourite game, where I ask my student to bet on whether words are real or fake. “Scurvy?! There’s no way that’s a real word.” Coming up with dozens of fake but plausible words was time-consuming but fun. In the middle of the game, I thought, this isn’t a bad life really.

real or fake game
Isn’t tomfoolery wonderful?

At this time of year the streets are lined with mărțișoare, which are talismans (I want to write talismen but that can’t be right) that men give to women to mark the beginning of spring on 1st March, and all the optimism that’s supposed to go with it. Some of the handmade ones are pretty cool. This year I’ve given a mărțișor to all my female students.

mărțișoare
Street stalls selling mărțișoare