Romania

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Why didn’t he tell me?

December 9, 2020 by 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 by 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 by 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
Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Romania

Is Christmas even worth it? And happy new decade

December 31, 2019 by 0 Comments

I’ve now properly caught up with my family to find out how their Christmases went. My brother’s was draining. Endless eating and drinking and small talk with the in-laws and trying to appear somewhat entertaining. He said he couldn’t relax for one minute. When he spoke to me his wife wasn’t there, and as he gave me the gory details I built up a picture of Christmas from hell. I really enjoyed our unusually long chat though – I’d say it was one of the highlights of my Christmas.

My parents’ Christmas wasn’t much better. A couple of days before, Dad learnt that his main gallery in Geraldine had jacked up their commission to 50% from an already slightly piss-taking 40%. What’s more, the increase came unannounced and was even backdated, how far I don’t know. The woman who “runs” the gallery does so chaotically (to put it politely), and Dad has written her a letter to say, basically, stuff you. So that drew a black cloud over their Christmas. Like always, these things affected Mum more than Dad. My father is able to be philosophical: they will continue to live very comfortable lives even if he never sells another painting again (and hell, a few months ago, we were wondering if he’d even see out the year). But for Mum, it’s a case of “must be successful, must be seen to be successful”. Dad also had his ongoing battle with headaches to contend with, and it’s always a battle he has to fight alone. The weather down in Moeraki wasn’t up to that much either, so all in all it was a pretty crappy Christmas.

I got off pretty lightly, then, with my almost totally pressure-free, family-free Christmas. Tonight I’ll be seeing in the new year (and new decade) at Matei’s place. I’ll take along the unopened bottle of Rakija I picked up in Belgrade the summer before last. Matei’s dad called me to say they’ll be starting at nine, not seven as they’d originally planned, and that’s fine by me.

The 2010s have been a weird, disorienting decade for me. Twenty ten itself, when I still lived in Auckland, wasn’t too bad. I’d made some friends up there, I’d left the toxic world of life insurance behind, I had my tennis, my online poker, my trip to the UK to see my grandmother for the last time, bits of pieces of meaningful but low-pressure work, I was managing. Then came the move to Wellington in early 2011 and my insane step backwards into the corporate inferno. Not one part of me wanted to be there (my job I mean, not Wellington which I think is a great city). Then the beginning of 2012 was just horrendous – my grandmother died, the house of cards (a.k.a. my job) came crashing down, I made the disastrous decision to buy my flat, and so it went on. Whenever I hear one of the hits of 2013 playing on the radio, I want to gag – I picture myself in that office with the music piped through the speakers. The best decision I made was to take a four-week trip around America in 2015. The vastness of the place made me realise that there’s a whole world out there to be explored, and here I am. I still have my ups and downs, but I no longer feel that barrenness, as if I’m driving through a desert and there’s not even a tree to be seen.

Twenty twenty. It feels like a mini-millennium. The Romanian ex-prime minister became the butt of jokes when she called the upcoming year “douăzeci douăzeci” (which literally means “twenty twenty”) instead of the correct “două mii douăzeci” (two thousand and twenty). Even though things have improved for me, I’m happy to see the back of the old decade. The constant news cycle, the partisan politics, the toxicity of social media, the illusion of being connected when we’re in fact more disconnected than ever, the technological advancements that help us buy increasing amounts of crap at increasing speed and not a lot else. And the natural and unnatural disasters that have dominated the very end of the decade.

Before I go, I’ve just watched a brand new three-hour documentary about Romania’s rocky 30-year path since the downfall of communism. It taught me a lot, and best of all I was able to watch it with Romanian subtitles.

As for the highlight of 2019, that’s very clear. All clear, in fact. I got out of bed on 25th June, a nondescript Tuesday morning, to find an email from Dad to say that he’d been cleared of bowel cancer. It was like a miracle.

Photos - Politics - Romania

Pics from Romania Day

December 6, 2019 by 0 Comments

Three years ago today I was living in a loft on the other side of the river, trying to find somewhere more permanent. I remember it being a good deal colder than today. Things had become quite urgent, and I was struggling to make headway through a forest of dodgy agents. Christmas was just around the corner and that only made things harder. I was forced to make phone calls in a language I could hardly speak at all, and some of the apartments I looked at weren’t even finished. Had I been ten years younger I might have just taken the first thing I saw. I particularly remember the main website I used, where apartments were advertised as having 2 or 3 or 4 camere, meaning rooms, or specifically rooms for living and sleeping in, not bathrooms or kitchens. Some places said they had “O cameră”, which I honestly thought meant “zero rooms”, i.e. some sort of storage space. It took me days for the penny to drop: “O” was the Romanian feminine indefinite article, meaning one, not zero. That seems really silly now, but anything seemed possible then, even flats with no livable rooms.

On the other hand, I had a new city to explore, I’d found somebody to play tennis with, and I was even starting to get the odd lesson here or there. It was through one of my very early students (who responded to one of my ads featuring President-elect Donald Trump) that I found the place I’m writing this from. I was extremely fortunate. The chances that I ended up right here must have been pretty slim.

After my last blog post, where I put the chances of a hung parliament in next week’s UK election at roughly one in three, I’ll now revise that downwards to 20-25%. A few more days have passed, the polls haven’t really changed, and the passing of time leads to greater certainty.

I didn’t mention the Romanian presidential election in which Klaus Iohannis was re-elected by a hefty margin of about two to one. My students were happy with this, and I took that as a good sign. Plus he appears to me to be cool, calm and collected, and he’s somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. I found the map of Romania showing the results by county to be particularly illuminating. In Timiș, Iohannis topped 75%. In Cluj he was in the eighties. But in the south where people are poorer and less educated, Viorica Dăncilă was either roughly equal or in some cases ahead.

On Tuesday I finally got my hair cut, and a good conversation in Romanian. (My hairdresser could speak some English – he’d spent some time in the UK – but no thanks.)

Sunday was Romania’s national day and the square was packed. I tried some mulled wine and it put me to sleep. The fireworks were set off from the park that reopened in August, so I got a ringside seat from my window. Here are some photos.

Moș Nicolae (St Nicholas) stick sellers
Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Take the money and run

November 24, 2019 by 0 Comments

After a no-show this afternoon (there’s nothing more annoying than that), I finished my week with 29 hours of teaching. It felt more than that – there was a lot of biking to lessons this week, and maybe that tired me out. I didn’t put an end to my lessons with that slightly weird woman after all. She told me yesterday that she’d kept pages of notes in pencil about me (what?!) and in particular she wanted to know what was going with my face. She asked me if I was a drug addict. What a question. (I’ve had flaking skin on my face for the last three weeks or so. How being a drug addict would cause that I don’t know.) After yesterday’s session I figured she was strange but ultimately (hopefully) harmless.

On Thursday I had my second lesson with the English teacher. She was marginally better this time, but now says she’d like to do two sets of exams, IELTS and Cambridge, both in the spring. She asked me how long it would take to get her up to her desired C1 level. I was honest – I said nine months at a push. This week I had – yet again – somebody who said her dream destination was Dubai. Women seem to really home in on that furnace of flagrant fakeness. I just don’t get it. For me, it would be way down at the bottom of any list that didn’t include war zones.

A popular discussion topic with my older and younger students is something I’ve called What If?, where they have to imagine what they’d do in certain situations. One of these hypothetical scenarios is where they find a package containing a large sum of cash. A majority tell me, unashamedly, that they’d take it. One of them even said, “well, I’d buy a car,” never considering an alternative to taking the money. There’s been a story in recent days of mystery bundles of £2000 turning up at random in a small town in north-eastern England, which was discussed on local radio today. The host was amazed that people were really handing the money in to the police.

Duolingo. I’m beginning to see its limitations now. A lot of intricate grammatical concepts are introduced too early, without any real explanation. In contrast, many very important words and phrases come into play too late, if at all. The Romanian course has fewer resources put into it than more popular languages do, and I don’t think the English sentences have ever been sense-checked. Some of them are worse than bizarre, they’re just meaningless non-English. At the higher levels the sentences often comprise ten or more words, and can be translated in many ways, but only some of the possible answers are marked as correct, so you’re forced to play a frustrating guessing game. The Italian course is better than the Romanian one. I’ll continue with both languages for now; the Romanian exercises have already been useful for drilling pronouns that I struggle so much with.

One of the best resources for learning Romanian I have at my disposal right now is the local radio station, Radio Timișoara. My favourite programme, when I get the chance to listen to it, is between six and seven on weekday evenings, where they play lots of older pop and rock music. This morning I listened to the sport show, even though I hardly follow sport these days. There were slightly amusing regular updates from Timișoara Saracens’ rugby match in Constanța, which the Saracens won 111-0. I heard the surname of their kicker (who must have got lots of practice in today’s match) is Samoa. The Saracens are perhaps the best team in the country, and they often make the European competition, but they’re no match for British and French teams.

Tomorrow is election day in Romania: the second of two rounds which will determine the president for the next five years. Klaus Iohannis is the incumbent, and he is facing off against Viorica Dăncilă, who was prime minister until the government fell last month. My students have quite strong opinions about Dăncilă. They aren’t flattering. They think she’s stupid and she’d be a disaster for Romania if she became president. From what I’ve seen of her, I can hardly disagree. But she came second in the first round, mopping up votes in rural parts of the country where people have lower levels of education on average.

Dad’s stunning sales in Geraldine have given him a shot in the arm. It’s great to see him (and Mum) so positive. Thinking he’s found the winning formula, he’ll be churning out rhododendron paintings like nobody’s business.

Books - Family - Life :) - Romania

Three years on, it’s still a great feeling

November 5, 2019 by 0 Comments

It’s a beautiful Tuesday morning here in Timișoara. Earlier I went to Piața Badea Cârțan where I had a coffee and bought some vegetables. Three years on, being amongst the fresh produce on a sunny morning, and watching the world go by, is still a wonderful feeling. As I sat on a bench near the market, I had a view of a brick wall I hadn’t noticed before. I couldn’t read what remains of the writing on it, but it looks like the letter to the right of the emblem is a W. So it’s probably more than a century old, dating from when Romania was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Back then, Timișoara was trilingual (Romanian, Hungarian and German), and German is the only one of those languages to use the letter W.

The writing on the wall

Yesterday’s weather was grim in comparison to today’s. My parents had ordered a book for me ages ago: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I think it will be a very good read, when I get around to it. But getting it in the first place wasn’t easy. It had come from Australia, via who knows where. Last Wednesday I finally got a note in my letterbox telling me that it was ready to be picked up. The next day I went to the main post office, where parcels normally go to, but I was told I needed to pick this item up from a different office, next to the railway station. On Friday afternoon I went there, only to find it closed at 1pm on Fridays and I was too late. Yesterday I went back – I got there ten minutes after it opened at 9:30. I went up to the first floor (where there was a poster telling me about the “new” notes and coins that came out in 2005) but was told I needed the customs office on the second. I spent the next half-hour in a forbidding waiting area, in which time six or seven other people collected their parcels before it was my turn. The room is what Romania must have been like under Communism. Everything was painted beige and brown, seemingly in about five minutes total. Aggressive-looking, bizarrely-printed signs adorned the walls. On the floor were some old scales, made in Sibiu in 1975, which had all the number fours printed in a typically Romanian way. I imagine they still work fine. The loud bang of metal doors closing in other parts of the building reverberated. I thought, I would not like to end up in prison in this country. When it was my turn, I entered another room, I handed over my passport, a man opened the package with a knife, decided there was no contraband inside, and I was free to go with my book.

When I got home I called my parents to tell me the book had arrived. We then moved on to the subject of Duolingo. I mentioned to Mum that I’d given 28 hours of English lessons in the past week, and she’d spent about as long on that site. I said it was an inefficient use of her time if her goal is to actually learn French, and she’d be better off doing 10 hours of Duolingo and 10 hours reading news articles, or something along those lines. Even the occasional conversation with me, perhaps. Suffice to say, this suggestion didn’t go down well. She wouldn’t speak to me. (That’s the way she’s always handled anything I say that she doesn’t want to hear. Even on a subject as unimportant as this.) I was just trying to help her. I honestly think it’s great that she’s trying to learn a language, and if she could get to the stage where she could go to France and communicate with people there, that would be fantastic. But I do have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t (it’s kind of, you know, my job).

After our chat, I bought a few bits and pieces from the supermarket, and on the way I popped into the second-hand clothes shop. Every six weeks or so, on a Monday, they have a new collection of stuff. I picked up a bronze-coloured leather jacket, made in Palma de Mallorca, for 70 lei (£13, or NZ$26). Yeah, I like this. It’s had some use, but not much. I thought it was pretty damn good value. It’s worth rummaging around in there sometimes. Beats going to the mall.

Although winter is around the corner, the markets are still full of tasty produce. Right now there are mountains and mountains of cabbages. Sometimes I buy a ready-pickled cabbage and try to make sarmale.

Two cancellations yesterday. I try not to let that kind of thing frustrate me too much.

Family - Hiking - Romania

All clear! (and trip report)

June 26, 2019 by 0 Comments

Fantastic news. Dad got the results of his biopsy yesterday and was given the all-clear. No spread to his lymph nodes (I initially typed “nymph lodes” but corrected it). A small, low-grade cancer which he is now free of. The best possible outcome. His next check-up will be in three years. He said the feeling of relief was indescribable.

This morning was my first chat with him since his ordeal in hospital. It was a horrible business, but he couldn’t rate the service he received in Timaru highly enough. His warfarin regime was a complicating factor, but they were on to that, and just as importantly they had the human touch which is all too often missing.

I don’t know what my parents’ plans are now. Maybe they’ll go to one of the islands and do not very much. Dad is still obviously in the process of recovery.

So early on Saturday morning I was off into the mountains. My student picked me up in his less-than-roomy Volkswagen Up! (That’s not me getting excited; the car is actually called an Up! with an exclamation mark.) We switched cars in Dumbrăvița into something a bit more spacious. Just as well, because there were five of us, complete with bags. It took 2½ hours to reach the foothills of Muntele Mic (“the Small Mountain”). We met the other four people in the group (a family) and from there we trekked to our hut at Cuntu. Great name.

The hut was very basic as you’d expect. We then set off for Țarcu, the main goal of our trip. We’d only gone a couple of hundred metres when it began to tip it down. It only hailed. We sensibly aborted our mission and scuttled back to the hut. Our second attempt was a success. It must have been sixish when we reached the summit. There’s a weather station up there, manned by well, a slightly unusual man who went by the name of Tintin. I guess that isn’t what his birth certificate says, but you never know. Tintin gave all nine of us cups of tea. He spoke surprisingly good English, and spat out every UK-based cliché imaginable to me.

When we got back down to the hut, it was time to eat. That was the lowlight of the trip. My student told me beforehand that I should bring tinned food. I assumed that meant there would be some way of cooking it, but no such luck. I was just starting my second tin of cold pork and beans when I started to get unbearable sinus pain. It’s bad enough when it happens when I’m by myself, but being in a group makes it that much worse. I lay down in bed, then a few minutes later I was physically sick; a mixture of the cold slop I’d eaten and nervousness caused by being with all those people.

By about 10:30 I was back in the world of the living, and I joined the others who were playing cards. I should mention that they were all Hungarians, not Romanians, although most of them could speak English at a pretty good level. As for the Hungarian language, it’s so unlike anything else. Most European languages are related in some way or another – they’re all branches of the Indo-European tree – but Hungarian isn’t even part of the same forest. It might as well be Chinese. We have the English phrase “it’s Greek to me” but I would have understood more if it was Greek. The card game was called the Hungarian equivalent of “cross”, used a special and hard-to-decipher 24-card Hungarian pack, and was basically a more complex version of euchre, played two against two. I was all at sea, especially at first, as I struggled to read my cards, let alone decide what to do with them. It was fun though, in a strange sort of way.

I slept surprisingly well. The other three people in my room were all called Zoltán, and apparently one of the Zoltáns moved me three times during the night because of my snoring. We had breakfast (no cold beans for me this time) and left just after nine. We tramped back to the cars and then went up Muntele Mic, which is popular for skiing. That took less than half an hour. Back down below was the resort, which in all honesty was ugly. The ugliness was capped off by an abandoned communist hotel, a monstrosity from which anything of value had long been stripped. We decided to enter the dark, dingy building and climb the stairs to the first-floor rooms. It was quite creepy. Then it was back on the road. Our driver raced along at 170 km/h on the motorway; none of the others in the car even batted an eyelid.

I was back home at around 4pm on Sunday. Was I glad I went? Yes, absolutely. As much as I love Timișoara, I really wanted to escape the city. Was I fit enough? Yes. One guy had problems with his feet and was 20 kilos overweight, and he still somehow made it to the top of Țarcu. But was I prepared enough? Hell, no. My student invited me at short notice and with three busy days I had very little time to prepare. I was able to get a sleeping bag and a poncho and that was about it. Next time, I’ll definitely bring some better food. I hope there is a next time; walking and climbing uneven ground does wonders for the body, and being among nature is great for the mind. Plus I get to meet new people.

This is a big post, sorry, but with the fantastic news from New Zealand it’s been a pretty big day. Next post: trip pictures.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Romania - Travel: Romania

Scaling new heights (and Dad’s operation)

June 21, 2019 by 0 Comments

On Tuesday one of my students invited me on a hike this weekend, with him and about half a dozen of his mates, to the top of Țarcu Mountain, at an altitude of 2190 metres. I shifted and cancelled this weekend’s lessons (it was hard to do that at short notice) and accepted his invite. We’ll be staying at a hut on Saturday night. I know it will be beautiful up there and I really want to get away and also explore more of Romania, so saying yes was an easy decision. I’m still (as always in these situations) apprehensive, though. Will I be equipped enough? Fit enough? Waterproof enough? Then there’s all the social stuff. My student is Hungarian. So are all his mates. I can’t speak a word of Hungarian. (It’s amazing really that even the Hungarians can speak Hungarian, it’s so complex and unlike anything else on the planet.) But it has the potential to be a great experience and a whole lot of fun too. Part of the whole point of living in Romania is to have these sorts of experiences. I had a gap in my schedule this afternoon where I ran around the mall trying to find a sleeping bag and other bits and pieces.

Dad. That’s the big news. The operation went about as well as it could possibly have done. I haven’t managed to speak to him since Monday’s op: the reception on the top floor of the hospital is patchy at best. Mum has been very impressed by the staff at Timaru; they’ve looked after him very well. He had a big feed at Mum’s birthday dinner, which he described as being like the Last Supper. It was his final opportunity to eat anything solid. We now anxiously wait for the results of his biopsy.

I’ve got a tricky-ish day in store tomorrow (but even the trickiest days are miles better than life insurance ever was). Two hours with Mr I Don’t Know’s mum, followed by two with Mr IDK himself, then 90 minutes with the 7½-year-old boy, then a final hour with a new boy of just five. Definitely a challenge.

Life :) - Romania - Scrabble

Centenary celebrations

November 30, 2018 by 0 Comments

One of my students is a chemistry teacher at a very good school called Waldorf (I can’t help but think of the Muppets when I see or hear that word) and she invited me to the school’s celebration of Romania’s centenary, which took place this morning. She gave me precise details about the two buses I needed to take, and stupidly I never looked on a map to see exactly where the place was. If I had, I’d have known it was almost right next to the apartment block of one of my students, and I would have walked or biked there. As it was, I went too far on the first bus (I didn’t realise it was only a five-minute ride) and had to call her. Um, what do I do now? I walked back to the stop I should have got off at, then took the second bus, and I got there just in time, or la țanc (an expression I picked up two weeks ago, meaning “in the nick of time”).

Inside the school, a drummer, one of the older pupils, gave everybody a rousing welcome. My English student led me upstairs into a hall, and a couple of hundred kids, most of them dressed in traditional Romanian attire, formed a spiral. (I didn’t have any clothing along those lines, and was concerned that I’d stand out in jeans and a plain white shirt, but I was fine.) The national anthem was sung. It was a good job the words were projected on a screen: “Deșteaptă-te, române!” is about as far as I get otherwise. The singing, sometimes accompanied by guitars, was lovely. After a video explaining the unification in 1918, some more songs and some readings, we joined hands for a hora, a traditional Romanian dance. I said “Am două picioare stângi” (“I’ve got two left feet”) but I managed, just about. (If you’re uncoordinated, or “unco” as some Kiwis say, you can say in Romanian that you have two left hands.) The kids filed out, to the beat of the drum once more, and I met some of my student’s colleagues, including Bogdan, the history teacher. He was the only man amongst them, although supposedly two other male teachers weren’t in attendance. Downstairs we ate bread covered in pork fat and red onions (some of the traditional food can be interesting) and that was that. In a funny way I felt quite privileged to be there. I could quickly tell that it was a good school; the kids behaved extremely well.

Otherwise things haven’t been so great: I’ve picked up a cold once again. Let’s hope it passes reasonably quickly. I spoke to Dad last night; he’s been having a terrible time with migraines. He said the only saving grace was the interminable spell of rain, which would have put the kibosh on a lot of activities, migraine or not.

The 100th anniversary of the unification is on 1st December, the day after tomorrow. The market stalls are all up in the square; they’ve been painted white unlike the last two years. Tomorrow they’ll be up and running, with the pleasant waft of chimney cakes and mulled wine. Outside my window is a sea of blue, yellow and red. I doubt I’ll see the parade because I’ll be working on Saturday, but I should get to see the lights being switched on and the fireworks, which last year weren’t until 11pm.

On Tuesday morning S and I had a text conversation while I was at Piața Badea Cârțan, the big market. She said, isn’t it wonderful that your job allows you to start the day in a marketplace among the vegetables and cheeses, and I said, yes it absolutely is. I’m certain that the fundamental change in lifestyle has been hugely beneficial to my wellbeing. I’m a different man. (Heck, I sure look like a different man. It’s nine months since I had a haircut.) It would take a helluva lot for me to go back.

Scrabble. I’ve played four games in the last 24 hours. Last night I started with a shocker. I couldn’t get anything going at all. Just one of those games, and I went down in a heap, 283 to 418. My opponent played extremely well; she seemed to actually know words. Perhaps that’s what happens when you’ve played 9000 games. The next game went considerably better: I found an early bingo, my opponent hit back with two of his own but I made RITZ for 69 and that was enough for an 83-point win. I had TOASTER on my (toast) rack towards the end, but I couldn’t find anywhere for it. After the game I realised that of course it has an anagram, ROTATES, that would have gone down. Everything seemed to go right for me in game three. Four bingos and a 536-332 win, just four points off my record game score, which happened way back last New Year’s Eve. I’ve played one more game (so far) today, a 390-all draw. After an early bingo I held a three-figure lead, but my opponent slapped down a trio of bonuses. I continued to score well, without seeming anywhere near another bingo, and I still had my nose in front as we entered the endgame, but my opponent put down EXEC (which I hadn’t seen) for 45 and I was perhaps fortunate to have an out-play that allowed me to escape with a draw.