Romania

On the weird off-chance that anybody from Romania actually read my last post, I didn’t mean to have a go at your country, which I absolutely love. It’s more that I really want Romania to succeed, and an upswing in tourism (return tourists, in particular) would go some way to making that happen. The present standard of service frustrates me because most Romanians I’ve met outside the customer-facing world have been extremely welcoming.

Talking of frustration, the family who live in Moșnița Nouă cancelled both their lessons yesterday afternoon, less than an hour before we were due to start, depriving me of 160 lei. Their daughter “wasn’t in the mood”. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood either. I’ll have a chat with them if and when I see them next to let them know what my ground rules are. If they don’t like them, they can find another native English speaker in Timișoara to teach them. Good luck with that.

Today I had an early start with my beginner-level student. The clock ticked well past our 7:30 start time, and then finally the doorbell went. Phew. Waiting for that bell to go is the most stressful part of my job. I speak a fair bit of Romanian in my lessons with him. This morning we talked about our ancestors and where they came from. He was amazed to learn that it was summer in New Zealand and that people ski there, but not now. My next lesson was at noon: my 21-year-old female student has come on a lot. She knows how to learn, and that makes all the difference.

Next was the lolly-stick company. Last Thursday I gave two of my students a test, as required by the training company I work for. They both only managed percentage scores in the forties, and today I had to hand back their papers. I tried to reassure them that their results really didn’t mean that much (they’re more a reflection on me than on them). I even suggested that as a team they got an awesome score, but I’m not sure how that went down. The third student took his test today and I’ve yet to mark that. From the company I trekked more than a mile, including that muddy, rubbish-strewn track; every time I squelch my way through there I can see it’s been updated with more household junk from people who don’t give a toss. I arrived at Matei’s place just after five. In his room he now has a tank with two freshwater turtles; watching them eat was strangely fascinating. Every week he has something new. Last time it was a Google assistant. As usual, we didn’t do an awful lot of intense English. We read two chapters of David Walliams’ Billionaire Boy. I have the book in English; he just happens to have the same book in Romanian. For the first chapter, I read a chunk (a half-page or so) out loud in English and he read the same chunk in Romanian, and we took turns until we reached the end of the chapter. For the second chapter we swapped roles. Matei suggested a modification to the rules of my Space Race game – some sort of bonus if you get all three of your spaceships in a row – and it’s certainly worth considering. At the start of my lesson with Matei I got a phone call from a prospective student and I’ve booked her in for Friday morning.

I’ve got no real news, probably because work tends to get in the way of news. My most memorable lesson last week was one in which I complained about how Romanian banks (locally-owned or not) charge for everything: incoming payments, cash withdrawals, or even having just an account in the first place. Their commissions often run into several percent of the value of whatever payment you’re making or receiving, and many people must surely avoid the banking system entirely as a result (as I manage to do most of the time, because I usually get paid in cash). I expected my students to say, yes it’s bloody ridiculous, banks are just parasites that make far too much money, but instead they thought all the fees were completely justified. There’s a wider point here: by and large customer service in Romania is shit. Romanians are extremely used to it being shit, to the point where they don’t expect anything else but shit, so there’s very little incentive for anybody to provide service that’s non-shit. Except of course, when dealing with tourists. In her scrapbook, my friend described the “ice maiden” she encountered at the tourist office here in Timișoara; she might have been the same lady I dealt with on my arrival, who managed to be very aggressive and defensive at the same time when all I wanted to know was how the tram tickets worked. People’s customer service experiences in a new country have a huge bearing on how they view that country; Romanians don’t seem to have figured that out at all yet. (

I’ve got five lessons scheduled for each of the next three days.

It was going to happen eventually, wasn’t it? The last few days I’ve been feeling a bit down. Not depressed as such, but just this general bleeugh feeling. I’m sure I’d be fine now if I’d managed to get away for a day or two and spend several hours reading a book on a train, but my illness put paid to that. Last year Timișoara was all new and fun and mad and exciting; it hasn’t stopped being all kinds of awesome, but it’s still a biggish city that I need to get away from every once in a while to break up the routine. I was thinking that if I’d gone to the UK and endured what would surely have been an absolutely awful Christmas and New Year, I’d probably be fine now too. This morning there was a tell-tale sign that things weren’t right: I had no recollection of having made myself a cup of tea two minutes earlier. That’s how life used to be week in, week out, doing things like grocery shopping and, um, trying to hold down a job, with a similar memory span to a fairly retentive goldfish. The good news is that I’ll soon have a lot more lessons again, and so far there has been a very strong positive correlation between how much work I have and how I feel.

The couple who bought me that hamper won’t be having any lessons until 2nd February. That’s a bugger. But I do now have some new students. A brother and sister (he’s 10, she’s 13) will have their first lessons with me on Monday. They live in Dumbrăvița, five doors down from the ten-year-old boy I started with in October. I’ve also got a new bloke starting on Thursday. Yesterday I had a call from a woman who I really struggled to understand. She talked so quickly and at such a high pitch that she reminded me of when I was a kid and I’d mess around with Dad’s record player, putting one of his 33s or 45s on 78. She seemed to think I knew what she was saying, but I could hardly understand a bloody thing. Cât costă? How much is it? Phew, a question I understand. On that note, I’ve had no choice but to put my prices up. In my first few months here it felt like an inflation-free zone, but in the last six to nine months everything has gone up. The leu has weakened somewhat against the euro, and oil prices have shot up. Just around the corner is a kiosk where they sell shawormas (I’ve seen about five different spellings for shaworma, which is a bit like a kebab). For the last few months I’ve been waiting for them to increase their price of a large shaworma from 11 lei, and finally on Wednesday I saw they’d put them up to 12.

Today is Epiphany, or as they call it here, Boboteaza, which to me is a funny word. Right now there’s a snaking queue of at least 100 people around the cathedral, waiting to get their hands on water that is supposedly even holier than bog-standard holy water. Tomorrow is St John the Baptist’s day, which probably a million Romanians called Ion or Ioan or Ionuț or Ioana will celebrate. People here often celebrate both their birthday and their saint’s day, if they have one. Slightly confusingly, the expression “La Mulți Ani” is used on someone’s birthday, their saint’s day, and for New Year. Just like last year, although this time I was in the middle of a lesson, the local priest and his accomplice dropped in and blessed me and this flat. I gave him 8 lei, up from 6 last year.

My watch strap is broken, and because it’s a Swatch I can’t replace it anywhere in Timișoara. Believe me, I’ve tried. Even the shop that sells Swatches couldn’t do it. When I leave the house without a watch I feel just about naked. I know my phone shows the time in quite large digits, but it doesn’t compare. Yesterday I tried to find a cheap watch to use as a stand-in until I get the Swatch strap replaced, with no luck.

The weather is incredible for this time of year. Our expected high today is 13. And I feel a bit better now.

I’ve been absolutely bloody hopeless with this blog thing, and for that I apologise. Last week was another busy one for me: 29 hours of teaching, and that was without any at the lollipop-stick-making company. This week I’m looking at 24 or so.

Right now we’re in a middle of a four-day long weekend. Yesterday was St Andrew’s Day; today is Romania’s national day, the 99th anniversary of Romania in its current format. Before the downfall of communism, the national day was celebrated in August instead, for some reason unknown to me because my knowledge of Romanian history is shamefully crap. The parade of military vehicles will start at eleven so I’ll pop down for that. Last year my feet were like ice blocks after standing around in zero degrees, so I might put on an extra pair of socks. Tonight there will be a firework display in the square. I asked one of my students what might be in store for next year’s centenary, and he said possibly an extra tank, and maybe they’ll add a screamer or two to their pyrotechnic arsenal. He said the parades of aging vehicles, which should be in museums, demonstrate what a joke Romania’s military is. I said, yeah, sounds a bit like New Zealand. Some people will be going to Alba Iulia for the day. I visited that city in August. In the middle of the citadel is where the declaration of unity (or whatever they call it) was signed in 1918, so it’s effectively Romania’s Waitangi. Today there will also be protests, timed for maximum visibility.

The Christmas market has just started in the main square, and will run until about 10th January. There will also be two smaller markets in the other squares that weren’t a feature last time around. It’s slightly weird that I’m now talking about last year. Everything is coming around for a second time – how did that happen?

The weekend before last, one of my students took me to the winery in Recaș, and we filled bottles of wine straight from the tap. She filled five-litre bottles. I can’t possibly drink those sorts of volumes by myself (although when I lived in France I did just that), so I just filled three two-litre bottles – two reds and a white – at between 13 and 15 lei a bottle, which is extremely cheap. When I showed the bottles to my brother last weekend on FaceTime, he thought they were hilarious. “Are you sure that one isn’t piss?” But I’ve almost finished the dry red which has been the best wine I’ve had since I arrived here.

I still play Scrabble, or more accurately Words With Friends, on my phone. I’m now leading my cousin by 52 games to 24, with one draw. Against a complete stranger I just played EQUALiZE across two double word squares for 143, my highest-ever score on one turn. I do find Scrabble fascinating from a tactical perspective, and I’m thinking I should take the plunge and actually attempt to play it seriously, which of course means learning those god-awful words.

Yes, I’ve got the job at the language school and I’m trying to sort the contract out now. I’m not exactly au fait with Romanian legalese and all the various acts and declarations and what have you. Assuming everything does get signed off, I still don’t know when I’ll start, what I’ll be doing precisely, or indeed whether I’ll be any good at it. What I do know is how much I’ll get paid, and it isn’t a lot. It’s marginally less than I get from my private one-on-one lessons. But taking the job should have all kinds of long-term benefits, so I’m excited to have the opportunity. I’d have to go back to 2004 for the last time I felt excited at being offered a job, and in that case the excitement wore off inside 24 hours. As for the job with the council, I wasn’t excited so much as relieved to be getting an increased salary and, more importantly, turning my back on the insurance industry.

Now that August is behind us, the one-on-one lessons are picking up again, or in yesterday’s case, two-on-one. I had my first lesson with a young couple, aged just 20 and 21. It wasn’t easy because he was at a much higher level than her and had far more confidence. She has highly ambitious plans to be near-fluent by next summer, so I’ll have my work cut out.

I’ve lived in Romania for almost a year, and now it all feels incredibly normal. I have no desire to go back home, wherever home even is. New Zealand is a great country but what would I do if I went back there? After going through the motions for so long, here in Romania I feel relaxed, comfortable in my own skin, alive! Slowly but surely I’m going somewhere I actually want to be. It’s bloody amazing really. I’m proud of myself for having the courage to completely change my life, but I’m also very lucky. Most people just aren’t in a position to do what I’ve done.

This morning it looked like the big Badea Cârțan market had disappeared. Oh no! But not to worry; it had just moved to Piața Traian for three months while Badea Cârțan is being renovated. The markets are great at this time of year, with stalls practically overflowing with bell peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes weighing up to a kilo each. There were also plenty of homegrown apples, some that wouldn’t have made the cut when I was a kid (I used to sell apples from our trees). As always there were lots of cheeses, but so far they’ve been a bit disappointing. Here you can buy many varieties of cow, sheep and goat cheeses but they look and taste surprisingly similar. Finally this week I chanced upon a sheep cheese that had a much richer, farmier flavour.

New Zealand’s latest suicide figures came out early this week. They are ugly reading, and to make matters worse, nobody quite knows why New Zealand has such a high suicide rate. It’s probably a combination of reasons. But one thing’s for sure: the cutbacks to mental health services that the country has seen under the present government have been inexcusable.