Romania

I spoke to my brother on Friday night. I think back four years to his very unhappy life with his fiancée and it’s been a total transformation. It’s as if he’s a completely different person now. He’s in a happy relationship and a fulfilling job that enables him to travel quite often and do lots of housey stuff that seems to excite him. The years he spent outside the Army did him considerable good; he avoided being institutionalised. One minute he told me about a presentation he gave about geopolitics, the next minute he was telling me about the ten eggs they were incubating. In the past it was a struggle getting much out of him at all except the occasional grunt. Yesterday I booked a flight to London and all being well I’ll get to see him and his girlfriend. I’m only going for five days, coming back here on Easter Sunday. As much as I like Timișoara I’m looking forward to the change of scenery.

I’m much happier than I was four years ago too. All that futility was almost too much to bear.

Last week was slightly frustrating – I only managed 7½ hours of teaching, compared with 14 the week before. This week I should be busier again. My Skype student continues to piss me off with her constant changing of dates and times to suit her, but being pissed off occasionally is normal in any job and something I take in my stride. We’re currently working our way through a very good textbook produced by Cambridge University Press – it delves into all aspects of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation while covering interesting topics and giving an insight into British life. It teaches British English pronunciation which can be a little confusing for my student who learnt American English before I intervened. In our last lesson we covered “linking R” (four apples) and “intrusive R” (Vienna-r-is amazing), neither of which come into play in most varieties of American English because most English speakers in America are rhotic, so they pronounce the R in a word like “four”, and they tend not to stick R’s in phrases like “Vienna is amazing” or “Pamela Anderson”.

On Thursday I turned up to a potential lesson outside the Continental Hotel, hardly filled with optimism as to how it would turn out. I met not one but two potential students there, a 19-year-old Romanian who could speak virtually no English, and an Italian bloke in his fifties whom he had somehow befriended. The young guy could speak Italian; the Italian spoke some English but had only been in Romania a month and could speak hardly a word of the local language. Communication was interesting – I did quite well in Romanian but my Italian was very rusty. They wanted to live and work in Manchester, a city I’ve never been to. We sat on a park bench and had an interesting chat. I wrote a few basic sentences in a notebook. The young guy wanted to know the word for “steal”, something that Romanians are sometimes accused of doing. After 50 minutes they’d had enough. Have you got some money? You know, we discussed this on the phone. The young bloke said he didn’t expect to have to pay for the first session, and they both insisted they had no money on them. I pointed out the word “steal” on the page, and that was that.

With one of my other students I incorporate a song in every second lesson. So far I’ve used five: Our House by Madness, Ironic by Alanis Morissette, Let Her Go by Passenger, She’s Leaving Home by the Beatles, and Friday I’m In Love by the Cure.

Spring is most definitely in the air now. There’s nothing half-arsed about the seasons here, and I like that. Summer might be the hardest season for me to deal with. My parents are coming to stay for two weeks from 10th June; Dad is worried that it might be too hot for him. When I mentioned this to Mum she said “we’ll just have to put up with it; we’ll be fine.” I then said, “Do you mind if I translate that? You mean I’ll be fine.”

Coming to Romania might be the best thing I’ve ever done. Every day I walk around this city and see something new, a shop front, a doorway, a sign, a tree, and think, this is fantastic. The whole place has a handmade feel about it that I simply love. I read an article last week about malls merging (bleeding, if you like) into city centres. That sounds bloody awful. In Timișoara the big swanky mall with English signs (because they have to use a language that represents opulence and Romanian doesn’t cut it) feels like an enclave, a separate country, and long may it remain so. It won’t be long before tourists find out about Timișoara. The daily Ryanair flights, which began last September, are already making a small impression. On Friday I walked past some young English people in an outdoor bar, talking about a popular pastime among young English people, “getting wasted”. If that’s your aim, this isn’t a bad place to come to.

In the longer term, this might be good place to find a partner, certainly better than the UK or New Zealand. To put it bluntly, a potential girlfriend might put my mannerisms and quirks down to being foreign, when in reality I’m just a bit weird.

In my 50th and most recent game of Words with Friends with my cousin, I’d just broken my record when she promptly resigned during the endgame. I was leading 559-291. It was a crazy game. I had two bingos including one on the opening turn, and several other high-scoring moves. I was fortunate to draw all four of the highest-scoring tiles and both blanks, although I did make a conscious decision to open the game up. I was worried she might not want to play with me again after she threw in the towel, but we’ve since started a new game. I’m now leading overall by 34½ games to 15½.

Apologies for such a long post.

Right now I’m feeling, well, messy. On Thursday I was given some tablets to help alleviate my sinus problems. They’re a combination of pseudoephedrine and an antihistamine. Initially the chemist didn’t give me enough pills so I had to get some more. I’ve also been given a new nasal spray. I realised yesterday evening that amongst all this I’d missed two doses of Citalopram (my antidepressant) in a row, and I started feeling dizzy. I didn’t sleep well last night or the night before; insomnia is listed as a common side effect of pseudoephedrine. Plus I still have sinus headaches and I’m coughing up thick phlegm, sometimes colourless, sometimes yellow, sometimes brown, sometimes lumpy and sometimes even hard and crusty, like the stuff that sticks to the sides of my nose all the damn time. A lot of the time I struggle to breathe out of my left nostril.

I explained my problems at my appointment with an allergist on Thursday morning, the best I could in Romanian. She was very nice and seemed quite impressed with how much of the local language I could speak. I said that I’d had problems in that area ever since I got pneumonia and whooping cough when I was six. She squirted twenty droplets of liquid on my forearm to test for allergies such as dog and cat hair and various types of pollen. They all came up negative with the exception of mould (mucegai in Romanian). I was given a list of tips and tricks for dealing with a mould allergy. After two weeks of taking the medication she prescribed me, I’ll see her again, and I’ll likely get to visit an ear, nose and throat specialist and a pulmonary specialist. I don’t know whether my insurance will pay for this – I guess you could call thirty years a pre-existing condition. I’m very glad to be finally getting it seriously looked at. For so long all the mental health stuff took precedence I just hope they don’t dig up anything sinister as Mum put it; I read some horror stories last night about younger non-smokers with lung cancer.

I did 12½ hours of teaching last week, my biggest week yet, and I expect to do the same this week. With none of the pressure to be somebody else that I’m used to feeling at work, teaching hardly feels like work at all. I’ve now bought a Romanian domain name and am trying to put a site together using WordPress (which I also use for this blog) to help promote my lessons, in particular those on Skype. I’ve created a logo that incorporates my initials and have chosen a colour scheme (yellow, not too bright but not too insipid either) but haven’t yet found a suitable WordPress theme for the simple site that I’m aiming for. Having this new laptop certainly helps though.

Apart from my health issues (a big exception, I know) I’m feeling pretty damn good about things. Sometimes lately I’ve been scarcely able to believe how happy I am.

It’s a soggy first day of spring in Timișoara. I’ve just got in on the action by buying a couple of those flowery mărțișoare thingies, purely as souvenirs because you have to, like, know people to give them to. Female people. The guy I played tennis with in December told me this morning that you give them to women, whether you’re close to them or not.

Yesterday was simply a beautiful day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and after the weather I’d become accustomed to in recent months I was practically sizzling in 20-degree heat as the accordion man and the violin man and the statue man did their thing. In the afternoon I wandered across town, as I often do, to get one or two bits and pieces for my apartment. Buying two screws in a large hardware shop, yes two bloody screws, was quite a performance. My purchase, which came to a few cents, had to be bagged and scanned and registered and signed off in their system. Romania generally works on a refreshingly manual basis so all this faffing around with systems took me by surprise. My biggest purchase was a kind of cube that you can sit on. You can buy them in delightfully weird and wonderful colours in a big store called Dedeman, and I got a yellow and red one to brighten this place up a bit. Having students means people actually see the inside of my flat, and that’s a bit of a departure for me. I’m used to having no visitors for months on end; any thoughts of making interior alterations would bring to mind images of bears taking a number two in the forest. Now I might even have to dust! I now also have a large table, which I got delivered from Dedeman ten days ago, set up beside the window.

I got back in time for my Skype lesson which was due to start at five, but five o’clock ticked past and she didn’t appear online. When I called her she told me she wasn’t at home and was about to go to her brother’s party. This isn’t the first (or fourth) time she’s pulled this kind of stunt. In future we need to arrange the whole week’s lessons in advance, with an agreement that she pays me for a no-show if she hasn’t contacted me 24 hours beforehand. This evening I’m due to give two lessons including a two-hour Skype one which may or may not happen. Frustrating, most certainly, but these sorts of frustrations are nothing compared to the feelings of complete emptiness I used to experience in the workplace. And it looks like I now have a sixth student! The future is bright.

After forty games of Words with Friends with my cousin, I now lead 28-11 with one rare and dramatic tie. More details to come.

I want to change tack a little with this blog. Shifting your whole life to some weird and wacky country 11,000 miles away where you don’t know anybody, don’t speak the language, don’t have any guaranteed work and have never even set foot in before… well, I guess you could say that’s a fairly major undertaking. For many people with their friends and families and identities all wrapped up in a place called home, it would be like going to Mars (and actually some of the temperatures we got here in January weren’t far off). So I’d like to post a bit more often and talk more about the things I do and see and the people I meet on a daily basis, and the challenges I face with the language and the culture and figuring out the various hows and whys. Last week for instance I took a bus (probably not the best bus, as it turned out) and then traipsed across half the city trying to find a particular shop that might, perhaps, sell the laptop I was looking for. I found the right street, a busy street, a main street. The shop was at 56A and I was outside number 32 so it was clearly just up there a little bit, maybe just past the petrol station. Well it was certainly past the petrol station, and a school, and a few factories, and another petrol station, and a small farm with lots of chickens, and some muddy park of sorts, and I could see a large overhead sign up ahead telling me I was about to leave Timișoara entirely, but sure enough there was the shop, a surprisingly big shop in fact, full of empty spaces where my desired laptop might once have been. That trip took over three hours there and back, and I take similar essentially futile excursions on a regular basis, but I learn a little bit more with each one.

Today is officially the last day of winter. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. The temperature is forecast to rocket into the high teens later today. Perfect for me. The streets are lined with stallholders selling mărțișoare, which are little amulets or talismans that people give to each other on the first day of spring. That’s yet another Romanian tradition that is completely new to me. The central squares are packed with people, even in the middle of a work day, and none of them seem to be that bothered to get anywhere in particular. A bit like me really. Do any of them work? Or do they all have “jobs” like mine? The team bus of Poli Timișoara, the local football team, has just pulled in and the players have filed into the cathedral, but I don’t even think God can save them from relegation now. They were penalised 14 points for multiple irregularities before the season even started, and they’re now sitting on 13 points, second from bottom, having just been hammered 5-0 in Constanța by the competition leaders Viitorul, or The Future.

I now have five students. Count ’em, five! One of them gets four two-hour lessons from me every week via Skype, one of them can unfortunately only afford one lesson a month, and the rest are somewhere in between. Teaching is bloody great! I get to chat to people one-on-one in a relaxed environment, I get to talk about aspects of language which fascinate me, I get to discuss news articles and song lyrics, I get to improve my Romanian a little bit too, and best of all I gets tons and tons of job satisfaction. I don’t get that awful “what the fuck did I actually do today?” feeling over and over, week in, week out, where nothing ever happens and the needle returns to the start of the song and here we go again. I’m helping people and I’m getting paid for something I enjoy doing. It’s amazing, really. As I keep saying, it’s a dream.

Dad emailed me last night to say that both he and Mum were very proud of me for having the guts to move to Romania and make a proper go of it here. That meant a lot to me. He said that I’ve already surpassed his (admittedly pretty low) expectations. Yes, coming here took some serious balls. I didn’t know anyone here and I’d never been here or anywhere in Eastern Europe in my life before. To say it was daunting would be a major understatement. But shit, how daunting was the alternative?! I’d been going through the motions for so bloody long that eventually I was going to crack. I simply had to break the cycle before it was too late.

And here I am. It still feels like a dream. The beautiful cathedral reminding me of its presence 96 times a day, the old trams (and new ones) rattling past, the parks lined with trees that will burst into leaf in a couple of short weeks. The melt-in-your-mouth bread from the bakery down below, the cheese, the salami, the peppers. I can now eat an orange in my workplace without the juice going all over the keyboard. I haven’t ironed anything in five months. I’ve been gradually stocking my wardrobe with clothes that I actually like wearing, such as the purple merino cardigan I bought for only 8 lei from one of the many second hand shops in the city; it seemed like new. I have no team meetings to remember (or forget, as the case often was for one particular weekly meeting at my last job, much to my embarrassment); I have no team.

I haven’t made a bad start with the teaching and my Skype student is a huge help, but I still need more business. I also need to meet more people even if I’m getting a healthy amount of human interaction from my lessons. But I don’t feel in any rush. Next week I hope to get a website up and running to help promote Skype lessons, and some business cards printed. Yes, business cards that won’t just sit in a drawer like all my previous ones have. One time I used them to make a card game I’d dreamt up.

The last couple of weeks have been frustrating with all my tech issues, and after contacting my cousin’s IT guru friend in Masterton, I bit the bullet and bought myself a new laptop. He said I would need a new hard drive and a clean reinstall of Windows 10, and the amount of time and effort and money involved wouldn’t be worth it. I’d already spent many hours painstakingly transferring data onto flash drives. At close to NZ$1200, this new Lenovo machine wasn’t cheap. It has a solid state drive and I hope it stays in a solid state as I drive it. It’s also a 2-in-1 meaning that it folds right back to become a tablet. So far (day three) it’s been pretty damn fantastic. Both the TV and washing machine are now working too, so I’m cooking with gas, so to speak.

The magnesium I took (and have now finished) was in the form of vials, not tablets.

Suffice to say I’m pretty happy with my lot right now.

These are interesting times to be living in Romania. A law has been passed in secret that could effectively legalise corruption, freeing hundreds of politicians and senior officials from jail. There have been massive demonstrations all over Romania, including here in Timișoara, the biggest protests the country has seen since the end of communism in 1989. Romania has huge problems with corruption and they’re holding the country back in a big way. I’m very glad to see people taking to the streets. I was caught up in the crowd of (at a guess) 20,000 last night. Whistles, horns, megaphones, banners, Romanian flags, the national anthem, and many rhyming slogans; as far as I could see it was all very peaceful. News reports of hooligans, both here and overseas, give a false picture: the hooligans are a tiny minority. The first protest here was quite small, perhaps 1000 people, but they have since grown. Last night they marched past my apartment block at about 10:30, more than four hours after the start of the demonstration. I expect a big crowd again tonight, being a Friday. Who knows, maybe they will bring down the government. As I said, interesting times.

I’ve been having computer problems again. My laptop has developed a habit of freezing every few minutes. This morning I defragged my hard drive and that has, surprisingly, improved things somewhat. I think we all need to defrag every now and again. Without a fully functioning computer I’m pretty much stuffed.

I had two lessons scheduled for Wednesday but both my students pulled out for very different reasons. (At least there were reasons. There usually aren’t.) So that was a bugger. But it looks like I have acquired a new student, my third active one and my sixth overall. Yesterday, at his request, we met in Cărturești, a fairly upmarket bookshop near Piața Unirii, where we chatted for 90 minutes over tea. He paid me for that, and when he asked whether I’d agree to a buy nine, get one free arrangement for lessons I just about bit his hand off. He plans to actually have ten lessons with me. He’s very motivated, and that’s probably why he already has a very good command of English. I’d put him at an 8 out of 10. My Skype student pulled out of Wednesday’s lesson because she has exams, but she said she’ll soon want ten hours of lessons a week. I think my hourly rate is extremely cheap for her.

I’m so glad I’ve made the move. I wish I’d done it, or done something, earlier. I was stuck in a cycle of jobs that were meaningless or anxiety-provoking or repulsive or some combination of the three. Repulsive isn’t overstating it either. A lot of people find team meetings and performance reviews and corporate bullshit a bit of a drag, but for me it wasn’t a drag, it was a highly toxic mixture. If I stuck around much longer it might have killed me. Here there have been frustrations. I’ve found some people to be intimidating and untrustworthy. I’ve made suboptimal decisions, spending more time and money on things than I’ve needed, as I’ve tried to find my feet. I haven’t got to know a lot of people yet, although the lessons have helped. I haven’t picked up as much of the language as I’d have liked. But I’m comfortable, I’m making things happen, and I feel a general sense of hope, of optimism. I think I’d like to do this teaching thing for the next few years (I’ve never felt that about any previous job). I think Romania is awesome. I think I’ll be here a while.

Maybe I should use tonight’s protest to my advantage and risk putting up a few posters in the hope that the cops will be otherwise occupied.

I must admit, I never saw Roger Federer winning another grand slam, not for one minute. But he played sublime tennis for three sets out of five against Nadal in a very good final that wound the clock back a decade or so. The match wasn’t in the same league as, say, the 2008 Wimbledon final, because both players were rarely at their best at the same time, but it was still well worth watching and those last few games were gripping. Both men’s semis and the final were thoroughly good matches, all going five sets, and I’m trying to recall other grand slams where the last three men’s matches all went the distance. Wimbledon 2001 certainly (which had the added bonus of the women’s semis and finals all going to three sets) but I’m struggling to think of any others. A more recent Australian Open, perhaps.

My cousin just snapped a four-game losing streak against me in Words with Friends, winning our latest game 424 to 328 thanks to 115 points for CRAZE and some pretty ropy racks for me. I swapped tiles twice. The first time I needed to do so earlier but I was playing in the middle of the protest and was distracted. That was my lowest score since our seventh game. I’m now leading 17-9.