Romania

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Condemned

December 11, 2017 by 0 Comments

Towards the end of last week, our body corporate sent out the latest estimate for strengthening our apartment building. The figures were eye-watering: $10 million to strengthen to 100% of new building standard; $8 million for 67%. And that’s just the bit that I live in. The other section, which abuts our building but is separate for seismic purposes, has recently been reassessed as even less earthquake-safe than ours, close to red-sticker territory. So strengthening is no longer a serious option. At the weekend the body corp had a brainstorming session to figure out what to do next, and I’ll expect we’ll probably sit it out now until 2028, when the complex is due to be demolished if it isn’t up to scratch by then. The amazing thing to me is how accepting everybody has been of their fate. (During the eighties, when the English-speaking countries changed from societies into dog-eat-dog economies, everyone became more submissive; there has been some backlash in recent years but it’s been weak and misdirected.) To avoid a repeat of the CTV building collapse, which this policy will fail to do anyway, they’re financially crippling thousands of people. If you’re reading this blog, you might think it’s perfectly fair for apartment owners to foot the bill – however much – to make their homes safe, and if they haven’t got the money, tough. They made a bad investment, right, just like the person who bought shares in a company that goes belly-up, or the guy who went to Las Vegas and put his life savings on red. But that’s eighties thinking again: your home is no longer primarily a place to live but is instead a financial instrument to be bought and sold like any other. As affected Wellington apartment owners, we should be getting together as a group and lobbying the government to end this insanity. This is the capital city after all, and there’s a new (more compassionate?) government in charge now.

It’s hard not to feel somewhat bitter about all of this. My cousin, for instance, makes bucketloads of money by helping make parasitic American drug companies truckloads of money. She works exceptionally hard, is driven beyond what I or most people will ever be, and is extremely well qualified. All of that deserves to be rewarded, and I get on very well with her, but the fact remains that her work is of questionable benefit to actual human beings. And her million-dollar house isn’t affected by the earthquake policy at all, because it’s a house, not an apartment. Just imagine the furore if people’s $2 million mansions in Eastbourne (many of which would be matchsticks in the event of a magnitude-8 quake) suddenly came under the scope of the policy and were effectively condemned overnight!

The apartment business might have had a silver lining though. Perhaps it gave me the impetus to say “sod this”, where I might have otherwise muddled along in a string of jobs, inevitably in disorienting (for me) team environments where the only good outcome would have been to avoid bad ones. If I’d carried on in that vein, then in the words of Bob Marley, one day the bottom would have dropped out, probably with disastrous consequences. Instead I’ve completely changed my life and to write that still feels bloody amazing.

I had 21½ hours of teaching last week. I was chuffed with that after all the cancellations I had in the early part of the week. Unfortunately this week it’s déjà vu: two cancellations already and it’s still Monday morning.

Last week King Michael, Romania’s last monarch, died at the grand age of 96. He became king before his sixth birthday, but was forced to abdicate in 1947 with the advent of communism. Today Romania is a very divided country – we had anti-government protests here last night – but the death of the king seems to have united the country temporarily and might help the current government to survive.

I’ve started getting frustrated with Words With Friends. I live in an awkward time zone for all the Americans who populate the app, so many of my games progress very slowly or sometimes fizzle out completely. Also I recently had to download Words With Friends 2, a more gimmicky version of the app that veers into Candy Crush territory, and I hate it. I’ll still play my cousin from time to time because I like to keep in touch with her, but apart from that it’s a waste of time. So instead I’ve started playing real Scrabble, with a clock, on the Internet Scrabble Club (isc.ro), a site that was set up by a Romanian in the nineties and visually has never been updated since then. But the server is actually very robust, and it attracts some of the best players in the world. It’s altogether a more high-octane experience than Words With Friends. I’ve so far played seven games, winning five. My very first move of my very first game was BUM, which turned out to be possibly my best move of the whole game, a 70-point loss for me. My other loss (by just 18 points, 396 to 414) was a fantastic high-scoring game. I had quite a dramatic game yesterday where I struggled with the tight 14-minute clock, and incurred a ten-point penalty for running over time, but was able to play out for a 36-point win before forfeiting the game altogether (which is what happens if you go over time by a minute).

The cancellations mean my only lessons today are this evening, from 6 till 7:30 and from 8 till 9:30. Unless they get cancelled too.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

La mulți ani, România!

December 1, 2017 by 0 Comments

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.

Language teaching - Romania - Travel: Romania

A relaxing weekend away

October 2, 2017 by 0 Comments

I’m writing this short post from Pensiunea Laura in the bustling village of Chișcău, almost right next to Peștera Urșilor, a.k.a. the Bears’ Cave. We visited the cave this morning; at almost a mile in length it was a sight to behold. As we entered the cave, it was strewn with bones from bears and other huge beasts. The stalagmites, stalactites and columns at times looked like marble figures. It was quite fantastic, as if we’d stepped into a scene from Lord of the Rings. (Mines of Moria? The first film? I forget.) After the cave, we walked down the long high street, stopping at a museum on the way. This was really a makeshift (but extensive) museum of farm machinery and tools, including all sorts of weird and wonderful Heath Robinson-style contraptions that we couldn’t figure out at all, and are probably still in use in Romania today. It’s been a relaxing and sunny Sunday.

Yesterday was rather different. I drove the best part of 300 km from our beautiful lodgings in Zolt to our booked accommodation in Chișcău, which I thought we might never reach. Things were fairly plain sailing to begin with as we stopped at Făget and Brad, but figuring out the last bit without GPS or a detailed enough map was no easy matter. We ended up a couple of kilometres from our destination but the only way to get there was down an extremely narrow gravel track that our car certainly couldn’t handle. Darkness was about to descend. Check-in supposedly ended at 8pm. We were hungry. Had I been with my parents, we’d have needed to scrape Mum off the roof of the car. Instead we kept our cool, rang the hotel people, got some surprisingly accurate directions from a man in one of the villages, and everything turned out fine. The level of calmness inside the car just about blew me away, as did the beauty of villages we passed through. We also met just about every farm animal I can think of except pigs.

The most stressful part for me was before we even started, when we had to find the rental car place.

Yes I really am starting the new job on Tuesday, with four students from a company where they make, as far as I can tell, lolly sticks. Somebody has to. Tomorrow morning I have to take a Skype call related to this job, after which we’ll head back to Timișoara.

Life :) - Politics - Romania - Travel: Romania

Timișoara with people!

September 29, 2017 by 0 Comments

My friends (or my parents’ friends really) arrived on Tuesday night. It’s been fun having them here in this wonderful city and meeting up with them in breaks between lessons. I feel perfectly comfortable with them. The highlight so far was perhaps eating out on Wednesday night. We ate at Timișoreana in the square. They both had fairly substantial meals while I was lumbered with a hunk of pork on a bone, with horseradish covering about a quarter of the plate. The pork was perfectly fine, but something with it would have been nice. We then went to a decidedly frill-free basementy “restaurant” alongside Piața 700 so I could properly fill up. The staff there were much older, male, and couldn’t speak English. There were no other customers. I had something advertised as sausage and bean soup, but “slop” might have been more accurate. We also had a beer each, and the whole lot came to 20 lei. Four quid. My friends couldn’t believe that. Yesterday, after visiting the Museum of the Revolution, we checked out a street food festival in Parcul Rozelor (the rose garden). Yes, oh-so-trendy “street food” has landed in Timișoara. The festival was sponsored by a bank or insurance company or something awful like that, and it was all basically overpriced mall food. You could hardly get a sandwich for four quid. We couldn’t get away quick enough.

This morning we’ll be going away, but where and how are still very much up in the air. I’m not looking forward to negotiating Timișoara traffic in a strange car on a strange side of the road. I’ll be meeting them at their hotel in just over an hour.

Last Saturday I met up with my student. We had a few drinks at a bar on the storm-stricken bank of the Bega. We spoke Romanian. I sometimes accidentally invented a word like “profesorile”, which she thought was funny.

Watching coverage of the New Zealand election last weekend and seeing people like John Campbell and Russel Norman, I got ever so slightly homesick for the first time since I left a year ago.

I might be starting my new job on Tuesday. More on that next time perhaps, but I’ve really got to go.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Amazingly normal

September 2, 2017 by 0 Comments

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.

Life :) - Other sports - Romania - Tennis

Mehala

August 22, 2017 by 0 Comments

We hit 36 degrees on Saturday, but it’s felt just the slightest bit autumnal the last two days thanks to a welcome drop in temperature and a fresh breeze. Yesterday I went to a market in the west of the city called Mehala. That “meh” combination, which is also found in Mehedinți (the name of one of the counties I visited with my parents) has an Arabic feel to it. “Meh” is, of course, now a word in its own right, thanks (probably) to The Simpsons. It can be both an interjection and an adjective. Mehala has a large car market but also a section where bikes, tools, second-hand clothes and other odds and ends are sold. One of my students told me about the market, turning the word Mehala into an English verb meaning to swindle: “I got Mehala’d.” With that in mind, I didn’t buy anything, not even from the very aggressive teenager trying to sell me sunglasses. It started to spit with rain, so it was all hands on deck for the stallholders. That green three-wheeled truck was incredible – I’d never seen anything like it. The market is also a popular spot for blokes to have a beer or two, although most places in Romania fall into that category. There was mici sizzling away on huge barbecues, and I even had some mici, though to be frank I find it pretty meh. I learnt that the local bike gang isn’t called the Red Devils, but the even more demonic Red Evils. The picture of the Trabant is from Baia Mare.

By my count, I put 483 flyers in people’s letterboxes yesterday, and walked about 13 km. I got another thousand flyers printed off today and visited a new language school; the bloke there was impressed with my Romanian or was just being polite, I couldn’t quite tell. I doubt they’ll have any work for me.

Simona Halep was taken apart by Garbiñe Muguruza in the final in Cincinnati last night; this was yet another missed chance for Halep to become world number one. She has an unfortunate habit of playing within herself in big matches. While that was going on (and long after it had finished) I watched the Red Sox beat the Yankees on a live stream. For some reason I’ve got back into baseball again. There are so many nuances to the game I don’t yet understand, but watching the Red Sox might help there: they’re unusually patient with the bat by 2017 standards, happy to work the count (I hope my terminology is right) rather than relying on the big hit. Unfortunately Romania is in a terrible time zone for watching baseball.

I spoke to Mum on FaceTime this morning. It was good to see her looking brighter. She wanted to read something out to me that she’d unearthed on the internet, and for a few heart-stopping moments I thought it might have been this site. Instead it was from the “court” section of a local UK newspaper: my brother’s ex-fiancée had been convicted of assault and tagged for four months. Mum likes to semi-cyberstalk her instead of just consigning her to history.

This morning I called Bazza for his 62nd birthday. I knew he’d appreciate that. He seemed fine.

Romania - Travel: Romania

Baia Mare trip

August 19, 2017 by 0 Comments

I left myself so little time to catch the train on Saturday that I practically had to run. When I got to the station they were carrying out renovations that made it hard to tell exactly what was what. I was pretty sure Timișoara station had one of those split-flap departure boards that are still ubiquitous in Romania, but I couldn’t see it. Three minutes. Instead there were two large sheets of paper attached to the platform wall. After a momentary mental block as to which Romanian word meant “departures”, I saw that my train was leaving from platform 5. At least at the bigger stations you know which platform is number 5, so dripping with perspiration, I boarded the train with moments to spare.  So much unnecessary self-inflicted stress. I wasn’t able to chat with the couple opposite me because they were busy either chatting with each other or glued to their phones. (The smartphone has made meeting people on trains that much harder.) I finished a book and made a good dent in another one (Mister Pip, which I’ve now finished); the trip was fairly comfortable and didn’t seem to drag. My phone rang a couple of times but I didn’t recognise the number. Thinking it might have been a new student, I didn’t answer. I still don’t feel comfortable speaking Romanian in a busy environment with potential business at stake, so I decided to call back the next day. After stopping in Oradea, Arad and Satu Mare, and a few other places besides, we pulled into Baia Mare just after 10:30. Like most Romanian stations (Arad being the only real exception I’ve come across), Baia Mare station was old and run-down.

I took a taxi to my hotel, and that’s where things got tricky. Those phone calls were from the hotel, and because I didn’t answer, they gave my room (the last room) to somebody else. This is Romania. The bloke at reception put me through to some manager on the phone; I told him I’d give his hotel zero out of ten on booking.com. In the end I got put up in a much nicer and slightly cheaper hotel for the first night, and had a hearty breakfast the next morning that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, before being transferred to the grottier (but manageable) place for the last two nights.

Baia Mare sounds like it should be by the sea. It isn’t. (The name means Big Bath. Mare means both “sea” and “big” in Romanian.) I spent most of Sunday trying to get a feel of the place. The historic centre of the town is quite pretty; it’s been recently tarted up. The city also features the ninth-tallest chimney in the world; it belongs to a disused copper smelter.

Like so many places in Romania, Baia Mare isn’t tourist-friendly. Yeah OK, I followed the “Museum 1.7 km” sign, but now what? Am I still on the right track? It would be nice to know. Street name signs would be a neat idea too. I visited the Muzeul de Etnografie which told me that Maramureș is in some ways a separate country. And a beautiful one, if only I could spend more time there. It’s steeped in tradition, with its own style of music and regional costumes. Everything seems to be built of wood with hardly a nail to be seen. I had a beer in a courtyard and watched four men play a card game that I couldn’t get the gist of. As for food, I was struggling. I had to settle for some noodles that I bought in a large, modern mall. That mall had eight or so food outlets. KFC attracted people like bees to a honeypot; the lure of McDonald’s and KFC seems to be universal.

The next day I felt like going to Sighet, and showed up at the bus station at 9am, hoping to catch one of the scheduled buses. Instead I met a pony-taled Australian in his early sixties who had been travelling for 169 days, and a local guy of 23 who painted, grew beards, played traditional music (he gave us a demonstration on his flute) and had a passion for languages.

He was second person I’d met up there who spoke decent English, after the receptionist at the good hotel. No buses to Sighet materialised until 11:30. The bohemian guy got off just before the end of our winding 1¾-hour journey up and down the mountain.

In Sighet we were right on the border with Ukraine, though you never would have known it. We ate a basic but perfectly good lunch at the bus station restaurant, if you could call it a restaurant. Menus? Bills? Who do you think we are? The Aussie guy and I parted company as he made his way to a hostel. I didn’t do much in Sighet but wander around; it was Monday so the museums and the old communist prison (supposedly a must-see) were closed. Back at the bus and train station I thought to myself how wonderfully peaceful and quiet it was on that sunny evening.

There didn’t seem to be much point in staying long in Baia Mare on Tuesday, because it was a public holiday, and there were no trains that didn’t leave at stupid o’clock, so I made the seven-hour bus journey back to Timișoara. I hope to be back in Maramureș before long – one of my students comes from there and said I could come with her when she next goes there. I mentioned this to Mum; she immediately asked about her name, her age, her bra size, her blood group… Mum has been sick the last few days. Seeing her in such a bad way on FaceTime was quite a shock, but I think she’s just had a severe cold.

Books - Films - Romania - Travel: Romania

Baia Mare, here we come

August 12, 2017 by 0 Comments

Today Dad emailed me with a page outlining the potential horror show of complications that I could be faced with during and after sinus surgery, should I choose to have it some time in the autumn. Then, right on cue, I got an attack of severe pain lasting about an hour, this time in my right sinuses.

The ENT specialist told me that extreme weather doesn’t exactly help, and we’ve had a ton of that lately. Caniculă – extreme heat – has often been the first item on news bulletins. Tomorrow things will cool down significantly, and maybe Europe’s most energy-sapping and soporific heatwave since 2003 (which was my last European summer prior to this one) will be over.

Unsurprisingly, being holiday season, I’ll have slim pickings on the work front for the rest of the month. I’ve got a three-hour lesson pencilled in for tomorrow morning, then nothing else until Wednesday, so I’m taking the opportunity to go somewhere, just like my students. But where? Brașov seemed the obvious choice – everybody visits Brașov when they come to Romania, but I’ve lived here ten months (shit! have I really?) and still haven’t been there. Unfortunately, because it’s August, every man and his dog will be in Brașov, and by Romanian standards it’s an expensive city. So I’ve decided instead to head north to Baia Mare, a seven-hour train trip away. I’m due to get up there around 11pm tomorrow. I haven’t done much research on the place, but it’s in Maramureș, an extremely rugged and remote corner of Romania, jam-packed with tradition. On travelling through Maramureș, a 2013 article in the Telegraph says this: “This is not the place to hire a car or to drive your own car. Roads are notoriously dangerous, directions are difficult, and maps are few.” Well, I’ll just be visiting a city in my first taste of the region, but it should be interesting, and who knows who I might meet on the train.

After watching Nosedive, the opener to Series 3 of Black Mirror, in which everything you do and say is star-rated out of five, I dared to watch the next two episodes. Playtest wound up as a full-on horror movie which I thought was spoilt by the ending. Shut Up and Dance though, oh boy. I was hoping for something good to cling to, somewhere, anywhere, but by the end of it I felt my well had been sucked dry. The final twist was unexpected (to me; maybe I’m just bad at reading these things) and not in a good way. I did however sympathise enormously with the main protagonist, even after the shocking revelation at the end. At the start you see him working in a kitchen, and his experiences with his colleagues were similar to mine in real life when I washed dishes in a pub. Shut Up and Dance was very well done, but I’d strongly advise against watching it if you’re feeling emotionally fragile in any way, or if you have anything important to do immediately afterwards.

I’m currently reading The Elements of Eloquence. It’s about rhetoric. Figures of speech. Like parataxis. Which I’m using now. But not very well. I’m just about to find out what the hell epizeuxis is.

Life :) - Romania - Tennis

They’re coming to stay

June 10, 2017 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Dad – he FaceTimed me from the library in St Ives. They’re due to arrive in Timișoara at 11pm tonight. I’ll get the bus out to the airport and meet them there. We’ll probably stick around the city until Wednesday and then hire a car. Nothing is planned but I think we’ll go south of here to Herculane and Orșova by the Danube, on the border with Serbia. I’m really looking forward to seeing both my parents and a slice of Romania.

Now that it’s well and truly summer, the city is buzzing. Yesterday the sights and sounds and smells of Piața Badea Cârțan – a large market – were almost too much to take in. I hope my parents enjoy it. Maybe we could even go to the theatre, or something similar that requires money that I don’t have but Mum and Dad do.

Simona Halep has – somehow – reached the final of the French Open. Obviously that’s quite a big deal here. She was almost dead and buried in her quarter-final with Svitolina where she made an improbable comeback from 3-6, 1-5, and saved a match point in the tie-break without even knowing it was match point. She didn’t exactly have it all her own way in her semi-final either, but she was the more consistent player. Ostapenko, who hits the ball as hard as the men or so I’ve heard, will be no pushover. I’d quite like to see the final but my TV has packed in (it’s always something). Hopefully I can find a bar that’s showing it.

Update:
Simona didn’t win, and she’ll probably never get a better chance. She led 6-4, 3-0, with a point for 4-0, but the scoreboard was the only place she was dominating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone play such a high-power, high-risk game as her opponent did today. Ostapenko finished the vast majority of points, either with a winner or an unforced error. Perhaps Simona needed to mix things up a bit as Hingis might have done; I really don’t know.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Tenc iu veri maci

June 5, 2017 by 0 Comments

Thursday was Children’s Day. That’s actually a thing in Romania, and this year the government decided it’s enough of a thing to make it an official public holiday for the first time. Personally I think anything that encourages parents to spend more time with their kids is great, although I was dismayed to learn that the awful phrase timp de calitate – quality time – exists in Romanian. Religious festivals are also most definitely a thing here, and today is Rusalii which I think translates to Whitsunday or Whitmonday or is it Pentecost? Whatever you call it, it’s another public holiday, so millions of Romanians have bridged the gap between the two for a bumper five-day weekend. Children’s Day was a popular day for my kidless students to have lessons so it was relatively busy for me. In the evening there was a show at the bandstand in the rose garden and a big smoky barbecue outside. I had a scoop of anchovies (hamsii) and some mici.

Mum and Dad should be safely in St Ives now. They had a two-night stopover in Singapore and called me from the airport. They looked worn out. Mum will be 68 next week, Dad turns 67 at the end of the month, and long-distance travel is starting to become both tiring and stressful for them. Mum doesn’t help – she gets very wound up if the smallest thing goes ever so slightly wrong, and of course when you’re travelling long distances, things rarely do go exactly according to plan. Oh no, there I go again, slagging off Mum. In fairness to her, she’s been very supportive of my move to Romania ever since I suggested it, and she’s proud of me for having the balls to actually do it. I’m optimistic that I’ll get on perfectly fine with Mum when they come here in five days’ time.

I’ve now had my first two lessons with Cosmin. They were fine, although next time I must make sure we sit alongside each other rather than opposite. He had some print-outs from a Romanian-based website for learning English which were worse than useless, but unfortunately he seemed to treat them as gospel. They were full of spelling errors (“fourty”), phonetic transcriptions that encourage terrible pronunciation (tenc iu veri maci for “thank you very much”), antiquated greetings like “How do you do?”, and words and phrases (“daughter-in-law”; “degree”) that you simply don’t need to know when you’re just starting out. None of this was his fault of course, and it disappoints me how much crap is out there, peddled by people who don’t know any better (or worse, don’t care), that actively hinder the process of learning English for student and teacher alike.

I’d better go. Next time (later today?) I’ll post some photos.