Romania

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.

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.

Last week was a good one. I had 14½ hours of teaching, I had an interview (that wasn’t supposed to be an interview) at a language school, and it looks like I have a new student. Maybe this crazy Romania thing might work out after all. In a sense it already has worked out of course. I’m living in a city that I love, doing a job that I love, doing my thing, without all that mind-numbing nothingness that I experienced day in, day out, for years. I’ve totally revolutionised my life, and how bloody cool is that?! But for my own sense of self-worth and, let’s face it, bank balance, I needed more work (and still do).

For the first time in eight months I ironed a shirt, and at 2pm on Friday I turned up at the language school just over the river, supposedly for an informal chat with two relatively young women. “This won’t be an interview.” Great. I was pretty relaxed. The woman on the right dragged out a copy of my CV which had some words like “actuarial” underlined in pencil. Presumably she’d Googled them. She described my decision to teach English after all those years in technical roles as “odd”. I did my best to emphasise that I really, really want to do this job, even if my CV might suggest otherwise. That felt a little weird. I thought of all those damn interviews in the past where was I totally unenthused, or worse. She then asked me to describe a time when I’d had to cope with a difficult situation in my teaching. I then said, “But you told me this wasn’t an interview!” The woman on the left, who teaches both English and French, went a little bit easier on me. The, er, informal chat lasted 50 minutes. They said they’ll contact me in the next week or two and I’m hopeful they’ll have something for me. Perhaps I’ll be able to help out in the intensive courses they run over the summer. Dealing with a class of students instead of the one-on-one teaching I’ve done so far will certainly be a challenge for me, but it’s one I’m up for.

On Saturday night I met Cosmin, my new student (hopefully that’s what he is) at a bar in the square here. He’s about the same age as me, but is married and has a boy of eleven. He lives in Dumbrăvița, where I currently teach the nine-year-old boy twice a week. Cosmin is pretty cosmic; he’s tall, sports a beard and has tattoos down the length of both arms, and on Saturday he wore several bracelets and a T-shirt just like the ones you’d get in Cosmic in Cuba Mall. For a living he puts up shades and marquees, and he wants to move with his family to Australia in November. I asked him to rate his level of English on a zero-to-ten scale; he told me zero. He started school under Communism and learnt French, not English. I’ll have one hell of a job getting him up to speed in just a few months, but I’ll try. We must have chatted for over an hour, my longest conversation in Romanian yet. Wow, I’m sitting outside here on a beautiful evening in a beautiful city, drinking the local beer and speaking a totally awesome language that hardly anybody else learns. Dammit, this is cool! Cosmin’s wife and friends later arrived, and he bought me four beers in all. If things go according to plan, we’ll start a week on Saturday. It should be good for my Romanian as well as his English.

Last week I had three lessons with my Skype student, but only one of those was an English lesson. She wanted some help with statistics, which is a requirement of her psychology course. The stats wasn’t too hard, but it was all in German so I was frantically Googling terms that, being German, ran to twenty letters or more. I was glad that I was able to help her.