Romania

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Inside and out

March 2, 2017 by 0 Comments

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.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Blogging my dream

February 28, 2017 by 0 Comments

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.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Happy with my lot

February 25, 2017 by 0 Comments

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.

 

Language teaching - Politics - Romania

The fight must go on

February 6, 2017 by 0 Comments

I gave a Skype lesson on Friday night and then played my cousin at Words with Friends for the 27th time. It had just gone eleven, and I had two blanks on my rack, when I could no longer concentrate on the game. What a remarkable sight and sound it was to see 30,000 people stream past my apartment block, armed with air horns and whistles, at that time of night. I gave my cousin a running commentary. Earlier I’d gone down to Piața Operei to see it relatively empty, and I wondered where everyone had gone, but they’d set off on their march through the city. Last night I spent some time in the square on a fifth consecutive night of protests, this time with the intent of joining them on the march, but the demonstration which had drawn a great crowd fizzled out at around ten. What’s happened? Have the people given in? Very bad news, I thought. But when I got home I read that the new prime minister had announced on TV that the government would repeal the new law, and in the last couple of hours they have done just that at an emergency meeting. It seems they have yielded to what has been very intense public pressure. But corruption is insidious in Romania and the people must continue to fight.

The protests were fascinating for me in many ways. I had an interesting time trying to decipher some of the banners and to understand what the hell they were chanting. I got some insight into Romanian culture. I was surprised how motivated younger people were to attend the protests when so few of them voted in December’s elections. I was also encouraged by how peaceful the demonstrations were and how many parents brought their children along. Seeing four-year-olds shout “de-mi-sia, de-mi-sia” (“resignation”) amused me. And visually, the protests were very impressive.

You could say that the low voter turnout was what caused this mess. As far as I can tell, the older generations voted PSD as they’ve always done, while the younger ones didn’t vote at all, and so the PSD got a thumping great share of the vote which allowed them to do pretty much what they liked, such as pass laws that decriminalise corruption. But then I don’t know how free and fair elections are in Romania.

I spoke to my parents this morning. My dad had just got back from a sailing trip in the Marlborough Sounds with two blokes both called Graeme. He seemed to enjoy the road trip there and back more than the rather claustrophobic few days on the boat. (The main road has been blocked since the November earthquake; now you have to go via Murchison, a town that has done quite nicely from the diversion, making for a seven-hour journey each way.) Mum had spent a few days in Moeraki with my aunt. I recently had a chat with Dad while Mum was at golf. He still finds his existence in that household plagued by unnecessary stress.

One of my previous students texted me earlier today to say that she won’t be wanting any more lessons from me because we couldn’t understand each other well enough. I’d already written her off. It was more than the language barrier, although that didn’t help. For whatever reason we just didn’t click. My Skype student now wants ten hours of lessons a week from me, starting tomorrow. Maybe she’s lonely.

I did find a word, LovELIER, with my rack. That low-scoring bingo helped me to a 401-344 win and an 18-9 lead overall. I was lucky with the blanks and S’s, although the high-scoring tiles I drew towards the end were more of a burden than anything as I had to quickly offload them. Having one blank on your rack is a huge asset; it effectively gives you 26 different racks and a much better chance of making a bingo or other high-scoring play. You have time in a game to go through the alphabet and consider each of the possible letters in turn. Having both blanks is even better, not least because you know your opponent won’t have one. But there are so many combinations with two blanks – 351 if I’m not mistaken – that you certainly can’t consider them all, and finding a bingo can be surprisingly difficult even if there are many available.

I’m thinking of getting into Scrabble reasonably seriously, despite all the things I don’t like about the game (all the silly words you have to commit to memory, mostly). I recently played a game of WWF where I had HIDEOUT on my rack, but nowhere I could see to play it. After giving up and playing a shorter word I realised I could have played the seven-letter bingo by attaching the O to the end of HOB. In Scrabble parlance, you’d say that HOB takes an O as a back hook. That kind of thing interests me. Learning all those stupid bloody words doesn’t, but maybe that won’t be a deal-breaker. We’ll see.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Romania is simmering

February 3, 2017 by 0 Comments

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.

Language teaching - Romania - Tennis

Delayed delivery

January 24, 2017 by 0 Comments

I wrote this on Saturday morning but didn’t have any way of posting it. I’m now back in business internet-wise, and not before time: I’ve got a Skype lesson later this evening. Losing my internet access, and potentially my ability to work, put a damper on my weekend.

Good news: I’ve got some more students, including a woman currently living in Austria who wants six hours of Skype lessons per week. Bad news: I no longer have an internet connection in my apartment, so those Skype lessons will be a bit tricky to arrange.

I gave my first Skype lesson on Friday, scheduled for two hours. We covered grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, and she wasn’t at all shy when it came to asking questions. It was intense, it was fun. Or at least it was until my computer crashed ten minutes before our scheduled end.

One of my students is some sort of IT guru and he managed to get my wi-fi connected on Wednesday night. It took him about 15 minutes of fiddling around with the DOS screen and who knows what else – it was all far beyond me. I offered to give him the lesson for free but he declined. Having wi-fi meant I was able to FaceTime my parents and my brother. But I think some settings changed when my computer crashed on Friday, and although I still had a connection for a few hours afterwards, now I can’t even connect with the cable. I don’t think having Windows 10 is helping. I’m only guessing though. I spent hours yesterday searching on my phone for some kind of solution and playing around with settings, not knowing what any of them really meant. And of course I turned various devices on and off again many, many times. Why can’t these concepts be explained in a way that mere mortals like me can understand?

I think the root of the problem is this laptop which was a cast-off from my parents and is too weak and flimsy to handle intensive processes like Skype. It takes several minutes just to start it up. If I’m serious about teaching, I can’t be making do with second-rate technology. My phone works fine and has been immensely helpful, but its screen is too small and its runs on a version of iOS that’s too old for many apps. The next time I’m back in the UK, I might spend some of the money I have over there. It’s not much use anywhere else.

Thankfully I can run Words with Friends on my phone, albeit the old version that doesn’t tell you handy stuff like how many of each tile is left in the bag. I’m now leading my cousin 12-7. In our latest game, she raced into a huge lead with FROZE which scored 115, the highest score in any of our games so far. She maintained a three-figure lead for most of the game as I drew badly, but at the end I found SiLLIEST, a 101-point bingo (it’s not often a word like that will play at such a late stage) to put a dent in her winning margin. In the end I lost 453-420, scoring 400 in a losing cause for the second time. In a recent game on a frustratingly closed board I held a large lead, but my cousin could have bingoed out for over 100 with OXIDISE, if only there was somewhere to play it.

I have the equivalent of Sky on my TV, and it’s remarkably cheap. Years ago I would have been glued to the Australian Open. I’ve watched a bit of it certainly, but tennis, or any sport really, isn’t as important to me as it once was. The tournament has certainly had its moments, mainly on the men’s side with Djokovic’s shock defeat to Denis Istomin, Kyrgios’s meltdown, and that extremely long fifth set involving Karlovic. (Advantage final sets are dying, with both the Olympics and Davis Cup now using tie-breaks in the final set. How much longer before scores of 8-6, 9-7 and beyond are sadly killed off for good?) The best part about watching the tennis for me is the Romanian commentary.

I think my time in Romania will be a marathon, not a sprint, and I don’t feel I’ve even crossed the start line yet.

Life :) - Romania

A cold snap

January 13, 2017 by 0 Comments

I’ve finally got internet access in my apartment, but it isn’t wireless and the cable has a habit of detaching itself. Better than nothing though. I assumed I’d get wi-fi installed but there are two things I’ve learnt about living in Romania: don’t assume anything and never trust anybody. Connecting to a wireless router in this apartment is beyond my un-techno-savvy brain for now because I haven’t got a modem; instead I’ve got a cable that comes through the wall, presumably one of dozens of cables that split off from some master modem somewhere.

It’s a good job I’m able to stay in Romania for five years (should I even trust or assume that, even though that’s what the piece of paper says?) because I might need that long to sort myself out. This apartment is comfortable, but I still have a long list of items I need, and it’s not that easy to find them. On Tuesday I tried to find a smoke alarm, somewhere, anywhere. Near the big mall there’s a large hardware store called Praktiker. I asked someone there if they had any smoke alarms. I didn’t fully understand his reply, which ended in a weird guttural sound. Hang on, are you speaking Romanian or Klingon? Could you repeat that? Yep, that’s definitely Klingon. They didn’t have any smoke alarms in stock, but they had no end of burglar alarms and movement sensors. You can see where their priorities lie.

Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing being stopped by the police when I put those notices up. I’ve had so many phone calls and oh so many complete time-wasters. I only have one regular student now, and I gave him a lesson on Wednesday night (at home, which was nice). He didn’t seem all that interested in the list of “false friends” I’d spent hours preparing (these are English words that look similar to Romanian ones but mean something different). In fact he didn’t want to talk much at all. I asked him what he did for Christmas but it was like getting blood out of a stone. But I can’t really complain: he showed up, and in Romania, and in this weather, that’s something.

It has been cold, even by Romanian standards. The weather has been the top story on the national news and at one point they interrupted the programme I was watching to allow the new prime minister to speak on the matter. (Yes, we have a new prime minister, and he comes from this part of the country.) Every morning this week it’s been minus 10 or colder when I’ve woken up, and it hasn’t got a whole lot warmer during the day. We had another fall of chunky snow yesterday. But my apartment stays warm, and given the choice between the freezing weather and attending pointless team meetings, I’ll take the minus 10 any day. I just have to be patient.

I’ve enjoyed playing Words with Friends with my cousin, for the chat as much as anything. I’m now leading 9-5. I definitely had the rub of the green in the last two games. In the penultimate game I scored well on just about every turn and posted easily my biggest total yet, winning 540-398. In the second half of that game, when I was really just trying to maximise my own score, I played two bingos for a combined 130-odd, but in doing so I opened up the board allowing my cousin to score 150 or so on her two subsequent turns without the aid of any bingos. I thought that was interesting; bingos aren’t as important in WWF as they are in Scrabble. In our last game I again drew well, grabbing I think eight of the eleven power tiles including both blanks, and putting down two bingos once more. If anything my cousin outplayed me as I won 430 to 385.

On Sunday I should get some more medication, but there’s no guarantee, and I’ve absolutely no idea how much it will cost me. Then later that day my tennis partner and his girlfriend will be coming over for dinner, hopefully, maybe.

Language teaching - Romania

Getting set up

January 6, 2017 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been speaking to someone at a call centre – I still haven’t got my wi-fi connected. (I’m writing this from the café close by.) Dealing with call centres can be hard enough in my own language, but in Romanian … forget it. The woman on the other end rattled off some long number that was neither my phone number nor the number on my contract because it ended in a three. Shit, what am I supposed to say now? Um, er, yes? She then kept repeating something that sounded like the French word saisissez but with the Z in a different place. Normally I absolutely hate it when people offer to speak English, but when she did so it came as some sort of relief. At a guess she was 25 and started learning English 22 years ago. Speaking (or more to the point, listening to) Romanian on the phone is still a real problem for me, even though I’ve handled dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls since I arrived in the country. When you can’t see their eyes or their lips or make gestures, you’re almost flying blind. When people ring up about lessons it isn’t quite so bad because at least I know what sort of questions they’re likely to ask and vaguely how to reply. People are still calling me, even though I’m (sadly) no longer putting posters up apart from in the university campus.

If it wasn’t for those posters I wouldn’t have found this apartment. And it’s awesome. I love it. In fact I’m more excited about this place than the one I bought in Wellington because that didn’t represent anything. This represents a dream. And the location, the view, is a dream. I’ve got the beautiful cathedral that graces thousands of postcards and fridge magnets staring me in the face, with the hustle and bustle of the southern end of the square in the foreground, and Parcul Central and a tram line in the background. This is most definitely Timișoara. (Consciously or otherwise, I have a habit of ending up in places where it’s pretty obvious where I am. I think I like that. Suburbia, where you could often be just about anywhere, doesn’t do it for me.)

My apartment is 50 square metres; both the lounge and the bedroom are a good size. I neither feel hemmed in nor am I rattling around. And it’s peaceful up here; I feel a long way from the busyness down below. My second night here was New Year’s Eve – tens of thousands packed into the square for the fireworks display, many of whom cracked open bottles of bubbly as the clock struck midnight. All the festivities and illuminations have made this spot even cooler than it would otherwise be. The night before last the priest called in to anoint me and wish me a happy New Year. And to collect money. I gave him 6 lei. Should I have given 60? Probably not 600, but really I had no idea.

My only real worry here is what would happen if we had a fire. Alarms? Sprinklers? Extinguishers? Escapes? Romania, I know you’re beautiful and everything, and I like the way you haven’t gone overboard with the whole safety culture thing, but jeez, basic fire protection in high-occupancy buildings like this is common sense. You lost 64 people in a nightclub fire not that long ago. It’s time you got your shit together. Plus some of the wiring around here is as dodgy as anything, so we’re more likely to have a fire in the first place.

Last night I gave my first lesson at home – that was a milestone of sorts. I haven’t got a table set up yet, so we just sat on the sofa. He wanted to go over a song so I played him Our House by Madness and we went through some of the lyrics. He said he liked the song because the lyrics actually have a point to them unlike so much of today’s stuff. Continuing the early eighties theme, we went over an article about the Brixton riots in London.

I’m still playing Words with Friends with my cousin. As the name suggests, it’s a good way to catch up. I’m currently leading 4-3, though I was hammered 455-299 in our last game. There are eleven “power” tiles in WWF (five S’s, two blanks, the J, Q, X and Z). I only drew two of them, the X and an S, and that’s really why I lost so heavily. There were a couple of interesting moments that might have changed the game, however. On just my second turn I had a load of vowels that didn’t want to go anywhere, so I decided to exchange five tiles. My cousin said I shouldn’t exchange in almost any circumstances, and I actually disagree quite strongly with that. Then, in the middle of the game when I was down but by no means out I played RAVED, and my cousin followed that up with HIVES vertically in a very dangerous spot, with the H directly below a triple word score. Wow, both the C’s are still out. She must have one and be gambling that I don’t (and she’d be right; the only way I’d have a C is if I drew one last turn, because otherwise I’d have played CRAVED). So I played the only move I could see that blocked CHIVES and a potential monster score. She didn’t have the C after all, but still went and played RAJ on the opposite side of the board for nearly 60 to give her a three-figure lead, and that was just about game over for me.

Both BRR and BRRR are allowed in Scrabble. I’m not so sure about Words with Friends. But tomorrow we’re in for a top temperature of minus 8. That’s getting into proper brass monkeys, BRRR-with-three-R’s territory.

That was almost a thousand words. Sorry about that.

Life :) - Romania

Pleading ignorance

December 30, 2016 by 0 Comments

Last night I got stopped by the local police, having just put up an ad for teaching. They told me that putting up posters isn’t allowed and can incur a fine. I pleaded ignorance (to be honest I was ignorant – I see so many signs for firewood and apartments and computer repairs and lost cats that I thought they might well be perfectly legal). The cops weren’t aggressive in any way and certainly didn’t fine me, but it’s a real bugger for me because the ads are effective and nothing else seems to be, and because I derived a certain amount of pleasure from making them and putting them up. They made me feel I was part of this city. Oh well. University campuses are still fair game I guess.

There are a lot of cops in this place, and that’s why I won’t risk putting up any more ads. The police often occupy themselves with stopping cyclists in the middle of town, because pedestrianised means pedestrianised, and that means no bikes. Bloody crazy if you ask me. One of my students thought so too, and said the policy was brought in by the current mayor whom he called “a stupid man”.

Today I got the keys to my new apartment. It’s fantastic, it really is. I’ve got a close-up view of the Orthodox cathedral with Romanian flags fluttering everywhere and people milling around. So much life. And inside there are more mod cons than I realised. I’ll miss this hotel a little bit though. I met two other long-term guests (inmates?) from overseas, both extremely friendly, open-minded people, as you might imagine someone who decides to live in Romania to be. The first was a French guy who has gone now. After chatting to him for a few minutes in French I quickly realised that my French is still miles better than my Romanian. The other guy, Tomás, is from Chile. Just a really nice bloke.

I won my third game of Words with Friends by 60 or 70 points and now lead my cousin 2-1. On my very first turn I had AIOQSU? (the question mark meaning a blank). My cousin had played an S on her first turn, and somehow I found SeQUOIAS for 109. Even with a lead of that size I didn’t feel entirely safe. I then started a game with a stranger purely by accident. That game was an eye-opener. I made four words of at least six letters. He didn’t make any. He kept the board really, really tight, and beat me easily, 463 to 351.

Life :) - Romania

A crazy year

December 28, 2016 by 0 Comments

My student, perhaps my only student right now, wants to go over both a text and a song in tomorrow night’s lesson. I’m going to play him Our House by Madness which came out in 1982 and I think is great for an intermediate English student, and print out an article on the Brixton Riots which took place the year before (if I can find a place to print anything out over the Christmas period). He might well already know Our House. Last week on the way to the lesson he had a Spice Girls album on in the car. When I asked him how his week had been, he used the good English expression “don’t ask”.

It has been a pretty messed-up year all round, and there are still four days of it left. We’ve lost so many cultural icons: David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, George Michael (on Christmas Day) and dozens more. Victoria Wood springs to mind as the kind of unassuming comedian the world needs more of, and she’s gone too. It feels that culture itself is on the way out. Musicians, actors, comedians, writers, they’re now all lumped in with journalists and academics as being out of touch with “real, decent, ordinary people” as Nigel Farage shamefully put it. Brexit and Trump were both, to an extent, triumphs of anti-culture. And let’s not overanalyse Trump’s victory. He’s a bigot, a narcissist and a bully, and many of the 63 million-odd people who voted for him did so because of that, not in spite of it. For me that’s scary stuff. But let’s not normalise the result either. As a kid I lived in the constituency held by the prime minister John Major. It received a fair bit of national attention at the election and attracted many candidates, perhaps ten, as a result. One of those was from the Monster Raving Loony party. It fascinated me just how many votes the Loonies got. John Major was a shoo-in to win his seat so some people thought, what the hell, and enough of them put their X next to the Loony candidate to propel him to the middle of the pack, ahead of some serious candidates. But in America they’ve gone eleven steps further by electing Mr Loony! Just wow.

Somebody called me in response to my Trump ad, even though he could speak good English and didn’t want or need any lessons. I think he was a little put out by my ad, which was meant as a joke more than anything. He admired Trump because “he has a winning attitude”. What a terrible reason to support him, or anyone. But he’s far from alone. People seem to want aggressive, uncompromising, authoritarian figures. I can’t see this ending well.

It’s been an interesting year for me personally as well. For four months I was stressed out to the max by my flatmate. Then I had to organise my big move, and that got pretty stressful too, to the point where I restarted my antidepressants at the doctor’s request. On 7th October I arrived here in Timișoara and I remember lying on my bed that first night and thinking how incredible that felt. I’ve done it! I’m in Romania! Since then I’ve travelled a bit, have managed to do some teaching (not nearly enough, but enough to know I love it), and most importantly, have found a place where I can live and work. I’ll get the keys to my new abode the day after tomorrow.

This might work out for me, it might not, but guess what, I’ve completely changed my life. Just typing that sentence makes me proud.

I played a second game of Words with Friends with my cousin, this time winning 458 to 381. I got the high-value letters and on one turn played DOZIER on a triple word with the Z on a triple letter. That’s the killer combination that is impossible in Scrabble, and it yielded 108 points of which one letter scored 90. My cousin replied immediately with TERMITES which gave her a 35-point bonus (it’s 50 in Scrabble), although she could have placed the same word elsewhere for a bigger score. She ended up with more points than in the first game when she beat me by over 80. Yep, we got some big scores in this game. In the long term, if we keep playing, we’ll be evenly matched I reckon.