Romania

Romania - Tennis

This really is my new home

December 22, 2016 plutomanby 1 Comment

I’ve finally found a place to live. What a relief. It’s on the corner of Piața Victoriei, right next to the city hall and with a close-up view of the Orthodox Cathedral, probably Timișoara’s most recognisable landmark. It’s a dream location, perfect for teaching and, well, everything. The apartment is on the third floor of a massive eight-storey block; it measures 50 square metres. I’ve been given a six-month contract (which is perfect at this stage) starting on 1st January. Finding a student who happened to work for a real estate agency was an enormous stroke of luck for me, and she only contacted me for lessons because one of her friends had posted a picture of my Donald Trump ad on Facebook. Yesterday I visited the agency to sign the contract and pay one month’s rent as a deposit, plus a commission of 60% of the monthly rent plus 20% VAT. I had to hand over seemingly acres of lei – the equivalent of 516 euros or about NZ$800. The landlord was there, well not the landlord actually because he’s in Israel but his go-between, and she seemed very approachable. Every month I’ll need to physically give her the rent in euros. W-wha-huh? Poftim? You won’t accept Romanian currency? This is like being in the UK and insisting on rent payments in US dollars. Are there any cash machines in Timișoara that spit out euros? The agent said that there are indeed one or two, but I’ll probably need to change lei at a bank or any of the possibly dodgy kiosks you see on just about every street corner. And yes, I will lose money every time I do this. She talked as if it was the most natural thing ever, just like Americans talk about their electoral system, or Brits talk about carpeting their bathrooms. I think it’s bloody stupid.

This morning, having at last found an apartment after a frustrating two or three weeks, I went to the immigration office expecting no end of complications. The office was staffed by a man, probably in his late forties, who could hardly speak a word of English. (Isn’t that wonderful? When you order a kebab, you’re bombarded with bloody English, because getting the spicy sauce instead of the sweet sauce would be a calamity.) The young woman in front of me was from Turkey which is outside the EU; she could speak English but not Romanian, and she was struggling to communicate with the man in the window. An English speaker was eventually located. Both he and the bloke in the window were being rather dickish to this young lady, and I wondered what sort of person sets him or herself the daily goal of being as much of an arsehole as possible, because there seem to be a lot of that sort of person all over the world. Then it came to my turn. I was told to get copies of my various documents made, which I did. I went back to the office with the photocopies, the window man took my photo, he said gata (“ready”), and I should be able to collect my registration certificate at 9am tomorrow. Great! I got treated very differently from the Turkish lady simply because I’m an EU citizen. What a difference Brexit will make.

My New Zealand credit card statements now get sent to my parents. Mum phoned me last night to inform me of a surprise whopping $580 charge. It had escaped my notice. I usually don’t notice until I pay the bill, automatically in full at the end of each month, and anyway I’ve hardly used my card since I moved to Romania. The bill was for the renewed hosting of this website and another one I have. It renewed automatically at a vastly increased price from the original (the bastards). I should be able to recover most of that money by cancelling the service but I don’t want Plutoman to be exterminated in the process.

I played tennis (singles) on Sunday on the same hard indoor court that I played on two weeks earlier. I won easily, 6-2 6-0 6-1. I hit a purple patch in the middle of the match where I made very few unforced errors. But for winning a very long game (seven deuces?) at 1-1 in the first set, things might have turned out differently. The court doubles as a basketball court and the hoops are in the way of where you’d normally serve in singles. You had no choice but to take a wider stance.

On Saturday I went to a flea market which was off a main street, many of the signs for which used the old, pre-nineties spelling. It was lined with pre-nineties apartment blocks. The temperature was minus something at midday. I got a coffee from a bar, because it could see it had a toilet. Most people in the bar were drinking something stronger. For only NZ$20 I could have had my stomach pumped. The market was full of second-hand clothes, including ski jackets of every crazy colour combination imaginable that I really, really wanted as a kid because I thought they were so cool. The market and that whole area of town was a time warp.

I love it here in Timișoara. I’ll love it more when it warms up again. I love the rawness of it all. I love that it’s given me the opportunity to be myself and completely change my life. I love that not everybody loves it, or even knows about it. I love that I’ll be able to travel. I love that I can play tennis on clay (maybe I’ll master the slide one day). And I love that I’ll be here until the middle of next year at least.

Language learning - Romania

Romanian commentary 11 – how many?

December 20, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Numbers. When you move to a new country, you really need to have numbers down pat in whatever language they speak. And it’s no good just learning them up to 10 or 20 or 100 or whatever your book or YouTube video goes up to. When you’re living in a new country, your accommodation costs are bound to run into the thousands, no matter what currency you’re dealing with. In some places even a chocolate bar will set you back a few grand. (I’ve figured out a way to help people remember the difference between hundred and thousand in English, by the way, even if they don’t have different-sized cats. Thousand, thanks to the long “ou” sound, is more drawn out when you say it.)

In French, you say four-twenties-ten-seven for 97. In German, you say seven-and-ninety. Romanian doesn’t have anything that off-the-wall, but it has its quirks nonetheless. Up to ten, Romanian numbers look pretty similar to those of other Romance languages. Of note (to me) are patru (4) and opt (8). The ‘c’ or ‘qu’ of Latin has morphed into, of all things, a ‘p’. Heaven knows why. You see the same phenomenon in other common words such as apă (water) and lapte (milk). Beyond ten, Romanian numbers diverge from their French and Italian counterparts, and they get long. The word for 15 is cincisprezece; 17 is șaptesprezece. They’re a mouthful to me, and clearly to many Romanians too – in informal speech the –sprezece ending becomes –șpe, hence cinșpe and șapteșpe.

Between twenty and one hundred, numbers are easy enough to form: 39 is treizeci și nouă, literally “three tens and nine”. But again, Romanians often get lazy, and treizeci și nouă is mashed together to become something like treișnouă. You will hear, and have to recognise, both the formal (long) and informal (short) forms, in just about every environment. When I’m speaking, I feel most comfortable using the short forms up to 20 and the long forms beyond that. These formal and informal numbers are the first real oddity.

Hundred is sută (plural sute); thousand is mie (plural mii). Both sută and mie are feminine, so for 1100 you say “o mie o sută” (one thousand one hundred; unlike in English you never say eleven hundred). Nothing too complicated there.

But here comes the second quirk. Gender. Romanian has different forms for ‘one’ and ‘two’ depending on whether the thing you’re talking about is masculine or feminine (and if it’s neuter, Romanian’s third gender, you use the masculine form for ‘one’ but the feminine for ‘two’). This can become a problem, especially when ordering food. Are langoși (deep-fried flatbread thingies) masculine or feminine? How about gogoși (which are a bit like doughnuts)? Part of the issue is that when you see a sign for these mysterious food items, they’re shown in the plural and you can’t necessarily tell what the singular is. As it happens, the singular form of langoși is simply langoș, which is masculine, but the singular of gogoși is gogoasă, which is feminine. One way of avoiding the gender problem is to order at least three of everything (but don’t go too crazy – if you order twelve of something, or a higher number ending in 1 or 2, you’ll run into the same difficulty). If you’re just talking about a number (e.g. platform two), rather than a quantity, you always use the masculine form.

The third quirk is that if you’re talking about a quantity, you sometimes have to put de (of) between the number and the noun. The rule is that you don’t use de for numbers up to 19, or for larger numbers that end in anything from 01 to 19. Otherwise you have to use de.

7 oaks – 7 stejari

39 steps – 39 de pași

76 trombones – 76 de tromboane

101 Dalmatians – 101 dalmațieni

10,000 maniacs – 10,000 de maniaci

A new apartment block, containing 108 apartamente (note, no de) according to the sign, is being built almost next door to this hotel.

In Cluj I saw this sign, promoting Walking Month (English – aaarghh!) which showed the number of steps to various landmarks in the city:

Note the de (or lack of de) in the above sign depending on the last two digits.

Staying in the beautiful city of Cluj, but changing tack slightly, I saw this Latin inscription on a church. Why are some of the letters tall? Hmmm. It looks like some kind of puzzle. Well, the tall letters are all Roman numerals, aren’t they? And if I add the M and D and L and various C’s and V’s and I’s, I get, let me see, 1782. I think. That would seem to be when the church was built (or finished; they take a while).

Just around the corner I saw this one. It’s a bit harder to read:

1744? Note that in both of these inscriptions, the letter V (conveniently) represents both U and V. I couldn’t find any other Roman numeral puzzles besides these two. These puzzles are known as chronograms and are quite common in Central and Eastern Europe, including Transylvania.

Life :) - Politics - Romania

No place like home

December 15, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night I FaceTimed my brother. I really enjoyed our chat. Years ago I found my brother a bit hot-headed or aggressive but now he’s simply a really nice guy. And he’s happy. The trials of 2012 and ’13 now seem like ancient history. Last week he took a very comprehensive dyslexia test that was free with the Army. When he was five or six he complained of “words jumping about on the page” and that’s absolutely what he experienced in this test. Not just words but squares or other shapes. He clearly tested positive for dyslexia, and will now get some special coloured glasses.

Finding somewhere to live has become a bit of a nightmare. On Tuesday I looked at a place that was actually quite good but the agent talked incessantly and tried to pressure me into making an instant decision about where to spend the next 365 days of my life (most rental contracts are for a minimum of one year). The more she talked, the less I wanted to know. One agency told me that Timișoara was the most expensive city in Romania to rent, including Bucharest. A quick look at any of the equivalents of TradeMe (there are several in Romania) confirmed that they were having me on. Dealing with owners on the phone has been a challenge. Speaking a foreign language on the phone is hard enough anyway (no gestures or facial expressions to help me), but many owners are suspicious of foreigners, so I’ve usually been swimming upstream from the moment I’ve opened my mouth. I had to laugh when one owner added “Exclus străini” (“No foreigners!”) to the bottom of his online ad as soon as I got off the phone with him. Yesterday my tennis partner agreed to accompany me to an agency. He was very good: “He’s not a refugee! He’s an English teacher!” This agency has an apartment for me to look at tomorrow, so I’m hopeful, but I’m cutting it a bit fine now. I’ve given some thought as to what I’ll do if I have to leave the country.

Romania’s parliamentary elections took place on Sunday. The Social Democratic Party, or PSD, easily won with 46%. I have virtually no handle on Romanian politics, so I have no idea what to make of that. Rather shockingly, turnout was only 40%. Were most people so content with their lot that they didn’t feel the need to vote? Or did they think that nothing would change whoever got in? Or that the PSD were bound to win, so why bother? Or that they didn’t want to participate due to the level of corruption?

There’s snow on the ground this morning, and we’re currently a couple of degrees below zero. Teaching is still going well and I’ll talk about that next time.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

It’s a mirage

December 10, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

This is Romania. The land of the bogus. The land of the fictitious. The land of the phantom.

Last night I rushed to view an apartment in the south-west quadrant of the city, not too far from the centre. The flat was on the ground floor of a forbidding seventies block, and far bigger than anything I need. But the real turn-off wasn’t the flat (“too big” isn’t the worst problem a flat can have after all), it was the agent. He was thirty or so, and his BMW couldn’t have been more than four years old. In Romania, that means he’s making far too much money. He was suave, he was smooth, he was someone I trusted even less than I normally trust real estate agents. From there I had to find my way, somehow, to my student’s apartment in the north of the city. I didn’t have much time, it was dark, and buses still remain something of a mystery. At Piața Regina Maria I got on the 14 bus, which seemed right, and tried to follow the route on the far-too-small screen of my phone. Traffic was heavy. I got off at Peter and Paul Street, or Strada Petru și Pavel, parallel to my student’s street. Excellent. But actually finding the right tower block was another matter. These blocks aren’t numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 or 2, 4, 6, 8 or anything predictable. They often have a letter and a number, and within every block there are typically several staircases each denoted by a letter. I needed block A35, staircase (or scara) C. By the time I found it I was five minutes late. The door was locked and I had to press a button so that my student could let me in. But which one? I knew he lived on the fourth floor but didn’t know which apartment. I phoned him. No answer. Great. A few minutes later a woman arrived. I asked her if she knew Silviu, she said yes and pointed me to the correct flat. I trudged up to the fourth floor, rang his doorbell, and got no reply. Wonderful. I then took the bus back to Piața 700, where I got two pleșkavițe (which aren’t all they’re cracked up to be), and walked home. The temperature was zero and dropping fast.

Finding a suitable apartment isn’t easy or fun. On Wednesday I got ripped off by an agency who charged me 100 lei (what I charge for two lessons) for some useless search tool. Well, it isn’t useless, but it doesn’t do anything I can’t do online, and it swamps me with spam. For my money I also got to chat with a young woman who said that inhabitants of Romanian villages are merely animals. Nice.

My dad showed me this article from the New York Times. (Dad finds these articles using a news aggregator called News360.) Wow, 148 diaries found in a skip (or dumpster). Alexander Masters’ Stuart was a great read and I’d recommend it to anybody. I spent a lot of time wandering around central Cambridge in the late nineties so I found it particularly illuminating.

This sense that I can’t trust anybody is frustrating, but it hasn’t put me off wanting to live here. Finding somewhere to live is my top priority. Once I’ve done that and got all my paperwork sorted (I hope), I can concentrate on finding genuine students. I’m getting plenty of responses to my ads so I remain positive on that score. Christmas and New Year will be a non-event and I don’t really mind.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Saint Nick (no it ain’t Christmas)

December 7, 2016 plutomanby 1 Comment

Today is St Nicholas Day, known as Moș Nicolae in Romanian. Last night children would have left their shoes outside, and this morning they would have woken up to find them (traditionally at least) filled with either gifts if they’d been good, or a stick if they’d been bad. In practice most of them would have received both. I was amazed to read that the average Romanian spends 318 lei on this religious festival. For that money you could buy six 90-minute English lessons from me, the haircut I had yesterday, plus a small coffee from the vending machine I often use. It’s a quarter of the minimum monthly wage. In other words it’s a lot of money. It’s a busy time of year for festivals and celebrations. St Andrew’s Day was on 30th November, the first of two public holidays in a row. The next day, 1st December, was Romania’s national holiday, commemorating the 98th anniversary of the unification of Transylvania (including the Banat region where I am now) with the rest of the country. I watched the parade of tanks and fire engines as my feet froze despite being double-socked. Later I had some food and mulled wine from the market in the middle of town, saw the mayor switch on the Christmas tree lights, and at 10pm watched the fireworks display to the strains of this revolutionary song. I even bought a Romanian flag.

I’ve got a new student who wants two lessons a week from me, starting this Thursday. He’s at a beginner level, so it promises to be interesting. I did well to hold that conversation together in Romanian. Again I’m a little worried about the first lesson from a safety point of view. I had several calls yesterday. Speaking Romanian (or rather understanding it) in the middle of a busy town is well beyond me at this stage. Somebody else rang me this morning wanting lessons in a café between 8am and noon, which would be very convenient for me, but we haven’t sorted out dates yet. Just from our English phone conversation I’d put him at a 7 (at least) on my 0-to-10 scale. The enthusiastic younger guy who I taught two weeks ago seems unfortunately to have dropped out of the picture, for now at least.

I have to find an apartment with some urgency if I want to stay in Timișoara (and I really really want to stay here!). But there are so many pitfalls. I’m at risk of being ripped off or in a noisy hellhole or robbed or some combination of the three. Noise control exists in the Romanian language: controlul zgomotului (see, another z-plus-consonant word) but that’s the only place it exists here. My tennis partner has a contact in real estate; I spoke with her this evening on the phone. Hopefully she can find me something.

I won’t be leaving Timișoara for Christmas.

Life :) - Romania - Tennis

Back on court (and it’s clay this time!)

December 5, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just heard about John Key’s shock resignation. I didn’t see that coming. For a third-term prime minister he was (is?) extremely popular. Throughout his eight years as PM he has benefited enormously from a weak opposition and a succession of uninspiring opposition leaders. They’ve enabled him to get away with being, at times, fairly weak himself. The Auckland housing crisis, the hundreds of thousands of children in poverty and an aging population are all major issues that he and his government have failed to tackle head-on. He could have handled the Christchurch earthquakes better and the Pike River disaster much better. It frustrated me how many people were taken in by his “common man” persona when in reality he was anything but. Some people on the left of politics really can’t stand the man but I wouldn’t put myself in that category. He’s presided over a prosperous country, largely safe and free of corruption (more on that in a minute). Good on him for making the move. I wonder how his exit will shape the political landscape in 2017. The global political environment being as it is, it’s hard to imagine Winston Peters not making significant gains. And who will take over as PM? Perhaps Bill English, who I’ve always had time for. If it’s Judith Collins I’m definitely staying in Romania.

I had a reasonably active weekend. I managed to play 6½ sets of tennis, all involving the guy from the language school who I seem to have made a connection with. On Saturday I played on clay for the very first time. The Romanian word for clay is zgură, one of those amazing words they have that begin with ‘z’ followed immediately by a consonant. The courts were in an indoor centre in the east of the city. The surface took some getting used to, but I think I liked the clay. We started a game. He struggled a bit with his serve in practice so when he won the toss he put me into bat. I lost the first point and as I called out the score, zero cinșpe, I thought, wow, I’m calling out the score in Romanian, this is awesome. My serve had been fine in the warm-up but eluded me in actual play and I served two double faults to drop the first game. I broke back but in my next service game I double-faulted three times. Un coșmar, a nightmare, I said. (I knew coșmar because it’s a word they’ve pinched from French: cauchemar.) Despite being massively handicapped by my serve I clambered out of a 15-40 hole to win that game, and grew in confidence from there. My serve improved, my defensive game was solid, and I took out the first set 6-1. I then won the second by the same score. I was ready to go home but, unbeknown to me, we’d booked the courts for two hours. I was getting tired. I fell behind 3-0 in the third set (sensing my tiredness he played some judicious drop shots), I drew level at 3-3, and then the clock ran out on us.

Yesterday it was time for doubles, this time on a hard indoor court in some university complex. The court was cramped to say the least: only about seven feet separated the baseline and the wall, there was a similar distance between the sideline and the wall, and even the ceiling made a high lob an impossible shot. I played with the language school guy. From what I could tell, our opponents worked for Radio Timișoara, or at least one of them did. My partner was quite competitive. He would never shut up, and it was hard to know what he was saying, in Romanian or English, in such an echoic building. He loved high-fives and other tactile gestures, all the stuff that drives me mad. We played four sets in all, losing three to one, 6-3, 7-6 (7-1), 4-6, 6-2. In the fourth set we appeared to have some momentum as we led 2-0 with a point for 3-0, but we just ran out of steam.

The score of the matches was, frankly, the least important part. The real purpose for me was meeting people and speaking some Romanian. All those hours I spent thirty-odd years ago hitting against a wall or playing in the (very cramped) back yard with my parents are still paying dividends now. After the doubles match three of us went for some beers in a nearby bar (outside, where it was about 4 degrees). Our remaining opponent had taken his car. I mentioned Romania’s zero-tolerance drink-drive policy. My partner said, yes, but he’s got connections in the police. I wanted to say corupția ucide or corruption kills, but thought better of it. I think if our opponent had drunk a lot rather than just two beers he still might have been in trouble with the law but who knows? Corruption is rife in Romania, no question, and when incompetent people are given positions of responsibility because of who they know, and when backhanders allow people to jump the medical queue ahead of more deserving people, then yes, it does kill. My only question is whether the situation in America, where they’ve elected a totally incompetent billionaire to be president, is any better.

I really need to find an apartment and a few more students.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Frustrations, and the latest from Geraldine

November 29, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

How long could I stay in that positive frame of mind? The answer: not very long.

Dad passed out again. He was out for about a minute; Mum could see the whites of his eyes and she thought she’d lost him. She called the ambulance which took half an hour to arrive. (This is Geraldine.) They did some tests: his heart was working as it should and his blood pressure was normal. He didn’t even have a temperature. It was all a mystery until yesterday when he received the results of a blood test. He’d picked up a bacterial infection that sent his warfarin levels sky high. He’s now been given antibiotics which should do the trick, and has been told not to take warfarin for two days. (He’s had to take warfarin ever since the aortic valve replacement he had done in 2005, which I touched on in my last post.) Dad regularly gets severe headaches, so when he gets sick like this he often suffers a double whammy. It doesn’t help that he also has a wife who only really starts caring when she thinks he might die.

The euphoria, or close to that, which I felt after my last English lessons, is well and truly over. Mihai, who is one of the nicest people I’ve met in Romania so far, has had to go to Bucharest so I won’t be teaching him tonight. I don’t know if and when I’ll see the first guy again. December 1st is Romania’s national day. The celebrations of all things Romania will be interesting to see, but people tend to use them as an excuse for an extended holiday, making things a bit awkward from a teaching perspective. I’ve heard nothing more about the “conversation club” due to begin on 9th December, so at this stage I’ll assume it won’t happen. The old guy who said he spoke no English pulled out of his lesson – twice – and only when I called him right before we were due to start to ask him exactly which apartment he lived in. Somebody called me yesterday to ask whether, when I said in my ad that I could “give you a hand”, I meant the left or the right hand. I hung up on him. Somebody else rang me at 4:20 on Sunday morning; I didn’t answer. Still more people have showed genuine interest, but were put off the moment I said I’d need to visit them rather than the other way round. This hotel room is in no way suitable.

I need to move out of this place soon. I’m using “need” accurately here. To get a registration certificate enabling me to live in Romania legally beyond early January, I need a fixed address. I was planning on sorting out all my paperwork at the immigration office this morning, but yesterday I spoke to the people at the hotel who said in an unnecessarily forceful way that they won’t let me name this place as my fixed address unless I commit to living here for six months or more. As I can’t teach here, that’s out of the question. Whether I rent a place through the usual channels, which have all kinds of pitfalls, or get something through Airbnb which would be safer but more costly, I haven’t decided yet.

Despite my recent frustrations, one thing is clear: teaching English is something I really want to do, and I really want to do it here in Romania. Making it all happen won’t be easy – there are barriers everywhere I look – but it’s all a lot more doable when I know the what and the where. For more than a decade I didn’t have a clue.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Teaching in Timișoara is terrific, but no sympathy in New Zealand

November 26, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I FaceTimed my parents last night. Dad has been ill for about a week. He’s been running a temperature and at one stage he was passing out. An obvious advantage of FaceTime or Skype is that you can see who you’re talking to, but it wasn’t much of an advantage last night. Dad looked frightful. For the first few minutes of my conversation with him, Mum was outside. He said he’d had absolutely no sympathy from her – quite the opposite in fact. In all the years I can remember, Mum has never given any love or attention to Dad when he’s been sick. I can’t forgive her for that. Mum’s sister, and sister-in-law, would be gobsmacked if they knew how she treated him sometimes. In fact her family was gobsmacked in 2005 when Dad went back to the UK for major heart surgery (that almost killed him) and she stayed in New Zealand. When Mum got to the phone last night I could see the burning anger in her face. When Dad came back on the line at the end of our call, Mum made faces and hand signals behind his back.

The night before last I gave only my second English lesson in Romania. I loved every minute of it and so did Mihai, or at least I think he did. He’s a 27-year-old medical student, so not that young, and he recently did a two-month work placement in Wolverhampton. To live and work in the UK long-term he needs a good score in the IELTS exam. Before the lesson I spent some time boning up on how IELTS works. The exam is in four parts – reading, writing, speaking and listening. He wanted help on the writing and speaking parts. He’ll probably be sitting the exam as soon as January, and is prepared to go as far as Slovenia to avoid having to take it on the Sabbath. I was impressed with his enthusiasm and that rubbed off on me. Every time I used a word or expression he was unfamiliar with, e.g. “salient”, “out there”, “think on your feet”, he jotted it down. We talked about how wonderful it is to travel (he’s done a fair bit of hitchhiking, something I’ve never had the balls to do) and the benefits to Romanians of being in the EU. We’ve got another lesson pencilled in for next Tuesday. As I walked down the stairs from his fourth-floor apartment (there was no lift or anything fancy like that) I was just about bouncing with happiness. I felt that good.

The woman at the photocopy shop yesterday asked me if I taught English; she said she wanted to take the IELTS exam so she could live and work in Denmark, where I guess English is a requirement. She was amused by my Donald Trump ad, which showed him pulling quite a ridiculous face, saying “I know words. I have the best words.” Above the picture of the president-elect, I wrote “Want to speak better English than this guy?”. My Simpsons ad will show the familiar blackboard scene that features at the beginning of most episodes, but in my version Bart will be trying to write out a difficult-to-spell phrase like “I will accommodate English in my schedule” and getting it repeatedly wrong until he gives up. Anyway, the photocopy lady seemed to like my Trump ad, and we swapped numbers. Maybe she’ll be another client of mine. It’ll help that I’m bound to use her photocopy services many more times.

I was going to write about Donald Trump and the state of the world, but things have happened, so that will have to wait.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

This is fun

November 24, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I gave my first English lesson last night. The guy picked me from the hotel and we had the lesson in some kind of hall. His wife told me on the phone that he needs to know the rules. Rules? Wow, where do I start? Because I’m a native speaker, I don’t even know half the rules, and every rule seems to have just as many exceptions. I found a really good web page that gave a comprehensive guide to the different present tenses in English (I watch, I am watching, I have been watching, and so on) and figured that would be a good start. But it wasn’t. When I went through various examples of the present continuous tense in use, he was presently continuously bored. At the half-way point of the lesson I wisely ditched grammar rules and spent the next 45 minutes having a chat. He had a good handle on grammar, but as he said, he lacked the confidence (and experience) to apply the rules in conversation. That’s a pretty familiar feeling to me. His English wasn’t bad – I’d put him at a 5 on a 0-to-10 scale – but he made classic mistakes that a lot of second-language speakers make, such as overusing “many” in place of “a lot of”, or mispronouncing certain words. He also came out with a fair bit of Romanglish such as “there exists a company…”. The “highlight” was when he talked about a “dessert” in Serbia. I asked him what it was made out of. Chocolate? Cream? Strawberries? I might have to try it if and when I venture over the border. “Sand,” he said. “Many sand.” Overall the lesson, or at least the second half of it, was encouraging. Next time he wants me to go over hard-to-pronounce words like “thieves” and “south”.

Later today I’m helping a younger guy prepare for an IELTS exam, assuming he agrees to the price. Just from our phone conversation I’d put him at an 8 (at least) on my scale, so this is a bit daunting for me. What can I actually do to help him? In a year’s time, sure, but I’m totally green right now. He said that five years ago he scored 108 in a TOEFL exam (he pronounced it “one-oh-eight”, a good indication in itself that he can do the English thing). I said, wow, that’s impressive, without having the foggiest clue what the score meant. It’s out of 120, and you need 110 to get into Oxford, so 108 is actually pretty good after all. Since the exam he’s lived and worked in the US, so it’s a fair bet that he’s improved since then. Again, I wonder just what I can help him with.

Last night somebody else texted in reply to one of my ads. His or her English was better than perfect. It was quite possibly the first time in fifteen years that I received a text with a semicolon in it, and what’s more, he or she used it correctly. This person says he or she doesn’t require any further training in English, but would like to meet me and show me around the city. Cool.

I’m loving this! It is a bit frightening at times, but completely overhauling my life, which is pretty much what I’m doing here, is bound to be scary. It’s totally mad that I’m doing this, but totally awesome, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. When I walk around Timișoara I now feel much more comfortable, as if I’m part of the city, as if I’m just another of the thousands of small business owners here trying to scratch out a living. And like them, I now have my own homemade signs. As well as the Big Ben ads, I’ve made (but haven’t yet put up) ones with the word Timișoara spelt out in colour with landmarks and symbols from the UK and America: the McDonalds logo for the M, the London Eye for the O, Big Ben (again) and the Empire State Building for the two I’s, and so on. I’ve also got Donald Trump ads and Simpsons ones (where I’ll ensure that even the tear-off bits are in Simpsons-style writing) in the pipeline. That’s all appropriate now that as a species we might as well be living in an episode of the Simpsons after everything that’s happened in 2016 (more about that in my next post). But even the effort of putting up ads around the city, and trying to find the end of the sellotape in the dark, has been kind of fun, because there’s a purpose to it all.

I just hope I don’t have to leave. That would be terrible.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania - Tennis

A great opportunity

November 21, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

In Romania, anything UK or English language-related is incomplete without a picture of Big Ben. My Romanian–English dictionary has one. My packet of Earl Grey tea has one. Any self-respecting English teaching advert clearly needs to incorporate one. So I found a picture of Big Ben, showing one o’clock as it happens, and added the slogan “Now’s the Time” at the top. Then I wrote some blurb in English that sort of implied that I’ve been teaching for ages. I said I was after intermediate and advanced students (not that I have anything against beginner students; it’s just that they’d probably be better off with a Romanian teacher until I can get my Romanian up to speed). I found a cheap photocopy shop, printed off forty copies with those tear-off strips of paper at the bottom, and started sellotaping them to bits of Timișoara. This morning I was in the middle of putting up an ad (the 25th? 30th?) when my phone rang. It was an older bloke. I asked him what his current level of English was. He said he didn’t speak any English at all. And he wants a lesson tomorrow at 11am. Oh shit! I really will have to wing it tomorrow, won’t I? Actually I’m not thinking ‘oh shit’ at all. I’m thinking this is a wonderful opportunity. A dream come true almost. But yes, teaching somebody English from scratch will be a challenge. It’ll help me improve my Romanian if nothing else. (I know, technically Big Ben is the large bell, not the tower or any of the four clocks.) One concern I do have is about security. Putting ads up everywhere screaming that I’m from the UK does make me a bit of a target. I’m not in Wellington. I’m not in St Ives. I’ll have to be careful.

When I got off the phone this morning I thought, how cool is this? This is fun, this is exciting, and if I could get a few more takers… Man, this is what I dream about. Being my own boss, helping people, roaming around town, getting my lunch from market stalls, and at weekends taking a train to Belgrade or Budapest or Békéscsaba or wherever takes my fancy. Freedom, dammit! Freedom from having to play a role, which is always so exhausting for me. I’m a long way from achieving that freedom, but I might yet manage it. There aren’t many native English speakers in Timișoara, and for the most part they aren’t as crazy as me: they had jobs to go to when they came here. So I might not have a whole lot of competition. One thing’s for sure: I love this city and have no intention of leaving any time soon. I still have some things to sort out with immigration to ensure I don’t have to.

I see that New Zealand has its own version of Donald Trump. He goes by the name of Brian Tamaki. Two years ago he was the subject of an argument I had with my flatmate, who said he was an upstanding citizen who does a lot of good in the community, or something to that effect. I said he should be in jail.

I’ve had one eye on the final of the tennis from London. Andy Murray has just beaten Novak Djokovic in two sets, a well-deserved victory in what was a shoot-out for the year-end number one spot. Yesterday Murray played a remarkable match against Milos Raonic, winning 11-9 in the third-set tie-break. He’s had a fantastic second half of the season, winning Wimbledon and Olympic gold. Murray always impresses me in his interviews with his appreciation for the game and his recall of matches. In a way that shouldn’t impress me – tennis is, like, his job – but some players are pretty hazy when it comes to the finer points. I was supposed to be playing tennis today, not just watching it, but that might have to wait.

A train crash in India has killed 120 people. I read that almost 15,000 people die in Indian train accidents each year.