I spoke to my cousin in Wellington this morning. They’d been down in the South Island and dropped in on my parents. I had a total brain fart when I asked them if they’d been skiing. In January. In New Zealand. Normally that’s why they’d be passing through Geraldine. Their eldest boy is about to fly the nest – next month he’ll be off to Canterbury to study engineering. My parents remarked that he’d developed a distinctly non-Kiwi – almost British – accent, and yes, he picked that up within weeks of starting his expensive school. It was amazing, and a little unsettling, to hear such a sudden change just because he’d started a new school.
Maybe I asked about skiing because I had snow on the brain. We got chunky flakes of the stuff most days last week, only for it to melt away. Now we’ve got a blanket. Walking through fresh snow – crrrunch – is one of life’s pleasures, and one I missed out on in all those years in Auckland and Wellington.
I made $57 in a badugi tournament yesterday, finishing third. It’s the seventh time I’ve cashed in eleven attempts, including three appearances in the top five. (I doubt that sort of strike rate is sustainable.) There were one or two things I might have done differently in hindsight, but I thought I had a pretty good tournament overall. I’m making a lot more player notes than I used to – the same players show up time after time, so knowing what you’re up against is so valuable. After my wander into the endlessly fascinating Iosefin area of Timișoara this afternoon, I gave back a few dollars at the cash tables (a very profitable game on average, but I couldn’t hit a damn thing). My bankroll is currently $214.
Two days left of Trump, we hope.
Here are a few pictures from Iosefin, pre- and mid-snow:
This shop used to sell seeds. There is a seed shop (still doing business) next door.The kids’ theatreThese two pigeons have found a warm spot. Here is one of many notices warning of falling bits and pieces.
It’s currently a ridiculous 12 degrees on the penultimate day of a crazy year, and the fourth anniversary of the day I moved into this flat. I remember that day well. All I had was a suitcase, a backpack, and a view. It was like a dream. I could have ended up anywhere but I’m slap-bang in the middle of this beautiful city. That’s mad. And then the next day the square was absolutely heaving. New Year is (under normal circumstances) a big deal here.
I’ve had a big last quarter of 2020 on the work front. A third of my hours this year have come since 1st October. To put that another way, my daily volume over the last three months has been 50% higher, on average, than in the first nine months. Yesterday I had five sessions (8½ hours) and felt I could have done better. I’d run out of things to do; I was winging it. Since I moved exclusively online, where there are fewer tools at my disposal, winging it has been a more prominent feature. One of my sessions was with the ex-professional poker player; he pointed me towards a database you can use to scout out fish in PokerStars hold ’em games.
Yes, poker. On Monday night I made $24 from a badugi tournament. I came fifth out of more than 100 players, surviving for 3¾ hours. It’s funny getting back into that again. The adrenalin rush of hitting a big hand or calling a big bluff. People made more moves than I remember a decade ago, or maybe they did then too and I just didn’t notice. I’m a better watcher of the game than back in the old days. My demise, or almost, came when I was dealt the 41st best hand in the game (which is better than it sounds), but my opponent made the 39th. That left me almost chipless, and two hands later I was out. After a couple of other cashes (and some non-cashes, of course), my bankroll is $97, which gives me just enough of a buffer to play the cash games. My goal isn’t really to make money (though that would be nice), but to enjoy the game and play a whole lot less robotically than I feel I used to.
When I called my parents last night, Dad had gone to Temuka to get his blood checked, so I was able to have a good chat with Mum. As long as we avoid all talk of Dad’s health, we get on extremely well. It will be a long time before I hug her again.
Here are some pictures of Timișoara (where else?):
Central Park, 20/11/20This is Serbian. “Who is the fastest in the city?”Some old maps of Timișoara FortressGearing up for the “Romania without masks” protest. Christmas dinner
This morning I got hold of some zinc to go with my vitamin D. The wintriest-ever winter is on its way, and if I can boost my immune system inexpensively and harmlessly, I should absolutely be doing so.
Last week was quite a big one on the work front. Three new students. One of them is a friend of another student of mine – a Romanian who has lived just outside Birmingham (which is where I studied) for the last three years. I spoke first with her husband whose English was mindblowingly good – practically fluent, with a Brummie accent to boot. Then I had my two sessions with her on Skype – she’s one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. The other new people are Lucian, a bloke of about my age who works for a courier firm, and an 18-year-old guy (I had a rare in-person lesson with him) who wants to study in Amsterdam and needs an IELTS certificate. I’m trying to discourage face-to-face meetings. I had my work cut out with the ten-year-old boy in Bucharest – with no games or fun physical activities at my disposal, 90 minutes is an aeon.
Talking of Birmingham, I’ve been in touch with my university friend who lives in the centre of the city. I mentioned that tri-generational families are quite common in Romania, and there’s generally a fair bit of mixing between different age groups, to the point where the elderly are in danger of catching Covid from their children or grandchildren. He said that (of course) that isn’t the case in the UK outside Asian communities, and when I saw a heat-map chart that showed just how age-sorted Britain now is, I thought, isn’t that sad? (I talk to my parents two or three times a week, and I’m in regular contact with people aged between 10 and 85.) And it’s not just age groups where people are increasingly sorting themselves. Race, income, level of education, how they voted in the EU referendum, you name it. When I saw that chart, I thought it’s no wonder that UK is so fractured right now.
What a contrast between Britain and New Zealand. The UK’s response to Covid has been shambolic, and I can hardly blame Scotland and Wales and Manchester and maybe one or two others for giving central government the middle finger. I couldn’t follow the NZ election because I was working, but shock horror, you properly handle the biggest crisis facing your country in 75 years, you bring in the best scientists, your messaging is clear, you show compassion, and guess what, you’re rewarded in the polls. It’s not that complicated. Labour won the first majority under proportional representation, in the ninth election to be held under that system. Although it was a decisive result, there was a nice balance, with the Greens (climate crisis, hello?) and a resurgent ACT picking up ten seats apiece. It’s great they have a system that allows such balance unlike the US or UK.
I did catch up with my brother. He’d just got back from northern Scotland. He likes long drives, which is just as well. His phone has just about had it, so we struggled to communicate. What? Wh-what? I couldn’t hear a damn thing on the other end. He doesn’t want to spend the money on a replacement phone. His attitude to money has taken a complete one-eighty in recent years; in his twenties he got through more phones than I did hot dinners. Now he’s all into mortgage interest rates and stamp duty and whatnot. I found out that he had a dramatic time up in Scotland – he helped rescue an American destroyer, however the hell you do that.
I had an email reply from my friend from St Ives. She and her husband came to visit me in Romania in 2017. We hired a car and had a wonderful time. She was relieved that I’d finally been in touch for the first time in months, thinking perhaps I’d entered (Covid-induced?) depression. But no, it was a combination of forgetting and lack of news. In truth I haven’t had depression in Romania. Sometimes I’ve felt a bit down, but that pointlessness, that neverending desert, weeks, months, years of it, seems to be in the past.
After work yesterday I went for a longish walk through the parts of town I frequented when I moved here. It was quite nostalgic, which might seem a silly word but I’ve now spent 10% of my life in Timișoara.
No tennis this weekend. Some of the group have been unwell, and I might have given it a miss anyway after what happened with my knee last weekend. One of the guys brings his small dog along; here are some pictures from the tennis court, which isn’t in perfect nick as you can see, as well as a bunch of snaps from yesterday’s walk.
The old abattoir
Opposite the old abattoir, just along by the guest house I stayed in, is a park. It’s pretty rough, as is the area as a whole, but I still remember being in this park on my second evening in Timișoara and seeing it packed with all the ping-pong tables being used.
This was a building site four years ago. There are 108 flats in this block, plus Guban, a locally-produced brand of shoes.
This is where I lived for two months
Above was once a bakery. You can just about make out the pre-1993 spelling pîine (bread, now spelt pâine).
The slogan above says “A Romania without theft”. We recently had the local elections, and we’ll soon be having parliamentary elections too. This new party, USR (literally the Save Romania Union), is on the rise.
This stone commemorates those who died during the 1989 Revolution.
The beer factoryTailorA poem
Above is the Millennium Catholic church, completed in 1901.
As case numbers have flattened, and perhaps started to trend downwards, I’ve been thinking back to March and how scary things were back then. During the second week of March, when both the Cheltenham Festival and Champions League football were allowed to take place in front of packed crowds, it was like watching a tsunami. By this stage it was already total mayhem in northern Italy, with hundreds dying every day. That weekend I went away to the mountains and I felt sheer panic, which was made worse by everybody around me carrying on regardless. As we drove there you could see queues forming outside supermarkets. Would there be food on the shelves when we got back? It was beautiful there but I could never relax. I disconnected from the news, but one of the others got a message that a state of emergency had been declared. What does that mean? On the way back I read about Italians singing traditional songs from balconies as a way of boosting morale amid the carnage, and I thought, in two weeks, or maybe three, that will be us. It was one heck of a relief to get back. Then the next morning I just about camped outside the supermarket before it opened.
We never reached anything like the level of transmission seen in northern Italy or New York. Our lockdown, which came in the nick of time, probably saved many thousands of lives. And luckily we don’t have the density of population or amount of travel that parts of the US or western Europe have. Things aren’t exactly great in Romania now, with more than 1000 new cases a day, and because we weren’t hit very hard initially, there isn’t much immunity in the population. About 98% are still susceptible. But at least we know much more now about how the virus spreads. In my last post I neglected to mention that a reason for Africa’s lower rate of severe Covid disease must be people’s exposure to other bugs and viruses.
I didn’t have a great start to yesterday. I had a no-show from my Skype student, who (in his messages) didn’t get that a no-show might be a slight problem for me. It’s clear that he thinks I’m a tap that he can turn on and off when he feels like it. I sent him a couple of what you might call passive-aggressive texts in reply, immediately regretting that, and wondering if I’d lose him completely, but he now says he wants to meet today, so that’s a relief. In a similar vein, I never saw the woman with whom I had the car-crash lesson last Boxing Day. Until last week, when she dropped by to pick up a book. She told me she’d changed her job, moving to a competitor coffee-machine-making company after being in the same place for 17 years.
I might buy a new bike later today, and I’ll post some pictures if I do. But until then, here are some pictures of Timișoara (where else, right now?):
The trees are dripping with plums. I picked about six kilos a couple of weeks ago.These one-seater, three-wheeled vans are quite a common sight.They didn’t see it comingThis is in Piața Traian. The sign in Serbian means “House of the Golden Deer”Space tomatoes
I’ve just had a lesson with a guy who admitted that he was addicted to fishing, to the point where he regularly dreams about it. It sounded like quite a good addiction to have. This was our first lesson since early March, before the lockdown.
I had a long chat with my parents this morning. I won’t be seeing them for absolutely ages. Not until we get a vaccine, which is probably a year away. For me, this has been the saddest part. I don’t know when I’ll next see my brother in the UK either. At least this is 2020 and not 1990, when hour-long video calls to the other side of the world would have practically been science fiction. Mum was disappointed that two new Covid cases had been imported into New Zealand from the UK.
Romania has seen 250 more cases and 10 deaths in the last 24 hours. Still way too many. I don’t know where we might head from here. There’s a lot of good simple stuff here – for instance, whenever I buy anything from the pharmacy (wearing a mask, of course) they give me another mask – but just about everything has now reopened, including malls. I was supposed to have a face-to-face lesson with a boy yesterday, but his mum changed her mind and we ended up still doing it remotely. I mentioned to him that malls had just reopened, and he said he wouldn’t be going anywhere near one because it’s too dangerous. But the fact is that after three months of being stuck, people have had enough. We’re seeing this all over the world. I don’t even talk to my brother about the virus anymore.
It really smelt of June today, with the sweet aroma of lime trees just about permeating the whole city. There’s no doubt about it, Timișoara has smells. When I moved in to this flat, the waft from the patisseries really got me, although that disappeared over the lockdown. The markets can be quite pungent, especially at this time of year, although the cheese section pongs all year round. Then the river has its own distinctive smell too. And then there’s the pigeon poo. And crow poo. I still remember visiting the UK in April 2018 and how good it felt, on my arrival in the middle of the night, to smell Timișoara again.
In March I asked Mum what her secret was for making such good pizza, and she gave me her recipe. Things got ugly with the virus almost immediately, and baking products became hard to come by, especially yeast. But yesterday yeast was back on the shelves, and I’ve currently got a pizza in the oven. I’m sure it won’t be anything like as good as Mum’s.
We’re having a run of wet, stormy weather. Here are some pictures I took this afternoon:
A busker about to start upThe Opera House getting an extreme makeoverSo many pigeons
Nearly 900 deaths were added to the UK figures today, just like yesterday and the day before. Nine hundred. Nine Hillsborough disasters. A dozen Grenfell Towers. Every day. Granted, some of the deaths, perhaps 100 a day, are people who die with Covid-19 rather than from it, but there are also vast numbers dying in care homes who aren’t being counted. The daily tally of people dying from Covid-19 is surely well over 1000.
Those numbers are terrifyingly high. But what really shocks me is how normal this seems to have become over there. What has happened to the country I was born and bred in? How has life in the UK become so cheap, all of a sudden? How has being unable to breathe and drowning in your fluids, while your family can’t even say goodbye to you, become so acceptable so quickly?
Here in Romania we’ll be in lockdown, with armed police, until mid-May at the earliest. I’m glad of that. I agree with whoever said that lifting the lockdown now would be like flushing half your antibiotics down the loo because you’re feeling a bit better, and anyway we’re yet to even properly reach the “feeling better” stage. A huge hole was blown in my teaching hours in mid-March, but my volume is starting to pick up. Yesterday I had that lesson with Cosmin’s friend – it was probably as good for my Romanian as it was for her English. Now she wants a lesson every day including weekends (after all, what is a weekend now?). She should improve quickly.
It’s my 40th birthday on Monday. Yikes! All this social distancing means I won’t be having the massive rip-roaring party I would have had otherwise.
Timișoara really is beautiful in spring, and here are some more photos of the bits of Timișoara that I’m still allowed to set foot in.
I called my aunt this morning. She told me that her dog had been put down yesterday. She couldn’t even be there while it was put to sleep. All very sad. She’s been on her own since my uncle died in 2002, and her dogs have always been a lifeline.
This morning, after hearing that Anak Krakatoa had erupted, I read about the Year Without a Summer. That was 1816, the year after Tambora erupted, the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history. This year looks like being summerless for completely different reasons.
Last night my UK-based Skype student predicted increasing casualty rates in Britain and even more draconian measures, just as people might want them to be relaxed. He said too many people were ignoring the rules. For some unknown reason we ended up talking about crumpets, as in the food item. He told me he picked up a packet of these mysterious floppy cakey things after arriving in the UK, but he wasn’t a fan. Apparently he ate them untoasted, unbuttered, un-anything, so no wonder they didn’t quite do it for him. To be fair, how would you know? (It’s always amused me that spectrum has crumpets as its anagram.)
The official death toll in Romania is approaching 300. Here is the latest graph, followed by some pictures of Timișoara in spring under lockdown:
A helpline for over-65s without supportThe shoes have walkedThe half-attached sign warns people over 65 not to leave their homeThis is a lovely notice on a nearby perfume shop. “Take care of each other, stay healthy, and we’ll meet again when this craziness is over.”
Today I’ve had a bit of a runny nose and a cough. It can’t be, surely. Millions of people must be Googling symptoms, wondering if this sneeze or that sniffle might be it.
We’ve had yet another sunny day. After my two lessons (which is a good day all of a sudden) I read my book in the park. It didn’t feel like Timișoara, but more like an expanded version of Temuka. Tomorrow I’ll make some progress on the book I’m writing, as long as I haven’t developed a raging fever in the meantime.
I’ve been plotting Romania’s coronavirus cases on a logarithmic chart I manually created. The numbers now come out twice a day, and I was relieved to see the 6pm figure of “only” 260, instead of something closer to 300. It’s too early to say where we’ll end up, especially as I don’t know how much testing is getting done.
Elsewhere in Europe, it isn’t too early. The situation is very ugly now. The latest figures in Italy show 475 deaths (19% of the previous total of 2503) in 24 hours. The death toll in France in the last 24 hours was 89 (51% of the previous total), while in the UK it was 32 (44% of the previous total). It’s those percentages that are so shocking. Emmanuel Macron made an impassioned speech on Monday night, and hopefully the French will get the message and those percentages might start to fall. In the UK I’m not so sure. They wasted valuable time on their herd immunity “strategy”, and as far as I know, many Brits are still going to pubs and malls like it’s a divine right. My prediction for the UK is that it will end up in a very bad place indeed.
On a much more positive note, here are some pictures from my trip to the mountains. I hope you agree that it was a beautiful place to spend a “last chance” weekend. The picture with the logs and dogs was from the place where I was served palincă.
Three years ago today I was living in a loft on the other side of the river, trying to find somewhere more permanent. I remember it being a good deal colder than today. Things had become quite urgent, and I was struggling to make headway through a forest of dodgy agents. Christmas was just around the corner and that only made things harder. I was forced to make phone calls in a language I could hardly speak at all, and some of the apartments I looked at weren’t even finished. Had I been ten years younger I might have just taken the first thing I saw. I particularly remember the main website I used, where apartments were advertised as having 2 or 3 or 4 camere, meaning rooms, or specifically rooms for living and sleeping in, not bathrooms or kitchens. Some places said they had “O cameră”, which I honestly thought meant “zero rooms”, i.e. some sort of storage space. It took me days for the penny to drop: “O” was the Romanian feminine indefinite article, meaning one, not zero. That seems really silly now, but anything seemed possible then, even flats with no livable rooms.
On the other hand, I had a new city to explore, I’d found somebody to play tennis with, and I was even starting to get the odd lesson here or there. It was through one of my very early students (who responded to one of my ads featuring President-elect Donald Trump) that I found the place I’m writing this from. I was extremely fortunate. The chances that I ended up right here must have been pretty slim.
After my last blog post, where I put the chances of a hung parliament in next week’s UK election at roughly one in three, I’ll now revise that downwards to 20-25%. A few more days have passed, the polls haven’t really changed, and the passing of time leads to greater certainty.
I didn’t mention the Romanian presidential election in which Klaus Iohannis was re-elected by a hefty margin of about two to one. My students were happy with this, and I took that as a good sign. Plus he appears to me to be cool, calm and collected, and he’s somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. I found the map of Romania showing the results by county to be particularly illuminating. In Timiș, Iohannis topped 75%. In Cluj he was in the eighties. But in the south where people are poorer and less educated, Viorica Dăncilă was either roughly equal or in some cases ahead.
On Tuesday I finally got my hair cut, and a good conversation in Romanian. (My hairdresser could speak some English – he’d spent some time in the UK – but no thanks.)
Sunday was Romania’s national day and the square was packed. I tried some mulled wine and it put me to sleep. The fireworks were set off from the park that reopened in August, so I got a ringside seat from my window. Here are some photos.
So last week I had my usual pair of two-hour lessons with the woman who doesn’t like speaking English, and I mentioned in passing that I played tennis but struggled to find anyone to play with. She said, why not have a game with my son at the weekend? Yes, sounds good. I popped along to the nearby courts to book a session. The only time they had a court free was from 11 till 12 on Sunday (yesterday) when her son was busy, so she suggested that she take his place. Fine. All booked. Then at around 9am yesterday I got an unusual WhatsApp message in reasonable English. Who’s this? It was her husband, telling me not to arrange anything for his wife or son during the weekend in future. Well it wasn’t my idea, but I replied politely. I understand. Weekends are family time. The next thing I knew, he appeared to have blocked me from WhatsApp. His wife was oblivious to the WhatsApp stuff until this morning, when she must have got hold of his phone. She sent me a long message of apology, talking about possessive Romanian men. I want nothing to do with this. For now, the lessons with her and her son will still go ahead, and they provide me with a quarter of my income. I will tread carefully. (Money doesn’t seem to be much of an issue for them. He clearly makes lots of it, but I don’t know what he does.)
It was a beautiful morning yesterday, and we did play tennis. She had hardly played before, and most of the exercise I got was from picking up balls that went here, there and everywhere. I told her that if she wanted to improve, the best way would be to hit against the wall for an hour. She certainly won’t be hitting with me again in the near future.
Brexit. I’m now totally, officially, lost. Boris Johnson does seem to just about have the numbers for his deal, which is basically the same as Theresa May’s that was defeated three times but a smidgen more Brexity, but will that even matter? Does any of this even matter anymore? Here in Romania, the government fell the week before last, and we’ll soon be on to our fifth prime minister in the time I’ve been here.
Here are some pictures from the area around Piața Traian, and a few autumnal shots. There’s even one of (a bit of) me in a hammock, which is the closest thing to a selfie you’ll ever get on here. It’s pretty awesome when I think about it. Not so long ago, if I felt a bit stressed during a work day, I might have been able to walk around a business park for a few minutes. Now I can go an actual park and lie in a hammock.
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