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Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

When will I see you again?

June 17, 2020 by 0 Comments

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 up
The Opera House getting an extreme makeover
So many pigeons
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Photos

Shockingly normal ⁠— what’s going on in the UK?

April 19, 2020 by 0 Comments

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.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Photos

Spring under lockdown

April 12, 2020 by 0 Comments

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:

Romania coronavirus 11-4-20
A helpline for over-65s without support
The shoes have walked
The half-attached sign warns people over 65 not to leave their home
This 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.”
Coronavirus - Hiking - Photos - Travel: Romania

Is this it? And some snow scenes

March 19, 2020 by 0 Comments

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.

Photos - Politics - Romania

Pics from Romania Day

December 6, 2019 by 0 Comments

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.

Moș Nicolae (St Nicholas) stick sellers
Life :) - Photos - Tennis

Caught up (and some autumn colours)

October 21, 2019 by 0 Comments

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.

The sun setting over the Bega
Language teaching - Photos - Scrabble

Headless chicken

April 15, 2019 by 0 Comments
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I spent most of last week running around like a headless chicken, trying to organise lessons at the last minute, wading through the disorganised piles of crap on my table in the process. At the weekend I took advantage of the iffy weather to restore some kind of order, and feel much more relaxed now. This morning I had a short coffee meeting with a new student, who will be starting Skype lessons with me tomorrow. She lives in Timișoara but I guess she feels Skype is still a time-saver. Yesterday (yes, Sunday, which I prefer to keep free) I had my first lesson with another new student, who works for a coffee machine-making company. She asked me two questions I get a lot: “What the hell are you doing in Romania?” and “Obviously you do some English teaching, but what do you actually do for a living?”

A problem lately has been long preparation time. I hand-make a lot of my materials. I’d go as far as to say the slightly offbeat homemade-ness is part of who am I as a teacher, and my students seem to like it. “We don’t get this at school,” they tell me, or “My Romanian English teacher just used grammar books.” But all that thinking and writing and printing and cutting and sticking takes time.

There isn’t a whole lot of other news. I thought I’d mention another of my experiences on the ISC Scrabble site, which unfortunately seems to bring out the worst in people. On Saturday I played seven games, winning four, but they were mostly against people rated lower than me, so my rating actually dipped a little. Not to matter. I then fired up game number eight, against someone I’d never played before. It was me to go first, and I had this rack: AEIUTZ and a blank. Hmm, there’s probably a bingo here, and it’ll score a lot. This was void, which means it’s perfectly fine to try words without penalty. Is ‘azulite’ a word? It rang a bell (a blue stone, something like lapis lazuli, perhaps?) so I try it, but no go. Perhaps it’s ‘azurite’ I was thinking of. I changed the blank to an R, and hey presto, 100 points. I felt a bit guilty at my unprecedented stroke of good fortune, but didn’t expect what happened next. He accused me of using a word finder, promptly aborted the game (doing the online equivalent of tipping the board up and letting the tiles fly across the room), then put me on his no-play list. I contacted the site’s help desk, saying that this sort of behaviour detracts from what should be a friendly game, but was told in no uncertain (and sarcastic) terms that if I wanted a friendly environment I should go elsewhere. It’s sad that basic civility seems to be in such short supply.

The Easter market from my window
Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Cold hard facts

December 18, 2018 by 0 Comments

It’s been a bit of a crappy day. At the weekend It was possible I’d have up to five lessons today, but everybody has cancelled. Literally everybody. The weather might have something to do with that. I also have no hot water. The plumber (or handyman) was here for two hours and after speaking to someone on the phone, he fixed it temporarily. Very temporarily.

My parents landed in the UK five days ago, and in another five days I’ll be there. They aren’t enjoying the cold and darkness, least of all Mum. Here in Timișoara we’ve had quite dramatic weather. Snow fell almost constantly for about 36 hours at the weekend, and the city is blanketed. Today I slipped and fell, appropriately outside the skating rink that’s been put up in Piața Libertății.

Outside my window on Saturday night

Some good news is that last week I picked up a bunch of new students and had a busy week: 29½ hours of lessons. It bodes well for 2019. Some of my recent discussions have made me very glad not to have office Christmas parties anymore. One woman of about thirty sought advice from me after getting drunk and stoned at her work do, and finding out that a man of about fifty had supposedly kissed her. She couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t think of much in the way of advice. Um, how about next time try not to get totally off your face at a work function.

Last weekend my body corporate in Wellington had their meeting. At 11pm on Friday I tried and failed to join the discussion on Skype. For some reason the plug-in didn’t work for me. The least bad option appears to be selling the whole block. With the deadline for objections rapidly approaching, last night I sent off my form to QV, contesting the latest hike to the rateable value of my apartment. I included the independent valuation report that we got six months ago, only to find an email this morning telling us NOT (bold and caps) to include it. Whoops.

No Scrabble during the week but I got in seven games over the weekend, winning six. My rating has hit 1400, which I think is hugely flattering. (Average is around 1000, while 1800 is expert level.) In short games I’d be eaten alive. Likewise in games where you lose a turn if you play an invalid word. While my strategy is pretty sound, I still don’t know nearly enough words. Heck, I’ve played fewer than 300 games. One of my opponents at the weekend, also rated 1400-odd, had played 18,000. He was the only player to beat me, although we played a second game which I won.

Four lessons in my diary for tomorrow.

This is from last night’s carol singing in the cathedral


Photos - Travel: Romania

Sighișoara trip pictures

August 17, 2018 by 0 Comments

As I write, we’re in the middle of a storm. For a moment I feared something as sharp and shocking as last September’s 15 minutes of carnage. It’s nasty out there and that lightning bolt just then was pretty damn close, but it seems we’ll be spared such horrors this time.

Yesterday was St Mary’s day, and about one in ten Romanians called Maria or Mariana or Marian or Marius (those last two being male names) or some other variant celebrated their zi onomastică. They’re basically tied with all the Johns and Janes and Joans, who have their big day in Johnuary.

Here are some pictures from Sighișoara and “Deer Meadow”:

Language teaching - Life :) - Photos - Romania

Drained (and our cold snap)

March 11, 2018 by 0 Comments

I need a break. A day off. Even a week off. For the first time I’m really feeling it in my body.

It’s time I stopped saying yes to everything and started blocking out days in my calendar. My last day off was 13th January, eight weekends ago. There’s a certain irony that this week I was missing the hours and days I spent last spring and autumn roaming the streets of this beautiful city, putting thousands of adverts in people’s letterboxes. The weather is far too nice now to be stuck inside all the time, or to venture outside only when I have a lesson to get to. It really hit me on Friday when someone rang me up asking for lessons. Of course I said yes, and my new student came over yesterday morning. We had a productive session, but it meant I no longer had a block of free time in my Saturday. In the afternoon I had back-to-back lessons in Dumbrăvița with the brother and sister who are both hard to teach for very different reasons. Their mother provided me with food – celeriac soup, chicken and rice, and even though it was delicious, I’d earlier grabbed a pleșcavița from one of the kiosks in Piața 700, so I felt quite bloated after that. I had another lesson in the evening – this time on Skype – and I muddled through despite my inadequate preparation.

I still love my job and wouldn’t go back to some god-awful insurance company for all the tea in China, but I’ve got to remember that I’m the boss here (that’s kind of the point!) and the extra money I make by saying yes all the time isn’t worth it. At the end of the week I have a healthy brick of lei in my hand, but in pound or dollar terms it might as well be Monopoly money, and at the moment I’m not even getting the chance to spend it.

Here are a few pictures of Timișoara during our late-winter blast of cold weather: