by A lot of stuff happens in Romania in December. The first of the month is the national day with all the parades of military and emergency vehicles. I wasn’t able to see the parade this time, but in the early evening I saw the bit where they march through the city carrying torches and stop every few minutes to sing the national anthem. A few days later there’s St Nicholas’ Day where all the kids get goody bags which always include a stick. Then on the 16th and for a few days afterwards there are commemorations of those who died in the 1989 revolution – that gets particular attention in Timișoara because it all kicked off here. Not long after that it’s Christmas, which is huge, though thankfully still not quite at the level of the UK. After a few blissful days it’s New Year’s Eve which is massive. As the clock ticks towards midnight, it’s practically impossible to move in town for people, as I found out nine years ago. (That was only my second night in my old flat.) Through it all and into January there’s the Christmas market which was very exciting to be among that first time with all the lights and smells. Though it seems far less exciting now – it all just feels normal – it’s actually got bigger.
On Saturday I met Mark in town, in the thick of Christmas market action. There were jazz Christmas songs booming from the stage. Things had all been rejigged to accommodate the extra stuff. We decided to get away from the chaos and go to Piața Unirii where the Museum of Banat was looking quite spectacular with all its Christmas lights. We tried a new restaurant. Predictably, it wasn’t worth it. It rarely is. One young waiter seemed to understand neither Romanian nor English. We sat there for over two hours and all I had was a burger and chips and two beers. Mark also had a dessert – some sort of pancake topped with a meringue which was supposedly some Banat speciality, though I’d never seen it before. I didn’t order a dessert and hoped Mark wouldn’t either because I knew it would mean sitting there for almost another hour.
I went to Ciacova yesterday – one of my favourite small towns around here – but the weather was pretty atrocious and I quickly came home. Other than that there’s not much news. Mum and Dad are currently in Moeraki. I’m glad about that because they manage to relax down there in a way they can’t at home.
Last week I had a session with a 25-year-old woman who said that making a lot of money is important to her. I told her that I gave up on that some time ago, and in fact I earned more at her age than I do now, 20 years later. She wants to move on from her job, not just in the pursuit of wealth but because she currently does shift work and the schedule is horrendous.
I had a difficult moment last week with a 17-year-old girl who in her last session with me made it clear that she didn’t believe in evolution. I find that hard, because to me evolution isn’t something you believe in any more than the result of two plus two is something you believe in. Anyway, on Wednesday night at close to eleven when I was halfway into bed, she sent me a message needing urgent help with an online test. At that time of night. Ugh. Reluctantly I agreed to help her. It was a 15-minute reading comprehension test that was part of the application process for an exchange programme in America. The problem is, her English level is well below what they require. She read the text and the possible answers to me but I struggled to understand what she was saying. If I’d had the text in front of me it would have been easy. In the end we ran out of time. I felt bad for her, but what could I do?
I recently joined an online Scrabble league. They split the participants up into eight divisions of 15 players each. I was put in the sixth division. It has a correspondence format in which you have to play the other 14 players in your division in 14 days. You get ten hours per move. Exceed that and you dip into a three-day time bank. If that runs out too, you lose the game. So there isn’t much time pressure. There is however significant pressure from my opponents who are mostly better than me, even in my lower division. You click on their profiles and they’ve played national and world championships, often with great success. So it’s a real uphill struggle for me. I’m currently on three wins and six losses, with five games still outstanding. Because this league is pretty new, they have an aggressive promotion and relegation system – five up, five down – so that people sort themselves quickly into the right divisions. It’s possible I can still sneak into tenth place and avoid the drop, but I may well end up being relegated. Though my play is sound strategically (I think), my word knowledge is my biggest handicap. As luck would have it, a Romanian player – one of the top-ranked English-language players in the country and a participant of two world championships – is in my division. We chatted in Romanian during our game. At one point he played cAEOmAS. Yes, using both blanks, as if he needed that advantage on top of all his others. I have no idea what that word means or how to pronounce it. I ended up getting stuck with the Q and he beat me by “just” 46. One of my other losses was by five points. My last play was MAN, and then my opponent went out with yet another word I didn’t know. I then remembered that NAM was also a word, and I could have played that instead. That would have given me four extra points, so fortunately it didn’t cost me the game.
On Saturday, the Beatles’ I’ll Follow the Sun came on the radio. Such a beautiful song, and all in a minute and 48 seconds. When I hear something like that (this song is from 1964), I always wonder how older people possibly manage in the modern world.
I’m trying to decide whether I can be bothered to get a Christmas tree. Here are some pictures of Timișoara in December:
