Travel: Romania

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Jimbolia and how tech is wrecking us

June 17, 2025 by 0 Comments

This time next week I’ll be meeting Mum and Dad somewhere in London, hoping that my phone works over there. You can never be 100% sure. Blame Brexit for that.

My hours are now dropping like a stone. The end of the school year has that effect when kids make up a higher proportion of my students than ever before. As always, this time of year means more trips to the market. The strawberries will be done in a few days. Stone fruit is now in abundance. Before I go away I’ll buy a few kilos of sour cherries to preserve in jars for the winter. (In Romanian, sweet and sour cherries are completely different words: cireșe and vișine, respectively.) Yesterday I met up for lunch with Dorothy at one of those basic but good Romanian places in her neck of the woods. I had quite a substantial meal: bean soup with bread, chicken schnitzel, rice, and mashed potato mixed in with spinach. The temperature had climbed to 30 by then. As always, she was unfazed by the heat while I was constantly looking around for shade.

On Sunday I went to Jimbolia (a fun name to say), a town of 10,000 people which sits close to the Serbian border. It was a typically Romanian town, mostly unmodernised, its wide main street lined with trees painted (as always here) white on the bottom. They do that, as far as I know, to stop the trunks from absorbing too much heat when the temperature quickly rises in the spring. The main street ends in the railway station, a border crossing between the EU and the wild exterior. The station was practically deserted, but to my pleasant surprise there was a toilet inside. In Romania this is a big deal. Those in Loo Zealand don’t know how good they’ve got it. (That’s just reminded me that there was a Lew Zealand in the Muppets.) Mostly I sat in the shade and read Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories by Thomas Hardy that Dad gave me. It took me a while to “dial in” to the late-Victorian English and obsession with marriage, which was the norm back then. (In Romania, it’s still kind of the norm now. I’ve got used to brushing off the “Why aren’t you married?” question.) The tales take place in towns and villages near where my brother lives, though the names are changed in the book. I’d hoped the stories would be more focused on the places themselves, akin to Wild Wales, but they’ve been worth reading all the same.

My lower workload will give me a chance to work on my other book, the one based on the bloke I played tennis with in Auckland. I hope to make some serious headway with that over the summer.

Last week I read this comment on AI:

AI is the latest con in a long line of charlatanism from the IT industry. Almost every promise made for how it would improve our lives has been a sham. The speed increase of communication has imposed insane pressures on people in the workplace. Social media has mentally damaged a whole generation. Society has become pornografied and every deranged whack job who previously would have had to stand shouting on a street corner has been given a seemingly respectable platform for their nonsensical hate filled tosh. No-one can read a map anymore – or spell – or write music – without pushing a button.

And now we have vast amounts of money being poured into a concept which is going to steal people’s jobs and just make us even more gullible and stupid. The worst part is being told that AI will solve climate change when in reality it is contributing massively to it! We don’t need a billion dollar computer to point out that we are consuming too much – we are just hoping that it will tell us how we can carry on doing it!

Think I’ll put my foot through the telly and go live up a mountain somewhere (if I can find one not swarming with bloody “influencers”).

I don’t think pornografied is really a word, but this commenter manages to be very funny and absolutely right (as I see it) at the same time. Social media has been profoundly damaging for people’s mental wellbeing. It has also catastrophically accelerated the hyperconsumption and each-man-for-himself “un-society” that started in about 1980. And as my student Matei (a big user of AI) said recently, we’ve now got AI on top of all of this, making us super dumb. (As for me, it’s instant messaging that’s the real killer. I turned off all alerts more than a year ago; it was the only way I could handle it. I couldn’t cope with being part of active WhatsApp groups.)

Here are some pictures of Jimbolia:

The railway station

I was met by goats outside the station

A compulsory charge of zero lei to use the loo doesn’t sound too bad. (It was once 2000 old lei.) But the loo had disappeared. Luckily there was one inside the station.

The main street, with the Catholic church on the left

The very centre. The statue on the left is of St Florian, who was venerated in Austro-Hungary, of which Jimbolia was a part at that time. (Jimbolia didn’t become Romanian until 1924.)

A monument marking 150 years since the 1848 revolution, also known as the Hungarian War of Independence, in which tens of thousands died. The plaque on the right uses the word “Pașoptiști”. That comes from the Romanian for forty-eight: patruzeci și opt, or patrușopt in quick speech. The suffix -ist (plural -iști) is used a lot in Romanian: IT workers are known as ITiști, for instance.

A WW2 memorial. The defaced plaque at the bottom is in German.

The Catholic church

Quite a handsome council building, I thought, even if it needs some TLC.

Family - Politics - Romania - Travel: Romania

Stress test: my parents’ stay

May 26, 2025 by 0 Comments

The weather has been cooler and wetter than normal for this time of year. The pungent whiff of lime trees all over the city has therefore been delayed. If it could stay like this all through the summer I’d be most happy, but it most certainly won’t.

Nicușor Dan will be sworn in as president later today. When I spoke to Matei’s parents on Saturday, they talked of their plans to leave the country in the event of a Simion victory. Like many others with good jobs in the main cities, they weren’t joking. A win for Simion would have meant another brain drain out of Romania. On Thursday, however, I had a lesson with a 14-year-old boy who said the election results were fake because just look at how many followers Simion has on TikTok! He said he expected “chaos” in Romania now and lamented the fact that Romania couldn’t have a “real man” as president. Ugh. If he is at all typical of his generation, Romania’s long-term future is bleak.

I’ve been exhausted ever since Mum and Dad left early on Thursday morning. I’ve had some very busy days of lessons, plus on Friday I had a meeting about the books. Plural now, because the publishers have decided to wrap both books into one “project” that still needs to be approved by an organisation called the AFCN (Administrația Fondului Cultural Național) which provides funding for cultural projects like books. The older lady went through all of this in great detail while I struggled to stay awake, even though I knew it was important. I was just that tired. (Also, in the morning, Dorothy got me to deliver a table from her friend’s house to hers. The table was an inch too wide to fit in my car, so it needed to be taken apart. Her friend didn’t have enough screwdrivers and spanners – I’d have brought some if I’d known – so she had to borrow some off her neighbour who luckily was in. I could have done without all that.) After nine hours of lessons on Saturday, I spent most of yesterday getting bits and pieces together for the AFCN, including CVs for both me and my father, a “justification” for the project, excerpts and so on. I still haven’t got the title finalised for the large book.

So I set the alarm for 3:50 on Thursday morning which, as it turned out, was far earlier than I needed to. I let Mum cuddle Kitty one last time (how much she liked the cat was a revelation after all the negativity when I got her), then took Mum and Dad to the airport where they checked in, and that was that. Their flight and trip from Luton to St Ives were painless. When they got to the flat, Mum sent me a lovely email to say how much she appreciated my help in Romania and also how helpful the staff at the airport bus station were. On Friday my brother came to the flat, then on Saturday he drove Mum and Dad down to Poole. They’ve now seen their granddaughter for the first time. Mum was busy playing with her grandson in the background and everything looked very jolly.

She wasn’t quite like that with me. Just like when I visited New Zealand in 2023, she would switch from being lovely to being someone I didn’t want to be within a mile of, at the drop of a hat. With all the talk of her digestive problems, which still need to be properly looked at, her stress levels are a much bigger issue. That’s why that trip we did was badly planned on my part – all that booking accommodation and driving was just begging for her to turn shitty. I mean, I even don’t like to move that often. And she now lacks that sense of adventure that she once had.

Last Tuesday I had lessons until 7:30. We went to the beer factory afterwards – a pretty late dinner by our standards. That didn’t help. Mum wasn’t in a great mood – maybe she was nervous for the trip to the UK – and she loses interest in food if it’s not at her normal time. Unlike the other time we ate there, the tables were free of paper menus and instead had QR codes to scan. I’m not at all a fan of QR code menus, but Mum really couldn’t face the idea of ordering dinner in that way. I suggested we eat outside; maybe there’d be paper menus there. Indeed I could see some, but when I asked the waiter for one, he told us – in aggressive fashion – to scan the damn QR code. The paper menus aren’t in English, he said. Look, I can read Romanian. I then got a bit animated, I suppose. Then Mum decided she couldn’t handle me waving my arms like that and stormed out. Great. Dad and I ordered a beer each. Dad told me how hard it is to live with Mum and how he’ll often go to his studio even if he has nothing to paint, just for the peace and quiet. He said he’s resigned to living the rest of his life under constant stress; his remaining years will not be happy ones. It’s all so very sad. A man who would normally float calmly through life, almost like my favourite snooker player Mark Williams, having to live like that. And it’s sad for Mum too – as well as being my mother, she’s fundamentally a very good person who wants the best for people. To see her under so much stress when she’s one of life’s great winners, someone who has everything she could possibly want, is so upsetting. Fifteen minutes later Mum came back, still very angry. We ordered food. Mum’s mood lifted just a little – there were two people who must have been identical twins on the table opposite that looked just like someone she knew in Geraldine. We got home, I put some music on, and we went to bed.

I had no lessons on Wednesday morning, so I took Mum and Dad to Ciacova, a place south of here that I’d only previously been to on a Sunday. In midweek it was much more interesting. Ciacova was a bustling little town, complete with its huge cobbled square, old men on bikes that were almost as old, meeting up for a coffee or (even at that time of day) a beer. As my parents said, it would have made a good film set; it could have been 1950s France. And the surrounding architecture is quite something. They really enjoyed Ciacova and (earlier) Buziaș; going to those places was stress-free – they were good decisions on my part. I know now that the trick is to keep stress to an absolute minimum.

Dad isn’t immune to stress either. So much of it is caused by modern tech. Both my parents struggle with that. I do to, if I’m honest, or rather I make a concerted effort to pick and choose the tech that I can handle. The very idea of a smart watch that can receive messages makes me break out into a cold sweat, so I’ll never get one. Neither will I get one of those “hey Google” thingies that sit on your desk. Dad would also benefit from deleting the damn Daily Mail app from his tablet. So often I’d see him engrossed in it. Come on Dad, you’re better than that. It gets him worked up about LGBTQ stuff which I see as mostly an irrelevance. It’s not even the political position of the paper that bothers me (though it is firmly on the right, while I’ve always thought of Dad as being squarely in the middle); it’s the bile and hatred that it – and the people who comment on it – spit out. Reading it will make you bitter and angry.

I plan to spend nine days in the UK from 24th June – I’ll meet up with the whole family over there – though I haven’t yet decided what to do with Kitty. Later in the summer I’m planning to visit Poland. Stay in the same place for five nights. Don’t move. Life is easier that way.

I’ve got more to say, but this has already been a long one. I’ll put up some photos next time.

Driving - Family - Travel: Romania

Tough trip with Mum and Dad — Part 2 of 2

May 22, 2025 by 0 Comments

So we were walking up the hill to our apartment in Brașov when Mum decided to spout some bollocks about Jacinda Ardern. Seriously, why New Zealand politics here and now? I told her what I thought, which I probably shouldn’t have done considering she was already in a crappy mood. That evening was so terrible I don’t want to write about it, though I will say that Mum talked about wanting to die. It was similar to the time I fell out with her in 2016 just before coming to Romania, although this time Dad was also involved and she got really shitty with him too. In fact she accused us of ganging up on her. It was made worse by having to book our next place to stay – she insisted on doing that, even though she was in no fit state to do so. It took her two angst-filled hours. She booked a night in Râmnicu Vâlcea which sits on the Olt River.

The trip to Râmnicu Vâlcea started off great with all the sleepy villages and picturesque countryside, complete with hay stooks and storks up lamp-posts. We stopped in the well-kept, bustling town of Râșnov, not too far from Brașov, whose focal point is a 13th-century fortress. But as we traversed the hills, we ran into a massive roading project which required incredible manpower and considerable expense. Mum was extremely anxious the whole time, and that didn’t make driving any easier. We were constantly stuck at red lights as traffic was reduced to one lane. It was also pretty warm and I was having trouble with the air con. At one point I was at the head of the queue and the traffic light was out, so I just bowled on as you would, only to meet head-on traffic which I was lucky to be able to swerve clear of. Then near our destination there was a maniacal driver that could have wiped out several cars with his overtaking manoeuvre. Nothing unusual for Romania, but it frightened the bajeezus out of Mum.

Finding our apartment at Râmnicu Vâlcea was stressful in itself. These privately owned places just are stress-inducing. We stayed there the night without even seeing the town or the river, then hung around for a maddeningly late breakfast (9:20) that was delivered in a car.

Then, off to Sibiu. Not an especially long drive, but a wet one. The temperature had plummeted. I found what seemed to be the right address but it was way out of town. We got there in the end; the owner guided us through the narrow archway into the courtyard that housed our apartment which was the best of the three we stayed in by a mile. Mum had an afternoon nap, which did wonders for her. She was fine after that and for the next three days, after which it all kicked off once more. We ventured into the city which was close at hand. We seemed to spend a lot of time in shoe shops before looking around the Catholic church. We’d all been to Sibiu before and the familiarity was nice, even if it was still raining. I didn’t feel any of the wonder and excitement at seeing Sibiu that I did in 2016, though. Looking back, that was something quite special. Magical, even. We had a simple but decent meal, and after a good sleep we were on the road again, back to Timișoara. (We’d planned to wander around Sibiu in the morning, but it was still wet and horrible.) The rain made the first half of the drive tricky, but it then brightened up. When we got back, I went over to Dorothy’s to pick up Kitty. She’d been well looked after.

If Mum and Dad come back this way again, there’s no way I’ll do a trip like that with them. I wanted to show them a bit of the country, but that kind of travelling is far too much, for Mum especially. Four nights in Sibiu or maybe Cluj, staying in the same place the whole time, would be fine. Maybe. With Mum, there’s no guarantee that anything will be fine.

Family - Travel: Romania

Tough trip with Mum and Dad — Part 1 of 2

May 18, 2025 by 0 Comments

We’ll get the results of the exit poll in just eight hours. I fully expect Simion to be elected as president. He talks just like Trump. He’s pro-Trump, pro-Putin, and anti-brain. All the progress I’ve seen in the last nine years is about to be undone in a flash. That’s where the zeitgeist is right now. It’s terrifying and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just glad I put the wheels of my residency renewal in motion prior to the election.

After Mum and Dad’s ordeal which I hope they won’t repeat – Dad’s feet had swollen up like nothing I’d ever seen before – they acclimatised pretty quickly. But now they’ve only got three full days left in Romania. We left Timișoara on Tuesday and got back yesterday after spending two nights in Brașov and one each in Râmnicu Vâlcea and Sibiu.

I messed up twice on this trip, or really before the trip. I had a long, exhausting day of lessons on Monday and had to give Kitty to Dorothy, so my preparation wasn’t fantastic. Due to lack of time on my part, I let Mum book the accommodation in Brașov – she said she’d used booking.com dozens of times and was very adept at it. Hmmm. My other mistake was travelling to three different places with my parents in such a short space of time – I really was asking for it. Dorothy had given me some elderflower heads, which can normally make a very nice summer beverage, but under the circumstances were a pain in the arse. I was frantically trying to bottle the socată (elderflower champagne) even though it hadn’t had enough time to brew.

It was a long old drive to Brașov, but nothing I hadn’t done before. Before we left, Mum went to the loo for the first time in a week. Fantastic news. The motorway (one of Romania’s few such roads) is very good and mostly empty, so I could bomb along at 130 km/h without many problems. We stopped in a lovely little village called Porumbacu de Jos, just to the east of Sibiu. (De jos means lower. For every de jos there was also a de sus, or upper. In this region, the de joses were on the main road.) Near our destination, we stopped in Codlea and got a pizza from a sleepy little restaurant with no other customers apart from us. When we arrived in Brașov, we found our apartment in a handy spot just up the hill from the centre of town. I’m lucky that my parents can still do hills. But otherwise the apartment was pretty crappy – it was too small for the three of us and it lacked some of the most basic facilities.

Brașov is a great city. I’d always wanted to visit it, but the only chances I’d got previously were in the height of the tourist season – no thanks. We spent Wednesday morning walking by the fortress and then into town where we visited the Black Church – a Lutheran church whose construction began in the late 14th century. The soot from the fire it suffered 300 years later gave it its name. In between it was struck by a series of earthquakes. Because you had to pay and my parents don’t really like paying for stuff (yeah, that’s something I’ve picked up from them), we nearly didn’t go in, but we did. We learnt of the importance of guilds back in the day. Parishioners sat in different sections of the church based on which guild (association of tradesmen or professionals) they belonged to. There was a clear hierarchy of the guilds; if you represented a trade with status, you’d get larger seats nearer the front. Perhaps the main attraction of the church is its enormous collection of beautiful Persian rugs from the 15th and 16th centuries.

We went back to the apartment for lunch. At this point I could see (and hear, and practically taste) that Mum was getting anxious. It happens so quickly. You hear those big sighs and you know you’re in for a rough ride. Batten down the hatches. In the afternoon we visited the local museum. The two main attractions of the museum for me were the building itself – it was once a fancy council building, which must have become less fancy before getting an extreme makeover 20 years ago – and everything about the two photographers that had successive monopolies in the industry at the back end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We found a Vietnamese place to eat in the middle of town, as you do in Romania, and walked back to the apartment.

What happened next wasn’t much fun, to put it mildly.

Cat - Family - Travel: Romania

Weary and washed out, but they made it

May 12, 2025 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad arrived on Tuesday afternoon, pretty damn tired, and also shocked that there were no passport checks at the airport. (Because Romania had recently joined Schengen and they’d flown from Munich, they could go straight through.) Their trip wasn’t bad as these things go, but when you’re 75 that kind of journey is an ordeal whichever way you slice and dice it, particularly that 13-hour leg from Singapore to Munich. They said that next time – if there’s a next time – they’ll stop off in Singapore on the way. (They will spend a couple of nights there on the way back.) Unsurprisingly they’ve been sleeping a fair bit during the day.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. While I was working in Dumbrăvița, Mum and Dad walked into town. They remarked on how much the city centre had smartened up since they were last here; there have been yet more building renovations. Today I took them to Buziaș which they found just as fascinating as I do. That park with the ornate walkway and the extremely tall trees but also the abandoned buildings and that somewhat dilapidated theme park restaurant with the soviet planes. In the park we saw a woodpecker – well, Dad was the one who spotted it; he has an eagle eye, honed from half a century of finding things to paint. On the way back we stopped at Decathlon (so I could get two new inner tubes for my bike – yesterday I got a flat tyre because the valve broke) and Dedeman (so Dad could get some DIY bits and pieces).

Tonight we ate at the beer factory that is so close to me that when anyone asks where in Timișoara I live, I say “near the beer factory”. Dad and I both had bulz which meant a heck of a good meal but an extraordinary amount of meat, while Mum had a pasta dish. For dessert we had papanași (which isn’t far off a rum baba) and a tiramisu between the three of us. I’d lost eight pounds since early March but I could almost feel that weight coming back on after such a rich meal.

After a full day of lessons for me tomorrow, we plan to travel to Brașov – a place none of us have been to yet – on Tuesday where we’ll spend two nights, then go somewhere else (Cluj? We haven’t decided yet) before coming back on Saturday or Sunday. No lessons for me while we’re away.

It’s been great having Mum and Dad here. Even more so because I’d almost given up hope of seeing them at one point. We’ve had a lot of good chat about Ernest Shackleton, the new pope, and Mum’s old colleague from her school in St Ives who died of mad cow disease. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well my parents have got on with Kitty. They’ve come at a good time in that regard. In the last few weeks she’s gone from being skittish at best and a pain in the arse at worse to a much more placid, friendly little thing. Tomorrow I’ll take Kitty to Dorothy’s – she kindly agreed to look after her while we went away.

Cat - Family - Life :) - Photos - Politics - Travel: Romania

Spring, Mum, and Arad pictures

March 13, 2025 by 0 Comments

No more news from the publishers. I can’t even get through to them. I don’t think they’re malicious in any way (though I might be wrong); I just think they’re hopelessly disorganised, even by Romanian standards.

Mum and Dad just Skyped me from the hotspot in Hampden. (There will be no more Skyping after 5th May when Microsoft are pulling the plug on what has been an extremely handy – and simple – communication tool.) They seemed mostly fine, though Mum had low-level stomach pain. She had her colonography scan on Tuesday. It involved her taking a barium meal and being inflated via a tube stuck up her bum. She should get the results soon after they get home on Saturday. (They’re in Moeraki at the moment. They’re always more relaxed down there.)

On Tuesday I helped Dorothy take a bunch of old electronic bits and pieces to the tip. Her husband was something of a hoarder. One of the contraptions emitted UV rays, she said. The man at the tip was very helpful, as these sorts of people usually are. After visiting the tip, she came back to my place for a coffee and to meet Kitty. We talked about spring. I miss being in my old flat and seeing everything come alive outside my window at this time of year. The green and then the blossom. I could take in three parks and the river on a short walk. A slightly longer walk would take me over to Iosefin – where Dorothy lives – with its beautiful old buildings (albeit unrenovated) and tree-lined streets. I think back to the early days of Covid, this time five years ago. Weirdly it improved my mental health. The quiet, the total lack of expectations, the simplicity of it all. The Monday morning shopping. Mask, gloves, job done as fast as possible. No queues, unlike in the UK. I felt strangely calm then. Mum still talks positively of that time. Nobody cared what I looked like. I could just hide behind my mask.

When I talk to my parents now, 60% of our conversation is about politics and world events. How did we get here? One thing I don’t understand is why we haven’t heard a peep from the Obamas or the Clintons about this utterly destructive shitshow. Is their silence on the matter part of some grand scheme? It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a rather different story north of the border. The Canadians have decided it’s gloves off, and rightly so. I’ve become quite a fan of Canada in the last few weeks. In fact I’ve always liked Canada, ever since I was lucky enough to visit in 1998. Yesterday I read this comment about Trump’s economic “strategy”, which sounded pretty accurate. It takes some talent to even write this:
I don’t see Trump as having even the remotest concept of economic and/or foreign policies. He rules by diktat tweeting out his edicts while taking a dump on his gold toilet with all the forethought, consistency and strategising of a squirrel cranked up on crystal meth. That’s what happens when big money buys the seat of power when it should be left to sober administrators who have a genuine sense of duty for the public good.
This week I’ve realised how little I know about tanks and fighter planes and aircraft carriers and warships and Britain’s (or anyone else’s) defence capabilities. They just aren’t things I think about on a daily (or even yearly) basis. Luckily I have a brother whose job is to know about this stuff, so I can always ask him.

Kitty. She’s changed in the last ten days or so. She’s become more comfortable with me around. I honestly think she was fearful of me. She’s now sleeping noticeably more too. The best thing is that she’s stopped biting me, unless I rub her tummy when biting is a reflex action for her. Due to the warmer weather (I presume), she’s now shedding a lot more hair than she did at the beginning.

Here are some pictures of Arad, where I went on Sunday. In some ways I like Arad more than Timișoara. It sits on a proper river, the Mureș, unlike the piddly Bega we have. Although they have a boat club, I didn’t see a single boat out on the river. Just imagine a river of this size in the UK on a lazy Sunday morning. Boats just aren’t part of the culture here, with the exception of canoes and rowing boats that are used for serious sport.

A plaque on the wall of the boat club showing where the River Mureș got to in 1970

The mishmash of languages in these places is always fascinating. Romanian became the dominant language in these parts pretty recently in the scheme of things. This inscription in Hungarian, from the gospel of Matthew, is hard to read. So the double letters in the first word are zeds, right? No, they can’t be, because that must be a double zed in the second word and these look different. So what are they? Gees? Jays? Does double J exist in Hungarian? Sure enough it does. This says Jöjjetek énhozzám which means “Come to me”. Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be learning Hungarian anytime soon.

Sunset over the Bega on Sunday

Kitty sleeping next to the giant mirror in my teaching room

Photos - Politics - Travel: Romania

Buziaș again

November 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

I visited Buziaș this morning. It was my second time there – I went there with Mark last winter, before I bought the car. It was wonderful with the sun shining through the autumn colours and the leaves continuing to accumulate in a golden blanket. I didn’t do much but wander through the park – extensive for a small town – and the surroundings. Oh, and go inside a large abandoned building. Buziaș might be my favourite town within a half-hour drive of Timișoara.

The presidential race appears to be very close now. I woke up this morning to see a shock poll of Iowa from a highly respected pollster which gave Kamala Harris a three-point lead. Iowa is a state that should be firmly in Trump’s camp. But I’ve been here before with promising polls just before voting day. I remember big leads for Remain just before Leave won. I can’t believe that’s over eight years ago. There were also polls giving Biden huge leads in 2020, and he only just won. (Trump supporters were less likely to answer polls. This could happen again this time.)

Apart from the grave danger a Trump presidency poses to America and the whole world, I still find him utterly repugnant. Îmi repugnă, you can actually say in Romanian. His values are diametrically opposed to mine, those that were instilled into me from my parents, my grandmother, and my teachers at primary school.

I was a bit surprised to hear Dorothy voice support for the US abortion bans. I get it, you’re religious and that’s fine, but even if you’re anti-abortion (which you’re entitled to be), actually banning it is horrifically cruel. Iowa, by the way, has a terrifying six-week abortion ban. Last weekend I watched a documentary on the January 6th insurrection. A scary number of the participants invoked God.

Update: Maia Sandu has been re-elected president of Moldova. She won the second round by a solid margin. That’s a relief. Just a week ago Georgia decided to go pro-Moscow in their election.

This booth was phoneless

This sundial was a bit fast. It was 10:35.

To the toilet. It was brand new and clean, surprisingly.

A squirrel

The abandoned building

I wonder what happened in 1980

This hand-painted sign is very Romanian, particularly those Bs

The Romanian elections aren’t far away either

The Catholic church

There was once a “first class” restaurant at the bottom of this crumbling block

An old Romtelecom phone box near where I live. The phone no longer works.

Driving - Other sports - Travel: Romania

Maramureș și mai departe — Part 2 of 2 (with photos)

August 7, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’d been to Maramureș twice before, and it still felt a world away. In every village you saw babe – old ladies who probably weren’t even that old – dressed almost identically in dark clothes and a shawl. Once I saw a woman spinning wool with a spindle and distaff like I’d seen in videos. But on Friday morning I left the region and made my way to Turda (which is nicer than it sounds), only 30 km from the major city of Cluj-Napoca.

It was a three-hour drive or so. The first half of the journey, which took in the beautiful county of Bistrița-Năsăud, was a pleasure, but after hitting the town of Beclean it all became dull and industrial. I reached Turda earlier than I’d told the apartment owner I’d be there, and tried to park in the city but the payment on my phone didn’t work. I wished we still had self-explanatory coin-operated meters. Then I found a Dedeman which is one of the most useful things in the whole of Romania. As well as being a hardware store which sells anything you could possibly want in that vein, you can also park for free, pee for free (a big deal in Romania) or get a coffee for not far off free. The apartment was in a pretty seedy part of town to be honest, full of brutalist blocks and semi-derelict shops. I hung around a bit more, finishing my book, before calling the owner who let me in. As is often the case, it was much nicer on the inside than the outside. It had everything I could possibly have needed.

We don’t want your dirt here

That evening I watched a bit of the Olympics which I haven’t otherwise bothered with. They were showing the athletics. Mixed relay – what’s this? The British stadium announcer did a great job. The world and Olympic records for the women’s 800 metres appeared on the screen. Some Russian set those records in the early eighties and they haven’t been equalled since. All totally undodgy, nothing to see here, according to the Romanian commentator. The event I got into the most was the decathlon high jump. So far Romania have claimed seven medals (three gold, three silver and one bronze), all of them in water – five in rowing and two in swimming.

From the museum. On Sunday morning I tried to visit the Roman site – the castrum – but it was closed off.

On Saturday I visited a museum in town; I was the only customer which meant I was watched the whole time. Turda was conquered by the Romans, at which point it was called Potaissa. I was impressed with the presentation of the museum, and the translations into English were excellent. My only gripe was a lack of way-finding signs; this meant I was constantly told to go this or that way, to my slight embarrassment. After the museum I tried to get a coffee from a bakery, but the woman there was spectacularly unhelpful. Olympic-level stuff. Eventually I did get my hands on a simple coffee.

The main reason I visited Turda was to see the salt mine. Salt was extracted there over centuries; the mine closed in 1932 but was opened as a tourist attraction in 1992. After standing in a half-hour queue, I entered through a tunnel and descended into a cavern which is now a sort of theme park with a ferris wheel and assorted games, then went down another 13 flights of stairs to the bottom where you could row boats on a salt lake. I guessed it was 200 feet deep in total, but in fact it’s about twice that. I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series 20-odd years ago and the whole place seemed somehow Pullmanesque. I rushed back from the depths of the tunnel to avoid going into a third hour of parking fees. I had lunch in the car on the hillside just outside the town centre; it was pretty there in a Romanian sort of way. Then I hung around the town for the afternoon; I had a very nice boysenberry-like ice cream.

I bought a melon from one of the least helpful stallholders I’d ever encountered (this anti-service still takes me aback after all these years in Romania), then grabbed a shaorma for dinner. I ate it in front of the judo finale – France beat Japan in a sudden-death tie-break to win the team event – then it was back to the athletics. I couldn’t get properly into it. I realise how anti-big I’ve become in the last eight years; the Olympics, the Champions League, the soon-to-be-expanded football World Cup, it’s all got far too big for me. (Olympic controversy has erupted here in Romania – I only knew about it when a student told me. The 18-year-old gymnast Ana Bărbosu won bronze and celebrated with the Romanian flag, only for the Americans to successfully appeal a minute later. The American got a 0.1 boost to her score, shunting Bărbosu down into fourth. She was in tears. Now we’ve got Nadia Comăneci weighing in and the Romanian prime minister boycotting the closing ceremony.)

On Sunday morning I drove back home. The super-fast motorway made this the easiest trip of the lot. (Romania’s motorways are great. There just aren’t very many of them.) My Peugeot was very happy bombing along at 130 km/h. On the way I stopped at Deva. Back in 2016 it was the first Romanian town I visited after Timișoara. Its main feature is the fortress on the hill. Eight years ago I took the lift to the top, but this time I walked up. If there was a proper paved track, I didn’t see it. I practically hiked to the top, then when I got up there I bushwhacked 300-plus degrees around the wall of the fortress before eventually finding the entrance and other people. Then I scaled 240 (?) steps to the actual top, took a few pictures, and walked down via the paved track like I did in 2016. A couple of hours later I was home.

Two students have so far raised eyebrows at my decision to go camping alone. Boring? Ever so slightly dangerous? (At 30 lei per night, it was certainly cheap. It was basic but it had a hot shower, a fridge, and even low-G internet. I saw a deer but no bears came near the tent.) The trip as a whole was fine, but I never felt I could fully relax. Very early tomorrow morning I’m flying to Luton; relaxation is the entire goal of my stay in St Ives. Very few places to go or people to see; it should be great. (Unfortunately I’ll miss my brother who flies to New Zealand on Saturday.)

Driving - Travel: Romania

Maramureș și mai departe — Part 1 of 2 (with photos)

August 6, 2024 by 0 Comments

I got back yesterday from my latest trip. It was interesting in many ways but I struggled to relax, probably because a trip like that requires a certain level of organisation, and being organised is always something I have to work at.

On Tuesday I did 487 km getting up to Bârsana. A few more than I needed to; for that I can blame crappy signs (or lack of them) and myself for not using GPS. The campsite was two kilometres up a steep lane from the town of Bârsana. It was basic and when I arrived it was pretty empty. There were three host cats; the woman at the entrance was slightly surprised that I didn’t have a dog. I pitched the tent between apple and plum trees. My first night was starry like I hadn’t seen in years – I wish now I’d stayed up to watch the meteor shower – which also meant it was much colder than I’d bargained for. There was the pleasant clang of cowbells, and in the early morning the sound of cockerels. Over breakfast the next morning I chatted to a French couple, using a mix of English and French. After speaking French for a bit, or trying to, I then had to talk to the campsite owner in Romanian; what came out of my mouth was pure gibberish, as it often is when I have to switch between two foreign languages.

Just up the hill from the campsite, shortly before sunset

The nearby cemetery. The big shots from the Bârsan family are buried there.

On Wednesday I visited the 600-year-old wooden Orthodox monastery in Bârsana – there was wooden everything for miles around, making the whole region visually distinctive. There was a lot to see outside the engine room of the place which was closed to visitors. I then drove to another, much smaller, monastery on the other side of the Iza river; not much to see there, so I sat for a bit by the river and read my book – Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. The author is a clever bugger. After that I spend a couple of hours in the town of Ocna Șugatag, whose name conjures up images of a childhood game. (An ocnă is apparently a salt mine; I’d visit one of them a bit later.)

The monastery had a pair of peacocks

I was more prepared for the cold on the second night. The following morning was the most strangely fascinating part of the whole trip as I visited Cimitirul Vesel – the Merry Cemetery – in Săpânța. A well-known tourist attraction, this consists of an ornate church surrounded by hundreds of brightly painted wooden gravestones.

Each “stone” has a naive picture of the deceased, usually illustrating what they did for a living, and below that a poem giving the story of the person’s life, sometimes in informal dialect rather than strict grammatically correct Romanian, and always in the first person. These poems could be amusing (merry if you like) but often they told tales of great sadness. Accidents, long illnesses, lost loved ones, the running theme that these people did everything they could. They died young, or they lived to a good age but saw their friends and family die young. One or the other, mostly. Worst of all might have been a three-year-old girl, together with an illustration of the tractor that ran her over. It was interesting to see people’s jobs – there was the occasional picture of a teacher at a blackboard but for the most part they worked on the land, as they still do now. No management consultants, no business development managers, no actuaries. And no pure housewives either; the women did (and do) hard physical work, just like the men. (It’s a very common sight in a village to see women carrying rakes and scythes.) It isn’t clear how this unusual tradition of painted stones came about. They’re made in a workshop nearby and each one takes considerable time.

Above is one of the happier stones. Irina was a part-housewife who weaved woollen cergi (rugs, I suppose) as you can see in the picture. She taught her children, enjoyed her time with her grandchildren, and wishes nothing for the best for them all. She hopes they grow old like she did. She lived to 93.

All the saints’ days, including (in this shot) my birthday

I spent the rest of the day at Sighet, or Sighetul Marmației to give it its full name. It was my third time there. I visited a small museum and read more of my book in the park.

Above are just some of the tennis trophies in the museum. There was a local champion in the over-70s.

Above is a selection of locally produced board games. They all got published; presumably they were crowd-funded. One of them uses a whopping 72 dice.

A scaled-up version of those 72 dice. Yes, I counted them.

A few pictures from Sighet. Dogs in doorways seemed to be a theme.

After a third night in the tent, in which it rained, it was time to make tracks.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Travel: Romania

The do and now for some time under canvas

July 30, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had a chat with Elena, the lady who lives above me and who almost missed her flight two weeks ago. She safely made it to Toronto but managed to pick up Covid – there’s a lot of it about right now – though she’s now made a full recovery.

Four lessons today including a couple of real tooth-pullers. The one with the near-eight-year-old boy was especially dentisty. Not his fault at all – he’s a really nice boy – but when I give online lessons to kids that young, it’s like having both hands tied behind my back. I asked him if he was bored. A little bit. He was being impressively polite for his age. He counted down the minutes remaining one at a time. I told him that constantly looking at the clock won’t make it go any faster.

On Saturday we had Dorothy’s do in Buzad. I drove there with Dorothy. There were maybe 12 to 15 people. Luckily it wasn’t too hot and there was plenty of shade. The weather could hardly have been better. The barbecue and all the other foody bits were great, including a crumble that Dorothy herself had made. I put together a meatless quiche on request – I was surprised to receive a request of meatless anything. This is Romania. There was a good variety of folk, including the large Australian lady (who ended up in Romania for some churchy reason) and her two children. She was good to talk to – we had a fair bit in common culturally, I suppose. Some of the chat did get contentious. At one stage I asked why two of them insisted on peppering their sentences with English words; they said they didn’t know. Ah, but I know. You’re doing it to show off your sophistication, aren’t you? One lady whose native language is German managed to offend somebody by calling Romanian a “poor” language (in a purely linguistic sense). Luckily there wasn’t too much politics. I suggested that Trump now had a 60-70% chance of winning the November election, while one of the sophisticated guys thought it was just over 50%, but in reality there wasn’t much between our assessments. (I put Trump’s chances a little higher because of the inbuilt structural advantages the system affords him.)

My main complaint was that the “do” went on a bit long. Not that it finished too late, but that it started too early. Finally I could go home, with Dorothy and two other women including the very overweight Bobbie. This lady couldn’t be far off sixty but has never married or had children. For some reason she wanted to stay in Buzad as long as possible rather than go home. I found her pleasant enough, though rather odd, and her “chat” with me strayed into some pretty negative territory when you consider we’d never met. On the journey back – it was dusk at this point – she wanted me to stop so she could take photos of churches that in some cases didn’t even exist. (I’ll admit that the Orthodox church in Remetea Mică with the red roof was quite striking.)

So tomorrow I’m off to Maramureș. My first time camping by myself. I’ve had a practice with the tent which packs away unintuitively to say the least. I plan to stay three nights at a campsite near Bârsana which has a famous monastery. It looks pretty remote there; I hope I don’t get attacked by a bear. Then I’ve booked two nights at a guest house in Turda, near the salt mine which people have said is a must-see. Tomorrow’s journey should take 6½ hours, though I expect it to take longer because I’ll need a break. I hope to set off at around 8:30.