Travel: Romania

Poker - Politics - Tennis - Travel: Romania

The intrigue awaits

September 7, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I haven’t really been following the US Open, but early this morning I saw the end of the quarter-final betwen Nick Kyrgios and Karen Khachanov. Kyrgios dominated the fourth-set tie-break to take the match into a rip-roaring fifth – these two players don’t mess around – but he dropped serve in the opening game of the decider after playing a tweener, and Khachanov was able to cling onto his service games despite a low first-serve percentage. The Russian, who was allowed the compete under a neutral flag, won the final set 6-4 to make the semis of a grand slam for the first time. The match finished at 1am local time. With Nadal and Medvedev out, there will be a new men’s grand slam champion no matter who wins. Kyrgios said he was devastated at losing; the draw had really opened up for him.

I didn’t have a great time at the virtual poker tables last night. I bombed out of the WCOOP single draw after an hour and a quarter. I’d been hovering at or just above my starting stack for a while, but then called a huge bet, which I probably should have folded, with my big but sub-monster hand. I was shown 85432, the fifth-best hand in the game. That all but ended my participation. My saving grace was that I’d qualified via a satellite, so it only cost me a dollar or so. I’ll hopefully try my hand at a couple more of these WCOOP thingies.

As I mentioned last time, Britain now has a new prime minister. It’s surely a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. In Boris Johnson’s leaving speech he compared himself to Roman or Greek gods, one or the other. It was all about him. He’s an egomaniac, pure and simple. He became more and more Trump-like during his time in office. Like Trump he was desperate for the power but had no interest in using it in a positive way, and he seemed totally devoid of empathy. And just like Trump, we might not have seen the last of him. But now, Liz Truss. Seriously. She appears to know bugger all about anything, and has already filled her cabinet with sycophants who know the same amount – a bunch of I’m-all-right-Jack climate-change deniers. A torrid winter is around the corner, and Britain will probably muddle through it and come out the other end in one piece, but it will be despite the country’s politicians, not because of them. I hope this lot get dumped out at the next election.

I’ll be off into the mountains, or sort of, just after lunchtime. Călin, one of the friends of the tennis crew – he works as a taxi driver – will pick me up. The drive will take about three hours. I’ll be staying three nights in a village called Blăjeni, near Brad. All the pictures I see of the area look extremely bucolic and beautiful. I’ve been given a list of food not to bring; yesterday I made a plum crumble and a pizza to take along. There are a load of unknowns around cooking and eating and sleeping and whatnot, but that all adds to the intrigue, I suppose.

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Some Romanian ruins

January 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been alerted of Romania’s huge virus numbers today. Ambulance numbers are on the rise too. If only the country hadn’t failed its vaccine IQ test quite so spectacularly, we wouldn’t be facing another month of utter carnage.

On Saturday Mark, the English guy, asked me if I wanted to join him on a trip to Arad the next morning, where we’d look at some churches and stuff. Sure, sounds good. I cycled to his place, where I expected his girlfriend to come too. She stayed at home, but he brought their dog along. It was an icy morning, and the flat expanse – bleak but beautiful – stretched out to the horizon. I’d imagined we’d explore the city and maybe grab a coffee somewhere, but Mark had other ideas. He wanted to visit two ruined fortresses. Great. But then I realised I’d need to climb icy hills and I didn’t exactly have the right footwear. Neither did he. Going up wasn’t easy, but coming down was even dicier, and we had no choice in a couple of spots but to slide down on our arses. For the dog it was dead easy. The first fortress, at Șoimoș by the Mureș river, was built in the 13th century, and seemed to be on the way to disappearing entirely. That’s how Romania treats its history. It was probably possible to get to the top – someone had stuck a flag up there – but we didn’t dare try. From there we drove to another ruin at Șiria. This was a longer but easier (less icy) climb than the first. On the hill near the fortress was a cross and a Hollywood-style sign that lit up at night.

It was a quiet, still day, as Sundays in Romania so often are. The terrain in this part of the country is pancake flat for miles on end, but then hills soar out of nowhere. There was plenty of bird life, as usual, and we met a herd of goats on the way. It was great to get all that exercise, even if I wasn’t prepared for it, including the bike rides to Dumbrăvița and back.

Monday, which was a public holiday, was a far less energetic day. I could feel my exertions of the day before. I played six poker tournaments, grabbing a satisfying win and two smaller cashes. I’ve had a good run since mid-November, with numerous first and second places. I made $62 on the day; my bankroll is now $1625.

Here are some pictures from Sunday:

Travel: Romania

Romania trip report — Part 5 (Mocănița)

August 31, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Thursday 29th July I talked to my parents on FaceTime. They were watching the Olympics. They told me that Romania had just won a gold in rowing. I couldn’t have cared less about the Olympics; it all seemed an irrelevance. I set off from Vatra Dornei at about 3:30 pm. I was sorry to say goodbye to the place. I would miss the hourly town hall bells that were audible from anywhere in town, and even the nearby hills. As I waited for my train, I thought how relaxing train stations can be, as long as they’re not something huge like King’s Cross. I was reminded of Aulla Lunigiana, an underused station that I wound up in when I was in Italy in 2010, on my way from Lucca to Parma. Romanian stations are much the same – quiet and peaceful places.

To get to Vișeu de Jos, I needed to take two trains. First I took the main-line train, then at Salva I changed to the regional train. There’s something wonderful about regional trains in Romania. The carriages have compartments which each seat six. Compartments were phased out on British trains in the seventies, so not for the first time on my trip I was transported back to a time before I was born. Most of the time I didn’t sit in a compartment; I just stood in the corridor and stared out the window. The countryside, baked in the early evening sun, was breathtaking. We clattered along, climbing a hill, and I doubt we ever broke 50 km/h. I was alarmed when I saw that an engine and a freight carriage had careened over an embankment, years ago by the looks of things, and had never been cleared. A little further along we passed an enormous timber processing plant. Romania still has virgin forests, one of the few places on the planet to do so, and they’re vanishing as I type this. Half the logging that takes place in Romania is illegal. It’s an environmental disaster, and it’s happening just so people can buy their shitty Ikea cabinets. Toward the end of the trip, we went through a 2.4 km-long tunnel, the third-longest in the country.

My train pulled in at Vișeu de Jos (“bottom”) and I hung around awhile at the blissfully quiet station before getting a taxi to Vișeu de Sus (“top”). (There’s also a Vișeu de Mijloc – “middle”). Now that I was in Maramureș, there was a strong whiff of Romanian tradition. The female taxi driver dropped me off outside the alleyway that led to the guest house. The owner wasn’t there – she was in Italy – so a neighbour let me in. I couldn’t pay by card, and this neighbour had no change. I eventually dug out the right change, but this kind of awkwardness is pretty common in Romania. I find the whole business of accommodation pretty stressful at times.

I slept well, and in the morning it was time for my trip on the Mocăniță, which was clearly a big attraction. I boarded the first of six trains; we set off at nine. I sat in an open carriage at the back of the train. (As Dad later explained, the carriages at the front were closed so that passengers didn’t get soot, or smut, in their faces.) We were off, and suddenly we had all the sounds and smells that you’d expect from all old steam train. The long peep of the whistle got people in the mood. With the forest on one side and a river on the other, it was all very picturesque. It took two hours to reach our destination at Paltin, 20 km down the line, although the track goes much further, almost to the border with Ukraine. At Paltin I had an early barbecue lunch, which (of course) included mici. A group of Romanian traditional dancers and musicians greeted us. The railway was built for logging in the 1930s. It has a narrow gauge, only two foot six. After an hour at Paltin, we were on our way back. There was some confusion as they’d rejigged the back carriages for some reason, and one old man was very angry about this and caused a scene.

I got back at about 2pm and promptly fell asleep. When I woke up I had the job of sorting out my return journey the next day, which was Saturday. Trains were out of the question. What buses even ran at the weekend? I found timetables, both online and attached to a wall, but could I trust them? I had no luck calling the various phone numbers. I figured I’d chance my arm on the local bus that went to Sighet early the next morning, and then hopefully hop on the bus from there to Timișoara. I cursed my lack of planning, but really it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d got back a day later, or heck, five days later. On Friday evening I wandered around the town, and explored one of the wooden churches with a kind of thatched spire which is typical of Maramureș, then got a soup for dinner.

On Saturday morning the local bus did indeed show up. It was run by a company called Dracard. Perhaps the drivers’ names were Hannah, Otto, Bob and Ada. That bus took me on a 90-minute journey through rural Maramureș to Sighet, next to the Ukrainian border, where I’d last been four years earlier. I was more confident about my next bus, which would take nearly eight hours to reach Timișoara, but because I hadn’t booked it was touch-and-go as to whether I’d be let on. Luckily there was a space for me. We skirted another border, the one with Hungary, on the way home. It was a stinking hot day. We stopped for a coffee break at a café; there was a fresh produce market across the road, where I bought some bits and pieces. I could hear all the ös and üs and sz‘s and zs‘s of the Hungarian language. Then at about seven, after eating some sandwiches on the banks of a sun-drenched Bega, I was home.

Travel: Romania

Romania trip report — Part 4 (Vatra Dornei)

August 25, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a wet old day here. Last night I tried the $11 WCOOP single draw tournament and it was a damp squib, much like it is outside my window. Bad table draw, bad hands, and whenever I got a good one-card draw it pretty much always turned sour. The table draw was the worst of all, though. At 10:45 pm I was still hanging on by my fingernails when I entered the pot-limit badugi, and that went much better. Within minutes of that starting I was bundled out of the WCOOP, and I wished I could have met my fate slightly earlier, in which case I wouldn’t have started another tournament and I could have gone to bed instead. It ended up being another late one – a third-place finish in the badugi, and although I did a terrible job of snagging bounties I finished the night up $19. My bankroll is $919.

I had four lessons yesterday. I was hopeless at the end of my two-hour session with the woman who sees our “lessons” as a form of therapy. She wants to speak Romanian with me when our allotted time is over, but yesterday I found her particularly exhausting, and I made errors in my Romanian one after the other.

Back, finally, to my journey through northern Romania. The next leg of my trip was best. I arrived in Vatra Dornei, by train of course, at around 4pm on Monday 26th July. I had a good chat with the owner of the guest house. She told me I needed to try balmoș, the local dish. (I could never remember the name. Bormaș, bolmaș, every combination except the right one.) I tried balmoș that evening; it’s basically the same as mămăligă, which is made from polenta. Just like at my previous stop, Vatra Dornei sits at confluence of two rivers, this time the Dorna and the Bistrița, and it’s also at the foot of some ski fields. It was a bustling town, without being at all touristy, at least not in the summer. (In winter it gets plenty of skiers.) Young people were taking the flying fox across the river, and the park was popular too.

The next morning – it was my brother’s big birthday – I was up quite early and I went out for some breakfast, which I bought from a patisserie. I got confused with all the keys and locked gates in the front yard of the guest house, and eventually thought, sod it, and clambered over the three-foot fence. When I got back I went to the kitchen and met a family (husband, wife, daughter) who had watched me from their room. The father was very in-your-face, and totally bald, and I found this sudden expectation to interact socially very stressful. He invited me for a barbecue that evening. Very kind of him, but a scary prospect. Later that morning I took a slightly rickety chairlift up the mountain. It was fun to do that. At the top I had a great panoramic view of the town and the hills. I found some wimberry bushes, just like the ones in the Welsh hills from when I was a kid, and set about gathering some berries. They’re tiny, so it was a painstaking process by hand, but they are delicious with ice cream or in a pie, if you can get enough of them. (Some people were properly prepared, and were armed with implements like rakes or combs.) On the way back down the cable stopped moving, leaving me suspended for a tantalising minute or so, at possibly the highest point from land of the whole trip (12 metres or so). There were 120 chairs and 40 pylons. It was a balmy evening but the barbecue didn’t happen and instead I just out in the garden and finished All the Light I Cannot See, before popping into town for a pizza.

The following day I went back to that same patisserie for breakfast. This was a delight: you could see all the beautiful pastries being rolled and glazed and baked. Then I went to the station and booked my train to Vișeu de Jos for the next day, before doing a spot of hiking. There are numerous tracks, clearly marked with varying symbols and primary colours, and I followed the track marked with the red cross. This took me past a graveyard and many small farms that were being busily tended, and up a hillside. When I felt I’d got far enough, I had lunch and started my Stephen King book, Mr Mercedes. (English-language books were three-for-two at Cărturești, and this was the third book I quickly chose.) I then set about picking another load of wimberries. It wasn’t any faster this time around. I climbed back down, and while I was in town I was caught in a storm. Dust from the road works blew into everyone’s faces. When I got back to my accommodation, I met the bald bloke who decided it was time for a barbecue, in spite of the weather. I gladly accepted his invitation, and we had the usual mici and pork chops. The fairly elderly woman next door joined in the conversation from over the fence – Romania is going to hell in a handcart, and what on earth possessed you to live in this terrible country? – and also provided barbecue advice which I’m sure the bald bloke could have done without. They were a nice family, I thoroughly appreciated the offer of food (all I did was buy drinks), and I misjudged him at first.

The next day I’d be off to Vișeu de Jos, and eventually de Sus, for the last leg of my trip and the steam trains.

The Covid numbers are whopping up here now; I’ll provide updates again soon.

One of the kilometre posts on the railway
This message is sadly falling on deaf ears.
There were delightful homemade signs everywhere
Even the road signs have a homemade feel about them
This sign has the new spelling of the name but with backwards U’s; the previous sign had the Ceaușescu-era one.
These coffee machines were ubiquitous on my trip. Very handy, as long as you avoid the Nescafé ones.
Did a Kiwi do the translation? “As easy as”!
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Romania trip report — Part 3 (Gura Humorului)

August 16, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last weekend at tennis, there were seven of us and it was my turn to sit out, along with the two old geezers. Domnul Ionescu, the old one (as opposed to Domnul Sfâra, the really old one) is always complaining about modern-day Romania and how it has gone to the dogs. This time he was talking about Romania’s vaccination rate. “We’re last in Europe in everything. Why do we even have to be last in this? Vaccination rates are a measure of a country’s civilisation, or in our case, lack of it.” Domnul Sfâra agreed, and so did I, of course. The English couple who came to visit me in Romania four years ago have now had their jabs. The husband was very reluctant to do so, and in the end he succumbed to social pressure. Telling, I thought, because how and why people get vaccinated hardly matters. If it’s only social pressure that does it, who cares? The fact is that in the UK that pressure exists. If he’d been in Alabama there’s no way he’d have got the jab, and in large swathes of Romania the social pressure, if anything, goes the other way.

Today I might be playing singles. It’s another scorcher here.

More on my trip. On Saturday the 24th – a sunny day – I left Iași, taking the train to Gura Humorului, passing through Suceava where I was able to have a quick look around the station. The journey took 2¾ hours. I met a nice lady on the train who pointed out my stop for me, because it wasn’t all that obvious. My guest house was on a main road about a mile from the station, and when arrived around 3pm, nobody was there. I just had enough battery on my phone to call the owner who said she’d come over. All the time on this trip I was battling a rapidly depleting battery. The owner, whose name was Simona, took down all my details and complimented me on my Romanian. From that perspective it was a good trip for me. I didn’t do much else that day except read my book – All the Light We Cannot See – and grab a basic dinner in town. Gura means mouth; the town isn’t exactly at the mouth of any river (there’s no sea!) but it’s at the confluence of two rivers, the Humor and the Moldova.

Back in the guest house, I felt a mini-earthquake every time a truck went past. I slept well though, and early the next morning I visited the museum of local customs, where I was given a one-on-one tour. He said he could speak some English but I asked him to explain everything in Romanian. The traditions of the region – farming, cooking, religious festivals with all their superstitions – are still alive in large part today. They used – and still use – oxen to plough the fields, while most of the country uses horses. It’s all a century away from the likes of Fonterra. After the museum I trekked 6 or 7 km up to the monastery at Voroneț, which was built in the late 15th century in under four months. I couldn’t take any pictures inside without stumping up extra cash, but you can see the very colourful exterior painting. I wandered back to the town where I booked my train ticket for the next day and then slumped on a bench. Just like in Timișoara, men crowd around tables to play and watch various games, and there seemed to be a form of extreme backgammon in full swing. My dinner that evening was very chicken-heavy.

The following morning I had time to visit yet another monastery, simply called Humorului Monastery. This was a more interesting experience than Voroneț, because of the tower you could climb with claustrophobically narrow steps, and the view from the top which was breathtaking. I took a taxi to the monastery and while walking back (that’s where I took the picture of the cranes perched atop a lamp-post) a minivan pulled over, and the rather grumpy driver gave me a lift back for 3 lei.

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Romania trip report — Part 2 (Iași)

August 14, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been another week of soporific temperatures here in Timișoara. Yesterday I had sinus pain, and with that and the heat, I didn’t want to do a whole lot.

I tried to call my parents from the park this morning after my 9-till-11 session, but I didn’t get a reply. On Tuesday Mum told me about her exploits on the indoor bowling green (should that be mat? lane? track?) – she’d won an interclub doubles tournament. The indoor bowls “scene” is dying (literally – the average age is now above mum’s 72) and may not survive beyond the next few years. I’ve been reading about New Zealand’s border-opening strategy for 2022. By that stage the UK might be on the green list while Romania could be blood-red.

I’ve had some decent poker results – a second and a sixth from the four mini-buy-in tournaments I played on Wednesday – and my bankroll is now at $780.

So, more on my trip. After my eat-your-heart-out breakfast, I explored Iași (pronounced yash). Iași is a mish-mash. There seemed to be an even greater contrast between the beautiful and the ugly than where I live. The centre wasn’t a patch on Timișoara’s squares and surrounding parks. Bulevardul Ștefan cel Mare – Iași’s Champs-Élysées – was very smart, but partly spoilt by a near-200-metre-long apartment block that was almost unbelievably ugly, even for me, and I’m certainly used to eyesores now.

It was a grey old day. My first stop was the Trei Ierarhi, a beautiful 17th-century monastery. I questioned the wisdom of those kissing the icons. Then I visited the Orthodox cathedral, for me just a building, but for the vast hordes queuing to sign some kind of visitor’s book, it was something rather more. What I enjoyed most that day was the Palace of Culture, an impressive building at the end of the Bulevard, which contained four museums. I first went to the art museum (I got in without paying, because I didn’t know you had do and nobody checked my ticket) – there were some Romanian paintings I really liked, mostly of rural scenes, some I couldn’t stand, and not much in between. Then I visited the museum of technology, paying this time, and that was the most fascinating part of my day. Old gramophones, street organs, valve radios, primitive stereo systems, typewriters, machines that added and multiplied numbers, and even mobile phones from the eighties. One of the staff even got a cupboard-like machine to work. She cranked a handle, setting off hammers and clappers and cymbals on the inside (which were visible), as it played a noisy classical tune. Near the Palace of Culture was Casa Dosoftei, an 18th-century religious building which has since been converted into a museum of early Romanian literature. The woman could see me trying to decipher the old Cyrillic letterforms and she told me that it was all in Church Slavonic and I had no chance. Some of the old books were decipherable however, and they were things of beauty.

That evening I explored the train station, which is an interesting structure in itself, and made a big mistake as I sheltered from the pouring rain to have a shaorma and a beer in the pouring rain; there were beggars everywhere, and the weather meant I couldn’t easily escape them.

The next day, which saw a massive improvement in the weather, I walked to Copou where the old university is situated. It’s certainly the posh end of Iași. The main university building was quite spectacular. Inside was a cavernous hall, called the “hall of the lost steps” if memory serves. I was intrigued by this, and expected all kinds of cool Escher-style optical illusions, but was disappointed. In the Copou area there were multiple parks, much better kitted out than anything we have here, with assorted eateries and drinkeries. There was even a botanic park, a skate park and fun stuff for the smaller kids. I wandered around the local football team’s stadium – visitors are free to roam, and the running track surrounding the pitch was popular. I was wishing Romania had an equivalent to baseball in America – a sport that adds a pleasant drumbeat to summer over there, or at least did until very recently (more commercialism, fewer balls in play, and then of course Covid). Speaking of Covid, people gave markedly fewer shits about the virus than they do in the west of Romania. Masks were something to dangle from your wrist as an accessory, and vaccination rates were clearly through the floor. Big banners adorned town halls and leisure centres: Roll up for your PFIZER jab! The best one! No blood clots! No appointment necessary!

On my third and last day in the city, I took a bus to the end of the line and walked up a hill called Bucium. I walked for more than 5km, coming to a village called Păun (which means “peacock”). Suddenly everything felt very bucolic. I went further and sat down on the edge of a wood for a bite to eat. I then trekked back to the start of the bus line. The bus back to the city was slow. I found a marketplace near the train tracks and had a beer in an outside bar to the sound of Scorpions, which one of the patrons was playing on his phone.

The next morning, after my fourth big breakfast, I was off to Gura Humorului.

This is only part of that monstrous building
A delta is used stylistically as a Latin letter D on these signs
Romanian written in Cyrillic. The topless 8 is equivalent to a Romanian u.
For the living and the “gone to sleep”
The Metropolitan Cathedral
The Trei Ierarhi Monastery
Made in Timișoara
No ghosts, no weird illusions
The stadium of Politehnica Iași
This is right in the city centre at a busy intersection
The railway station
Tennis - Travel: Romania

Romania trip report — Part 1 (15 hours on the train)

August 9, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday – another scorcher – I met up with the English couple from the doctor’s surgery. We had some drinks in the centre of town, in the square and down by the river. They already seem to be fans of Timișoara – much more so than Bucharest where they spent a year. She’ll be working full-time at the €8000-a-year British School which opened in 2019. Soon after that I played tennis. The 86-year-old bloke, who by now shuffles on and off the court, never ceases to amaze me.

My trip. I made an early start on Tuesday 20th July, the day after Britain declared freedom from Covid restrictions. I had a very long train journey in store. Romanian trains are notorious for their delays, so who knew how long. When I left home, the binmen – and women – were out in force. It started to spit with rain, and the rain intensified as we left the station at 6:50. Everyone, as far as I could see, was complying the the mask requirement. We had allocated seats, which considering the train was barely half-full, were more of a pain than anything. Look, the row behind is empty. I know your ticket says seat 64, but you don’t have to sit next to me. Maybe that’s my Britishness coming out, but mainly I had a heavy bag and I didn’t want to be cramped. You’ve got to be fully equipped on these long trips, as if you’re hiking, because they don’t provide anything. It’s madness really. You’re just about gagging for a beer after a while.

The CFR, the state-run railway, had clearly been the pride of Romania in communist times and before, but investment since then has been minimal. I saw rusting hulks of carriages, some carrying passengers, and I could make out dates on the engines, mostly from the early seventies. Many of the stations were decaying. The journey was roughly 800 km, about the distance from Wellington to Whangarei. I tried to figure out the train’s top speed. Most railways have mile or kilometre posts, and this line was no exception. When we were racing along, comparatively speaking, I timed how long it took to get from one white post to the next. Thirty-eight seconds; we were doing 95 km/h. (A few days later, on an even slower train, a younger guy wanted to know how fast we were going, and he just brought up an app on his phone. Bob’s your uncle.)

Despite the wet weather, I got to see a large cross-section of Romania on that train. The communist blocks. The abandonment, seemingly everywhere. Oradea, the thriving city I visited when I arrived in the country. The beautiful Vadu Crișului, not far from Oradea, in the middle of a forest and with a stunning waterfall. I had the trip mapped out, with a list of stations, before I went, so I could track our progress. I could see the car number plates change as we passed from one județ (county) to the next. Occasionally I needed to relieve myself. A numărul unu is doable on these trains, just. A numărul doi really isn’t. At about 8pm we stopped in Suceava and they briefly cut the engine. For a couple of minutes it was blissfully quiet. To my surprise, I reached Iași, my destination and the 40th stop on the line, bang on time, shortly before ten.

My guest house wasn’t far from the station. After checking in and having a relaxing bath for the first time in five years, hopping into bed felt so good. It had been a long day. When I got up, it was time for breakfast. This took place at a hotel just around the corner, which had a couple more stars than the place I was staying at. Breakfast was, if I’m honest, one of the highlights of Iași for me. They had the whole shebang. Bacon, eggs, sausages, beans, cold cuts, fried vegetables, yoghurt, pastries, even slices of cake. That did me for almost the whole day.

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Done my dash of trains and buses

August 4, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Just a very quick note to say that I got back to Timișoara on Saturday evening after a long stint on the bus. More about my travels next time, when hopefully I’ll have some pictures to show you. Sunday was a real scorcher here – one of the great things about my trip was escaping the searing heat.

I played a marathon poker session on Sunday morning, cashing in all three tournaments I played, including a pair of third places (in single draw and pot-limit badugi). My bankroll received a welcome $45 boost; it’s now $749. That evening I had a good chat with my brother and his wife. They’d been to London to celebrate my brother’s big four-oh; they visited Kew Gardens and ate at a pretty nice restaurant. They’d spent a few days in St Ives and managed to drop in on our aunt. He said I’d hardly recognise her now – she’s piled on weight and has let herself go. He said the front door had almost seized up from the length of time since it had last been opened. She’s used Covid as an excuse to make her world even smaller. My brother thought she might not be long for this world. Dad said he felt angry at how his sister, blessed with such natural talent and good looks, has been able to chuck it all away.

At the doctor’s surgery last night I met a British couple of my sort of age; they’d just arrived in Timișoara so that she could take a job here at a language school, following a one-year spell in Bucharest. Meeting anybody from the UK is such a rarity for me. We swapped numbers and I’m sure we’ll keep in touch.

Almost time for a lesson with Bianca.

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When I get back…

July 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My last day before I go away is a soggy one. We had yet another thunderstorm overnight. I had a lesson with a UK-based guy on Friday night, and he was even more adamant than my previous student that I should have booked a flight instead of spending an eternity on painful Romanian trains. Why would you do that to yourself?

Right now, instead of thinking about my trip, I’m contemplating everything I need to do when I get back.

I’ve written 400 pages of my “tricky English words and phrases for Romanians” book (it needs a better name!), but I’ve hit the wall in the middle of the S section. The Romanian teacher from the university was helping me but gave up on me late last year, and it’s hard to keep motivated when you get unspoken feedback that what you’re doing is pointless. But heck, I’m on the S section. Three-quarters of the way through. It would be crazy not to finish it now. Once I’ve finally dealt with the word zone, it’ll still need a lot of tidying up. Have I repeated myself? Have I put in adequate cross-references? Can I make my example sentences a bit more fun and enticing? And so on, and so forth. Z won’t be the end of it. And I won’t have anybody else to help me. As is almost always the case no matter what I do, I’m on my own. I’ve promised myself to work on the book for a minimum of 15 hours a week.

Then there’s moving. Scary stuff, but if I want to move on with my teaching business, I’ve got to do it. I need to view houses and apartments and see what’s really out there. On Friday I met an ex-student who now lives in Austria but was back in Timișoara for a few days. She told me to avoid the trendy new apartment blocks because they’re overpriced and the build quality is lacking. That was my instinct too. However, she said she didn’t trust the vaccines, particularly the messenger RNA ones, and although she’ll be visiting several countries in the next few weeks including Sweden, some others have been scrubbed off her list because they require vaccination. As we were drinking our coffees, a man walked by wearing a T-shirt covered in handwritten Romanian text: “I’m unvaccinated and proud of it. I will not be controlled! Covid is a big lie!” And there was more. I asked my ex-student if he was one of her mates. Anyway, I’ll draw up a comprehensive checklist and get the ball rolling on the house stuff.

I also want to improve my language skills. Ten hours a week of that is the goal. Romanian, Serbian, Italian, French. So much is in one ear and out the other, because I don’t keep it up. Obviously I do keep my Romanian up by actually speaking it, but I’m improving slowly if at all. Languages are definitely a case of little and often, and that’s part of the plan. In the case of Romanian, the next item on the list would help…

Finding somebody. If only that involved just a checklist and x hours a week. Any tips from my many long-term readers would be much appreciated.

What I won’t do until September is advertise for lessons. A relative lack of work will help me kick-start the other stuff in August, and it’s pretty rare that anybody wants to start lessons in August anyway. I’m better off not wasting money on online ads, and instead waiting until the start of the new academic year.

Poker. I’ll still play on a Sunday morning and the occasional evening if I happen to free of work, but that’ll be it until I get the other stuff sorted. I haven’t played much lately anyway, and my few attempts haven’t been particularly fruitful. My bankroll is $704.

And one more thing. I must buy a bike. I had a look at some at Mehala Market. There was a modern racing bike I particularly liked, but at 1500 lei it was out of my price range. Now, thinking back, I probably should have just bitten the bullet and bought it.

That was going to be just about it, but this morning I had a “lesson” with a woman who was depressed and will be flying to Bucharest tomorrow to see a doctor. The whole session was devoted to that. Like many people who suffer from depression (especially women?), she goes round in circles when she talks, going over and over and over things that happened years ago. I was worried she’d do this with the doctor tomorrow, so I wrote down a list of bullet points (in Romanian, in an English class) so she could just present them to her.

After my lesson I called my parents. Dad had received an email from my cousin (his niece). She’s 50 and got married last year. They’ll soon be going on their honeymoon (it was delayed by the pandemic) and she asked Dad to contribute to the cost of it. She and her husband, who had been married before, aren’t short of money. Dad said he’ll ignore the request which is utterly outrageous. I mean, seriously.

Before I forget, I mentioned spelling bees in my last post. The documentary Spellbound, which charts the progress of eight youngsters from radically different backgrounds in the 1999 national bee, is a must-watch. It’s hard not to get emotionally worked up by it.

It’ll be an early start in the morning. My train will take me to Oradea and Cluj, before heading through the mountains on the way to Suceava and finally to Iași. The mountainous stretch should be very picturesque, and I’ll certainly post some photos of that and the rest of my trip. The city of Iași, the monasteries near Suceava, the mocăniță, and plenty more I hope. I don’t know if I’ll post while I’m away because it’s so cumbersome on my phone. We’ll see.

Language teaching - Travel: Romania

I’m not crap at everything (Warning: long post)

July 16, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night we had a thunderstorm, and that should take the edge off the oppressively hot weather we’ve experienced lately. I’m now getting ready for my trip, booking this, planning that. I’ve just booked two nights at a guest house in Gura Humorului, a small town which has a famous 16th-century monastery. One of my students, a really nice guy, thought I was positively mad when I told him about my 15-hour-plus train journey to Iași. (I’m saying plus from experience.) “Couldn’t you find a flight?” Flight? Everyone’s got to be bloody flying everywhere. I never even considered flying; for the purposes of this trip, slow is good.

I often wonder how I ended up here, washed up in some place nobody’s heard of. (As much as I’d like my brother to visit if and when Covid is over, I can imagine what he might say. What are you doing in this shithole? Come back to St Ives. I can hear his voice now.) I like it here, of course. My mind tends to focus on all the big, important, life-defining things that I’m rubbish at. It’s a pretty long list. I’m crap at building relationships. I’m crap at working, or even being, with groups of people. I’m crap at being with any people for an extended period of time. I’m often crap at motivating myself. I’m often crap at organisation. In the past, my memory and concentration would turn to crap as a result of all the other crap, and what ever job I happened to have at the time, which generally made me feel like crap anyway, became a steaming pile of crap and I’d have no choice but to get the crap out of there. Then I’d move on to another job, and a couple of years later the same crappy thing would eventually happen, and so on. Regarding my lack of motivation over the last 10 to 15 years, I wonder how much has been caused my parents’ affluence, as bizarre as that might sound. I’m sure it has been a demotivator to know that, short of winning the lottery, I’m taking a giant leap backwards relative to their position regardless of what I do, because of all the other stuff I’m crap at, and that (along with the crap with my apartment in Wellington which is now mercifully over) perhaps gave me the impetus to cut the crap and come to Romania.

But I’m not crap at everything. Giving thousands of English lessons to more than a hundred people has made me realise that I’m actually half-decent at a few things that are come in pretty handy in my job. First of all, I can spell. I pride myself on being a good speller, and I kick myself when I get a word wrong (as I did in a recent email!). When I was twelve, in the pre-spell-check era, Dad got me to correct his spelling (which, at the time, was atrocious) for a book he was writing. I can’t watch footage of a spelling bee, a tradition that goes back to the 1800s in the US, without thinking, damn, why didn’t we have these in the UK? I might have won something. Alas, I was hopeless at football and not a whole lot better at cricket. Spelling bees certainly were a thing in small-town New Zealand in the late eighties. When I went to school in Temuka, a girl from the top class did well in what must have been the South Canterbury regional bee. It was all over the Timaru Herald and I remember thinking, how cool is that? As a bit of a joke, our teacher tested us (a class of nine-year-olds, about three years younger than the spellers in the bee) on a bunch of words that had come up; most of them were impossibly hard. A girl and I tied for the highest score; we got barely a third of the words correct.

On a similar theme, I can look up a word in a paper dictionary in somewhere between five and ten seconds. That’s because I’ve had lots of practice. My parents bought me a dictionary as a Christmas present one time, and I was immediately fascinated by it. The best thing about it was the IPA (pronunciation) transcriptions; I quickly became fluent in the sounds that make up English. Of course, it’s 2021 and we have no end of excellent online dictionaries as well as Google Translate (boo!), so I could get by perfectly well without being a fast dictionary looker-upper, or even being able to spell all that well, but they’re extra weapons I have in my arsenal. Another is an ability to read upside down almost as well as I can read the right way up, and that’s surprisingly handy. I could do that from an early age. I loved the Mr Men books, and I remember that Mr Impossible could read upside down. Hey, I can do that too. It’s handy because my face-to-face lessons are often literally face-to-face. In the last few years I’ve often found myself in a less-than-ideal cramped kitchen or bedroom where I’m opposite my student. I once managed to impress a twelve-year-old boy by reading a paragraph in Romanian upside down. Occasionally I’ve even written words upside down in lessons, but that skill still needs some work.

So I possess some skills that are mostly useless in 99% of jobs in the 2020s, but what else do I have? Well, I’m reasonably creative. I’ve made a bunch of games and exercises that have kept my students engaged, and they have a manual, tactile quality to them that appeals, especially to the little ones. It’s nice to have a job that allows creativity, after having that beaten out of me during all those years in the office. Follow the process, don’t ask questions, and you’ll make life easier for yourself. Talking of kids, I’ve had more lessons with kids than I expected when I took this giant leap into the dark, and I’m better at teaching them than I thought I’d be. I can be quite animated, and I play games like Simon Says which they find fun, and it’s exciting to teach someone with a long future, a world of possibilities, still in front of them. (Whenever we do Simon Says, or Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, I think to myself, this is mad. Totally mad. And awesome. I was supposed to be a bloody actuary, wasn’t I?)

I’m also better at thinking on my feet than I expected I’d be. It’s a skill I didn’t really have when I started out, but I’ve picked it up along the way. It just comes down to experience, drawing on what I’ve done before. For instance, last night I did a lesson on ordering food at a restaurant, and I pretended to order for a table of six. Sometimes my lesson plans go out the window. I can tell my student is tired or has had a tough day, and last thing he or she wants is to learn the conditional forms. Or they might tell me that they’ve got a job interview, in English, the very next morning.

Another important skill I’ve partly picked up is being able to communicate in Romanian. With kids it’s vital – they didn’t ask for a strange man to enter their territory and start babbling away to them in a foreign language – so being able to speak Romanian goes some way towards winning their trust. But with anybody it’s extremely useful. I constantly get asked what the word for x is. And very importantly, it helps me understand why Romanians say what they do in English. Please open the lights.

Finally, my most important skill, dwarfing any of the word-play stuff, is being personable, tolerant, and flexible. I sometimes fail here – I have little time for hyper-arrogant people or, right now, anti-vaxers (who intersect with hyper-arrogant people) – but I take pleasure in teaching people from all walks of life.

That’ll do. Apologies for making this so long.