Travel: Romania

Language teaching - Tennis - Travel: Romania

Happy memories

January 27, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Next week I could have over 30 hours of lessons, and that’s without that young couple with whom I had 12 hours a week until just before Christmas. They said that they’d be back shortly after 2nd February, when their exam session finishes. In other words, I face the imminent prospect of being totally knackered.

My travel companions from four months ago have sent me (as a present) a quite wonderful scrapbook of our trip, full of photos and diary entries. It must have taken several hours to put together. So many wonderful little things happened; I’m so glad that someone had the presence of mind to record them. I can’t believe how much I’d forgotten, like the time the car-hire man told me to maintain a good distance from the vehicle in front because the brakes might not be up to it, or the rubbery omelettes we had for breakfast, or the huge wedding party, out of the blue, at 8pm in a primitive village. And of course, just the wonderful scenery, pretty much wherever we went.

Twelve hours from now, another big opportunity to snatch her maiden grand slam will come Simona Halep’s way. I only saw her semi-final with Angelique Kerber from 2-2 in the final set because I had a lesson, but I was grateful to see what I did. For me it was literally edge-of-the-seat (and off-the-seat) stuff. Halep played noticeably more aggressively than I’m used to seeing her, and that bodes well for the final. Perhaps the fact that her very participation in the tournament has so often been hanging by a thread will relax her for the final. Wozniacki, her opponent in the final, has had a very precarious path too. In fact the two players have faced a whopping seven match points between them, including five for Simona in two separate matches. I’ll miss most of the final, or perhaps even all of it if it’s a quick one, because I’ll be working.

Language teaching - Life :) - Travel: Romania

Excursion

November 13, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday morning I had my usual lesson with a married couple (he the same age as me, she a few years younger), and after the lesson (on the present perfect tense and phrasal verbs, with a handmade game of Taboo chucked in at the end) they invited me to go with them to Lipova. I gratefully accepted. We drove along the same road that I followed six weeks ago with my friends from St Ives. In one of the villages in Timiș, in a scene that’s about as Romanian as you get, we met a man who needed a push to get his totally clapped-out 1980-ish Dacia going. Off it spluttered in a puff of blue smoke that reminded me of the emissions from Mum’s Allegro. Apparently Romania does have an equivalent of a Warrant of Fitness, but sufficient cash will get you the green light. Over the border into Arad county, the road became potholed; our driver did a much better job of avoiding the pits than I did.

In Lipova we visited a beautiful Catholic basilica which had recently been restored. There is also a monastery that pilgrims flock to every September, often from Hungary. There are services in Hungarian and German, as well as Romanian. We had a guided tour of the top floor of the basilica, where our guide explained what the slightly bizarre pictures that had been donated by parishioners actually symbolised. Outside the basilica was a sloping zigzag path with fourteen statues, representing the Stations of the Cross, arranged chronologically from bottom to top.

From Lipova we drove to Arad, the nearest city to Timișoara and the last place I visited on my tour of Romania last year. We met my female student’s cousin at a restaurant where we had pizza. Her cousin, a teacher, was amazed (in a good way) that somebody from a wealthy English-speaking country would choose to live and teach in Romania. It was the first time I’d ever eaten pizza topped with peas and corn. Not my first choice I guess, but it was fine. From Arad we took the motorway back to Timișoara. By that stage I was tired. I’d been speaking Romanian – or attempting to – all afternoon, and speaking any language for hours at a time is exhausting for me.

I might try and write again this evening. One of my students, who weighs 19 stone, has had to have a knee operation, so I have a gap in tonight’s schedule.

Language teaching - Life :) - Travel: Romania

It feels good to be alive

October 6, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last weekend was great for all of us. There were so many interesting little things along the way, like the animals we met, the old (and not so old) ladies in headscarves who congregated on benches, the villagers who gave us surprisingly accurate directions, the big places on the map that turned out to be tiny, the tiny places on the map that turned out to be substantial, the significant places that were missing from the map altogether, the ramshackle cafés we visited, the lady at one of the cafés who politely commented on my overly aspirated pronunciation of the letter T, the slabs of meat we ate despite our best efforts to avoid them, and the crazy road surfaces I drove on (a skating rink for ten miles, the surface of the moon for the next ten, then a signposted main road would turn into an equally signposted muddy farm track). Unlike my parents who are basically the same age, my travelling companions never entirely left the sixties behind, so they had fairly relaxed attitudes to a lot of things. They enjoyed their trip and their time in Timișoara. I hope they come back.

I gained some valuable experience of driving on this side of the road, facilitated by a very competent navigator and the absence of anybody related to me. I drove 700 km in all. Returning the hire car on Monday in rush-hour traffic was a challenge, especially because my phone was going like billio, but we managed it and got back our deposit.

I’m getting quite a lot of work now. Yesterday I started with a ten-year-old boy called Octavian who obviously comes from a well-heeled family. On Tuesday I had my first session at the lollipop-stick factory; only two employees, both senior managers, showed up. Tomorrow I should be having my third lesson with the shy 4½-year-old girl. After a trial run on Tuesday, I should also be doing short (15-minute) phone-based language assessments which could be a useful money-spinner because they require little preparation.

My life is interesting and varied; it feels good to be alive. I won’t be leaving Romania any time in the near future if I can possibly help it. I wouldn’t mind having a fuller social life, and I hope that will come in time.

I’m just about to watch at least some of Game 1 of the series between the Red Sox and the Astros. I like Baseball because it kind of makes sense. Very little else in America seems to right now.

Language teaching - Romania - Travel: Romania

A relaxing weekend away

October 2, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m writing this short post from Pensiunea Laura in the bustling village of Chișcău, almost right next to Peștera Urșilor, a.k.a. the Bears’ Cave. We visited the cave this morning; at almost a mile in length it was a sight to behold. As we entered the cave, it was strewn with bones from bears and other huge beasts. The stalagmites, stalactites and columns at times looked like marble figures. It was quite fantastic, as if we’d stepped into a scene from Lord of the Rings. (Mines of Moria? The first film? I forget.) After the cave, we walked down the long high street, stopping at a museum on the way. This was really a makeshift (but extensive) museum of farm machinery and tools, including all sorts of weird and wonderful Heath Robinson-style contraptions that we couldn’t figure out at all, and are probably still in use in Romania today. It’s been a relaxing and sunny Sunday.

Yesterday was rather different. I drove the best part of 300 km from our beautiful lodgings in Zolt to our booked accommodation in Chișcău, which I thought we might never reach. Things were fairly plain sailing to begin with as we stopped at Făget and Brad, but figuring out the last bit without GPS or a detailed enough map was no easy matter. We ended up a couple of kilometres from our destination but the only way to get there was down an extremely narrow gravel track that our car certainly couldn’t handle. Darkness was about to descend. Check-in supposedly ended at 8pm. We were hungry. Had I been with my parents, we’d have needed to scrape Mum off the roof of the car. Instead we kept our cool, rang the hotel people, got some surprisingly accurate directions from a man in one of the villages, and everything turned out fine. The level of calmness inside the car just about blew me away, as did the beauty of villages we passed through. We also met just about every farm animal I can think of except pigs.

The most stressful part for me was before we even started, when we had to find the rental car place.

Yes I really am starting the new job on Tuesday, with four students from a company where they make, as far as I can tell, lolly sticks. Somebody has to. Tomorrow morning I have to take a Skype call related to this job, after which we’ll head back to Timișoara.

Life :) - Politics - Romania - Travel: Romania

Timișoara with people!

September 29, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

My friends (or my parents’ friends really) arrived on Tuesday night. It’s been fun having them here in this wonderful city and meeting up with them in breaks between lessons. I feel perfectly comfortable with them. The highlight so far was perhaps eating out on Wednesday night. We ate at Timișoreana in the square. They both had fairly substantial meals while I was lumbered with a hunk of pork on a bone, with horseradish covering about a quarter of the plate. The pork was perfectly fine, but something with it would have been nice. We then went to a decidedly frill-free basementy “restaurant” alongside Piața 700 so I could properly fill up. The staff there were much older, male, and couldn’t speak English. There were no other customers. I had something advertised as sausage and bean soup, but “slop” might have been more accurate. We also had a beer each, and the whole lot came to 20 lei. Four quid. My friends couldn’t believe that. Yesterday, after visiting the Museum of the Revolution, we checked out a street food festival in Parcul Rozelor (the rose garden). Yes, oh-so-trendy “street food” has landed in Timișoara. The festival was sponsored by a bank or insurance company or something awful like that, and it was all basically overpriced mall food. You could hardly get a sandwich for four quid. We couldn’t get away quick enough.

This morning we’ll be going away, but where and how are still very much up in the air. I’m not looking forward to negotiating Timișoara traffic in a strange car on a strange side of the road. I’ll be meeting them at their hotel in just over an hour.

Last Saturday I met up with my student. We had a few drinks at a bar on the storm-stricken bank of the Bega. We spoke Romanian. I sometimes accidentally invented a word like “profesorile”, which she thought was funny.

Watching coverage of the New Zealand election last weekend and seeing people like John Campbell and Russel Norman, I got ever so slightly homesick for the first time since I left a year ago.

I might be starting my new job on Tuesday. More on that next time perhaps, but I’ve really got to go.

Life :) - Travel: Romania

Engagements

August 30, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Some news hot of the press: my brother has got engaged. I know that last weekend he took his girlfriend up for a ride in the plane he subsequently jumped out of, so perhaps he proposed then. I’m happy for him, well both of them, although I was happy for them even before this news. Now that I live much closer to the UK, I might even go to his wedding. Imagine having to fly half-way around the world just for that. I’m only joking – he’s the only sibling I have, so of course I’d have travelled from New Zealand for it – but it does amaze me just how many people travel vast distances for weddings of relatives and so-called friends that they’re hardly ever in touch with. Perhaps the obligation they feel is extremely strong, or who knows, maybe they’re just crazy and actually enjoy weddings. On that note, I half-expected my cousin (the one I stayed with in America two years ago this very day) to invite me to his wedding which took place in northern Italy last year, but I’m very glad he didn’t.

The interview wasn’t too bad. On odd occasions she asked me to speak English, probably because I wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. In fact she did about 80% of the talking. After the interview I had to do an online multiple-choice English test, and I got 60 out of 60 in a third of the allotted time. There were errors in two of the questions that rendered all four of the possible answers incorrect, but I figured out which of the incorrect answers they wanted. Onwards to the second interview I had this morning. The initial instructions as to what this would entail were far from clear, and it’s just as well I asked the interviewer to clarify, otherwise I’d have got the wrong end of the stick entirely. My task was to give a half-hour one-on-one lesson on Skype on the subject of job interviews (!), imagining that it was my first meeting with the student. The time constraint upped the level of difficulty for me; I had a real hard time fitting everything in. But I gave it my best shot and that’s all I could do. She gave me some honest (and helpful) feedback and I probably scored about a 7 out of 10. Whether that will be enough, it’s hard to say. Working in my favour is the fact that their Timișoara office currently has no native English speakers at all. They all flock to Bucharest.

Thanks to my latest bunch of flyers I’ve picked up two more private students, taking my total to nine, assuming they both show up. Let’s hope so. I’ve got lessons scheduled with both of them on Thursday.

Towards the end of my train journey to Alba Iulia I got talking to a woman in her late twenties who wondered what was wrong with me to have got to my stage in the game without a wife or kids. (I notice that the last sentence includes six consecutive words beginning with W. Could that be the basis for some English exercise?) She described me as rușinos, which at the time I thought meant “ashamed” (from the word rușine, meaning “shame”), but actually means timid or bashful. My lodgings (“hotel” isn’t the right word) were pretty basic. Alba Iulia was a tale of two cities: the seven-pointed star fortress and buildings within it which were kept in pristine condition, and the city centre which (apart from the churches) had been wrecked by ugly Communist-era buildings and was overflowing with litter. I’ve just been reading about star forts and why they were constructed like that. Pretty clever really, but the cost of building such defenses must have been colossal. I didn’t do an awful lot on my second day in Alba Iulia; the heat slowed me down. I got back home at about 12:30am.

I saw some economic figures on the news tonight. The average Romanian spends 28% of his or her income on food, compared to 11% for the EU as a whole. Only one in three Romanians buys new clothes as opposed to second-hand ones. (The second-hand clothes shops here are pretty good. I’d never dream of buying anything new here.) So private English lessons are certainly a luxury item.

Romania - Travel: Romania

Baia Mare trip

August 19, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I left myself so little time to catch the train on Saturday that I practically had to run. When I got to the station they were carrying out renovations that made it hard to tell exactly what was what. I was pretty sure Timișoara station had one of those split-flap departure boards that are still ubiquitous in Romania, but I couldn’t see it. Three minutes. Instead there were two large sheets of paper attached to the platform wall. After a momentary mental block as to which Romanian word meant “departures”, I saw that my train was leaving from platform 5. At least at the bigger stations you know which platform is number 5, so dripping with perspiration, I boarded the train with moments to spare.  So much unnecessary self-inflicted stress. I wasn’t able to chat with the couple opposite me because they were busy either chatting with each other or glued to their phones. (The smartphone has made meeting people on trains that much harder.) I finished a book and made a good dent in another one (Mister Pip, which I’ve now finished); the trip was fairly comfortable and didn’t seem to drag. My phone rang a couple of times but I didn’t recognise the number. Thinking it might have been a new student, I didn’t answer. I still don’t feel comfortable speaking Romanian in a busy environment with potential business at stake, so I decided to call back the next day. After stopping in Oradea, Arad and Satu Mare, and a few other places besides, we pulled into Baia Mare just after 10:30. Like most Romanian stations (Arad being the only real exception I’ve come across), Baia Mare station was old and run-down.

I took a taxi to my hotel, and that’s where things got tricky. Those phone calls were from the hotel, and because I didn’t answer, they gave my room (the last room) to somebody else. This is Romania. The bloke at reception put me through to some manager on the phone; I told him I’d give his hotel zero out of ten on booking.com. In the end I got put up in a much nicer and slightly cheaper hotel for the first night, and had a hearty breakfast the next morning that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, before being transferred to the grottier (but manageable) place for the last two nights.

Baia Mare sounds like it should be by the sea. It isn’t. (The name means Big Bath. Mare means both “sea” and “big” in Romanian.) I spent most of Sunday trying to get a feel of the place. The historic centre of the town is quite pretty; it’s been recently tarted up. The city also features the ninth-tallest chimney in the world; it belongs to a disused copper smelter.

Like so many places in Romania, Baia Mare isn’t tourist-friendly. Yeah OK, I followed the “Museum 1.7 km” sign, but now what? Am I still on the right track? It would be nice to know. Street name signs would be a neat idea too. I visited the Muzeul de Etnografie which told me that Maramureș is in some ways a separate country. And a beautiful one, if only I could spend more time there. It’s steeped in tradition, with its own style of music and regional costumes. Everything seems to be built of wood with hardly a nail to be seen. I had a beer in a courtyard and watched four men play a card game that I couldn’t get the gist of. As for food, I was struggling. I had to settle for some noodles that I bought in a large, modern mall. That mall had eight or so food outlets. KFC attracted people like bees to a honeypot; the lure of McDonald’s and KFC seems to be universal.

The next day I felt like going to Sighet, and showed up at the bus station at 9am, hoping to catch one of the scheduled buses. Instead I met a pony-taled Australian in his early sixties who had been travelling for 169 days, and a local guy of 23 who painted, grew beards, played traditional music (he gave us a demonstration on his flute) and had a passion for languages.

He was second person I’d met up there who spoke decent English, after the receptionist at the good hotel. No buses to Sighet materialised until 11:30. The bohemian guy got off just before the end of our winding 1¾-hour journey up and down the mountain.

In Sighet we were right on the border with Ukraine, though you never would have known it. We ate a basic but perfectly good lunch at the bus station restaurant, if you could call it a restaurant. Menus? Bills? Who do you think we are? The Aussie guy and I parted company as he made his way to a hostel. I didn’t do much in Sighet but wander around; it was Monday so the museums and the old communist prison (supposedly a must-see) were closed. Back at the bus and train station I thought to myself how wonderfully peaceful and quiet it was on that sunny evening.

There didn’t seem to be much point in staying long in Baia Mare on Tuesday, because it was a public holiday, and there were no trains that didn’t leave at stupid o’clock, so I made the seven-hour bus journey back to Timișoara. I hope to be back in Maramureș before long – one of my students comes from there and said I could come with her when she next goes there. I mentioned this to Mum; she immediately asked about her name, her age, her bra size, her blood group… Mum has been sick the last few days. Seeing her in such a bad way on FaceTime was quite a shock, but I think she’s just had a severe cold.

Books - Films - Romania - Travel: Romania

Baia Mare, here we come

August 12, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today Dad emailed me with a page outlining the potential horror show of complications that I could be faced with during and after sinus surgery, should I choose to have it some time in the autumn. Then, right on cue, I got an attack of severe pain lasting about an hour, this time in my right sinuses.

The ENT specialist told me that extreme weather doesn’t exactly help, and we’ve had a ton of that lately. Caniculă – extreme heat – has often been the first item on news bulletins. Tomorrow things will cool down significantly, and maybe Europe’s most energy-sapping and soporific heatwave since 2003 (which was my last European summer prior to this one) will be over.

Unsurprisingly, being holiday season, I’ll have slim pickings on the work front for the rest of the month. I’ve got a three-hour lesson pencilled in for tomorrow morning, then nothing else until Wednesday, so I’m taking the opportunity to go somewhere, just like my students. But where? Brașov seemed the obvious choice – everybody visits Brașov when they come to Romania, but I’ve lived here ten months (shit! have I really?) and still haven’t been there. Unfortunately, because it’s August, every man and his dog will be in Brașov, and by Romanian standards it’s an expensive city. So I’ve decided instead to head north to Baia Mare, a seven-hour train trip away. I’m due to get up there around 11pm tomorrow. I haven’t done much research on the place, but it’s in Maramureș, an extremely rugged and remote corner of Romania, jam-packed with tradition. On travelling through Maramureș, a 2013 article in the Telegraph says this: “This is not the place to hire a car or to drive your own car. Roads are notoriously dangerous, directions are difficult, and maps are few.” Well, I’ll just be visiting a city in my first taste of the region, but it should be interesting, and who knows who I might meet on the train.

After watching Nosedive, the opener to Series 3 of Black Mirror, in which everything you do and say is star-rated out of five, I dared to watch the next two episodes. Playtest wound up as a full-on horror movie which I thought was spoilt by the ending. Shut Up and Dance though, oh boy. I was hoping for something good to cling to, somewhere, anywhere, but by the end of it I felt my well had been sucked dry. The final twist was unexpected (to me; maybe I’m just bad at reading these things) and not in a good way. I did however sympathise enormously with the main protagonist, even after the shocking revelation at the end. At the start you see him working in a kitchen, and his experiences with his colleagues were similar to mine in real life when I washed dishes in a pub. Shut Up and Dance was very well done, but I’d strongly advise against watching it if you’re feeling emotionally fragile in any way, or if you have anything important to do immediately afterwards.

I’m currently reading The Elements of Eloquence. It’s about rhetoric. Figures of speech. Like parataxis. Which I’m using now. But not very well. I’m just about to find out what the hell epizeuxis is.

Travel: Romania

Deepest Romania with Mum and Dad – Part 3 (photos)

July 3, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

As promised, here are some pictures of my recent trip with my parents. One of the real stand-outs for me was the wildlife. Everywhere you looked you’d see an unusual bird or a snake or a lizard or an army of frogs or a beautiful butterfly or a beetle or some other weird and wonderful creepy-crawly, which I didn’t always catch on camera. The loss of these creatures in the UK – even in my short lifetime – is nothing short of scandalous, and nobody in Britain with the power to do anything about it gives a shit. Of course, Romania isn’t exactly a hotbed of environmentalism, it’s just that modern farming practices (which they’d adopt in a heartbeat if they could) haven’t got here yet.

 

Orșova (most of it doesn’t look as nice as this):

 

Monastery:

Boat trip down the Danube. You can see the Decebal sculpture carved into the rock:

 

 

The cave:

 

A stork with chicks atop a telegraph pole:

 

Any idea what this is?

 

Faded glory in Herculane:

 

The waterfall at the top of the mountain we climbed up:

 

The 45th parallel north at Baia de Aramă. I’ve passed the south one plenty of times too – it’s close to Oamaru in New Zealand.

 

Another mystery beetle:

 

Back in the day this would have been quite something:

 

I think this is a stag horn beetle:

 

Izvorul Bigăr, which just happens to sit right on the 45th parallel:

 

Serbia!

Travel: Romania

Deepest Romania with Mum and Dad – Part 2

June 25, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

On the way back to Timișoara we stopped at the rhyming towns of Oravița and Moravița, the latter of which was a stone’s throw from the border with Serbia. Mum was surprisingly enthusiastic about crossing the border, which was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I think she was keen simply because she’s a fan of Novak Djokovic who hails from Serbia. Dad was a lot less keen, and said he would have put his foot down had he known that Serbia was outside the EU. We got through the customs grilling and made our way to Vršac, pronounced (I think) vr-shats; just like in Srbija, the Serbian word for the country, there’s no vowel sound in the first syllable. Another interesting point: the Serbian language uses both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. We sat in a café and had ice coffees. These were delicious; the best coffee my parents had during their Romanian trip wasn’t even in Romania. It was also the cheapest coffee they had. We had no local currency, no euros either, just Romanian lei, and they didn’t accept plastic. They decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of making us change money, so they gave us the coffees on the house. I might visit Vršac at some point in the future; I’ll need to change there if I ever go to Belgrade by train. We had a job returning the car at the airport; we hit Timișoara at peak time and the office was empty when we eventually got there.

Seeing such beautiful scenery and a completely different way of life was quite something, but with Mum the whole experience was extremely fraught. Even simple decisions such as what food to buy at a supermarket or a restaurant became almost politically charged. If Dad or I ever disagreed with anything, she took it as a personal affront and wouldn’t speak to us or would say that she wanted to go home (I never knew which home she meant). She accused us of ganging up on her and even, at one point, abusing her.

On Friday night, my parents’ last night in Romania, we had a meal out. Or tried to. At the third place (the others were expensive) we sat outside, but then a torrential storm literally ripped through, tearing shades from their poles and knocking over tables. At that point Mum just wanted to get a few slices of pizza from the kiosk downstairs, but when I suggested that I could do better than that by buying whole pizzas from a pizza parlour, again she didn’t want to speak to me. Shit, I live here, I know what’s available. Why do you have to make all the decisions? She didn’t even trust me to drive the rental car apart from on a couple of occasions when Dad basically handed me the wheel.

Money has changed Mum almost beyond recognition. She has worked hard, I’ll certainly give her that, but like many of her generation, she thinks her financial success is solely due to her own efforts, making morally right decisions at the right times, living the right way, being a good person. Her value as a person can be measured purely by her net worth. As a friend said to me last year, life has become a game that you win by having the most shit when you die.

I felt a deep sadness yesterday when my parents left. Mum and I love each other dearly. I saw the last two weeks as a big opportunity to get on with her, to enjoy spending time wth her, and even though we didn’t completely fall out, I felt I failed miserably. I’m at a loss as to what I could have done differently, apart from simply agreeing with everything she said and did, which is Dad’s solution far too often. I suggested that they come here earlier next year when it will be considerably cooler, and perhaps just stay in Timișoara which Mum seems to like. Perhaps they could go on a Baltic cruise – Mum has become a fan of cruises, which remove a lot of the stressful decision-making from the equation. (With so many damn people, they’re my idea of hell.)

For the last two weeks I’ve been full of cold. It’ll take ages for me to come right, not that I ever really come right. My parents said they’d pay for me to have an operation on my sinuses and I’m very grateful for that. This week I’ll find out what the procedure would entail and what it would cost.

Yes it’s hot. Right now it’s 31 with a cloudless sky and hardly a breath of wind. Later it should reach 35. I’m relieved to see that they’re forecasting only 35 for this Thursday, rather than the 39 they were predicting yesterday.

Next post: photos.