Travel: Romania

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Scaling new heights (and Dad’s operation)

June 21, 2019 by 0 Comments

On Tuesday one of my students invited me on a hike this weekend, with him and about half a dozen of his mates, to the top of Țarcu Mountain, at an altitude of 2190 metres. I shifted and cancelled this weekend’s lessons (it was hard to do that at short notice) and accepted his invite. We’ll be staying at a hut on Saturday night. I know it will be beautiful up there and I really want to get away and also explore more of Romania, so saying yes was an easy decision. I’m still (as always in these situations) apprehensive, though. Will I be equipped enough? Fit enough? Waterproof enough? Then there’s all the social stuff. My student is Hungarian. So are all his mates. I can’t speak a word of Hungarian. (It’s amazing really that even the Hungarians can speak Hungarian, it’s so complex and unlike anything else on the planet.) But it has the potential to be a great experience and a whole lot of fun too. Part of the whole point of living in Romania is to have these sorts of experiences. I had a gap in my schedule this afternoon where I ran around the mall trying to find a sleeping bag and other bits and pieces.

Dad. That’s the big news. The operation went about as well as it could possibly have done. I haven’t managed to speak to him since Monday’s op: the reception on the top floor of the hospital is patchy at best. Mum has been very impressed by the staff at Timaru; they’ve looked after him very well. He had a big feed at Mum’s birthday dinner, which he described as being like the Last Supper. It was his final opportunity to eat anything solid. We now anxiously wait for the results of his biopsy.

I’ve got a tricky-ish day in store tomorrow (but even the trickiest days are miles better than life insurance ever was). Two hours with Mr I Don’t Know’s mum, followed by two with Mr IDK himself, then 90 minutes with the 7½-year-old boy, then a final hour with a new boy of just five. Definitely a challenge.

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Sighișoara trip pictures

August 17, 2018 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

Travel: Romania

Deer Meadow — Part 2

August 6, 2018 by 0 Comments

Poiana Cerbului was peaceful and relaxing. I had sunny weather the whole time I was there, and thankfully it was never too hot. On Friday evening a group of eight French tourists arrived in their two cars. Again I had dinner with the old ladies. After the meal I drank two glasses of homemade vișinată, an alcoholic drink made with sour cherries. Luckily it was pretty weak. I went out for a walk that evening and met two farmers who asked me in three languages (if you count “moo” as a language) whether I’d seen their cow. Unfortunately I hadn’t.

The next morning, after being given vișinată as part of my breakfast, I chatted briefly with the French people. I tried to speak French, but I was mixing it with Romanian the whole time. And of course, I’m so out of practice with French now. I’m sure it would come back pretty quickly if I spent some time in France. I’m envious of people who can switch between multiple foreign languages. Both parents of one of the families could speak English fluently, and the father wasn’t far off fluency in Romanian; in the nineties he’d spent 18 months in Romania for his civic service in lieu of military service. He told me all about his time hitchhiking on horse-drawn carriages, and how much the country has developed in the last quarter-century or so.

To save the taxi fare I decided to walk to Sighișoara. It was about ten kilometres, four along the shingle track and the rest on a main road. When I arrived in Sighișoara I found a very pretty and old town, if a bit touristy, full of cobbled streets designed so that all the water flows through the middle of the street if it rains. Sighișoara’s history is German and Hungarian, and the centre of the town is very well preserved. I walked up the clock tower, around the fortress, and up a covered wooden staircase. And down lots of cobbled lanes, and eventually into a park where I could just sit down for a while and check the news online (the guest house had no access, apart from in a small corner, and to be honest I liked that). Then it was time to trek back to Deer Meadow. After all that walking I was pretty tired and hungry. I have blisters on my feet as I write now.

My stay at Poiana Cerbului was certainly worth it, even if it took me an insane amount of time to get there and back on the train. (Next time, I’ll consider hiring a car.) I got to speak a lot of Romanian and realise, hey, I’m not actually too terrible at this. I might recommend the place to my friends in St Ives, if and when they next come to Romania. The talkative lady took my business card, saying she might want some English lessons over the phone. I wonder if she’ll actually call me. Yesterday morning she got me to write down some useful English phrases for guests, along with a pronunciation key. For “welcome”, for instance, I wrote “uel-căm”. On Friday she gave me a book about reiki to read. Many of the pages had been annotated with what looked like the ravings of a madwoman – political commentary interspersed with bits of astrology and numerology.

One young guy from the French contingent celebrated his 17th birthday yesterday. They celebrated with breakfast birthday cake. I was thinking back to the day he was born, 5/8/01, when life had turned into a disaster zone for me. After breakfast I gave my hosts some money for meals, said goodbye, and then the French group kindly drove me to Sighișoara station. I had about two hours before my train left, so I called my parents on FaceTime. Nothing of note happened on the trains back. At Aiud I avoided that very unwelcoming bar like the plague, obviously. We clattered through five județe, or counties: Mureș, Sibiu, Alba, Hunedoara and Timiș. This reminded me of my train trip through five states from New York to Chicago. Late morning turned into afternoon, then evening and finally pitch blackness. We pulled in to Timișoara a few minutes before midnight.

Travel: Romania

Deer Meadow — Part 1

August 6, 2018 by 0 Comments

It absolutely bucketed down as I walked to the station early on Thursday morning, and by the time I boarded the train I was soaked to the skin. I made a beeline to the toilet so I could change my clothes. We don’t exactly have bullet trains in Romania, and the journey to Aiud, 267 km away, took more than six hours. If I counted correctly, the train made 17 stops. It was a pleasant journey until a gypsy whanau (or whatever the correct term is) got on at Alba Iulia. They were dirty, smelly and loud, and amongst them was a pregnant girl of about 15. They were also ticketless. You’re allowed to buy tickets on the train in Romania, but they cost about 50% more than at the kiosk. We’d gone two or three stops down the line from Alba Iulia when the ticket inspector did his rounds. He quoted the fare to the mother (or boss) of the whanau, but she was having none of it. Things got pretty heated. The inspector must have called the police, who threw the group off the train at Teiuș, the next station.

When I got off the train at Aiud, I was hungry and in need of the loo. Aiud is about the same size as St Ives, the town I grew up in, and in parts it is quite pleasant. I found a bar in a prominent position by the river. It was well patronised. I couldn’t see anybody eating, but I was confident they could rustle me up something simple. Even mici, if need be. As I sat down, I was met by some stares, followed by comments about my bags. Who are you? I felt uncomfortable. Humiliated, even. I did the sensible thing, and I got up and left to a chorus of guffaws. Just when I think I have some I idea how Romania works, I get that, which I might have expected in a dingy basement dive, but not there. I wandered around the town, frustrated at the lack of places that served food, until I came upon a place that supposedly did pizza. I went in, and after banging glasses together to get somebody’s attention, I finally got a beer and a bite to eat.

I wandered back to the train station, and had a conversation of sorts with a bloke on the platform. I was glad when the train arrived. The trip to Sighișoara was uneventful. From the station, I took a taxi to my accommodation, which was further away than I thought. “You almost need a tractor for this,” the driver said as we bumbled along a narrow shingle road. We got there eventually. The ride cost me 40 lei. Poiana Cerbului, “Deer Meadow”, was quite a wild place, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A woman of about 70 greeted me, and I soon met her older sister. They gave me some meat and noodles, an omelette (the eggs came from their own hens) and a salad, again using their own tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.

I had no trouble sleeping in my double bed, in an otherwise fairly basic room. For breakfast I had scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, a large salad and some bread to mop up all that oil. At this point I was the only person staying there. I had a long chat with the two ladies. The 70-year-old lady talked a lot. The older woman had one good eye, not many teeth, and a crude DIY tattoo on her wrist which looked like the sort of reminder note I sometimes write on my hand. She was much quieter. I didn’t want to take a taxi to Sighișoara and back, because I’d only brought 710 lei with me, half of which went on my accommodation, so a few more taxi rides would have just about wiped me out. So on my first day I explored the wood at the back of the guest house (trying not to get lost), walked along the gravel road for a bit, and mostly read A Moveable Feast, a very readable account of Ernest Hemingway’s time in Paris. I also chatted to the old ladies. This was great for my Romanian.

Language teaching - Travel: Romania

How the other half live

August 1, 2018 by 0 Comments

Tomorrow morning at half-six I’m taking the train to Sighișoara. I’ll have to change at Aiud, which I remember being quite a picturesque town as I passed through it on the bus from Bucharest to Cluj in 2016. It seems to be most famous for its large prison. I’ve got 2¾ hours there; it’ll be quite a long day. My train is due to arrive in Sighișoara at close to 6pm. I’m not actually staying in the medieval town, but in the remote village of Daneș about 10 km away. My accommodation will come with a panorama of the mountains, but no internet access. That’s not such a bad thing. Trains from Sighișoara to Daneș exist, and they cost literally pence, but they’re very infrequent so I might end up taking a taxi. I come back on Sunday; I’m due to get in to Timișoara just before midnight. All in all, it should be quite an adventure.

Yesterday I had my lesson with Matei. I got him to read three poems, complete a simple crossword, and answer about 15 “Would you rather…?” questions, which seem pretty popular with kids. Then I introduced him to the Formula 1 game which was clearly a success. We played two games, winning one each. (In the first I spectacularly ran out of fuel on, I think, the fourth lap.) Before all of that he told me about his English camp and his two-week family holiday in Egypt. He described his accommodation as a “seven-star” hotel which seemed to include its own theme park. He told me all about the pyramids and Giza and the Nile and the Red Sea and riding a camel and the searing heat and dirty, stinking Cairo with its population equal to Romania’s. I think of Egypt as being a faraway land, but it’s only three to four hours by plane from here. One of his “Would you rather…?” responses blew me away. Amid all the questions where he had to choose between two superpowers, I asked him if he’d rather be paid 50 lei for every hour of homework he did, or receive no homework at all. No homework, he quickly said. But, but, it’s 50 lei! What do I need that money for? Fifty lei an hour would be a huge amount for most kids in Romania, and even most adults for that matter, and passing up that sort of money at his age would have been unthinkable for me. But he’s right, he doesn’t need the money. I earlier asked the same question of another kid, whose parents are in a similar financial position, and got the same reply.

Next time you might get some more photos.

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

Travel plans

July 28, 2018 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother this morning. He now has a beard. Yesterday was his 37th birthday. He and his wife have just put their house on the market: they might soon be expanding. The UK has been experiencing a heatwave the likes of which they haven’t seen since 1976.

I’ll have four work-free days in a row soon, so at the end of next week I’ll take the opportunity to do some travelling within Romania. I plan to visit the medieval town of Sighișoara, which is pronounced roughly “siggy-shwara”, just like the place I now call home is “timmy-shwara”. The -șoara suffix is some kind of feminine diminutive, and it comes up in a lot of place names, as well as in words like Domnișoara, which is the equivalent of the English Miss. (Mrs is Doamna.) Because of its prevalence in place names, I got really confused when I saw scorțișoară pancakes for sale. Where’s that, I wondered. The word in fact means cinnamon.
The only trains from Timișoara to Sighișoara take a circuitous route, and they all leave at an ungodly hour. Unfortunately I’ll miss the annual festival, which is taking place right now, so I might end up going somewhere else. But it’s been on my list for some time.

Six games of Scrabble since I last wrote. Three big wins against lower-rated opponents, two of whom resigned before the end, but the others were all close. In one game I found an early low-scoring bingo but my opponent drew both blanks, bingoed with each of them, and kept scoring heavily enough to snuff out my comeback chances. I lost that game by 27. My next game showed that bingos aren’t everything. Both times I bingoed, my opponent had the tiles and the presence of mind to make big scores immediately afterwards. I clung on to win by 22. I was particularly pleased to find BLOOPED in that game. B and P don’t go well together, and it’s easy to give up with a rack like that. I won my final game by just 11 points after going over time by a few seconds and getting stuck with a W. My score of 323 was my second-lowest in a winning effort since joining ISC.

Update: I’ve since had a nightmare game which I had in the bag with both blanks on my rack, only to lose by seven. But for the ten-point time penalty, and possibly the sinus headache I was grappling with, I would have won. Time management is a massive problem for me. Well, it’s not time management as such, it’s just that I can’t see the best plays fast enough, especially towards the end of the game when the board gets blocked. My opponent played all his words in just six minutes. Straight after that horror show I had a lesson with an Italian guy. He didn’t want to do our customary IELTS writing exercise so I half-jokingly suggested we play Scrabble. He agreed. He went first, played SPENT, and on my turn I found SPINDLES through the P. I then had to explain what a spindle was.

Update 2: It’s getting worse. Three more losses on ISC, by 51, 16 and 8.

Update 3: Now two wins! By 27 and 16. Could easily have lost both of them. In the first game I was 133 points down (that’s a lot!) before I remembered from somewhere in the recesses of my mind that CANG was a word. That allowed me to play GLUMmER and gave me just a glimmer. In the second game I led by 109 but was swamped with consonants and swapped tiles three times, and only because my opponent was overrun by consonants at the end was I able to sneak a win.

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The Big Day and trip report — Part 4

June 3, 2018 by 0 Comments

Sunday. The morning after the night (and day) before. No full English breakfast this time. A bunch of us, including my brother, his wife, and most of the New Zealand contingent, met up at a café in the Barbican. Then it was back to the Sergeant’s Mess, where about ten of us, blokes mostly, spent two hours dismantling and re-mantling everything. My uncle B felt honoured to be selected as a tidier-upper; he likes to boast of his “special relationship” with my brother. (As a kid, my brother liked to spend time on their West Coast farm whenever he came to New Zealand. They moved back to South Canterbury in 1996.) My brother kindly gave B and me a bottle of whisky each for our readings the day before. When all the white frothiness had been cleared away, the mess looked much like a century-old tennis club room. The usual inhabitants of the mess, many of whom were at the wedding, form a very close-knit community.

I had a lazy Sunday afternoon watching the opening day of the French Open in my parents’ room. In the evening we went to Wetherspoons, where I had a curry and an apple crumble, and then walked to the newlyweds’ hotel room on the seventh floor of the Crowne Plaza. We didn’t stay long there.

Plymouth is an interesting city, particularly along the beautiful coastline, but the city centre was bombed to pieces in World War Two, and the collosal hideous-looking blocks that sprung up in the next two decades wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Communist-era Romania. Plymouth also appears to have a serious obesity problem. On that note, I’ve lost about three kilos (or half a stone) since my trip to the UK in April.

On Monday morning I had a full English once more, and then it was time to say goodbye to all the Kiwis, with the exception of B and my aunt J, who were coming to Romania with me. This was the end of their marathon trip that took in the US (where their son lives), Canada, and Holland (for the flowers). We took a taxi to the train station (they had far too much luggage to make walking an option) and boarded the 12:05 train to Paddington. We sat at opposite ends of Coach C. The journey to Paddington seemed to whizz by. We hung around Paddington station for some time; our flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until 9:50. We snapped up six reduced-to-clear sandwiches for £1 each from Boots, but then paid through the nose for coffees and muffins: three each of those cost more than I receive for a lesson. I got a call from a frustrated Mum, who had been stuck at Kings Cross for an hour and a half on a driverless train with no air conditioning. Mum and Dad were very tired and were extremely glad to eventually get back to St Ives.

Having loads of time up our sleeve helped to reduce stress. B and J were a little out of their comfort zone on the underground. My offers to help B with his suitcase mostly fell on deaf ears. We negotiated the underground, took the train to Luton, and then hopped on the shuttle bus to the airport where we ate our sandwiches and whiled away two more hours before boarding the plane. I realised that travelling with other people can be less stressful than travelling alone. Boarding was slow, as always with Wizz Air, but we were up and down in under three hours. It was after 3am by the time we exited the terminal building, and taxis were thin on the ground at that time of night, so I had to call one. B and J were staying in an apartment in the building next to mine. We followed the owner’s instructions involving keys and lifts and PIN codes, which my aunt had meticulously copied down, and (in what felt like a miracle after such a long day of travel) they gained access to their spacious apartment. Welcome to Romania!

Language teaching - Tennis - Travel: Romania

Happy memories

January 27, 2018 by 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 by 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 by 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.