Family

Books - Family - Life :) - Politics

And the band played on

November 18, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Scârț, the place that has all the communist memorabilia and also houses the theatre I went to last December, reopened today, so I met Dorothy there for coffee this afternoon. They had records and books for sale, but I didn’t buy anything. Tracy Chapman’s first album would be amazing to have on vinyl, but I wasn’t going to fork out 160 lei for it. We sat inside – the renovation was still under way – and had tea and coffee. We met an Australian guy of sixty or so who had a long white beard and had that general bushman look about him. He also had his cat with him. He talked at length about his cat, including how he nibbled first his fingers this morning, then his dick. He said he lived a two-minute walk from Scârț. He settled in Timișoara ten years ago. In the meantime he tried to return to his native Sydney but couldn’t afford a place to live. Dorothy and I talked about all manner of things including Balinese first names.

Chats with Mum and Dad now revolve around two things. Their house (see later) and how irredeemably screwed we seem to be as a species. Things weren’t looking too rosy even a decade ago, but as I see it we’ve recently entered a new dark age, a cultural desert, devoid of meaning and substance and most of all, hope. Too few of us care because we’ve been conditioned not to care. We’ve all got six-inch rectangular shiny things in our hands that distract us from anything that really matters. And most of us are pretty busy working, in some cases just to make ends meet, but in other cases so we can afford pointless shiny shit that we’ve been conditioned to think we need. The biggest story of the weekend was a geriatric ex-champion boxer (who was massively famous when I was about eight) losing to some YouTuber who is supposedly massively famous now. Both trousered millions just for showing up. There’s also some conference going on in a petro-state where they won’t do anything to solve a climate crisis that many in power deny even exists. Bitcoin has hit US$90,000, a new record high, on the back of Trump’s re-election. How that’s supposed to be a good thing for anybody, apart from the bros who have bitcoin, I have no idea. Elon Musk has even named a new government department after a crypto coin. It feels more and more that as we go about our daily lives we’re like the band that played on as the Titanic sank, though worse, because the band didn’t actually make the ship sink faster.

The House. It feels worthy of a capital H now. On Wednesday I called Mum and Dad. After a few minutes with Mum, she went to an exercise class, so I got to talk to Dad alone, which meant a certain calmness and frankness. Their place is irretrievably bad, he said. “I’m embarrassed to have people round, especially if they ever saw our old place.” Yikes. He’s doing a whole load of DIY now, including doing up a big old shed, a process my brother called “polishing a turd”. Is all this work really worth it? Mum is in denial, he said. The only good news is that the house and renovation have set them back (so far!) around $900k, when I thought the figure was more like $1.1 million. It was confusing – there were so many quotes floating around before (and as) the work got started. Dad wants to be out of there in two years. Sounds like a good plan. They should be challenging their energies into finding a suitable next place, rather than, you know, polishing turds.

I’m reading a book that I picked up at Luton Airport in (I think) June 2023. It’s called Honey & Spice, by Bolu Babalola. I chose it mostly because of the enticing red-and-yellow cover and the author’s name. (The author is a woman.) The modern themes and language (words like mandem which looks kind of Portuguese to me; it’s actually multicultural London English or MLE) make me think I’m too old for this book. It’s like the opposite of a historical novel; I’m reading about a time after my own time. Wikipedia gives the author’s date of birth as 24/2/91, so yes, she’s quite a bit younger than me, but I would have guessed even younger. I’ve so far read just four chapters, and well chapter three was great, so even though the rest of it has left me cold I’ll persevere a little while longer.

Two months, give or take, until I have a niece. Apparently within two hours of my sister-in-law finding out she was having a girl, her mother had bought a whole load of new pink shit. Because that’s what we now do.

Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Politics

Trying to make sense of it all

October 22, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a tiring last few days. My students’ constant chopping and changing of lesson times, and all the associated messages, have been exhausting for me. More than the lessons themselves.

I had a funny lesson this morning with an 18-year-old guy whom I last saw in August 2023. He came armed with textbooks on something called “consumer math” from an American publication called Christian Light. There were maths problems, mostly of a practical nature, interspersed with readings from the Bible. He told me he’d so far done them with the help of ChatGPT. That became pretty clear when I asked him to work out a percentage. He’s homeschooled (that’s highly unusual in Romania) and wants to study in America. His English is excellent.

I spoke to Mum just before that lesson. She still hasn’t fully got over her cold, which she thinks might have been another bout of Covid. She was annoyed that she’d accidentally deleted a recording of a netball match. I said that all wasn’t lost – it’s 2004 and online stuff exists – and sure enough she found it on YouTube. My parents still think of TV (and they watch a lot of TV) as something that comes on at a specific time, and that’s it. A little while ago I told Dad an “old person” joke I’d seen – “What time does that programme start on Netflix?” – and he didn’t get it.

Our clocks go back this coming weekend. These are the dying embers of not-winter, in other words. It especially feels that way with the US election only two weeks away. I remember very clearly the lead-up to the 2020 election. We were in the midst of a horrendous second Covid wave. Ambulances sped past every couple of minutes. I was still in my old flat then – it was on the route to the hospital. The city was shrouded in thick fog that didn’t lift for days. And then the election. Surely he can’t win again. Just look at the polls. But just imagine if he does.

The polls were way off in several swing states, but he still lost. I actually enjoyed the drawn-out vote-tallying process, especially when it became clear Biden would get over the line. But now there’s a full-scale war practically on my doorstep and the guy who just said that Arnold Palmer was a real man because he had a ten-inch dick (or whatever), and is now arguably a favourite to become the most powerful man in the world, supports the guy who invaded a completely independent country. How can 75 million-odd Americans vote for this heap of shit, just because they’re angry that gas isn’t under $2 a gallon? It’s beyond fucked up.

Recently I’ve been watching YouTube videos on maths. There are a couple of popular channels I like: Stand-up Maths (run by Matt Parker) and Numberphile. A regular guest on Numberphile is Neil Sloane (now 85 years old) who was born in Wales and emigrated to Australia but has lived most of his life in the US. I particularly like his videos on sequences and their often crazy patterns. His voice and manner are quite soothing.

Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music

Home sweet home

October 10, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a no-show from one of those real millennials I once talked about on here. One of the ones who’s been to Dubai. That’s after reminding her less than two hours before she started. Yes, she said. Or rather, da. Then nothing. When she messaged me last month to say she wanted to resume lessons with me, I let out a deep groan to myself. Uughhh. I thought I’d got rid of her.

Yesterday I caught up with my cousin on Zoom. The one who lives in Wellington and has had cancer. For all I know, she may still have cancer. In an hour she didn’t mention her health once. Her siblings and even her mother have virtually no idea what’s going on either. All very bizarre. There was still the visibly drooped jaw but her speech wasn’t affected. We discussed my parents’ house, both agreeing that it was madness, then we talked about working from home. On that matter we disagreed entirely. Her number one son has almost finished at Canterbury and is going to Sydney do a master’s in robotics. Number two boy has just started working for Wellington Free Ambulance. The little chap, now all of 16 (time whizzes by), looks set to join either the police or the military. I thought my cousin might push all her boys into academia, so I’m glad the younger two haven’t gone in that direction.

Yeah. Working from home. A bloody great invention if you ask me. Obviously some very important jobs can’t be done from home. Even mine doesn’t always work online. Getting an eight-year-old kid to sit still and look at me can be quite the battle. Teaching maths online is rather inconvenient. I can never seem to find the pi key. But yeesh, there are millions of people in white-collar jobs (both good and mind-numbingly crap) where face-to-face contact is a near-total irrelevance when it comes to actually doing the job. Sure, there’s the socialising if you’re into that, but even that can be unbearably fake. The modern office itself is unbearable to a lot of people. If I went back to a large open-plan office I’d last five minutes. Two minutes if hot desking was also involved. Just fuck no. And if you live in a dormitory town (what a horrible phrase) in the UK, you’re probably looking at two to three hours a day just getting from your soulless housing estate to some equally soulless business park and back. Who wouldn’t want rid of that and have the chance to exercise more (the amount of exercise the average Brit gets is shockingly low) and spend more time with their kids? (Yes, I know, there are plenty of TGIM fathers – thank God it’s Monday – who like all that commuting and office fakeness precisely so they can escape from their families.)

My cousin is 55 and owns a business. To put it mildly, she wasn’t a fan of working from home. She talked about fostering team environments which may have been a thing 30 years ago but isn’t really now. When I spoke to Dad, he expressed a dislike of the whole WFH concept which I found very weird coming from him, but then again he is 74 and you can’t cure 74. It’s great, he said, that civil servants in Wellington are finally going back to work. Back to work! This amused me greatly. If Dad’s definition of work involves travelling to an office, he has done zero hours of work in the last 45 years.

Here’s the British comedian Michael Spicer’s take on the WFH phenomenon. My favourite comment to the video is the one that mentions commercial real estate investors and surrounding businesses like coffee shops. Sorry, but $7 cups of coffee aren’t a good enough reason to bring people back.

A terrifying storm, which goes by the less-than-terrifying name of Milton, is making landfall in Florida. There are several tornadoes. Joe Biden has just called it the Storm of the Century. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Milton. The name makes me think of the character from the Office Space (ha!) documentary comedy film. Another Milton I’m aware of is the nephew of the mathematician who wanted a name for 1 followed by 100 zeros. Milton came up with googol. This was then extended to the googolplex, which is 1 followed by a googol zeros. The name “googol” was the inspiration for the name Google.

On the subject of maths, it’s taken me till October to realise that the year 2024 is a tetrahedral number. In 2016 we were living in a triangular year: if you have 2016 balls, you can arrange them into an equilateral triangle with 63 balls on each side. Well, tetrahedral numbers take this to another level. (Or several other levels, to be precise.) You can arrange 2024 balls into a tetrahedron (or triangular-based pyramid) in which each face is an equilateral triangle. Specifically, 2024 is the 22nd tetrahedral number; there are 22 balls on each edge. It’s equivalent to the sum of the first 22 triangular numbers. This means that tetrahedral numbers (or years) are even rarer than triangular ones. The previous one was 1771; the next one won’t be until 2300.

Earlier today my student read an article about Threads, a 1984 docu-drama about a nuclear apocalypse. Frightening as it must have been then, during the Cold War, I’d like to find and watch it now.

Music. A new favourite song of mine is called Help Me See the Trees by Particle Kid. The lead singer of the band is Willie Nelson’s son. Here’s the song being performed at the Tomboy Sessions in Santa Cruz, California. There’s loads of other good stuff – mostly country music – from the Tomboy Sessions.

Family - Life :) - Photos - Romania

Eight years in this crazy place

October 8, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

As my work hours are getting longer again, my posts are getting shorter.

This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle in Woodbury (the ones who visited me in Timișoara). She had a lot to say; he didn’t. She said they’ll be putting their property on the market. Time to pull the plug. Though with my uncle starting to lose his memory, I wonder how much a totally alien home might mess him up.

Today marks the eighth anniversary of my arrival in Romania. I’ve spent 18% of my life here. Yesterday I met Mark in town. We talked about a lot of teaching, mostly. But also his three children. And how much we both still like Timișoara. If only it wasn’t so hot in summer, this place would be just about perfect for me.

This was from Saturday. I still haven’t been invited to a Romanian wedding. The more I hear about them (400 guests? Lasting three days?) the more grateful I am.

A statue of Adi Bărar, guitarist for Timișoara band Cargo. It was put up just three weeks ago. Bărar died in 2021 after getting Covid.

Glory to God. Read the Bible every day. In Recaș yesterday.

This dog just wouldn’t budge, no matter what. I even took a video of cars swerving around it. At Bazoșu Nou yesterday.

Family - Life :) - Romania

Musafiri

September 28, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Musafiri means visitors. It’s a word imported into Romanian from Turkish, just like dușman (enemy), macara (a crane that you lift things with), mușama (oilcloth), and hundreds of others. And in a pretty rare event, I actually had some musafiri last weekend.

At 6:30 pm on Saturday, after a solid day of lessons, my university friend (let’s call him Jason) arrived in a campervan with his girlfriend (let’s call her Marianne) and her parents. They (or specifically her father) had driven all the way from Paris, stopping in Normandy, Germany, Austria and Hungary on the way. They came up to my flat. We chatted and eventually ate (I was getting hungry). I spoke mostly English, peppered with some French. Marianne speaks English at a native level, while her parents speak just enough to get by. Her parents’ intrepid travels made for some interesting conversation. They drove to Iran in 2019, got stuck in Turkey during the early stages of Covid, and even took the van to Russia after the war started in 2022. The mind boggles. I put Jason and Marianne up in my larger bedroom, I slept in the small one, and Marianne’s parents slept in the van in the car park.

Marianne, only 33, was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. With all her treatment, she understandably gets tired easily, so we took things pretty slowly. We made a late start the next morning, taking the tram into the centre of town, arriving at the Orthodox cathedral while Sunday mass (which takes hours) was still in full swing. The four of them found this a quite incredible sight, as I did myself the first time. (As I lived practically right by the cathedral, I quickly got used to it.) Marianne wanted to check out all the souvenir shops. Her other big thing was cats. She’s a cat obsessive. Timișoara is awash with cats, so she was in heaven – my apartment block’s cat-heavy car park was a rich source of photo opportunities.

We went to Porto Arte, the bar and restaurant by the river. The weather was excellent and the bar was doing a good trade – the bell, which rang every time a new food order came in, was going incessantly. From there we walked through the three main squares. They were impressed by the architecture. Jason and Marianne said the city centre was much cleaner than Birmingham’s – I found this comment rather alarming. Birmingham, like so many other British cities, is in a right mess. We went to the Bastion which had a newish tourist office that was informative even for me – it showcased the attractions of Timiș as a whole, not just the city. We sat in a nearby bar, inside to get out of the heat. (Marianne seemed quite sensitive to it. It’s just as well she didn’t come a month earlier.) We took the tram home. Marianne lay on the bed while Jason and I chatted. We covered some interesting subjects, such as the standard of maths teaching.

At around 7:30 we made our way to the Timișoreana beer factory, just a few minutes’ walk from my place. Unlike the previous two times I’d been there, all the action was in the outside area. I suppose it had been winter the other times. It was somebody’s 50th birthday, so we were treated to a rather loud rendition of De Ziua Ta by the Romanian band 3 Sud Est. There was also, surprise surprise, a cat among the tables. We ate and drank. Marianne’s parents struck up conversation with anybody and everybody they could find. Then a card game came out. A trick-taking game like euchre, this game used a special pack with pirate and mermaid cards as well as numbered cards of various coloured suits. There were no teams; the five of us played individually. The game’s big thing was that rather than trying to win as many tricks as possible, you had to predict how many you would win after seeing your hand, then try and hit that exact number. What’s more, players bid simultaneously. The game progresses over ten deals (only one card per player in the first round, increasing by one with each round). I was nowhere near winning, but it was an interesting game nonetheless.

Jason and Marianne parted ways from her parents, who were up early the next morning for the next leg of their van trip. Jason and Marianne rose rather later, and luckily I had no lessons until 1pm. I took them to the train station and said goodbye. They were heading to Budapest, then on to Croatia where they would finally fly back to Birmingham. Throughout the afternoon and evening (I had five lessons, finishing at 9:30), Jason updated me on their delays. The train was almost two hours late leaving Timișoara, then they had another hold-up at the border. It was close to midnight when they got to Budapest.

Having visitors seemed to make me feel better. It made me tidy this place up, for one thing, and added a more general sense of purpose to life for that short period. Since then it’s been a tiring few days. Right now we’re nudging 30 degrees – very warm for late September.

Some big news: Mum and Dad have booked their flights to Europe. They’re flying to Munich and then to Timișoara; they’ll arrive on (I think) 8th May. They’ll maybe spend two weeks with me before heading to the UK.

The US election is just 39 days away. The polls (for what they’re worth) are close. Some people have already voted; early voting started last week. The stakes are extremely high.

Family - Language teaching - Politics - Romania

The big bam!

September 16, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I said last time that seasons in Romania change with a sudden bam!, and what a bam! this has been. Its real name is Cyclone Boris (yes, these things have names now) which has dumped months of rain on us in a few days. In the county of Galați in the east, flooding has claimed six lives. I wonder how many Romanians died from the heat waves that immediately preceded all of this. Climate change is real. On a personal note, I haven’t minded the deluge. I feel I’m built to handle it, in a way I’m simply not with the extreme heat. Yesterday I met Mark in town. I got there early. Piața Victoriei was almost deserted, lockdown-like, so I could take in the architecture without worrying about bumping into people. We ate at Berăria 700. Obviously we didn’t sit outside as we normally would. Inside means you’re in part of the old fortress, which has a real cosy feel about it.

In town yesterday afternoon

Work is getting back to normal, though it’s a different normal. So many kids now. They all want (or their parents want, let’s face it) lessons just after the school day finishes and it’s impossible to accommodate everybody.

Part of a lesson on Friday

Last week I heard some dreadful news. A 17-year-old student of mine (we started when he was just 11) has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. His mother messaged me with the news. His English is excellent; he’s come on in giant leaps in the six years I’ve spent with him. He wanted to be a pilot. We often discussed planes, routes, accidents and incidents. Sometimes I’d talk about planes that I flew on as a kid, such as the three-engined DC-10. This diagnosis has surely scuppered his plans. For someone so young (and he had an old head on young shoulders) it’s so sad.

I saw snippets of last week’s presidential debate. Kamala Harris performed very well. She knew what buttons to press. The “rally size” button was particularly effective. She made Trump seem even more egotistical and unhinged than usual. Trump went on about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating cats and dogs. That was the clip played around the world. What didn’t get so much airtime was his admiration of Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. I doubt many in the US would even have known who Orbán was. But it certainly got some attention here in Romania. The prospect of Trump getting back in again is scary as hell. Harris needs to get herself out there more. More rallies, more interviews. She’s shown she can perform. Just seven weeks to go now. (I’ve just seen that apparently there was another attempt on Trump’s life while he was playing golf, though it didn’t get nearly as far as in July.)

Yesterday I saw my nephew on a WhatsApp video call with my brother. It was his second birthday. There were balloons and streamers and all sorts. Mum and Dad are now serious about a trip to Europe, probably next May. So that’s good.

Family - Films - The UK

One of each

September 8, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ll be getting a niece to go with my nephew. When my brother told me, I was over the moon. I don’t really know why. I might just be that so much of the toxic crap we face these days is generated by men. The due date is 22nd January. Hey, isn’t that around the date of the presidential inauguration? How about a little Kamala, then, if she wins? Goes pretty well with our surname. Of course they wouldn’t dream of calling her anything like that, but it’s fun to think of slightly out-there names.

Last night I had my longest phone chat ever with my brother. He’s not one for talking on the phone, or even WhatsApp video (as it was), but we managed a whopping 50 minutes. There was a lot to get through. The baby gender reveal (should be “sex reveal”, really), the New Zealand trip, the flight back in which my nephew screamed and bawled for hours, and my parents’ house. He was horrified by how impractical it was. How did our eminently sensible Mum and Dad descend into such madness? Then when I told him how much the renovation cost (he didn’t know), his jaw dropped.

This summer is the first time I’ve ever been seriously mentally affected by weather. The floods in St Ives, the humidity of Auckland, the howling wind and horizontal rain of Wellington, my pretty brutal first winter in Timișoara, even some heat waves I’ve experienced here, none of it comes close to the summer of 2024. It’s been unremitting. I’ve almost put housework on hold, because after 15 minutes I’m dripping with sweat and need a cold shower. With the air con, the living room stays nice and cool, but that’s meant I’ve been confined to just this one room. The good news is that seasons don’t change gradually here; you shift abruptly – bam! – from one to the next. The forecast tells me that we’ll get the bam next week, and it can’t come soon enough. One ray of light has been my sinuses. At just about the moment I got back from NZ a year ago tomorrow, they stopped running. I’d had a constant stream for a year and a half, mostly from my left nostril. Then like magic, it stopped. How I have no idea. I still get pain sometimes, and end up taking paracetamol or occasionally something stronger, but the stream drying up has made a huge difference.

Yesterday I saw One Life at Cinema Timiș with Dorothy. Starring Anthony Hopkins, it told the story of Nicky Wilton who helped hundreds of mostly Jewish children escape from Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia on trains to Britain, just before the start of WW2. The last train, with 250 children on board, never made it – it was aborted, tragically, when Germany invaded Poland. The film flitted back and forth between 1939 and the autumn of 1987, when Winton was an old man. (Winton died in 2015 at the extraordinary age of 106.) I clearly remember the autumn of ’87 when so much bad stuff happened. Mum’s mother was over from NZ at the time. She got bronchitis when she was with us, during which time world stock markets plunged, our garden was waist-deep in water (there are photos of my brother and I canoeing in the garden), an unforecast hurricane ripped through southern Britain giving us a day off school, and (the day before my grandma left the UK) a fire at King’s Cross underground station killed 31 people.

The inquiry into the Grenfell fire, which killed 72, came out last week. Damning stuff. So many players, all cutting corners, ignoring dire warnings about the cladding, putting their own profits above human lives, blaming each other. A good number of them need to be banged up. Owners of flats in the UK (600,000 people) are having to pay to have the cladding replaced. A lot of them simply can’t afford to. This is all a lot like the earthquake-prone building business in NZ which I was caught up in, only at least it’s getting some proper coverage.

Three new students, all women, at the end of last week. I really seemed to click with the last one; that’s always nice.

Family - Photos - Travel: Europe

Photos from Vienna

September 6, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tomorrow we’ll know whether my nephew will get a little brother or sister to terrorise. Mum and Dad are still recovering from their extended family time. I’m sure all five of them would have had a better time if my sister-in-law had stayed at home.

Now for some pictures from my Vienna trip.

The view from our apartment. Red squirrels abounded.

Above: Pictures from Schönbrunn Palace. The bottom photo is from the Gloriette.

The Gloriette: a display of strength and power

The next day: Walking to the Albertina, and below: some paintings I particularly liked.

Christian Rohlfs

Albin Egger-Lienz

Oskar Kokoschka

Rudolf Wacker. This might have been my favourite of all. Dorothy and I spent considerable time perusing it.

Franz Sedlacek. At first glance you think they’re birds.

Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, painter and scupltor

Marc Chagall. I could have stared at this one for hours.

There was a whole room of Picassos that I didn’t take photos of, then we saw the extensive collection of American photographer Gregory Crewdson which was well worth it. Each photograph included a frozen figure; the small-town America setting only increased the creep factor.

This little girl was transfixed by the violinist

These newsstands add colour to a city, but they’re thin on the ground these days

St Stephen’s Cathedral

The Belvedere

Cities need more buildings like these. The height and general appearance make you feel good.
Family - Travel: Europe

Vienna trip report (and some family stuff)

September 5, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

So last Thursday I drove to Vienna with Dorothy (70), Sanda (54), and Sanda’s uncle Valeriu (about to turn 80 and who had never been out of Romania before). Another long drive for me. After some stops along the way and a very slow run into Vienna, we finally made it to the Park & Ride. Sanda, who speaks excellent German, was able to ask someone how that whole system worked. Then we took the underground to our apartment which was in an old building similar in style to the ones in Timișoara. (Timișoara was part of the same empire then, after all.) I shared a room with Valeriu. My mother’s father was 77 when he first left New Zealand. Valeriu had him beat, and at times he was like a fish out of water. He relied heavily on his niece. (Valeriu lost his wife last year after a long illness. They never had children.)

The apartment had cooking facilities and we used them three nights out of four. The next day I was completely shattered. A combination of the long drive, broken sleep, and the sheer heat meant I couldn’t stop yawning the whole day. A shame, because we visited the beautiful Schönbrunn Palace, the residence of the Habsburgs until their monarchy ended in 1918. Valeriu was very keen to see everything there was to see about Empress Elisabeth, otherwise known as Sisi, who Romanians have great affinity with. She was stabbed to death in 1898. We did an audio tour of the palace – I had no hope of keeping up with the Ferninands and Josephs – then climbed up to the top of the Gloriette which sits at an elevated position at the end of Schönbrunn’s garden. I tried to decipher the inscription on the Gloriette with the help of Dorothy who once taught Latin and Greek. The way I was feeling, my favourite part of the day was in the morning when I had a very good coffee with Dorothy at an underground station while Sanda helped Valeriu buy an “Austria” baseball cap.

Day two was much better. Sanda and Valeriu went to a technological museum, while Dorothy and I visited the Albertina, a quite wonderful art gallery near the centre. The previous time I properly went to an art gallery was in 2006 when I visited the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. This was at least as good. The Monet to Picasso collection could hold you transfixed for hours. Zoom in, zoom out. What is this supposed to be? What was he thinking? What further wonders would he have produced if he hadn’t been killed in the war? How shocking was this at the time? Look how incredible those hands are. We must have spent four hours there. The thermostat was turned right down – it was pretty parky in there – but much better that than sweating and yawning and rapidly losing interest. The night before I’d found an out-of-the-way restaurant with local cuisine; the four of us met up there at 6:30. (I relied mostly on an old map. Outside the apartment, my phone was a brick with a camera.) We took one look at the prices and went next door instead. Sausages, goulash, beer. Perfectly good, only I could have eaten twice as much.

Our last full day involved us all meeting up with two of Sanda’s friends at a café slap-bang in the middle of the city, in the shadow of St Stephen’s Cathedral. Again we split up – Valeriu stayed with Sanda and her friends, while Dorothy and I wended our way through the Mozart zone to the Belvedere Gardens. We didn’t go to the museum; we just walked through the gardens which were free to enter. On the way back we had tea and an apple strudel in a café, then met the other two in the city centre once more. By this stage, Sanda had tummy troubles and Valeriu was understandably tired. I wonder what he made of the whole experience. He certainly travelled light; he came with one small holdall and no shorts or other summer clothes. He predates even the baby boomer generation and grew up in the sticks not too far from where I went in late June, and having never been abroad before, the idea of changing his wardrobe from the tried and true was alien to him.

Dorothy and I got on well. We talked a lot about language. That subject came up a lot with Sanda too; she is practically fluent in four languages (Romanian, English, German and Italian) – that level of mastery isn’t that rare in Romania, but it continues to blow me away. I did get slightly annoyed by Sanda’s tendency to organise everyone, even though she meant well, and her penchant for selfies. Valeriu had clearly done a lot of driving back in the day; much of our conversation focused on that.

After breakfast the next morning, we were off back home. A short loo break 170-odd km down the road, then a similar distance to Kecskemét, a small city in the centre of Hungary, far from the tourist trail, where we stopped for lunch. (It was close to 3pm by then. I was ravenous.) Sorting out parking payment was hard work. None of us could read the Hungarian signs. Does that mean three wheels? But I’ve got four wheels. What the hell? Dorothy and Sanda exchanged forint notes for coins at a bank – this took ages and Dorothy thought it was jolly good fun – while Valeriu and I stood by the car. Eventually that was sorted. Now for some food. A bistro round the corner. Looks good. Then it came to ordering our meals. A major performance. We found one guy who spoke English but he didn’t work there. Sanda made cow noises and flappy bird gestures. Google Translate came out. I was rapidly losing the will to live. We got there in the end, and it took them less time to bring us our food than it took to order it. I had a substantial meal of pork escalopes and chips. Great. But then two massive plates of food materialised that we hadn’t ordered – a communciation breakdown despite everyone’s best efforts. By 7:45 I’d dropped the others off and I was home, but not before a tight squeeze in the car park behind my apartment block which nearly threw me after being on the road for so long.

Yesterday I spoke to Mum and Dad. A sigh of relief. Bar the first couple of days, it had been a really shitty time for them all. Dad still isn’t right. My sister-in-law didn’t want to come to NZ anyway, as far as I could see. She’d rather have used up her leave allocation elsewhere – probably something involving a cruise. Mum and Dad were pissed off that my brother did most of the work when it came to looking after my nephew. He was up early while she stayed in bed. And as for my nephew, he’s a very bright little boy, and physically strong with it. He hurt my parents on several occasions, and seemed to enjoy it. (Yikes.) He can already count to twelve. Count me out.

I can’t wait for the sub-30 temperatures that we’re forecast to get early next week. Right now it’s still far too hot. My university friend and his girlfriend are staying with me for two nights from the 21st. Not many people other than students get to see the inside of my flat, so that’ll be slightly nerve-wracking for me. I’m now off to Dedeman to get flat-related bits and pieces. When they’ve gone it’ll all be back to normal.

Like my recent drives across Hungary – four of them – this post has gone on far too long.

Family - Life :) - Romania - Tennis

On the right track (maybe)

August 28, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A bit more positivity from New Zealand this morning. I got to see my nephew who is a very bright little boy indeed. He loves playing with toy cars, especially old British ones like Morgans, apparently. Then Dad said, “We’d better get onto booking our trip as soon as they’re gone,” meaning a trip to Europe. If they’re serious about ever seeing their younger son and grandson again, they don’t have a lot of choice. Dad’s been ill for too long for it to be a virus, so he’s been put on antibiotics. Mum, who I’m sure is greatly enjoying spending time with her grandson despite the stress, seemed to like my pictures of Slovenia.

After our Skype chat, and before my four lessons, I met Dorothy in town. We talked about how Romania is, slowly but surely, heading in the right direction. Every week I see a building being renovated or a bike rack conveniently added or an intersection modified to make it that little bit safer. Romania’s economy has grown substantially in the time I’ve been here. People are earning more in real terms. Unlike some of its neighbours, Romania has become considerably more stable. It’s still very imperfect – those imperfections really came to the fore during Covid – and I worry that Romania’s urge to modernise will compromise its natural and man-made beauty, but there are reasons to be optimistic.

I’m off to Vienna in under 36 hours. I’ll have three passengers, one of whom I’ve never met in my life. I have no idea how this will all pan out. I’ll reveal all in my next post.

Update: One thing that hasn’t noticeably improved since 2016 is Romania’s level of customer service. This morning I waited 45 minutes to withdraw some euros from my bank account. The woman at the desk (when I finally got there) must have had some pretty rigorous training. Never look at the customer or change your facial expression in any way. If the customer asks a question, remain silent. If he or she repeats the question, respond in an exasperated tone but whatever you do, never fully answer it. Consult your phone five times per minute and your smart watch ten times per minute.

The US Open is under way. I read that Birmingham-born Dan Evans came through the longest match in tournament history in the first round, beating 23rd-seeded Karen Khachanov in 5 hours and 35 minutes. Incredibly he was 4-0 down in the fifth set, but then won six games on the spin. He’s now a 34-year-old veteran; I saw him in Auckland when he was still a teenager. At only five foot nine, he’s struck me as a cross between Lleyton Hewitt and a typical British lad who never stops being a lad. A few years back he got a one-year ban for taking cocaine.

I’m now packing for Vienna.