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Family - International travel - Life :)

Mum and Dad’s visit — Part 4

June 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

In our last two evenings in Belgrade we ate in the main square. It was full of life. Young people who walked fast, mainly. We saw surprisingly few people on their phones. Eating there simplified things: we were starting to get fed up of eating out, which I’ve always thought is overrated anyway. Mum was still grappling with the badly-designed local currency. They have nine denominations of notes, ranging from 10 dinars (worth roughly 8 pence) to 5000 (almost £40). With that many values, it’s impossible to distinguish them all based on colour alone. As for the virtually worthless coins, they were identical in shape and colour, and very similar in size too. On Saturday night we got ice creams from the bar next door to our apartment. The woman who served us, if you can call it that, was miserable. We saw two ice cream prices: 30 and 70 dinars, but I couldn’t work out what the Serbian alongside each price meant. It turned out that the cone itself was 30 dinars and each scoop of ice cream was 70. That was a new one on me.

Serbia beat Costa Rica 1-0 in their opening World Cup game, thanks to a stunning free kick, and we expected to see wild celebrations in town, but they weren’t forthcoming. Sadly they conceded a late goal to Switzerland last night to lose 2-1, and are probably out of the tournament now unless they can pull off a huge upset win over Brazil.

On the last day we went down to the waterfront, and saw some fishermen with a decent haul. By this stage I was feeling a bit claustrophobic. Mum and Dad were quick to judge and criticise everything they saw; many things that annoyed them didn’t really bother me. The city had been ravaged by war only twenty years ago; of course it won’t be like Paris. It’s also much cheaper than Paris, and for that reason, as well as the interesting language, I’d quite like to go back there by myself. Perhaps I could then take the train to Bar, on the coast of Montenegro. That trip is supposed to be spectacular.

On Monday the bus was again an hour late, but at least I had a working phone. We weren’t held up very long at the border this time, but the journey still took over three hours. I had a lesson that evening. The next three mornings I did a spot of fishing with Dad, and was gradually getting the hang of it, but the fish weren’t having a bar of our rubberised sweetcorn bait. We did see people catch sizeable caras, a.k.a Prussian carp, using maggots, which I’ll need to get my hands on.

I had my 71st two-hour session with Matei on Tuesday. I’m running out of things to do with him. I prepared a piece on Ronaldo, who I thought was his favourite footballer. I thought it would be timely after he’d just scored a hat-trick for Portugal against Spain. But either I’d forgotten or Matei had changed his mind, and apparently he can’t stand Ronaldo and instead Messi is his favourite. Oh well.

My parents’ experiences here, and in Belgrade, were pretty positive on the whole. Things inevitably became strained on occasions – Mum doesn’t cope well with stress and that’s just the way she is – but she and I never had any real arguments. It helps that I’m more relaxed myself these days. They left on Thursday. I ordered a taxi, the woman on the phone said “four minutes” before I had the chance to specify a time, and before I knew it they were gone. That was a shame.

Mum and Dad are making another trip to the UK for Christmas, so I should see them then, not that I’m overly enthusiastic about enduring a horribly commercialised British Christmas.

We’ve had thunderstorms lately, and today has seen a welcome drop in temperature. I’m looking forward to everything being back to normal once more.

Family - International travel - Language learning

Mum and Dad’s visit — Part 3

June 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

Our first full day in Belgrade was Mum’s 69th birthday. We visited the impressive fortress, on the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. Outside, as part of the military museum, was an array of tanks and guns from various countries and eras. Given Belgrade’s recent bloody history, it seemed a fitting place to find things that go bang.

It soon became apparent what one of the major highlights of Belgrade would be for me: the Serbian language. As far as I know, all the countries of the former Yugoslavia speak very similar varieties of the same language, which I’ll call Serbian here, because Serbia is where I first encountered it. It has a little over 20 million native speakers, roughly the same number as Romanian. Serbian is written using both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, although there are significant differences between Serbian Cyrillic and Russian Cyrillic. For one, the Serbian variant makes use of the Latin letter J. It also has two letters, Љ and Њ, that are romanised as LJ and NJ respectively, and are equivalent to ll and ñ in Spanish, or lh and nh in Portuguese, or gli and gn in Italian. I was quickly able to read Cyrillic street and shop signs reasonably well, although actually speaking and understanding the language, which is very different from anything I’ve studied before, would take a huge effort. For a start, it has seven grammatical cases, leaving Romanian firmly in the shade.

After much angst, we did in the end find a good restaurant for celebrating Mum’s birthday. We all had something filling and pork-sausagey. We were getting accustomed to terrible service by now, but our waiter (an older bloke) was excellent. The next day we visited the nearby automobile museum, which was brilliant. It had shining examples of makes such the Aero, a Czech-manufactured car that I’d never heard of. We could have done without the yapping, pooing dog that was allowed to roam free the whole time we were there. Later that day a black cloud descended on us, as we worried how we would get back to Romania without a working phone that the bus company could use to contact us. We bought a sim card from the Serbian equivalent of a dairy, but I had no luck getting it to work. I had all kinds of fun and games trying to use Google translate to figure out the Serbian instructions. After dinner, which consisted of pizza slices from a kiosk and a wonderful chocolate dessert, we caught the second half of the thrilling 3-3 draw between Spain and Portugal, the match of the tournament so far.

Dad said he didn’t sleep a wink that night. He was worried that without a phone we’d never get back to Timișoara. He had visions of being stuck on the side of the road in the pouring rain, with the stress levels unbearably high. The next day was Saturday, the phone shops shut in the early afternoon, so we urgently needed a connection, for our sanity as much as anything. The lady at the first phone shop was breathtakingly unhelpful, but we had much better luck at the second shop and were soon up and running at very little expense. Having breathed a huge sigh of relief, we walked through the city, with the intention of visiting the national museum to give us all a better handle on the region’s troubled history. But it was closed, as it has been since 2003. We changed course and reached St Sava’s Temple, which we thought would be spectacular. And old. Instead we found a post-WW2 edifice that had ridiculous amounts of interior scaffolding to keep it from falling to pieces. When we got back to our apartment, we met the old man who gave us a bottle of Serbian schnapps that I’m now working my way through. He made it very clear that he didn’t like Tony Blair.

Family - Life :)

Mum and Dad’s visit — Part 1

June 23, 2018 by 0 Comments

Two weeks ago my parents arrived in Timișoara after a six-hour train journey from Budapest. Meeting them off the train, in what is now my home town, was one of the loveliest things. Two days ago they took a taxi to the airport. Seeing them go was really quite sad. It didn’t help that the taxi came almost immediately after I ordered it, so we weren’t able to properly say goodbye. In between, Dad taught me how to fish (or sort of – there’s still a hell of a lot to learn), Mum rearranged (i.e. hid) various items in my flat, I received a bunch of clothes that I didn’t really want, and we spent five nights in the lively city of Belgrade.

Mum and Dad’s train from Hungary was three-quarters empty and it arrived, surprisingly, bang on time. We walked from the station to their apartment, the same one my aunt and uncle stayed in at the end of May, on the fourth floor of the Communist-era block next door to mine. The entranceway to the building isn’t the most salubrious, but the floor tiles and time-worn stencilled walls give it some charm. The process of tapping in a code to retrieve their apartment key from a box – seemingly by magic – reminded me of the brilliant nineties game show The Crystal Maze. In contrast to the exterior, their apartment was rather nice.

The next day was a hot and relatively lazy one. We bought some fruit and vege from Piața Badea Cârțan, watched the world go by from the local café, and wandered through the surrounding area. Dad took numerous pictures of the figure dancing on a ball atop one of the many decaying buildings – he thought it could make a painting. It’s a beautiful piece of architecture, and it’s amazing that it’s still standing. He was also impressed by the pharmacy building, now also in a state of disrepair – it has housed a pharmacy for all of its existence, and a snake-around-a-spike (officially known as a Rod of Aclepsius) adorns its roof. It was good to see these architectural marvels through somebody else’s eyes. In the afternoon we watched Nadal chalk up yet another French Open title on the 50-something-inch TV in my parents’ apartment, and then Mum cooked a lovely dinner using the food we’d bought from the market and some of my leftover bits and pieces. Unfortunately, after that first evening we ate out, and with Mum that’s always a fraught experience.

On Monday I had a full work day – 8½ hours of teaching – so my parents were left to their own devices. The following day I only had one lesson, in the early evening with Matei, so in the morning I had my first attempt at fishing. After I’d shown an interest, Dad was keen for me to pursue it, and he kindly packed a telescopic rod in his suitcase for me. We were on a canalised or channelised (what is the word?) section of the Bega river, but really I was all at sea. I had visions of landing a ten-pound pike, but only very fleeting ones, and to begin with I was struggling to even cast the line. On Wednesday morning I popped in to the fishing licence place across the river, to pick up some kind of additional permit. I had a good chat with the woman at the desk. When I told her what I do for a job, she and one of the customers each took one of my business cards. She informed me of the various fishing quotas, and when I said I very much doubt they’d come into play for me, we had a good laugh.