It’s quite cold around the motu today and I’ve finally been to the wharepaku – what a relief that was. I hope my command of Te Reo can attain a solid B2 level by the time I leave. This morning I went with Dad into Peel Forest and down the Rangitata – he was out of things to paint. There was less snow on the Four Peaks than we expected. The road became icy though, so we turned around.
Yesterday we saw my aunt and uncle who visited Timișoara five years ago, and also dropped in my aunt – the third and last wife of my uncle who died in 2014. This morning one of my many cousins popped in briefly on the way to the airport in Timaru. I hadn’t seen her for a decade or more.
Loud drilling is taking place as I write this.
Sixto Rodriguez, star of the wonderful film Searching for Sugar Man, has died at the age of 81.
Mum and Dad’s placePeople playing croquet in Geraldine DomainA sadly deceased monarch butterflyThe Orari RiverThe church at Peel Forest
What a trip. It started early on Friday morning when I took the tram to the train station. I had sinus pain and was sleep-starved from the steaming hot night before. How will I possibly survive this? My train to Budapest was delayed by half an hour, and that was just the beginning. Opposite me on the train was a man who’d been travelling with his large dog for four days. It was a cross between a golden retriever and a Siberian husky, and totally out of its happy place in such hot weather, poor thing. We had longish stops on both sides of the border – at Curtici and Lőkösháza – for passport checks, and things went properly pear-shaped soon after that. At Békéscsaba our sweaty air-con-free train went back and forth half a dozen times over 45 minutes so that a new engine could be connected, then we found out that there’d been a storm in Budapest the night before and our train would only go as far as Szolnok and we’d have to change. We lumbered on to Szolnok, and then neither me nor the dog-man nor anyone else had a clue which train to get on next. I got on a modern train whose destination was supposedly Budapest Keleti – the main train station – but had to get off at the small town of Maglód which I couldn’t see on any map. From Maglód I had to get two buses and the metro, then finally a bus to the airport. Trees had been uprooted in the storm – it looked like what happened in Timișoara in 2017. I’d given myself absolutely bloody ages to reach the airport, and that was just as well – the delays added up to three hours.
My online check-in hadn’t worked, so I wanted to get to the desk ASAP to hopefully get myself sorted. The lady at the desk was lovely. She had a good laugh at my itinerary, even showing it to her colleague. “Look what he’s doing. Going to Christchurch! Four flights! I haven’t seen this for months.” She asked me if had an electronic weeza for New Zealand. Huh? Then I remembered my Hungarian student who had a wery difficult time with Vs and Ws. I said I had a New Zealand passport so I didn’t need a weeza, then she checked my baggage right through to Christchurch and I was good to go. Getting to the airport in the first place was a such a hassle that I felt shattered – concerningly so – before I’d even stepped on the plane. Budapest Airport was remarkably unbusy. My flight, like almost all flights departing that evening, was delayed by over an hour and a half. My connection would now be pretty damn tight. The two-hour flight to Istanbul was fine. I got off the plane and onto the tarmac where I boarded the shuttle bus to the vast terminal. Inside I saw the departure board with my flight to Singapore – due to leave in half an hour – flashing red. Shit. I ran as fast as I could – pathetically slow, actually – to my gate which of course was right at the end of the vast concourse.
Istanbul to Singapore (ten and a bit hours) was a good flight. I was impressed with Turkish Airlines. They run their 777s with nine seats per row in a 3-3-3 configuration (most airlines do ten in a 3-4-3). What’s more, I had a spare seat next to me, so even though I was alarmingly close to the baby zone I got maybe four hours of shut-eye. The second half of the flight wasn’t much fun as I battled sinus pain and struggled to get enough drinking water. The days of flight attendants coming up and down the aisles with trays full of water or juice are over – now they create an artificial night to cut down on their workload. After our approach to the runway was caught by a camera under the plane, we landed in Singapore at 6pm – it didn’t feel like any time on the clock at all to me. With three-plus hours until my next flight boarded, I lay on a chaise longue and watched the sunset, which when you’re one degree north of the equator happens quickly. I was over half-way there, and out of Europe for the first time in seven years. I took the Skytrack train to another terminal, then got on the plane to Melbourne. Slightly annoyingly, there was a direct flight to Christchurch that left just before my flight. My flight to Melbourne was on an incredibly quiet A350 – I’m talking about the plane itself rather than the people on it. During those seven hours, I saw the second Avatar film – such an expansive film isn’t really worth it on a tiny seat-back screen. I only had a short stop in Melbourne before the final leg of my marathon journey – just over three hours to Christchurch. The plane was no more than 60% full and the service was exceptional, although when “Welcome aboard Flight 212 to Ōtautahi” came over the PA, I wondered momentarily if I’d got on the right plane.
I had great flights overall, but everything leading up to Budapest put me on the back foot, and my sinus problem was a huge handicap. Finally, at 3pm yesterday, I’d got through customs without having to pay hundreds of dollars for a rogue banana, then Mum met me in the arrivals lounge and we joined Dad in the car. It felt good to be back in New Zealand, and obviously seeing Mum and Dad again was quite wonderful. Waves of tiredness came over me on the drive to Geraldine. My parents’ place is homely and character-heavy, but all the work – now happening in earnest – would be beyond overwhelming to me. We had sausages and chips for dinner and I held out until nine before going to bed. I was out like a light and to my complete surprise I got ten hours.
I’ve managed to stay awake all day today – I’m coping much better than I imagined. Mum played golf today – it’s weird being back in a land of golfers – and Dad and I went for a walk up the Downs and through the beautiful Talbot Forest reserve, nicely done up with a new walkway. It was lovely to see the totaras and hear the sound of bellbirds, tuis and fantails.
My parents are staying in Moeraki. This morning (my time) they called me from the hotspot in Hampden to wish me a good trip. The signal was dodgy as ever. They’ll be picking me up in Christchurch on Monday afternoon.
It’s my last full day before I jet off. I’ve made these sorts of trips before without batting an eyelid, but this time it all feels like a bigger deal. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, maybe it’s because I haven’t done anything like this for seven years and the world isn’t the same place now, or maybe it’s the reactions I get from other people. New Zealand is unimaginably far off most Romanians’ mental maps. Few of them could locate the country on a real map of the world, even one that actually shows New Zealand. When it’s stinking hot (like it is right now) and I open up a weather app that says it’s currently one degree in Geraldine, it doesn’t compute. How can it be both winter and night-time? The US and Canada certainly do feature, however, and this morning I dropped in on my neighbour above me, who told me she (or some member of her family) had just booked a flight to Canada for next Friday, and she’ll be gone for five months.
I managed to keep today free of lessons. My last lesson before I go – my 614th of the year – was an online session last night with a woman who broke her ankle two weeks ago playing tennis. The one before that was with a woman I started with way back in 2017. Since then our lessons have been off and on, and two years ago she gave birth to a girl. Last night’s meeting with her was on Skype; she was at her parents’ place in a small town. It was a traditional house that her grandparents had built – the family house, to be passed down through generations, is a feature of Romanian life – and it seemed to be overrun by animals of all sorts. My student is lovely, and easy to build a rapport with, but she lacks the attention to detail required to really improve. She’s been at about the same level for years. For example, the word “freight” came up on numerous occasions last night because she works in logistics. The first time, she pronounced it like “fright”. It could logically be pronounced that way, if you consider height, but it isn’t, so I corrected her, emphasising that “fright” is a different word. But despite my best efforts she kept on pronouncing it “fright” regardless, and I gave up. I expect that if I’m still teaching her in 2029, I’ll still get messages from her saying “I will late 2 minutes”.
Yesterday was Ziua Timișoarei, the 104th anniversary of when Banat – the region where I live – officially became part of Romania. In the gap between my two pairs of lessons I met Dorothy and we chatted for an hour in one of the cafés in Piața Victoriei – inside, to get out of the heat.
My bags are now packed. I’ve used up half my 30 kg allowance and I’m wondering what the hell I’ve missed.
Update: In tonight’s Muzicorama, the big highlight for me was Paul Young.
The Rose Garden this morningA volleyball court, where the European youth finals were played, outside the Opera House
I’ve got the plumber here for the third day running. He’s a really nice guy, and he’s doing a good job as far as I can tell. But with the exception of my students who are confined to one room, I’m used to having this place to myself. He has to constantly flit between all the rooms to replace the old heaters, and I can’t relax. Not his fault, obviously. Nor was it his fault that he locked me in on Wednesday night. When he left I was giving an online lesson. He locked the front door behind him with the spare key I’d given him, turning the key twice. When I tried to leave at 9pm, I couldn’t. I found out that if you turn the key twice, whoever is inside can’t open the door. Before Wednesday I had no idea about that. (I live by myself. There isn’t normally a ‘someone else’ to lock the door behind them.) Thankfully there was no fire that night – my only option would have been to jump – and when he came back the next morning I was a free man again. This place is now a complete pigsty, and of course there’s the noise too. I’m grateful for the thunderstorm we had in the middle of last night; it has (temporarily) taken the edge off the temperature, so I could comfortably escape for a bit earlier today. I think (hope!) he won’t come back again tomorrow, and will start getting everything piped up on the 24th when he comes back from his break. Wednesday was an expensive day – I forked out 11,645 lei (£2000, or NZ$4100) on all the materials. I’ll give the plumber 2000 lei today, and the remainder (a little over 2000 lei, I think) when he finishes the job.
This morning I spoke to my parents from the café next to the market. It was 10:15 and I was the only person not drinking beer or whisky. Their builders had had the day off; it was the newfangled Matariki public holiday. (I always get that word muddled with tamariki, which means ‘children’ in Maori.) Matariki doesn’t shine very brightly in their part of the country, though I’m sure people don’t mind the extra day off in the middle of winter.
I read a couple of articles this morning on the local news website. The first was about a musical instrument called a duduk which will be accompanying an organ at an upcoming festival. My first thought was, ah, it’s Indonesian or Malay. I thought that because on all those Garuda and Malaysia Airlines flights I took many years ago, I saw the native word duduk – which meant ‘seat’ or ‘sit’ – all the time. It’s a distinctive word. Your life vest is under your duduk. Please fasten your duduk belt. Maybe the duduk is similar to an organ, and has that name because you have to sit down to play it. But no, it’s actually an Armenian woodwind instrument.
The second article was about the International Maths Olympiad which had just taken place in Japan. Romania finished an impressive fourth of the 112 countries who took part, behind (in order) China, the US, and South Korea. (New Zealand came 64th.) Maths olympiads are a really big deal in Romania – they’re treated a bit like American spelling bees – and some teenagers spend many hours priming themselves for them. (The test/exam takes 4½ hours, by the way. Are you allowed to pop out for a pee?) So I’m not surprised that Romania did so well. Each national team consisted of six students, and (this is the bit that blew me away) 59 of the 60 participants from the top ten countries were male. You expect a skew towards boys – they have a thing for largely pointless competitiveness – but that stat is just nuts. An important takeaway is that just because Romania did well in this olympiad thingy, Romanians aren’t necessarily good at maths as a whole. It was nice when Andy Murray won his three grand slams, but it didn’t make Britain any better at tennis.
I’ve just had a marathon – 81-minute – Skype call with my parents.
We spent the first part of our call discussing the latest shocking news, that my Wellington-based cousin has cancer in her jaw. My parents had noticed something was up when they met her at their tragically young relative’s funeral in late April, but never imagined it was cancer. Googling “jaw cancer” makes for sobering reading. Jaw cancer is rare and doesn’t exist per se; it nearly always starts somewhere else in the mouth and spreads to the jaw, meaning it’s usually in an advanced stage. The prognosis can’t be good. On Wednesday she’ll have an operation to remove flesh from her jaw and replace it, probably from her arm. I must send my cousin a message, but what do you say?
A good half-hour of our chat was spent discussing life admin. It’s making my parents’ lives a misery. They must get rid of both their flats in the UK. They must move to somewhere far simpler as soon as the building work on their current place is finished. They must do things that are financially sub-optimal, just to simplify their lives. Seeing them buckle under the weight of all this crap is upsetting for me, especially at a time when I’ve been overwhelmed by it all myself.
Yesterday I had my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița. When I turned up for the maths lesson, Matei’s father told me that the British school is hiring a maths teacher. I very much doubt I’d get the job anyway because I have no experience of teaching in a school, but if I did I’d have to Get Involved and coach football and heaven knows what else, and um, yeah, I’d have nice long holidays but no thanks.
After my lessons we were supposed to have the latest edition of the English Conversation Club, this time at my place, but just about everybody was away. Sanda, who ran the club in its previous incarnation, showed up at five. We chatted about wedding traditions and the word “venue”, and I gave her a Kiwi vocab matching game which she was somehow fascinated by. Then at 6:20 another woman, Ramona, turned up. She had lived some time in the US, and spoke English pretty well. At one point we discussed silent-b words: “subtle”, “debt”, “doubt”, and words ending in -mb such as “bomb” and “lamb”. Ramona told me, and I get this a lot, that “You don’t pronounce the b in doubt because you’re British. Sorry, but I learned American English and in America they pronounce it.” No, no, no, no, no. I may be British, but I’m also a teacher and I’ve taken the time to learn about pronunciation in different English-speaking countries, I also watch American films occasionally, and believe me, they don’t.
At seven, Sanda said she was going to the open-air museum to see Festivalul Etniilor, where performers based in the Banat region, but with different ethnicities, sang and played and danced. After tennis was cancelled because of the waterlogged courts, I decided to join her. There were Germans (Swabians or șvabi), Ukrainians, Serbians, Aromanians and Gypsies (Roma). It was a riot of colour as all the performers were dressed in their traditional costumes. The event was free and completely non-commercialised, unlike the much more publicised Flight Festival also taking place this weekend. The star of the show, Damian Drăghici with his group Damian & Friends, came on later. In the past he’s been a supporting act for the likes of Joe Cocker and James Brown. Towards the end he played the nai (a traditional panflute); the last song of the evening was Ciocârlia (the Lark), a very traditional Romanian tune – I much preferred last night’s version to the one in the link. I really enjoyed the evening; well, at least I did after the start – I was starving but grabbed a large langoș from a kiosk quite a way from the stage.
The GypsiesThe blind pianistThe flower stalls at the market, still open at 10:30 last night
I made a summer pudding for yesterday’s club which barely happened, and still have most of it. (We also discussed the word “pudding”. When I was growing up, we never used “dessert”. “Pudding”, or simply “pud”, covered anything that you ate after your main meal. For me, “pudding” sounds about nine times tastier than “dessert”.) The main benefit of yesterday’s “event” was that I made me tidy up the kitchen, living room, and main bathroom.
So I met the guy in the McDonald’s car park again and went with him to the mall. He was more friendly this time. When we got to the mall though and it became apparent that I didn’t actually have the equivalent of 2000 euros – almost 10,000 lei – in cold hard cash, his mood quickly turned sour. He accepted a bank transfer, but wanted it done there and then, and the sum was above the limit set by the banking app. My bank even has a branch at the mall that’s open on Sundays, but they wouldn’t allow me to withdraw that amount at the desk. The guy then got angry with me for not sorting all of this out beforehand, and at that point I decided to walk away. He asked me for 100 lei for wasting his time, so I gave him 50 and was relieved to get out of there relatively unscathed. Like so many Romanian men, he resorted to sheer aggression to get what he wanted. One of the guys from tennis recently lamented the “softness” of young people who live in cities. “They’re so much more aggressive in the country.” Aggression is seen as a positive attribute here. Well, this guy’s aggression cost him a sale. There’s one more car I’m interested in, and if nothing comes of that I might wait until I get back from New Zealand.
Last week there was a fire in a hostel in Wellington, just a stone’s throw from where I used to live. It was almost certainly arson, and at least five people were killed. The building had no sprinklers – amazingly, given how stringent New Zealand’s safety regulations tend to be across the board, it was exempt from them. Very sad and a total failure on a number of levels, but to put it into perspective, fatal fires are probably a weekly occurrence in Romania.
I’m just about to meet Mark in town. Apparently there’s a “festival” of overpriced “street food” going on. It’s such a nice day; it’s bound to be heaving there.
Today has been a catch-up day after a tiring week. Yesterday I had a pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița followed by a 90-minute one at home, then I went to the second meeting of the English Conversation Club to give a presentation on New Zealand. I’d had to prepare the talk and also give a translation into Romanian because one of the women in the audience (of four!), whom I’ve started teaching, knows very little English at this point. I went on for 20-odd minutes and could have gone longer. I also prepared a Kiwi vocab list – chocka, crook, dairy, Eftpos, feijoa, heaps, jandals, munted, OE, pom, she’ll be right, stoked, tiki tour, togs, wops, and more. One of the women found this list fascinating, especially the bit about chips meaning both hot chips and cold chips. A young bloke knew about the All Blacks and the haka, but otherwise people knew very little. New Zealand is off the map to most Romanians. (It’s literally off the map to many people, it seems.) One woman was amazed to learn that there exists a side of the world with reversed seasons. Skiing in August? You having a laugh?
Plenty of work for the rest of the week too, and not nearly enough sleep. I felt pretty good though, for a number of reasons. We had good weather (that today has turned sour). My shipment of second-hand clothes arrived. I got my bike fixed (again, at a cost of nearly 300 lei, even more than I expected). I felt the eager anticipation of getting on the road and seeing more of this amazing country, the place I now call home. And the biggie – lately I’ve stopped feeling blasé about what I did by coming to Romania. It’s nothing to be blasé about, is it? Coming to a place where I don’t know a soul and can hardly communicate, to do a job I’ve barely dabbled in before and do it full-time. Utterly batshit mad, on the face of it. But I did it, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Before I came here, people were incredulous. Why Romania? Why not do what thousands of other native speakers do and teach in tried-and-trusted Japan? Or Korea? No no no. Precisely because of the thousands of other teachers. I’d have been part of a teaching farm. Competing against people better than me and feeling like a failure again. Sod that. Romania was blissfully off the map. After 6½ years it’s still just me doing this, in a city the size of Wellington. I’ve got this whole wonderful place to myself, which is utterly batshit mad. Should I put my prices way up? I do think about it. On Thursday one of my students – a teacher – was about to go to Greece for a teaching conference. She showed me the programme, chock-full of life-sucking buzzwords and acronyms. Look what I’ve escaped, I thought.
Tomorrow I’ve got my appointment to get my British driving licence converted to a Romanian one. If everything is deemed to be in order, they should give me a temporary licence to tide me over until I get the proper one in the post, and I’ll look at buying one of those Dacias.
My parents are staying in Moeraki for four days. Just up the coast is Hampden, the village with a great fish and chip shop and a wi-fi hotspot which they called me from last night, luckily after I’d finished work. The morning sky was a brilliant blue, as was their shiny, shapely new electric vehicle. Seeing that sky made me really look forward to getting over there. Five months away. Earlier Dad almost got wiped out in a Pak ‘n’ Save car park. He was pushing a trolley when an old lady went full throttle in reverse, ripping the trolley out of Dad’s hand, and slammed into two cars on the edge of the car park. Dad’s hand was hurt in the process, but a few inches or a split second this way or that and he’d have ended up under the car. Such is our perilous existence. The driver was unscathed (thankfully she was going backwards); it sounds like she wrote off three cars, but it could easily have been catastrophic. The incident was caught on camera; it took 30 seconds for staff to appear on the scene.
Dad has had several narrow escapes now. No such dramas here, though at times it feels like it. On Tuesday morning I went to the immigration office because my residence permit still shows my old address, and getting it updated (which I should have done months ago) might help me with my Barclays debacle. As soon as I got there, a middle-aged man said (in English), “Why are these places so fucking disgusting?” He was Mexican, and with his Romanian-born wife, whom he’d met in Germany, and their daughter. His wife and daughter were summoned to some office or other, and he and I had a chat. He wasn’t a fan of Romania at all. He compared the country to his native Mexico – a similar standard of living, he said, but services like immigration work much better over there. The immigration office is horrible, I agree, but I think I’d rather be living somewhere largely free of drug cartels in a city where I can walk around safely, day or night. Timișoara, touch wood, is a remarkably safe city. At one point, a border police van pulled up outside, and two Middle Eastern-looking handcuffed men got dragged in. The place was very busy, and after hanging around there for an hour, it was clear that I wouldn’t get anywhere. In the afternoon I tried again, and this time I met a Romanian guy of around sixty who told me to use the app instead of wasting hours in the office. He was extremely helpful (bizarrely, he actually seemed to enjoy this stuff) but when I got home and tried to use the app I had more questions than answers.
Yesterday morning I had a two-hour lesson scheduled for eight. I started with him last week, and I tried calling him the night before to confirm, but got no reply. (He’s twenty and a new student – exactly the sort of person liable to forget or just not be bothered.) If he didn’t come, I’d get the “opportunity” to go back to the immigration office. Should I go? Eight o’clock rolled around. He won’t turn up, will he? Then at 8:05 the intercom beep went off, to my relief. It was him. We had a productive session, I got paid, and the “opportunity” to deal with life admin was taken away from me. I wonder how I’d be managing right now if I still had the earthquake business in Wellington to contend with. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I had three lessons this morning, and I still have three more this afternoon and evening. This is shaping up to be my busiest week for some time.
At around 5pm yesterday, a 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck about 170 km east of here, at a depth of 15 km. I didn’t feel it, but many in Timișoara did, and I think the recent scenes from Turkey and Syria spooked some Romanians more than normal. Yes, earthquakes are common in Romania, mostly in Vrancea in the south-east. About 1600 people were killed in the 1977 Vrancea quake, which Ceaușescu took advantage of by clearing out swaths of Bucharest to build even more brutalist concrete blocks. There’s often talk of building codes and yellow stickers which is all hauntingly familiar to me.
It’s an absolute mess – once again – in New Zealand’s North Island. The floods caused by Cyclone Gabrielle have displaced thousands, destroyed homes, and cut off whole towns. I worked for a water consultancy company twenty years ago; we produced maps that were fascinating in their way, delineating the extend of flooding at various levels of likelihood: once every 5 years, then 10, 25, 50, 100 and 200. Then there was a “climate change” line that blew everything else out of the water, so to speak. A 1-in-200-year event would be more like a 1-in-2, if the doom scenario came to pass. It already has. I was pleased to see James Shaw, the minister for climate, give such an impassioned speech in parliament.
I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos on cities (mostly American and Canadian ones) and public transport. One word that keeps coming up is stroad – a hybrid of a street, which has shops and bars and other stuff that people actually want to visit, and a road, whose purpose is to transport people from one place to another. A stroad tries to be a street and a road, and fails at both. Stroads, with their mega-center malls and drive-thru everything, are all over America and Canada. They’re depressing places if you’re in a car – you’re constantly stopping – and even more depressing if you’re not in a car. When I watched the videos I thought how I often found myself on one of sprawling Auckland’s soul-crushing stroads – Wairau Drive or whatever it was called. Wellington seemed almost free of them. Romania is pretty stroad-free I thought, until I suddenly realised something when I was cycling to my maths lesson on Saturday morning with the temperature hovering around minus 6. I cycled past Iulius Mall, which now has what the videos call a lifestyle centre (ugh), then went down the two-kilometre-long Calea Lipovei until I hit the roundabout at the edge of Dumbrăvița. Hey, now I’m on a stroad. There you’ll find a big supermarket that existed six years ago, and the Galaxy shopping centre that certainly didn’t. It’s already a big choke point, but now they’re also building a drive-thru McDonald’s. Just what we all need.
On Saturday I went back along the stroad again – all of it this time, because I was meeting the English guy Mark who lives at the end of the four-kilometre stroad and down a long, muddy, unpaved road where nothing is more than five years old. I think that would mess me up mentally. We, and the two dogs he and his girlfriend now have, went in his car to a village called Bogda, 45 minutes away. In the village was a camp that was used by schools and had clearly flourished in communist times, but was now abandoned like so much else around here. There was a good walkway and we trekked along and back with the dogs. It was a bit higher up and there was snow on the ground. I struggled with sinus pain, especially as we got back to the car, but subsided and when I got back home I felt much better after all that exercise. In fact I’m a bit better all round now.
I played poker yesterday for the first time in a while, and made $41 thanks to my first ever outright win in five-card draw. Here are some pictures.
The abandoned camp buildings and bandstandThis well is still functionalSome street artThe stroad
I found the early part of the week a struggle, but have bounced back since. I think the trick is recognising that life admin is a bit of a challenge for me, and if my less urgent tasks spill over into the following day or even week, that’s nothing to beat myself up over.
I’ve been trying to book flights to New Zealand today, all the time longing for the days (and places) of travel agents who could actually help you. I did visit two agents today, but the antipodes were alien to both them and whatever screens they were looking at. It wasn’t their fault, but their computers really did say no, at least for even a semi-reasonable price. I did eventually find a Turkish Airlines ticket online for just under £1400, but it wouldn’t let me book because it was over my online limit. I’ll try and get through to my New Zealand bank this evening and see if I can get that limit lifted.
Yesterday lunchtime I had pizza in the centre of town with the dictionary woman and another lady who speaks English at a high level and used to have lessons with me. That gave me a welcome, stress-free break in the middle of a busy day of lessons. They want to restart the English conversation club which was a success before it broke up ten years or so ago.
I’ve found two interesting YouTube channels of late. One is called CityNerd, and is all about urban planning and the depressing dominance of the car in North America. The other is called Lord Spoda, and features a guy who visits ghost towns – or close to it – far from any interstate. I enjoyed this video – if enjoy is exactly the word – of half a dozen once-thriving towns in Texas. Now it’s tumbleweed stuff. What names these places have. Motley County is delightful, as the narrator says. Paducah, named after the much larger place in Kentucky that I actually visited in 2015. Rhymes with Temuka. Quitaque, pronounced “kitty-kway”. Turkey. Yes, Turkey. And then there’s the pretty ghastly Floydada.
There have been hellish scenes in Turkey and Syria all week following Monday morning’s earthquake. Tens of thousands dead, and now great anger.
Update: I’ve just successfully booked my flights. I’m leaving Budapest on 5th August, arriving in Christchurch on 7th August and staying until 8th September. There are three stops, in Istanbul, Singapore and Melbourne, and there’s also the business of getting to Budapest. I didn’t expect to feel so excited at making an online booking, but I was practically jumping up and down for a couple of minutes after I got the confirmation.
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