New Zealand

Life :) - New Zealand

New Zealand flights booked!

February 11, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

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.

New Zealand - Other sports - Writing a book

The magic of the Cup

January 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Near-biblical rainfall, landslides, homes falling into the sea. That’s what Aucklanders have been dealing with in the last few days. Mum said last night that four months’ worth of rain fell in three hours in places. At least four people have died. I had the usual hell-in-a-handcart stuff from my parents, though I keep agreeing with them more and more; we’ve entered what I’ve already called on this blog a post-optimism world.

It’s weird how I sporadically get interested in various sports. Now it’s FA Cup football. I watched bits of Birmingham’s entertaining 2-2 draw at Blackburn on Saturday – Blues opened the scoring in just the third minute, were 2-1 down immediately after half-time, but 18-year-old Jordan James equalised in the 91st minute, just after he came on as a substitute. What a moment for him and for the supporters who are going through an ugly spell right now – they’re struggling in the league and everybody hates the current owners. The end of the match was marred by racial abuse towards Neil Etheridge, Blues’ Filipino goalkeeper. The replay is tomorrow night at St Andrew’s, Birmingham’s home ground which I visited a few times more than 20 years ago. Yesterday I dipped into Brighton’s 2-1 win over Liverpool, which featured a stunning late winner, then saw a marvellous match between Wrexham (currently outside the league) and Sheffield United (in the second tier), which finished 3-3. The Welsh club were recently taken over by a pair of Hollywood actors. Their kit sponsors are TikTok. I remember Wrexham’s run to the quarter-finals in 1996-97; back then they were sponsored by Wrexham Lager. Alcohol sponsorship has now been banned, so instead we’ve now got endless betting firms, big banks, and the likes of TikTok – collectively they’re doing at least as much harm as booze.

When I watched those games yesterday, my attention wasn’t squarely focused on them – I was working on my dictionary, adding entries and tweaking them here and there. It’s a big effort that I know might be for very little. I’ve had no choice but to my other book – the novel – on the back burner for now.

Language teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Politics

Knowing when to go

January 19, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had another online lesson with that boy who cried. It was hard work – he rarely uttered anything apart from “yes”, “no”, and “I don’t know” – but at least he didn’t cry this time. Later I’ve got that maths lesson again. Yesterday I had a terrible session with the four twins. Having already exhausted all topics with them, I tried a printable domino-style words-and-pictures game that I found online – lots of painstaking printing and sticking – but the game descended into farce because there were too many cards and they were unable to read the words on them; none of them can read in English beyond words like “cat” and “dog”. The rest of the session turned into a load of nothing. It didn’t help that my mood was terrible and my enthusiasm at rock bottom.

Jacinda Ardern has resigned as prime minister of New Zealand. Good decision, I’d say. Most leaders are ego-driven, desperate to retain power at all costs, and they outstay their welcome by years. She dealt admirably with the horrors of the Christchurch mosque shooting, then the initial stages of the pandemic. Had National retained power in 2017, I imagine thousands more New Zealanders would have died of Covid “to keep the economy moving” or some such tripe, and the economy wouldn’t have moved any faster. Quite the opposite, in fact. Set against chaos of Trump and the like, her leadershup was a beacon of calm. Latterly, though, her star has fallen. The disappointment, as I see it, is that Labour won a majority in 2020 – almost unheard of in the MMP system – but have totally failed to use it. Housing is a zillion-dollar disaster. Mental health for many Kiwis continues to be a mess. (Mental health provision got noticeably worse in my time there; here was a chance to reverse that.) My parents are always telling me that local farmers can’t get workers from overseas to do the jobs that Kiwis won’t. I don’t know anything about this Luxon bloke who may well be prime minister by the end of this year, except that he’s probably less of an arse than Judith Collins.

On Tuesday night I watched a football match for the first time in ages. Birmingham City, a.k.a. Blues, a team I saw several times at university, were playing Forest Green Rovers away in the third round of the FA Cup. Forest Green are based in Nailsworth, a town of 5000-odd in the Cotswolds, and the smallest town in England ever to host a league football club. They’re owned by renewable-energy business moguls and everything at the club is fully vegan. During the game, flashing advertising hoardings counted up the number of plastic bottles thrown away, millisecond by millisecond, and other depressing environment-killing stats. Forest Green took the lead with a stunning goal in the eighth minute. Birmingham were terrible in the first half, though I liked their young player Hannibal, mostly because of his name. Their manager must have dished out a bollocking at half-time because they sprang into action and equalised just after the break. The big moment came at 1-1, when Blues’ keeper pulled off a scarcely believable double save. Though the atmosphere was mostly flat – the magic of the FA Cup is nothing like it once was – it was worth watching the game just for those ridiculous saves. Blues soon took the lead and saw out the remainder of the match. Forest Green were unfortunate not to at least force a replay; Birmingham now go to Blackburn in the next round.

Yesterday, before my bad session with the four kids, a fresh breeze blew, and as I was sitting at my desk hundreds of helicopter seeds hit my window before slowly twirling to the ground. At first I thought they were insects. This isn’t normal for mid-January, is it?

Life :) - New Zealand

Seismic times

March 1, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On a snowy last day of February, I’m definitely feeling better. That might just be because the painkillers are kicking in, but I’ll take it. I’m taking a concoction of drugs right now. One of them comes in a partly pink box that looks like it should have a feminine hygiene product inside. Another has a name that sounds like somewhere Putin would like to invade, and consists of tiny amber-coloured pellets. But yes, I’m better. Last Monday, when the lesson with the twins rolled around, I was in pain and really didn’t want anything do with it. Today I managed to complete all my lessons at my desk instead of on the sofa. Tomorrow I’ll have my stomach ultrasound, which I bet won’t show anything.

The Ukraine war is mental, and unbelievably sad. Ukrainians are losing their lives all because of some twisted fucker whose delusions know no bounds. As my brother said, Putin has lost the plot. (He thinks one of his henchmen might take him out.) When I woke up on Thursday, it was like a magnitude-10 earthquake had jolted Europe. I googled Ivano-Frankivsk, a city 150 km from Romania’s border, whose airport had been bombed hours earlier. Google Street View showed a bustling city in summer, with shops and bars and a popular confectionery market.

The war is providing a grisly backdrop to everything. I’m grappling with all these Ukrainian names I’d never heard of before – all these harsh Vs and Ks. I’m not even quite sure how I should be pronouncing Kyiv, the Ukrainian (and therefore accurate) version of the city I’d always called Kiev (the Russian name). Yesterday morning there were at times both Ukrainian and Russian players at my online poker table. Last night Dad was complaining to me about the awful Australian-owned banks (and they really are profit-gouging bastards), and I jokingly suggested that the NZ goverment should kick them out of SWIFT, a system I’d only vaguely heard of a week ago.

Europe is increasingly uniting against evil. (I had serious doubts over this.) Germany finally got on board with sanctions over the weekend, and is now providing weapons to the Ukraine. I must say I liked seeing the rouble plummet to one cent against the US dollar this morning. Roll on half a cent. It’s bad that innocent Russians – many of whom already live in poverty – are going to be hit hard by this, but what’s the alternative?

I bought some shoes today, on the way to the supermarket. They’re leather, blue and brown – well mostly anyway – and made in Romania. A super-rare impulse purchase (and another sign I’m feeling better). They were 130 lei, or about NZ$45. A bargain.

I’m now seriously considering a trip to New Zealand in August. NZ is feeling the full force of Omicron right now, but with such high vaccination rates it should be much less painful than it was (and still is) here. Then normality, we all hope.

Life :) - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Hard to keep in touch…

January 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

What a final that was, all 5 hours and 24 minutes of it. I never imagined Nadal would find himself anywhere near the final, let alone winning from two sets down against Medvedev who is one of the best players on a hard court. I still don’t know how he did it. That game where he dug himself out of a love-40 hole at 2-2 in the third set was the catalyst for his fightback, and you could see Medvedev tire ever so slightly towards the end of that set. There were so many long, draining games in the match, going several deuces. Nadal won less than half the points – in the first set he was completely outplayed, and he got hardly any easy holds until the very last game. Just wow. There it is then, his 21st grand slam in extraordinary circumstances, with Roland-Garros around the corner. The French don’t take kindly to anti-vaxers either.

Last Sunday, on the morning of my trip to the fortresses, I heard from a friend I first met in Wellington back in 2011. She shifted to Auckland not long after that, and then upped sticks and moved to Naseby in Central Otago. I’d sent her some pictures of apartments – I still haven’t made much progress there. It was a huge pleasure to hear from her. To get up and see that message felt great. It’s sad that I’ve fallen out of touch with most of my NZ-based friends, and even some of my extended family, and that hasn’t been for want of trying. I send sporadic emails but don’t get replies, then eventually I give up. People are selfish. They want contacts that will give them results. Tangible benefits. Access to other people who will give them results and tangible benefits. Friendship itself doesn’t cut it. (It doesn’t help that I don’t use social media. Communicating with one person at a time, like in an email, is oh so cumbersome and inefficient.)

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei. I didn’t see him last Saturday because he’d gone with his family to Milan for the long weekend. As you do. My job as a maths teacher is to explain things that are obvious to me but non-obvious to him, and I partly failed to do that, as a result of my inexperience. I’ll revisit the topic at the start of next week’s session, after giving it a lot more thought.

Some good news, I suppose, about my book. I’ve completed my journey through the thousand or so words and expressions that baffle and bemuse Romanians. I still need to put some more meat on the bones in a few of the sections and add one of two appendices. But then what? How will this huge tome (that’s what it is) ever see the light of day? I could go back to the Romanian teacher at the university. She stopped communicating with me too. What is it with people?

Wordle. It’s taken the world by storm, in a way that no puzzle game has since Sudoku back in 2005. If you haven’t heard of it by now, it’s a daily game created by Josh Wardle (hence its excellent name) where you have to guess a five-letter target word. Enter your guess (which must be a real word) and it’ll highlight in green any letters that are in the right place in the target word, while any letters that are in the word but in a different place are coloured yellow. Letters that don’t appear in the word at all are highlighted in grey. Then you try again, until you (hopefully) home in on the final word. This was my attempt today. I think I got lucky:

I average about four guesses. The concept of the game isn’t new, and it’s interesting (and surprising) what takes off and what doesn’t. As someone who has created a whole ton of word and number puzzles in my time, I’m pleased that this has been a success. Why has it blossomed? Well, it’s simple, it’s pleasing on the eye, the coloured grids are shareable on social media (gotta have that), and best of all, you can only play it once a day. A couple of minutes, then gata, as they say in Romanian. The ultimate anti-Candy Crush. It takes you back to the days of internet cafés when you’d pop in for ten minutes to “check your emails” and then return to glorious disconnection.

Poker. Not my best session today, but it’s been a good January. I’ve made $205 this month, and my bankroll is now $1648.

Coronavirus - Life :) - New Zealand

Someone please pull the plug

November 29, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tonight’s tennis was cancelled because the courts were wet following overnight rain; my next outing won’t be until March. I suggest to my singles opponent that we go out for a beer at some point, and he called a friend who (after he’d been to church) picked us up, and in the end there were six of us (and a dog) who went to a bar that served Hungarian beer, including an older couple who joined later. We all needed our Covid certificates. Everybody was really nice, but we were there for what seemed an eternity. Almost two whole football matches played out on the TV, and there was a gap in between. (Poli Timișoara scored twice in the last ten minutes to come back and beat Steaua Bucharest 2-1, then the depressingly rich Paris Saint-Germain also came from behind to beat Saint-Etienne 3-1. I’ve been to Saint-Etienne.) I hit the social wall pretty damn fast in my own language, and in Romanian that happens even sooner. Some interesting conversation, though. One woman said that the five glass monstrosities next to Piața 700 are the ugliest buildings in Timișoara, and it’s hard to disagree with that. One of the guys, the driver, smoked a pipe. The dog really got off on the nicotine. The driver had three beers before getting back in the driver’s seat; the limit in Romania is nil.

We’ve now got the Omicron coronavirus variant to contend with. It appears to be a different beast to anything we’ve seen so far, with dozens of changes to the shape of its spike protein. We can be sure that it’s more transmissible than the previous versions including Delta, but we don’t yet know if it makes people more sick. The WHO skipped over two Greek letters (Nu, because calling the super-scary new variant the Nu variant would have been slightly ridiculous, and Xi, which would have been hilarious but they couldn’t call it that).

My aunt, who visited Timișoara after my brother’s wedding, and whom I’ve always had a lot of time for, has now ventured deep into the rabbit hole of Facebook, sharing any anti-Jacinda material she can get her hands on. Last week she sent my parents a video of a woman’s crazed rant about the supposed damage to the country’s economy that the Covid restrictions are doing. I have no problem with the rant itself. The woman is entitled to her views, even if they’re crazy. The problem is that the bile she spouts is spread throughout her band of followers (like my aunt), people who agree with her already, and they think it’s great. She isn’t changing anyone’s opinion. All she’s doing is making people’s opinions more entrenched, and that’s dangerous. My aunt has sent my parents several Facebook links along the same lines. Dad emailed me to say that Mum might be slowly disappearing down the rabbit hole too. None of this stuff is unique to the political right; I remember “Fuck John Key!” circulating when I lived over there. This morning I listened to part of Kim Hill’s programme where a woman (who was brought up in China) explained why we still don’t know whether the coronavirus arose zoonotically or if it escaped from a lab. She then said that she was lambasted on both sides for her balanced views, and her personal safety was threatened on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikBloodyTok, I wish we could nuke the whole lot.

Yesterday I tried a new fruit for the first time. I bought some scorușe from the market. They’re soft, brown, and a bit smaller than a golf ball. They taste a bit like pears, but with some extra tang, and their texture is mushier. They’d probably go well in a pie. I might make a pie with quinces and scorușe and see what happens.

Friday was a crappy day. We had awful weather, and I had a terrible headache which left me sapped of energy even when the pain had subsided.

I watched the first episode of Squid Game yesterday. Whoa. Not sure I want to watch another.

New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Tennis at various levels

November 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a beautiful cloudless Sunday in Timișoara. I met the British teacher guy in town, where it was packed. The police were trying to enforce mask wearing. We sat outside at a restaurant in Piața Unirii. I only had a beer – I’d already eaten – while he had a sizeable beef salad.

Yesterday I played tennis with that same guy. This time the games and sets came thick and fast, even though we had some long rallies, and from my perspective we finished up at 2-6 6-2 6-2 2-2. In the first set I really struggled on my serve and didn’t come close to winning any of my service games. When your serve isn’t functioning, the rest of your game can often fall apart too, and that’s sort of what happened. Also my opponent was playing well; when he’s in the zone there isn’t an awful lot I can do, serve or no serve. I just have to try and weather the storm. I did bounce back and he started to make more mistakes. An interesting moment came on my opponent’s serve at 0-4 and 15-30 in the third set. He whammed down an ace out of nowhere, and that gave him a visible confidence boost. I did however take out the set on my fourth opportunity – a real bruiser of a final point to conclude the longest game of the day.

A world away from Parcul Rozelor where we played yesterday, there have been two good developments in professional tennis. First, Chinese player Peng Shuai. Her disappearance, after she accused the ex-vice-premier of sexually assaulting her, has been deeply troubling. In a breath of fresh air, players (current and former) and the tennis organisations have spoken out against China. The ATP and WTA have threatened to pull their (highly lucrative) tournaments out of China. The second item of good tennis news came when the Australian Open organisers said in no uncertain terms that it’s no jab, no play, no matter what your ranking is or how many titles you own. Things might get interesting then for Djoković who holds nine Australian Open titles – he’s unvaxed as yet, as far as I know.

When I spoke to my brother yesterday he had a cold. That’s such a rarity for him (unlike me), but there are so many bugs going round in the UK at the moment.

I had four of the most uninspiring poker tournaments I could imagine last night. Got absolutely nowhere in any of them. I shouldn’t complain too much after my two recent wins. My bankroll is $1132. Tennis will soon pack up for the winter and I’ll have less work over Christmas, so I’ll probably get to increase my volume a bit.

Yesterday I read an article about Wellington’s many chairlifts that carry people up hillsides to their (often very expensive) homes. The lifts themselves cost a bomb to install and maintain. They’re a visible part of the landscape around Oriental Bay. Just seeing an article about Wellington did make me slightly homesick (or something-sick; nowhere counts as home for me).

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - New Zealand - Other sports - Tennis

The benefits (perhaps) of big sport

November 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got tennis this afternoon, straight after my lesson with the young couple. It’ll probably be singles again with that super-fit guy. We chatted after last weekend’s game, and he attributed his fitness in part to growing up (and going to school) under communism in the Nadia Comăneci era. Sport was a top priority then, as it simply wasn’t when I grew up in the UK, and isn’t now in 21st-century Romania. Sure, we all did gymnastics and swimming and team sports, but unless you were one of the best at football or cricket, we were pretty much going through the motions. I know I was. We certainly didn’t have scouts visiting schools to eye up the best young talent, as they did in Romania. I was, however, exposed to a higher-priority regime when I spent those six months in New Zealand as a nine-year-old. There were inter-school tennis competitions, inter-school athletics competitions, and cross-country runs. I participated in all of that and hated the lot, even tennis, a sport that I otherwise liked.

I saw two more flats yesterday, both in the same block in the Fabric area, which is to the east of where I live now. The block was designated U4, as in “U4 me”, but I don’t think those places were quite for me. In Romanian, U4 is pronounced “ooh patru“. They weren’t bad apartments at all, but do I know what I’m taking on here? I left feeling more confused than anything.

After my Moderna booster, I felt fine for the rest of the day, but at night I got the shivers and slept no more than three or four hours. The next day I felt a bit tired and groggy, but soon I was back to normal. Some short-term grogginess seemed a small price to pay for the level of protection that the extra jab should give me, especially seeing that I’m in Romania where getting a severe case of Covid is a riskier proposition than it would be in New Zealand, for instance.

Mum and Dad missed out on seeing their one-in-800-year near-total eclipse of a blood-red moon. It clouded over at just the wrong time. I had a chat to them this morning. All is well there, although they have taken on a pretty big project with their new house. I also spoke to my brother, who was on his own – my sister-in-law was attending a conference in Liverpool.

Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Trying to keep up

November 15, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had seven lessons scheduled for Thursday. That would have been a record, but by the Romanian law of low averages it was pretty unlikely that they’d all actually happen. In the end, only four did. The guy who probably didn’t have Covid cancelled, then the new woman cancelled because she’d had a fight with her boyfriend, then I got a message from the twelve-year-old girl’s mum to say that she was ill. In the final case I had no complaints.

Saturday morning was cold, with thick fog. I went to the market in Mehala, which isn’t a million miles from that house I’d looked at the previous day, but didn’t buy anything. When I came back I had my lesson with the young couple, which went fine. I then watched an episode of Black Mirror. Hang the DJ, season four, episode four. I nearly didn’t watch it because I knew it was all about relationships, something I find ever so slightly triggering, but it was great episode and I’m glad I watched it.

After Black Mirror it was time for some poker. A fixed-limit badugi tournament with a $5.50 buy-in and 96 entries. I haven’t run well in that tournament in general, and on multiple occasions I had one foot out of the exit door. But I kept surviving, and when we got down to six players, all my Christmases came at once. I amassed a big stack which I never relinquished, and although we had a protracted short-handed battle, I was able to run out the winner for a profit of $90 in a little under four hours. What a surprise that was. It was my first win in 90 tournaments – that sounds bad, but in the intervening period I had four second places and two thirds. Yesterday, normal service resumed – three tournaments in which I got precisely nowhere. My bankroll is now $1096.

I’ve been listening to End of the Line by the Traveling Wilburys. (When I was younger, I imagined it was Wilberries, a kind of fruit. It’s only one letter away from those wimberries that I picked over the summer.) It’s a great song, and one that reminds me of the simple Twizel house we lived in on Princes Street in Temuka in the winter of ’89, before moving to a place on Richard Pearse Drive. We had no TV, and made do with the radio that was tuned to either 93 Gold or Radio Caroline. We always got the results from races eight, nine and ten. The scratchings and quinellas and trifectas. Racing seemed a big part of Kiwi life back then. I’m pretty sure one of the bedrooms had a waterbed, which were all the rage in the late eighties over there. There was always the pungent smell of chimney smoke, which we never had in the UK.

I played tennis again yesterday. Once again it was singles with the guy of nearly sixty who is like the Duracell bunny. How does he never get tired? I won the first two games, then he won the next three. I edged back in front, and on his serve at 4-5 down, he led 30-0 but I levelled the game at 30-all. The next point was an exhausting long rally, which I won to bring up set point, but I hit long on both the next two points and he dominated the rest of the set. I think that long point ultimately cost me. I was soon in a deep hole at 5-7, 1-4, having lost seven games out of eight. I was struggling physically while he was as fresh as a daisy. I also couldn’t win the important points. He had a killer shot to my backhand corner that I found hard to combat, and he saved plenty of game points with it. Despite the fatigue and sweat, I clung on, and reached 4-4. At 30-all in the next game, I had him pinned to both sidelines before eventually winning the point ten shots after I thought I’d won it. But he played the next three points as if nothing had happened, winning them all. Quite extraordinary. He led 30-0 in game ten to move within two points from victory, but I won the next four points to break him. At 5-5 I held serve from 15-40, but then he held to love to force a tie-break. I won the shoot-out 7-4 and we finished all square, but I was left wondering how somebody of that age could be so fit. I saw that sometimes with the trip leaders on the day tramps I did around Wellington. Is it all in the genes?

Here are some pictures of abandoned Timișoara. There are ex-swimming pools dotted around the city. If you look closely you can see the name of Morărit CILT, an old flour mill.

A sunny afternoon along by the Bega
Buying property - Coronavirus - New Zealand

Step inside (and back in time)

November 14, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Well on Friday morning I had a look at a house in the picturesque Mehala district. An actual house this time, not an apartment, and on 860 m² of land (just over a fifth of an acre). A man in his mid-fifties (maybe; in Romania it’s often hard to tell) with no more than half a dozen teeth and a small yappy dog showed me around. It was going for €135,000 (NZ$220,000), which is right at the limit for me. He told me the place was built in 1968; I would have guessed earlier. An old lady had lived there, perhaps since ’68. The furniture certainly didn’t look any newer than that. I had a short but fascinating tour of a traditional simple Romanian house with all its religious artwork and flowery embroidered decorations. “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked, expecting a simple “It’s just here”, but instead I got “There isn’t one.” In fact there was no running water inside at all. He then showed me outside, where there was a tap, a shed which I think contained a long drop, a lot of grapevines and plenty of overgrown grass. The place was beautiful in its own way but getting it plumbed and generally into shape would have needed time and money beyond anything I could face. I thanked the man, explaining that I was an English teacher, and apologising for my rudimentary Romanian. I’m probably better off with an apartment, but the modern ones tend to have an all-in-one kitchen and living room, which is a non-starter for me. I have to keep persevering. Here are some photos that I took of the place.

I had a low-level argument with Mum this morning. (My parents are fine, by the way.) She said that the vaccination rate in and around Geraldine was poor, because of all the weed smokers and what have you. No it isn’t, Mum. I’ve seen the map with the figures, so stop making false assumptions that suit your Jacinda-is-bad agenda! You’re at 90% first dose and 80% second dose, which is pretty damn impressive when you consider that there’s currently no virus on the whole of the South Island. Sure, when you explore the map, there are pockets of Northland and the West Coast where take-up isn’t great, but even then the disparities aren’t as stark as in the US.

In the early hours of Thursday morning two people were killed in a fire at a Covid hospital, Romania’s fourth of the pandemic. This country, which still has no functioning government as far as I know, is a disaster zone right now. Thankfully, case numbers are coming down fast, and (anecdotally) I’m not hearing as many ambulances as I was a month ago. By Christmas the pressure on hospitals should have eased, but with such low vaccination rates I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a new spike in early 2022.

Last Sunday there was a protest outside the City Hall. A lot of noise for only a hundred or so people. There was a large banner saying that vaccines, masks and social distancing were against God’s law. Please, make it stop. (Religion is to blame for many thousands of Romanian deaths.)

After tennis last Sunday, my sister-in-law sent me a message, asking if I could help with her sister’s boyfriend’s maths problem. It was more of a civil engineering or surveying problem, with co-ordinates and degrees. I spent a chunk of Monday on it, and sent her back five scanned pages of pencil. I actually quite enjoyed doing some maths for change. I couldn’t remember the last time I had to calculate a sin or a cos.

Next time I’ll post some pictures of abandoned Timișoara.