New Zealand

Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Politics

Missing NZ (and more US election talk)

September 9, 2020 by 0 Comments

The guy in Austria just cancelled his lesson 45 minutes before we were due to start. No sorry or anything. He’s a nice bloke and we have productive lessons, but when it comes to reliability he’s becoming a pain in the butt. The lessons with the woman in the north of Romania – we have two a week – are going well. My Romanian has improved to a point where I can handle beginner students, even online.

I spoke to Mum and Dad yesterday. They were about to head off to Moeraki for three days. I miss them a lot. I even miss the journey down there from Geraldine, through Oamaru and perhaps a stop at Kakanui, seeing penguins and seals, going to the pub there, and maybe getting fish and chips in Hampden or on the way back. It would be great to visit Central Otago again. I went there with my parents in 2014 – it’s quite a magical part of the country. Mum says we’re unlikely to meet before 2022, no matter what side of the world that happens to be.

Yesterday Dad said that America could enter a civil war if Trump is re-elected. Crunch time is approaching. Every poll of the country or a swing state is being met with delight or despair from the sorts of people who follow these things. And then there’s the geeky (but important) analysis. Is it a partisan poll? What is the margin of error? Does the pollster weight for education? (This was a big problem in 2016. Educated people are more likely to respond to polls. They are also more likely to vote Democratic. Four years ago, most pollsters didn’t take this into account, so their samples were skewed a couple of points to the left of the nation.) Yesterday a Florida poll showing Trump and Biden tied 48-48 got a lot of attention. Florida is a huge state. It has bucketloads of electoral votes (29) and tends to march to the beat of its own weird drum. The large Cuban population tend to lean Republican. It’ll be one of the first states to report on election night, so we’ll get a good idea of how the election will pan out (perhaps days or weeks later) by watching the Florida returns. Pennsylvania (20 votes) is also of massive importance.

It’s totally crazy that states allocate all their electoral votes to the winner, no matter how close the vote is. (See Florida – again – in 2000.) Or, at least, 48 states do. The two exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, where two votes are given to the statewide winner, and one to the winner of each congressional district, of which Maine has two and Nebraska three. This could be crucial in one of Nebraska’s congressional districts, centred on Omaha, the biggest city. It’s much more Democratic than the state as a whole, and there are non-crazy scenarios where that single electoral vote could put the Dems over the top, 270-268. (Although if it’s that close, prepare for court cases and frankly dangerous behaviour from Trump.) As for Omaha, there’s a lovely song by Counting Crows called Omaha. Released in the mid-nineties, it evokes a simpler time.

There’s plenty of Brexit news again. The government are just being extremely irresponsible now. There’s not much else to say, except for I didn’t vote for this.

We’re having beautiful, and quite hot, weather. There’s a string of temperatures in the low 30s stretching out as far as the forecast goes.

Coronavirus - Life :) - New Zealand

Certainty is overrated

March 11, 2020 by 0 Comments

The guy who invited me to go up the mountain came for a lesson this evening. There’s currently two feet of snow up there, so things might be interesting, shall we say. I don’t think we’ll go up Țarcu this time. Perhaps we’ll just potter about in the snow, or play that inscrutable Hungarian card game. Hatvan. That means sixty.

Another 168 deaths from coronavirus in Italy today. The whole country of 60 million plus is now locked down, as if it were a war zone. In Romania, chaos might just be around the corner. A dozen new cases were reported today, taking the total to 29. I’ve heard there might be two strains of the virus, where Italy has been struck by the worse form, which we will undoubtedly get too. Kids here seem quite happy with the situation: they’ve all been given eight days off school, and that could well be extended. This morning Dad called me; he and Mum seemed almost resigned to being stuck in the Southern Hemisphere for winter.

I’m being seriously hassled now to sign the agreement to sell our apartment block in Wellington. This is now urgent. Are you having difficulties because you’re overseas? Some of the other owners are overseas, and they’ve managed, so why haven’t you? Maybe I just don’t want to sign because I think it would be utter madness for me to do so. Maybe I don’t like the idea of guaranteed shit, and would prefer the chance, however remote, of some unshit.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

It’s 2020 but not everybody can see clearly

January 2, 2020 by 0 Comments

My parents called me to say they’d spent the first day of the twenties shrouded in smoke from Australia, with only outlines of the mountains visible on a sunny day. Geraldine is just over 2000 km, or 1300 miles, from the West Island. That’s a long way. By comparison, from here to London is 1050 miles. The fires have long since reached apocalyptic levels. Six million hectares of land have been burnt since the start of the season – an area a quarter of the size of Romania. Hundreds of millions of animals have succumbed, either directly or indirectly. People are fleeing to beaches to escape the flames. Life is happening under a permanent solar eclipse, and it’s happening all over the country, not just in a localised area. Their prime minister has his head either up his arse or in the sand. There’s no rain in sight. This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Last night I ate dinner at my normal time and then took the bus to Matei’s place. When I got there at around nine I was greeted with mountains of food that I hadn’t expected at all. At around eleven, people filed out into the garden where they’d lit a fire. Midnight came around quite quickly. As the clock ticked around to the new year, they had Abba’s Happy New Year playing, and that was a good choice: “It’s the end of a decade / In another ten years’ time / Who can say what we’ll find / What lies waiting down the line / In the end of eighty-nine”. Quite prophetic really; the western world changed beyond belief in the eighties. There’s even a line in there about every neighbour being a friend, but we went backwards on that score. By 12:30 I’d had enough, but I couldn’t get away from all the meat and rum and whisky and having to talk and listen. Where do you all get your stamina from? We then had our second short-lived power cut of the night. They’d also had a water outage earlier in the day – they said it gave them flashbacks to the Ceaușescu era. I hoped the power would stay off, but no such luck. One-thirty. They were still going. Eating, drinking, making jokes. Am I really that weird? At this point I’d have much rather been at home than there – It wasn’t remotely close – but I couldn’t easily escape. At around two I finally got away. I mentioned something about taxis, and Matei’s mother called me an Uber. I’d got through the whole of the 2010s without ever Ubering (or Airbnb-ing for that matter), but two hours into the new decade I found myself in the back of an Uber car. When I arrived, I opened my wallet to pay the driver, but apparently Matei’s mum had already paid via her app. As I said, I’d never taken an Uber before. Next time I’ll know. How Uber works, and how Romanian New Year’s Eve parties work, so I can pace myself better. I don’t want to miss out on these experiences. I just want to manage them, and who knows, maybe one day even enjoy them.

We’re at last back in a decade that actually has a name. The twenties. I wonder what, if anything, will be the decade’s defining features. Will there be twenties music and twenties hairstyles and twenties parties? I guess not. Society is so much more divided now. In the UK for instance, comedy, music, TV (four channels!) and culture in general used to unite everybody, even people who didn’t like it. Now the UK, perhaps since it hosted the Olympics in 2012, seems to be culturally dead. Brexit hasn’t helped.

How do we say years in English? This subject comes up a lot in lessons. Until now I’ve told my students that years in English split into four groups. (1) You say years before 2000 as two pairs of digits, so 1994 is nineteen ninety-four; (2) From 2000 to 2009, you say the year like a normal number: 2004 is two thousand and four; (3) From 2010 to 2019, you have a choice: 2014 can either be two thousand and fourteen or twenty fourteen; (4) From 2020, everybody will revert to the pre-2000 system, so 2024 will be twenty twenty-four. I think that’s accurate. But in the future there’s a chance that the system will retrospectively change itself. A kid born today might be so used to hearing things like “twenty twenty-eight” and “twenty thirty-two” and he’ll say 2009 as twenty oh nine or even twenty zero nine.

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Romania

Is Christmas even worth it? And happy new decade

December 31, 2019 by 0 Comments

I’ve now properly caught up with my family to find out how their Christmases went. My brother’s was draining. Endless eating and drinking and small talk with the in-laws and trying to appear somewhat entertaining. He said he couldn’t relax for one minute. When he spoke to me his wife wasn’t there, and as he gave me the gory details I built up a picture of Christmas from hell. I really enjoyed our unusually long chat though – I’d say it was one of the highlights of my Christmas.

My parents’ Christmas wasn’t much better. A couple of days before, Dad learnt that his main gallery in Geraldine had jacked up their commission to 50% from an already slightly piss-taking 40%. What’s more, the increase came unannounced and was even backdated, how far I don’t know. The woman who “runs” the gallery does so chaotically (to put it politely), and Dad has written her a letter to say, basically, stuff you. So that drew a black cloud over their Christmas. Like always, these things affected Mum more than Dad. My father is able to be philosophical: they will continue to live very comfortable lives even if he never sells another painting again (and hell, a few months ago, we were wondering if he’d even see out the year). But for Mum, it’s a case of “must be successful, must be seen to be successful”. Dad also had his ongoing battle with headaches to contend with, and it’s always a battle he has to fight alone. The weather down in Moeraki wasn’t up to that much either, so all in all it was a pretty crappy Christmas.

I got off pretty lightly, then, with my almost totally pressure-free, family-free Christmas. Tonight I’ll be seeing in the new year (and new decade) at Matei’s place. I’ll take along the unopened bottle of Rakija I picked up in Belgrade the summer before last. Matei’s dad called me to say they’ll be starting at nine, not seven as they’d originally planned, and that’s fine by me.

The 2010s have been a weird, disorienting decade for me. Twenty ten itself, when I still lived in Auckland, wasn’t too bad. I’d made some friends up there, I’d left the toxic world of life insurance behind, I had my tennis, my online poker, my trip to the UK to see my grandmother for the last time, bits of pieces of meaningful but low-pressure work, I was managing. Then came the move to Wellington in early 2011 and my insane step backwards into the corporate inferno. Not one part of me wanted to be there (my job I mean, not Wellington which I think is a great city). Then the beginning of 2012 was just horrendous – my grandmother died, the house of cards (a.k.a. my job) came crashing down, I made the disastrous decision to buy my flat, and so it went on. Whenever I hear one of the hits of 2013 playing on the radio, I want to gag – I picture myself in that office with the music piped through the speakers. The best decision I made was to take a four-week trip around America in 2015. The vastness of the place made me realise that there’s a whole world out there to be explored, and here I am. I still have my ups and downs, but I no longer feel that barrenness, as if I’m driving through a desert and there’s not even a tree to be seen.

Twenty twenty. It feels like a mini-millennium. The Romanian ex-prime minister became the butt of jokes when she called the upcoming year “douăzeci douăzeci” (which literally means “twenty twenty”) instead of the correct “două mii douăzeci” (two thousand and twenty). Even though things have improved for me, I’m happy to see the back of the old decade. The constant news cycle, the partisan politics, the toxicity of social media, the illusion of being connected when we’re in fact more disconnected than ever, the technological advancements that help us buy increasing amounts of crap at increasing speed and not a lot else. And the natural and unnatural disasters that have dominated the very end of the decade.

Before I go, I’ve just watched a brand new three-hour documentary about Romania’s rocky 30-year path since the downfall of communism. It taught me a lot, and best of all I was able to watch it with Romanian subtitles.

As for the highlight of 2019, that’s very clear. All clear, in fact. I got out of bed on 25th June, a nondescript Tuesday morning, to find an email from Dad to say that he’d been cleared of bowel cancer. It was like a miracle.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

It’s only just begun

November 20, 2019 by 0 Comments

This morning I picked up some ink cartridges that I’d had to order, and the man who served me said, “Sărbători fericite” meaning “Happy holidays”. A few minutes later I was in Carrefour, where Slade’s famous Christmas song was blaring out. This evening I was sitting at my desk next to the window when two people, just about close enough to touch, were up a crane fixing the festive lights to the lamp-posts. There had been little sign of Christmas until it all hit me today. Ten days from now, the market sheds will be going up, and with the waft of chimney cakes and mulled wine soon after, it’ll really feel like the festive season, particularly if daytime temperatures do eventually fall from the balmy mid-teens.

I had a new student yesterday. She actually teaches English to groups of beginner adults, but if I’m being brutally honest, her knowledge isn’t quite what it needs to be. I’d put her no higher than a 6 on my 0-to-10 scale. She told me, “I have teached English for three years.” Oh yes. She then got confused between “taught” and “thought”. She didn’t know the word “narrow”. As it turned out, we had a very productive lesson, covering acres of notepaper in our 90 minutes, on all kinds of matters to do with vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, and I hope I can get her up to speed. I’ll be seeing her again on Thursday. The crazy thing though is that she wants to improve her English to help her get out of her English teaching job! She also plans to take the IELTS exam in March, which is pretty soon. Tomorrow I’ll have my last lesson with the woman who sent me that strange text.

Dad has had a successful local exhibition, selling a number of high-value paintings. Spring and the run-up to Christmas make it an opportune time to hold a show. There are quite a few people in the area who have sold family farms for colossal amounts of money, and I think that money was burning a hole in their pockets. My latest conversation with Dad was all very upbeat until we discussed my predicament in Wellington. My body corporate’s self-imposed deadline for me to sign the sale agreement is Friday. That ain’t gonna happen.

A new mural on an abandoned factory by the Bega
Life :) - New Zealand

Saying no

November 18, 2019 by 0 Comments

Six cancellations last week – pretty frustrating, but withstandable: I still racked up a reasonable 26 hours of teaching. I might soon be needing some new students, however. On Friday I got long, and bizarre, text from the woman I played tennis with last month. She seems to like me. “This is a delicate situation. We’ll talk about it when you’re ready.” I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready. But I am ready to stop having lessons with her, a married woman in her early forties whose twelve-year-old son I also teach. I think I’ll have to pull the plug on the lessons with the boy too, and that’s certainly a shame because we’ve been making good progress. Despite the money, it isn’t worth the risk. Her husband seems quite an aggressive man, and things could get ugly for me if I carry on. On Wednesday I’ll see her for one last time, explain the situation as nicely as I can, and that (I hope) will be that.

Committee members of my body corporate in Wellington are badgering me to sign the collective agreement to sell our apartment block. They’ve imposed a deadline of this Friday. I simply don’t want to sign. Maybe I’m just stupid, but none of the arguments I’ve seen so far convince me that now is a good time to sell the only property I’m ever likely to own, while I’m receiving over NZ$2000 a month (net) in rent. (If I ever do buy another place to live, it’ll almost certainly be in Romania. In either of the other two countries I have connections with, property will be far beyond me.) I had a Skype chat with one of the owners (she’s lived there since 1997) and she’s not keen on selling either. If she sells and I’m the only hold-out, perhaps I’ll be forced to.

My sister-in-law recently invited me to have Christmas at her parents’. That was a nice gesture, but it’s a non-starter. Getting down there would be an enormous hassle at any time of year, let alone over the festive season. Dad asked my aunt whether she’d be interested in having me over, but she apparently she’s going through one of her “black dog” periods and doesn’t want to see anybody. So it looks like I’ll be on my own. I’m sure I’ll manage.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

Mum, I think you’re addicted

November 4, 2019 by 0 Comments

In the last week I’ve used Duolingo a fair bit. Italian in the morning, and brushing up my Romanian in the evening. It’s important to keep the two languages separate as much as possible, because they’re fairly similar. It would be very easy to start mixing them up. This week I happen to have earned around 1500 so-called experience points (XP), which to me are meaningless apart from in one aspect: to gauge how long I’ve spent on Duolingo, in the absence of any clock. (The creators wouldn’t want a clock. They want everyone on there as long as possible, collecting gems or chasing promotion to the next gemstone-named league. It’s a great site, but the way it hooks you in is extremely Candy Crush-esque. Or even pokie-machine-esque.) I seem to pick up about 150 points an hour, so I’ve spent ten hours or so on the site this week. That feels like a reasonable amount if you’re splitting the time between two languages. But then I saw this:

MUM?!?!?!?!

I’ve connected with my mother, who is learning French exclusively. I’ll be generous here, and assume she’s doing tasks that yield points faster than the ones I do (because the points motivate her more than me). I’ll give her 200 points an hour instead of my 150, in which case she’s spent 25 hours on the site. Sheesh. I wonder how much she’s really learning, and how much she’s just mining fool’s gold. If her goal is genuinely to learn French, there isn’t much point in putting in so much volume. Little and often works well. Plenty and often (Mum’s strategy) doesn’t get you very much further. But it sure does get you a whole heap more digital diamonds.

I’ve had some interesting lessons, as I always do. In this morning’s productive session, we discussed the words analyse and analysis, two words that my student uses in her job but finds hard to pronounce, because of the changing stress pattern. After the lesson I sent her a video clip of me saying the pair of words repeatedly. On Thursday evening I had a particularly awkward situation in my lesson with two women in their twenties. They’re both at around a 4 on my 0-to-10 scale. One of them started to get angry with the other woman when they discussed learning styles (What works for you doesn’t work for me!) and out of the blue she burst into tears. I think she’d had a stressful time at work, and I realised that (unusually) we hadn’t discussed their work day at the start of the session. Perhaps, ultimately, it was my fault. The one who cried has always seemed a really nice person, and my biggest worry is that she’ll be embarrassed about her outburst and they won’t come again. I hope that doesn’t happen.

The week before last I had one of my (sadly rare) half-English, half-Romanian sessions. I asked the teacher how I would say “My living-room window faces west” (which it does) in Romanian. She simply said that Romanians don’t say that, and instead I should just say that my room gets the sun in the afternoon. But it doesn’t always, and certainly not today it doesn’t! She told me that compass directions are used fairly infrequently, apart from sometimes to talk about parts of the country. One thing I really noticed when I moved to New Zealand was that compass directions are used all the time there, much more than in the UK (and, as I now know, considerably more than in Romania). Especially where my parents live, there’s always a nor’wester springing up, or perhaps a cold southerly about to hit. The mountains tell you precisely where west is. There’s Northland, Southland, Westland (but no Eastland). Even the two main islands are simply called North and South. I remember when I lived in Wellington and I’d sometimes go on day tramps, the trip leader might say “if you just look to the east…” and I’d be thinking, where’s east?! It’s as if all Kiwis are born with an internal compass. Quite a lot of New Zealanders sail, some of them still build their own homes, and there’s still some of that pioneering spirit.

This morning I went to the chemist to pick up two medications (an antidepressant and something for my hair) but they were out of the hair lotion. That meant I had to go to their other branch at Piața Unirii. It’s in Casa Brück, one of the most wonderful buildings I ever have the pleasure to enter. After that, and just before my lesson, I had a Skype chat with my cousin in Wellington. I also caught up with her husband and all three of their boys. The eldest is now 17. All of a sudden, he’s a man. Time is shooting by.

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics

Turning it up to eleven

September 25, 2019 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I watched live coverage of the UK Supreme Court’s unanimous and damning verdict. By an 11-0 margin, they ruled that Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament for five weeks was unlawful. Yikes. I never expected that for one minute. I mean, silencing parliament for more than a month just so you get your own way should bloody well be unlawful, but the law so often makes little sense. Lady Hale wore a very striking (and symbolic?) spider brooch as she read out the decision, and she bore a slight resemblance to my grandmother at a similar age. This latest episode in the Brexit saga has brought to the fore a pair of eleven-letter words that I wouldn’t like to have to say once I’d had a few (which hardly ever happens these days): prorogation and justiciable. To be honest I’m not entirely sure how to pronounce the latter of these even though it’s 9am and I’m stone-cold sober. I think I’d go with /dʒʌˈstɪʃəbᵊl/ (jus-TI-shuh-buhl), but it’s a weird word.

Boris was in America yesterday. He met Donald Trump, and the two of them are looking more and more alike. Trump now has a pair of eleven-letter words of his own to contend with: impeachment proceedings. (OK, an impeachment inquiry.) I was hoping it would never come to this, mainly because the impeachment process, if that’s what we get, may well galvanise support for Trump. Then on Monday we had 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg giving a very powerful and emotional speech in front of the likes of Trump. So much has happened already this week and we’re less than half-way through.

On Sunday I spoke to my parents. They’ve booked their flights to Europe; they’ll be coming this way in May and will stay here for ten weeks. Can’t wait. (But it is a very long wait.) They’ll be flying direct, which I warned Dad never to do. “But we’ll have three hours in Dubai,” Mum said. Bloody great. We ended up talking, for some reason, about the Māori language. In the three years I’ve been away, it seems to have exploded. Ring up your bank now, and apparently you get a Māori (or should I say Te Reo) lesson while you’re on hold. As if the god-awful music wasn’t bad enough. My parents and aunt and uncle resent all of this, and I don’t blame them. A lady in my apartment block just forwarded me a letter she’d sent to some MPs about our situation, and at the beginning and end of the letter she’d written a sentence in Māori, complete with macrons (which represent long vowels), like the one I’ve put on the a in Māori. This woman is 0% Māori, but presumably she thinks slipping into that tongue for a few lines will help her cause when dealing with politicians. It’s a beautiful, powerful language (and the argument that it isn’t a real language because it wasn’t originally written down is absurd), but Māorification seems to be going too far, and who knows where it will stop.

It’s real Autumn here now, and I don’t mind that at all. Spring and autumn in Timișoara are lovely.

Language teaching - New Zealand

A black day

March 16, 2019 by 0 Comments

Yesterday morning I switched on the seven o’clock news. To my shock, the first item (on Romanian TV) was a shooting that had taken place in two mosques in Christchurch. At that stage the details were fairly sketchy. “Between 9 and 25” deaths, they reported. After my first lesson, which finished at 9:30, I called my parents. Soon the death toll was being reported as 49, with dozens more seriously injured. The perpetrator is obviously a very sick individual, in the mould of Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011. I think the suspect even praised Breivik in his social media posts, although if you took everything you saw on social media at face value, you’d never leave the house.

New Zealand has seemed somehow immune from terrorism and extreme hatred, two islands of tranquillity in the Pacific. Now the country is dealing with its own 9/11. How could this happen? How could he get his hands on this sort of weapon so easily? I imagine legislation to tighten firearms laws will be rushed through parliament in the coming days. As for Christchurch, what a nightmarish nine years it has been.

For me, life has carried on as normal. Plenty of work this week (33 hours of teaching) with some quite knackering days mixed in. Yesterday I tried to get Albert (the seven-year-old) to watch Peppa Pig. It was otherwise a successful session, but Peppa Pig was a dead loss. This is boring. After less than five minutes. I get this quite a lot. I want to say “Get used to it buddy!” or “In a few years, being bored will be the least of your worries” or even “Tough shit!”. This morning’s lesson with the 17-year-old girl wasn’t easy. She has an £800 iPhone, which never stops beeping and buzzing and vibrating. Has she ever stopped to think that it’s weird to have a phone that most people in her city couldn’t dream of affording, having never earned a penny in her life? Today I wanted to take a hammer to it.