Coronavirus

Today is Dad’s 70th birthday. He’s dodged at least two bullets to get there, and altogether he’s had a remarkable life. I know it’s simple maths, and I hit my own milestone a couple of months ago, but both my parents being in their seventies is hard to comprehend. I called him early this morning (my time), before my aunt and uncle and a couple of friends were due to arrive. Mum had the fancy glasses out because, well, they were having fancy champagne. My cousin from Wellington had bought a job lot of Moët, as she can happily afford to do, and given my parents a bottle.

After talking to Dad I had a moment’s panic. I went to the loo and what’s this? Streaks of red. Crikey. If I see the doctor, how will I even explain this? Mi-am dungi de sânge în… what word do I use? Caca? Pupu? Luckily it’s 2020 and we have Google, and the culprit seemed to be the several great hunks of watermelon I’d eaten in the previous 24 hours.

It’s been another hot day, but I’ll soon be wishing it was only 32 degrees. My student friend who lives in Austria (she had to quarantine for two weeks when she returned to Romania to visit) gave me a guided tour of central Timișoara today. In fact she had some friends visiting from Moldova, decided to show them around, and asked if I’d come along for the ride. It was great. I know the centre of Timișoara pretty well, but she had encyclopedic knowledge of the history behind the buildings, and pointed out details, some of which had escaped my attention in all this time. Best of all, the commentary was in Romanian. (Her friends’ Moldovan accent was very noticeable, but didn’t stop me from understanding them.)

Back to medical stuff, on my monthly visit to the doctor on Friday, he tested the oxygen saturation in my blood. The readout flickered between 96 and 97; that’s good news should I ever contract the virus.

Dad has just sent me another batch of photos, including me in my 1984 Nissan Bluebird. It’s amazing how tidy that car looked – it was already 20 years old. There are also some pictures of my great-aunt, who was a lovely person from what I’ve heard. I sat on her lap once as a baby; she died of cancer soon afterwards.

It doesn’t seem long ago that the official worldwide tally of coronavirus cases reached half a million. Today we reached half a million deaths and ten million cases. The real case numbers are, of course, far greater. (It is now spreading alarmingly in poor countries with limited health care. Will we reach ten million deaths?)

Tomorrow I might go back and look at those bikes.

Bogdan, the guy on the second floor, just phoned me to ask if I wanted to join him at a bar on the riverbank. He said there was live music. I would have joined him but I have a Skype lesson soon. Hopefully we can meet tomorrow.

The coronavirus case numbers aren’t looking great in Romania – more than 300 new cases on each of the last three days – but people I talk to seem to be living in a parallel universe. “Social distancing is nonsense,” the father of one of my younger students told me yesterday. We still have very few cases here in Timiș, but the return of all those ambulance sirens I heard in April feels inevitable, sadly. But this time with the lid off.

My parents have a friend of sorts who has just flown from Christchurch to Arizona, where he grew up. Imagine voluntarily going to Arizona at the moment – they’ve got terrifying Covid numbers. What’s more, he’s over 70, he’s overweight and he’s got type II diabetes. His wife has stayed home; she might never see him again.

In my list of Timișoara smells in my last post, I didn’t mention mici. In the summer, the smell of those pieces of pork sizzling on a barbecue (grătar) permeates the city, and probably the whole of Romania. From time to time (not where I live, thankfully, but on other arterial roads in the city), you also get the dreadful pong of what will become mici. Pig crates. Even when they’ve rattled by and are well in the distance, the stench from the pigs, or rather their ordure, still lingers.

Family has seemed more important than ever, now that we can’t see each other, and Dad has been sending me family pictures from when I was a kid. My favourite so far is from the time we lived in Temuka in 1989-90 and Dad’s parents came out to see us. All four of my grandparents are in the picture, along with Mum, my brother, me and our cousin (she’s between me and my brother in age). My brother had Grandad’s hat on – he liked to wear it. Other highlights are my brother sitting on a tractor on my uncle’s farm on the West Coast, and one from even further back (December 1986) when we stopped off in New Caledonia on the way from the UK to New Zealand – my brother and I looked unbelievably tired.

I gave up painstakingly updating my Covid graph on 21st May, but it hasn’t gone away. Far from it. Today we reported 320 new cases in Romania, the most on one day since 8th May, and 16 more deaths. Active cases are edging back up. In this corner of the country we’ve got near–New Zealand levels, but it’s spreading like wildfire in Bucharest, Suceava and Brașov, and will surely be back here with a vengeance.

Today is Mum’s birthday (and Steffi Graf’s and Donald Trump’s). When I called her, my aunt and uncle (who visited Timișoara two years ago) were over for dinner. It was great to see them on FaceTime. They were shocked to see I now have a ponytail. I’m shocked to have one too.

Yesterday I had a bad day with my sinuses, or migraine (whichever it was), so today it was nice to sit on the riverbank and read my book, and get all the wonderful strawberries and cherries and apricots and tomatoes from the market (while I still can, before the second wave hits).

On Friday I had my lesson with the guy who lives on the outskirts of London with his wife and son whose first birthday it was. They’re looking at buying a house; he said they’d been to see a ghastly place costing £500,000. He showed me an online property evaluator with an intriguing feature called a happiness rating. You tap in a postcode and this needle waggles into position, telling you how happy everyone in the area is. It’s based on crime, deprivation, health, levels of education, and so on. I asked him to tap in the postcode of the flat I rented in central Peterborough in 2003, and the needle hardly budged. So sad. But I was reasonably happy there. My job didn’t pay a lot but I had interesting flatmates, played tennis, went bowling, went to the pub, and ate out from time to time. I often saw my grandmother. I made two trips to France, including beautiful Montpellier. I only had a six-month work contract which they happily extended, and they would have given me a permanent role. But my boss said he was unconvinced that flood mapping and forecasting was the best career path for me, and when my parents decided to shift to NZ, I convinced myself that I’d be better off over there.

Anyway, we read an article containing the word cusp, and I explained that the word is sometimes used in relation to star signs (which some Romanians take as gospel). Like me, he is on the cusp: he was born on 21/9/89. He has a family, a career, pretty soon he’ll have a house, and he has almost an extra decade to play with compared to me. Maybe I should have stayed in Peterborough.

I spent half of yesterday doing something I didn’t want to do (trying to find a courier) so I could do something else I didn’t want to do (send my signed sale agreement and associated documents to my lawyer in Wellington). At one office a lady quoted me 330 lei (about NZ$120) for an estimated delivery time of two weeks. Sorry, what? Did I hear that Romanian number correctly? Trei sute treizeci? Doamne. After biking here, there and everywhere, and finding offices had been relocated to other parts of the city, I found a place that could get it to NZ in two days for $100. It was 5:05 by then, and too late for them to send it. I’d have to wait till the morning. But then I thought, that’s still bloody ridiculous. Bugger the body corporate committee and their fake urgency. Who knows when they’ll even invoke the agreement. I popped it in the normal post today. That cost $10. They said it would be there in nine working days. I know we’re talking about property and six-figure sums—hopefully I’ll still get a six-figure sum if and when the place sells! I paid $354,000 for it 8½ years ago—but I couldn’t handle the principle of blowing a hundred bucks (for probably no reason) on sending a sodding envelope.

Yesterday I also had a genuinely urgent situation to deal with. This laptop was making a racket. I was sure it was the fan. (It has a solid-state hard drive.) If my laptop dies, I’m pretty seriously compromised, especially in the world of online lessons. I told four of my students that our lessons probably wouldn’t be happening. I backed up my data and in the morning I took it in to the repair shop down the road (just before Piața Bălcescu). In no time they had the back off. The thermal paste (which I’d only just learned about) had turned to dust, and two blades had detached from the fan. This will be expensive. And slow. Blow me down, at 3pm I got a phone call to say it had been repaired. It cost me 150 lei ($55). I’ll still need to source a fan from Ebay – it’s hard to get a replacement in Romania – and they’ll be able to fit it for me.

On Saturday I went on my first decent bike ride since we locked down in March. I did my usual trip to Sânmihaiu Român. I’d forgotten how noisy the Bega gets with all the frogs. Yeah, I do need to get myself a new bike.

On Friday morning I had coffee on the sunny balcony of one of my students. We spoke Romanian for an hour in a low-stress situation, and I felt a certain sense of pride at being able to communicate reasonably well in someone else’s language. It’s such a rewarding feeling, especially because Romanian is both beautiful and an unusual language for people to learn.

Mum was telling me that she’d been to the funeral of a woman I knew in Temuka. She would have been about 85. She was from an enormous Catholic family – ten children I think – but never had a family of her own. She was a very kind person, but quite shy. I went to see Whale Rider with her in Geraldine in March 2004, days before I moved up to Auckland to take that job. Apparently she had a habit of arriving at church late and leaving early – perhaps she didn’t want the conversation – and the priest joked that she was on time for once. Mum also recently went to her 95-year-old aunt’s funeral in Mosgiel – this was her mother’s younger sister.

New Zealand is at Level 1. They seem to have crushed Covid. Apart from the fact that it’s now hermetically sealed, everything is back to normal there. On the phone, my parents and I joke about NZ’s “smug level” (that’s after my aunt described NZ as being unduly smug about their low case numbers). Both my parents would prefer to be back at Level 4, I think. Dad’s migraines are an ongoing problem and he quite liked being unable to see anybody. As for Romania, we’re doing pretty well in Timiș with very few new cases, but in the rest of the country this thing sure isn’t going away. Around ten Romanians are dying every day on average.