Coronavirus

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.

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.

Coronavirus - Poker

Moderna man

November 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was up bright and early yesterday for my 8am booster dose. I got it done in some nearby businessy building on the other side of the railway tracks which goes by the rather obscene-sounding name of Incuboxx. The nice lady at the desk asked me if I took any medication. I told her about the pills I take for depression, and then she asked me if I was anxious about getting the injection. Oh no, I said. Everything is în regulă. I got the Moderna jab. I expected it would be the half-sized booster dose, but no, I got the full shot because I’d previously had Astra Zeneca instead of an mRNA vaccine. This surprised me, and googling tells me nothing about different-sized third-dose Moderna shots depending on what you got for your previous two doses, so it’s possible it was a mistake and I got twice as much vaccine as I should have. I felt fine the rest of the day, but last night I had chills combined with a (probably unrelated) headache, and I slept for only three hours or so. I had to drag myself out of bed in time for my 8am lesson.

I didn’t know much about Moderna, but there’s a lot to like about it. For a third dose, it probably offers you more protection against severe disease than Pfizer, and almost certainly does better than Astra Zeneca or Johnson & Johnson. (All four of these vaccines are available in Romania. In New Zealand, you can get whatever you like as long as it’s Pfizer.) The Moderna company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I spent a fantastic day six years ago, and it’s a lot smaller than Pfizer; vaccines are literally all Moderna does. Dolly Parton partly funded the Moderna vaccine, and here’s the video of her singing “vaccine” to the tune of Jolene and then getting the jab. Seriously, who doesn’t love Dolly Parton? The name of Moderna’s vaccine is also way cooler than Pfizer’s. The Pfizer jab goes under the brand name Comirnaty, and what sort of name is that for something that can literally save your life? It starts off fine (Com…) but then turns into total mneh. It’s not even obvious how to pronounce Comirnaty – the –aty ending (as opposed to the extremely common –ity) just isn’t a thing in English, outside words where the a is part of a vowel combination, as in meaty or throaty. Moderna’s vaccine, on the other hand, is called Spikevax, a proper badass name. Finally, when so many people have had Pfizer (if they’ve been jabbed at all), getting something different is a talking point.

Of course all of the above, with the exception of the first point (and even that is debatable), is basically a joke. Get whatever goddamn vaccine you can.

Because my jab was nice and early, I was able to call my parents and still be in time to play three tournaments. And guess what, I had another win, this time in the no-limit single draw. Apart from the speed wobbles I suffered in the middle of the tournament, which could easily have led to my elimination, I thought I played good, aggressive poker, and made more moves than I normally do. I didn’t play with fear, and best of all I had fun. I made $52 on the morning; my bankroll is now $1147.

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.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Rooted to the spot

November 7, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just booked my booster dose of the vaccine, which I’ll get in ten days’ time, precisely 182 days after I had my second dose. (You have to wait at least 180.) I clearly remember the sunny March morning when I got my first jab. It was Astra Zeneca, concocted by the good, not-profit-making guys from Oxford. I came out of there brimming with optimism. A shaft of light at the end of the tunnel. We’ll get over this, and soon. At that stage there was Alpha but not the super-transmissible Delta, and little did I know that my position – taking the sodding jab – was a minority one in the country I happened to be living in. By May, when I got my second dose, the picture was far darker. Last week I had three lessons with a girl who had just turned twelve and become eligible for the vaccine. On Monday she proudly displayed her arm to me over Skype. Any side effects? No, just a slightly sore arm, like the vast majority of people. That was great to see.

Yesterday I met up with the English couple in Dumbrăvița. I took my old bike – the one that had been nicked – and it was painfully slow going. The area they live in is only half-built and the roads are still unsealed (I use the Kiwi word there), so it was all muddy after the heavy rain we’d had. After being practically attacked by their large one-year-old mongrel dog with gangly legs, we chatted for a bit, and the guy played me some of Gnossienne on his fancy touch-sensitive keyboard with full-sized keys. He followed that up with a few bars of Genesis’s utterly mad über-prog-rock tune Firth of Fifth. On paper, it looked like a chaotic mess of key and time signature changes. He said he’d passed all eight piano grades as an adult. Then we went to a restaurant called La Ioji (the first letter of Ioji is an i, not an l) where we sat outside and talked. I had ciorbă, a thick soup, and a beer.

From there I went home (a struggle) and almost immediately went to tennis. It was singles against that same guy, and it didn’t go well for me at all, for the simple reason that my footwear was totally inadequate for the slippery surface, so I could hardly move without slipping and sliding all over the place. We’d booked the court for two hours. To begin with we just rallied, and I was content to do this for as long as possible. Then, the inevitable. “Let’s play a game.” But you know I can’t move, right? I eked out the first set 6-4 on my fifth set point, and extended my winning run to five games as I went 2-0 up in the second. From 3-1 though, I lost seven games on the spin, including a long game which gave him the second set. I was paralysed out there. When you’re almost rooted to the spot, the rest of your game suffers too. When time ran out, I was one game from defeat, at 6-4 3-6 2-5.

Then it was online poker time. I played five low buy-in tournaments with very little joy, although the mix of different games made life interesting. My bankroll is currently $1008. Two more tourneys in store for later today.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Music

Don’t freak out!

October 28, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a beautiful Thursday morning here. I’ve already had two lessons. The Rapid Bucharest football team bus has just pulled up outside the cathedral. They’re playing Poli Timișoara in a cup game this evening.

During a lesson on Tuesday afternoon I started to feel less than 100%. A stuffy nose, a few sniffles, fatigue. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of that – they’re typical symptoms of a cold – but when I’m living in a country where daily Covid death tolls are in the 500s, that’s panic-stations territory. As it happens, I was paying the doctor my monthly visit that evening, and naturally I asked him if I should be alarmed. He took my temperature and measured my oxygen saturation level, and said I was probably fine. I slept badly that night and had all sorts of weird dreams, and the morning after I felt (and looked) pretty groggy. I called my parents and asked them not to freak out. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Covid but I got a rapid test from the pharmacy anyway. It isn’t easy to do the test – how to I swab my tonsils without wanting to gag, or twizzle the swab around several times in my nostril without sneezing? As expected, the test (which has a high false-negative rate) was negative. Yesterday I improved throughout the day, and last night I slept well. Mum called me back last night, and was glad I looked better. South Islanders are understandably mad that two cases of the virus are now in Christchurch. Why there are no restrictions on flights between north and south beats me.

I’ve got a new student – a 21-year-old guy – and I had my first lesson with him this morning. Yesterday he introduced himself on the phone as Răzvan, but he popped up on Skype as the rather non-Romanian-sounding Memet. Today he told me he was a musician – a saxophone player in a travelling band – and he’s still enrolled in high school after having to repeat whole years, although he never actually attends any lessons. He said he wanted a change of lifestyle. A job? A career? A salary? Oh no, he said, my only boss is God. He didn’t seem particularly well educated (failing whole years isn’t a good sign); when I used the English word “precarious”, and then gave him the translation precar which isn’t an uncommon word in Romanian, he didn’t know what I meant. But he’s already paid me for today’s session and now plans to have two lessons a week, so he should be OK.

Last night my student gave me the happy news that she’d passed her driving test at her first attempt, having only started learning about three months ago. She told me she still feels uncomfortable driving at more than 40 km/h. Getting a licence at that stage of the game would have been unthinkable for me. It took me ages to get mine (at my third attempt, not counting the test that was postponed because of snow). British tests were bloody hard. Atypical of young men, I was low on confidence and unmotivated to get my licence until I really needed to. Running and insuring a car in the UK was ridiculously expensive, even back then. I then moved to New Zealand where I would have been utterly screwed if I’d been unable to drive.

In one of my weird dreams, a song started playing. Heck, what is that song? Ah yes, it’s one of those songs that I voted for to be the UK’s Eurovision entry, a very long time ago, by calling an 0898 number. It might have been ’93 or ’94. It’s amazing what your mind can dredge up in a dream. Yesterday I found it on YouTube – it’s Lover Come In, a beautiful non-Eurovision-y song written and performed by Brendan Faye, a Liverpool folk singer. It just missed out on being Britain’s 1991 entry (even earlier than I thought), coming second to some forgettable poppy crap that came in the middle of the pack on Eurovision night. Had Faye’s song been nominated, it could well have won the whole shebang, and I’d be hearing it now on Romanian radio 30 years later. (Eurovision is big here, for some reason.) I wonder what happened to him.

The MicroMillions series has started on Poker Stars. It’s a series of small buy-in tournaments with big fields in a wide variety of games. I plan to play two of these tournaments tonight.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Making the news for all the wrong reasons

October 25, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Romania’s Covid woes – excavators being brought to cemeteries to cope with the sheer weight of mortality – have made the news in New Zealand, which is saying something because Romania hardly ever makes the news anywhere. Covid is now killing one Romanian every three and a half minutes. Romanians are now getting vaccinated in much larger numbers, because of the increasingly severe restrictions that they face if they don’t. Far too late for this wave, but it will help in 2022. My parents are worried about me. They fear that all lines of communication could be cut in the event that I get whisked off to some Covid ward. Or corridor. Or car park.

I played tennis this afternoon. First I played singles with the guy of 60-ish, whom I’ve had close battles with until now, but this time I was up 6-0 5-0 when we were joined by a third player; we then played what they call American doubles. The singles match was bizarre because the score was more down to him than me. I really didn’t play that well in the first set. My forehand wasn’t doing what it was supposed to, though in the second set that started to click. I sometimes wonder about etiquette in such situations. Is it poor form not to let someone win at least one game? (To my mind, absolutely not, but I know others see things differently.) After the first set he was marvelling at the colours of the leaves on the big maple tree that overhangs the court, so I’m guessing he had no problem with me.

House hunting has taken a back seat. It involves meeting unknown people which isn’t particularly safe right now. That agent has stopped contacting me. Today I had a look at a place in Mehala, but only from the outside.

Living on the edge of a time zone has its oddities. We’re still on summer time until next Sunday morning, so right now it’s dark in the mornings until eight. There has been serious talk of EU countries ending their twice-yearly clock changes, though that has stalled, probably because of the Covid crisis. If Romania were to observe permanent summer time, it wouldn’t get light until 9:15 am in December in Timișoara. I like the long summer evenings here, so clock switching gives us the best of both worlds. I imagine it’s a minority position, but I’d choose to keep the time shifts.

Last night I had a marathon poker session, and a deep run in Omaha hi-lo, but only made a tiny profit from the four tournaments I played. My bankroll is in four figures for the first time, at $1001.

The two pictures above are from Parcul Regina Maria.

The last three pictures are from Mehala. The sign on the power pole is telling dog owners to clean up after their “quadrupeds”, or four-legged friends.

Coronavirus - Photos - Poker

Rise and fall (with some photos)

October 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

What a lovely autumn day it’s been today. I managed to cycle along by the river in between my lessons. It’s the last day of balmy weather we’re getting.

Vaccination numbers are stepping up in Romania, but it’s all way too late for this wave of the pandemic. (I read that at the current rate, Romania will hit 70% vaccinated in May 2024. First or second dose wasn’t clear.) In this morning’s lesson, my student said that the case numbers had been kept artificially low until all the political shenanigans (that I don’t even understand) had been completed on Monday, then a big dump of cases were reported on Tuesday. Seriously mate, you’re an intelligent bloke, and the first thing you do is reach for the conspiracy option. Why? There was a spike in cases on Tuesday because it was a Tuesday. Sunday and Monday’s numbers are always low, thanks to the limited reporting and testing over the weekend, then there’s a catch-up on Tuesday. Happens every week, like clockwork.

Talking of case numbers, New Zealand has recorded a three-figure daily tally for the first time. I’m surprised it took so long. South Islanders are dreading the inevitable appearance of the virus on the mainland.

I spoke to my brother and his wife last night. She’s been going through a tough time and has taken time off work due to stress. She’s one of many recent victims of burnout in the NHS. I just hope she’ll be OK.

In the last few days I’ve listened to Tubular Bells several times. It’s that good. Mike Oldfield wrote the album when he was still a teenager.

In poker, I had a third-place finish in a small buy-in pot-limit badugi tournament yesterday, but didn’t get a single bounty. My bankroll is $998.

Autumn is always beautiful here as the leaves change colour. This weekend we’ll have the ritual of sweeping the courts of leaves before we can play. Here are some pictures that I’ve taken in the last week. A Romanian-style bike, the Bega bathed in autumn sunshine, the park under the full moon, and ultra-modern and not-so-modern architecture.

Coronavirus

The 13th hour

October 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been to the park to get my 12 litres of water. It’s a full moon tonight. The air was pungent with crow poo, as it often is at this time of year.

While I was teaching this evening, President Klaus Iohannis gave an eight-minute speech about the Covid crisis in his usual deliberate way. He said that the figures we see every day are people’s lives, dreams and futures, not mere numbers. Then he went on to talk about the fake news that anti-vaxers are lapping up, and bringing in unpopular measures (a lockdown?) to curb the spread. “We’re at the 12th hour,” he said. It’s actually the 13th. For thousands of Romanians it’s too late. He then said the current crisis is beyond even the most pessimistic of predictions. Sorry, you’re wrong there too. I’m a bear of average-sized brain, and I predicted this. On 6th June, I wrote in this blog, “…most people won’t touch the vaccines. Unless that turns around pretty sharpish (and why will it?), Romania is probably screwed.”

This morning I was almost talked out, following a good hour on Skype with my aunt and uncle, who are doing remarkably well, and another chat with my parents.

Coronavirus - Life :) - The UK

A dark place

October 19, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Friday I got a call from the police. What happened to my your bike? I told him, and he said I had to come in to give a statement so he could close the case. I went in first thing this morning. When I arrived, the receptionist was smoking. He asked me who I’d spoken to. No idea, I said. Eventually the officer met me and showed me to an upstairs corridor with several rooms on both sides. He led me into room 8 where we sat down. There were mugshots pinned to the wall as well as two stopped clocks, one advertising Camel cigarettes. I tried not to get too close to the officer; he wasn’t wearing a mask. Just imagine getting Covid because of a $90 bike. That would be so typically Romanian. He typed up a statement and I had to write some bits and bobs on the end. He told me my written Romanian was better than some Romanians’. Then I was free to go.

Yesterday I met the guy who teaches at British School. We had a drink in Piața Unirii. It was sunny, 17 degrees, and pretty lively when you consider that it came at the end of Romania’s deadliest week since the Second World War. (This week will surely be deadlier still.) Nobody checked our green passes or anything of that sort. We talked about teaching and Margaret Thatcher, then I gave him a short impromptu Romanian lesson.

My near-neighbour, whose husband plays tennis, recently gave me five pancakes. In return I baked them a quince crumble. I’ve had no feedback whatsoever on that, despite meeting him twice at tennis since then, so I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly a hit. At the weekend a new guy in (I guess) his late fifties showed up. Shortly after my arrival in the country, I learnt that one in three adult Romanians no longer have any of their original teeth. This guy had about four teeth in total. The spoof travel guide Molvanîa, written by Australians and a minor hit in New Zealand at about the time I moved there, is surely based on Romania and its neighbour Moldova.

Molvania400px.jpg

Another British politician has been murdered. Conservative MP David Amess was stabbed to death on Friday at his constituency office in Essex. I didn’t know much about him, except that Mum once joked about his surname (“a mess”), and he once spoke out in parliament against a drug, Cake, which was entirely fictitious. British politics, and Britain in general, is in a dark place right now.