Buying property

Buying property - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Is it worth the risk?

March 21, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just come back from my second-most expensive grocery shop in Romania. The only time I spent more was in the headless-chicken initial days of the pandemic. Everything has shot up in price. This reminds me of 2008 in New Zealand, when a block of cheese hit $16 and they were practically giving gas-guzzling Ford Falcons away: petrol had smashed through $2 a litre, which seemed crazy at the time. This morning I met up with Mark, the teacher. We had a coffee; he also had waffles. We had a good chat, mostly about teaching, but he didn’t have much time because he was going to a barbecue soon after.

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița, then two online English lessons when I got back, including one with a new guy who lives near Cluj. Most of my lessons are still online, but face-to-face is coming back gradually. After that I was on the tennis court for the first time this year. We’d planned to start back a couple of weeks ago, but we had a chilly first half of March. The tennis crew is depleted. Yesterday I partnered a teenage girl who is a national-level rower; we played against her father and the older guy I sometimes play singles with. We lost the first set 6-3, and in the second we’d fended off half a dozen match points to be at deuce for the umpteenth time in the tenth game, when time ran out on us. I wasn’t too bad. My serve needs some work; my only ace, which hit the sideline at 2-5 in the second set, came out of the blue.

A silver lining to those awful kidney stones is that I’ve dropped a few pounds. On Friday I had my first haircut since last June; the barber’s comb turned my long thick hair into unappetising grey spaghetti before it fell to the ground. I didn’t really want that much taken off, but hairdressing vocabulary is something I struggle with even in English. I do prefer the slimmer, less caveman-like me, though. (I still have the beard.) On Tuesday I’ll go back to the doctor, and maybe I’ll find out if my stones are still there. I don’t think I’ve passed them, but the pain has gone. Now I “only” have my intermittent sinus pain to deal with, plus the cold that never goes away. (If I’m outside on a chilly day, I have to blow my nose all the bloody time. When I played tennis yesterday I had to wipe my nose after every second point. That’s just life for me.)

That’s more than enough about me. My dad passed out on Thursday night, just after I wrote my last post. He somehow fell into the bath at about two in the morning, and blacked out. He was lucky not to injure himself. He came round, then eventually clambered out of the bath. The next day was a write-off as he had such terrible leg pain, but yesterday he assured me he was coming right. As for Mum, a rogue contact lens had got stuck up her eye, and when she extricated that she was fine. I wish I wasn’t so far away from them. I expect they’ll want to come to Europe at or around Christmas – there will be a new addition by then – but I’d like to make a trip to New Zealand too.

I want to move on with my life, which means finding a new apartment and running a proper teaching business from it, but last week’s near miss has made me even more skittish than I was before. The appalling war in Ukraine has made the local economy very uncertain, then when you add in that I don’t really know what I’m doing, and I’ve had my fingers well and truly burnt before…

I forgot to mention a horrific accident – or pair of accidents – that occurred earlier this month near the Black Sea in eastern Romania. It was a quiet evening, and I got alerts on my phone in Romanian, one of which made me do a double take. Is that really what it says? A MiG fighter jet went down in a remote area, in terrible weather, killing the pilot. Then a Puma helicopter flew out in search of the plane, and it too crashed. All seven on board the helicopter died.

Buying property - Family - Life :)

Feels like we’re all running out of gas

March 18, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

When I spoke to my parents this morning, they were showing their age. Mum had just about gone blind in one eye overnight, while Dad had a sciatica-like jabbing pain in his right leg. I’m 11,000 miles away and I can’t do a damn thing. Last weekend I spoke to Dad, pre-leg pain. Mum had gone to church. They’d just had a “friend” to stay; Dad said that Mum was stressed to the max the whole time and could have erupted at any second. Since I left New Zealand, I’ve missed out on Mum’s volcanic (and irrational) side.

Yesterday I got pretty close to buying that flat I mentioned in my previous post, but after making an offer and receiving a counter-offer of €8000 more, I backed away. This is a minefield, isn’t it? I may still end up buying the place. The owner is in Mexico (why there?) and won’t be back in Timișoara for another three weeks, so there’s no way I can sign anything before then. I want to do this and start running a proper business, but right now I’m stumbling in the dark, at the mercy of a highly uncertain economy. My only saving grace is that this time I’m only putting half my eggs (or hopefully fewer) in one basket.

I got the new fridge-freezer delivered, but god, installing it was a performance. This flat has a funny V-shaped laundry “corner” which meant I couldn’t remove the old appliance without disconnecting the washing machine, and shitshitshit how do I turn off the cold tap? I’ll be knee-deep in water if I’m not careful. Then after sorting that out, I had to remove the doors of the new fridge-freezer because it wouldn’t fit otherwise. That’s about as close as I want to get to actual DIY, but in my new place (if I get that far) I might be forced into doing some. It was lucky that the fridge broke down in March and not August.

On Monday my sister-in-law sent me her latest scan. It looks amazingly human now. A human that will have the same last name as me. The due date is 20th September.

Tomorrow I’m getting my first haircut in nine months.

Here are some before-and-after petrol prices at the same forecourt. Unlike some stations which are in danger of running out of digits on their signs, this one can handle 10-lei-plus petrol.

22nd May 2020
12th March 2022
Buying property - Coronavirus - Life :)

Could this be the one?

March 12, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Tuesday night all of Romania’s Covid restrictions were lifted in one fell swoop. Doing my supermarket shopping maskless will feel very weird; I’m sure I’ll still don my mask on my next visit or two. So Romania is clambering out of the pandemic at last – the country has had a torrid time, with the majority of deaths coming after the vaccines became available. It beggars belief, honestly.

Some good news on the flat front. Today I finally saw a place and thought, yes, this could be me. The kitchen cupboards are painted a lurid lime green, but that wouldn’t bother me. The appliances are modern, it gets the sun, it’s got plenty of space which I could turn into an office, and best of all I like the area. So many of the suburbs I’ve looked at have an absence of anything old, and that would get to me after a while. I had a look at a second place which had just been renovated and looked rather nice on the inside, but it was somehow too pastelly for me, didn’t get much natural light, and in the renovation process had been almost completely undoored. That doesn’t work for me at all. So I’ll have a decision to make, and then potentially all the legal stuff. Plus, should I be buying full stop? The economy is about as uncertain right now as the next lottery draw. Petrol prices have shot up so much that some stations might soon run out of digits on their displays.

My fridge-freezer has packed in. The light is on but there’s nobody home. I’ve been trying to get through a massive hunk of pork. My landlord came over tonight, and it looks like he’s going to order a new fridge. He took measurements, denoting the length (lungime) by capital L, and the width (lățime) by small l. That makes sense when the two words annoying begin with the same letter in Romanian.

I no longer have tummy troubles, but my drugs are about to run out. What will happen then?

Weather permitting, tennis might start up again this Saturday. Sadly there will be no Domnul Ionescu, who seemed such an integral part of the group.

Buying property - Life :) - Photos

Can I get my A into G? (And some pictures)

March 7, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Not a bad day. It started with two Skype chats with people in New Zealand (my cousin and her husband in Wellington, then a friend in Auckland). After almost being hermetically sealed from Covid for most of the pandemic, they’ve most definitely got it now. But apart from a precious few muppets, some of whom spent three weeks in Wellington intimidating and obstructing, they damn well got vaccinated. In a month’s time, they should have just about weathered the storm.

After lunch, the English guy picked me up and we went for a walk by the Timiș river, just past Giroc. It felt good to be out and about again, and to spend time with somebody I feel comfortable with. We passed sheep farms (it’s lambing season) and plenty of bird life including something I’ve just identified as an African goose, which doesn’t come from Africa. A beach had been created on the bank of the river, which would be an attractive proposition on a 35-degree day. People were hooning along on motorbikes, and you could hire quad bikes – after rolling one and getting my leg trapped under it in 2004, these give me nightmares. Mostly though, it was nice and quiet there. On the way back to the car, we had a coffee at a newly-built café called Sasha’s Pub, which was great with the exception of the muzak. Play the real version of Right Down the Line by Gerry Rafferty, will you, not the lift version.

I looked at a whole slew of flats on Friday, one of which was owned by a bloke with a Rottweiler. I tried to give the agent the “I don’t want a conversation” look, because I really didn’t want one, but he started one anyway. Yeah, there were some OK-ish places, but it was the same story. If only it wasn’t this or that, and can I really be bothered? I’ve been dangerously unmotivated of late, even before the business with the stones started, and that just sent my motivation levels through the floor. I’ve got to somehow get my butt into gear.

In tonight’s lesson with the guy on the outskirts of London, we went through Joe Bennett’s recent piece about wanting to banish the internet from existence (I wouldn’t go that far, but I’d love to get rid of social media), and then an article about Shane Warne, bane of England’s cricket team over many Ashes Series, who passed away on Friday. He was only ten years older than me.

On a similar theme to Joe Bennett’s article, I’ve been reading Stephen King’s Cell, in which anyone who makes or receives a cell phone call is infected with a “pulse” that makes them go crazy. I first picked it up when it came out in 2006, when mobile phones were still primarily used to make calls, at least in the US where texting was yet to take off. The book starts off fantastically well – in Boston, which I loved when I visited the city in 2015 – but now I’m over half-way through and it isn’t quite the page-turner it started out as. I’ll persevere, though.

The war in Ukraine has shifted from something immediately shocking to dreadful drumbeat in the background. I’m no longer glued to the TV.

Buying property - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Some sad news, and my latest flat search

February 13, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My neighbour called me yesterday to deliver the sad news that Domnul Ionescu, the 70-year-old tennis regular, had died just that morning. He’d died of lung cancer. It all happened remarkably quickly; in November I was playing tennis with him, often on the same side of the net. He was a heavy smoker. He could get through one set of tennis without a fag, but not two. He had a typical smoker’s cough, sometimes yacking out the contents into his hand. He was also pleasant to talk to, even if his favourite topic of conversation was how Romania had gone to the dogs. He was particularly scathing about Romanians’ attitudes to the pandemic; he’d been fully vaccinated. He loved following sport: tennis, football and handball. He worked for the railways, as some of the other tennis players do (or did), and as far as I can tell he reached quite a high position.

I got to look at four places on Wednesday. They were all built in the eighties and in a similar part of town.

The first one was a doozy. (Maybe I should choose that as my starting word for Wordle.) It was a biggish flat on the ground floor, owned by a couple in their sixties. The lady was cooking pancakes at the time. The place had unusual-looking archways and was eccentrically decorated, with no two walls painted the same colour. One of the rooms had snowmen and the like painted on the walls. Under the living room was a hidden storage space. One of the rooms could have been an office, but was rather small. In the bathroom, the sink and bath were shell-shaped, while the sink pedestal was in the shape of a fish. I had a certain admiration for the owners for deciding to decorate the place like this, and they seemed lovely. The woman even gave me two pancakes before I left. But really it was a non-starter. I told the agent I thought it was overpriced, and he agreed with me.

The second place also on the ground floor and had recently had a makeover. A large, typically Romanian elderly lady owned it. It was well furnished and had potential, but unfortunately was just too small. Then on to number three. I met the owner, a man of sixty or so, who might have been a welder. It seemed he could turn his hand to anything involving metal. I do admire people who have such practical skill. Unlike number two, this place was filled with cheap furniture. It had a garage I could have bought for a few thousand extra. Opposite was supposedly a brewery of some sort, which had ceased operations a long time ago. Just like the second place, this was also too small to run classes.

The final apartment was the best of the bunch. It was in a slightly different area, and one I prefer, because it is relatively quiet and has more green space. The flat was a decent size, and one of the rooms could have made a good office. I wasn’t sure about the electrics – the wires hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen looked a bit dodgy. Like the first place, it had a hidden storage space (basement) under the kitchen, with a ladder going down. The owner didn’t stop talking – he was in hard-sell mode – and I wasn’t sure if I could trust him. Again, there was a garage that I could buy for an additional €5,500, on top of the €120,000 asking price of the flat. I wasn’t sure if it got much sunlight. I soon learnt that the apartment had been on the market for a year, and the owners have increased the price by €10,000 in that time. The owner showed me some paperwork with various unaccepted offers, all around the €100,000 mark.

This wasn’t wasted time, because I felt I got my eye in a bit, which I need to do because it’s such a big decision.

Last week was a better one for work as people recovered from Covid, some for the second time.

Poker. I’ve been less active of late, but I got in two tournaments yesterday. In the single draw I snagged the last of the eleven paid places, while in the badugi I had a good run, finishing fourth for a $43 profit. After that successful session my bankroll is up to $1740. If and when my profit reaches $2000 – that’s $300 away – I plan to withdraw most of it, leaving $700 in my account.

Buying property - Life :)

Still searching for the right place (and the right word)

February 9, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Doing the Wordle has now become an early-morning ritual for me. Although the game is hosted on a .co.uk site, today’s one was an American spelling. I see American spellings pretty often without batting an eyelid, but I don’t immediately think of them, so it was a challenge today. I was happy to get the word on my fourth attempt after deliberating for ages. What could it possibly be? The best part about Wordle for me is that I can use it as a teaching tool. When you’re sometimes giving hundreds of lessons to the same person, you can never have too many tools. The Romanian version is also great for me because it gets me to think about words differently. For instance, last week COAJA was one of the answers. Coajă means the skin of a fruit, or the shell of a nut or an egg. I could lump that together with coadă (a tail, or a queue) and coamă (a ridge, or a mane), so that those three words no longer took up three separate spaces in my brain. (Edit: there’s also coasă, which is a scythe, and coală, a scrap of paper, to complete a quintet.) Yesterday’s answer, by the way was SOFER. The French word chauffeur was borrowed into Romanian as șofer, and like in French it just means driver, without the added swank that comes with it in English. It’s funny how a nine-letter French word became a five-letter Wordle-valid Romanian word.

Today is a fairly big day for me, because I’ll get to look at two, maybe three, perhaps even four flats. I don’t even know which they will be – not for the first time, I’ll meet the agent outside a pizza place and go from there. Most the ones I’ve seen so far have merged into one big amorphous blob. At Mum’s suggestion I’ll go around with a checklist for each flat: sunlight, noise, wiring, security, furniture (that’s usually included), too open-spacey?, does it have a balcony?, parking, and so on and so forth. I really want to make some progress here, but I feel I’ve got two big handicaps. The biggest is that I’m on my own. Nobody to bounce ideas off or to tell me that the flat I’m eyeing up is ideal or utterly ludicrous. The other is that when it comes to home interiors, I’m colourblind, shape-blind, everything-blind.

Actually one of the places I looked at last week seemed pretty decent. This one was being sold directly by the owners, without an agent. That isn’t uncommon here. I met the owners, a very pleasant couple in perhaps their late sixties, who showed me around. The man first asked me whether my hair was natural or if I dyed it that colour. You seem young, he said. I was wearing a beanie (with my grey hair flopping out of it) and carrying a backpack. After I removed all of that, he could see I wasn’t that young after all. Once I’d been through all the rooms, I told them that I was a private English teacher and needed a room for work. The lady then said, well that explains why you have an accent. An accent? That’s one of the greatest compliments on my Romanian that I’ve ever received. I liked the area, and the flat was fine, if maybe a little overpriced. I really don’t know though.

On Monday I bought a fruit I hadn’t seen before – a nectarcot, a cross between a nectarine and an apricot (but apricot-sized). It tasted pretty good.

In my next post I’ll say how I got on today.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker

Wobbling slightly

February 8, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Saturday, after realising I’d hardly taken anything in of the flat I’d rushed off to see, it hit me. I’m struggling a bit here, aren’t I? I’ve got a pretty big decision to make, and I can’t motivate myself, while this dump, the one I’m living in now, is a mess and falling apart. How great the initial lockdown was two years ago. No decisions to make. Just do whatever you can to stay safe. Walk in the park once a day and smell the daffodils and tulips, and be thankful that you still can, meaning that you probably haven’t caught the virus yet. (Did people even call it Covid then? I can’t remember.) Traipse up and down the stairs eight times with water bottles on my back. Listen to the birds and the trains in the evening. At times I wish the Sigma Max plus-plus-plus variant could hit us, and we could all go back there. (It’s kind of crazy that Covid is actually pretty bad in Romania right now, far worse than at the start of the pandemic, but it’s predictably bad, so everyone’s sort of OK with it.)

As I was writing the last sentence but one, I googled the name of an insurance product—which had Max and Plus in its name—that was sold by the large company I spent several years working for in NZ. For some reason the name popped into my head. I found out that the company, while large, was taken over by a three-letter-acronym behemoth in 2018, so no longer exists.

What I’m trying to say here is that my propensity for depression hasn’t gone away. I doubt it ever will. I’ve got to move, and until I do, and I’m (hopefully) settled in a new place, I’m probably in for a certain amount of mental turmoil. The good news is that it’s never that long until my next lesson, and connecting with a person for an hour or two (and no longer!) invariably lifts my mood.

New Zealand. There’s talk of opening up, and finally ditching the rather draconian MIQ set-up. I’d love to make a trip over there, but when could I do it? I’m thinking August, of a year to be determined.

I’m still Wordling. Mr Wordle (or Wardle, in fact) has now sold his idea to the New York Times for at least a million bucks, so I don’t know how long it’ll stay free. As well as the Wordle, I’ve been doing the Romanian version, plus a maths-based one called (appropriately) Nerdle.

Poker. I wonder if I’m enjoying that so much. Last week I decided to do a deal, which I basically never do. We got heads-up in five-card draw, and my opponent was happy to split the money 50-50 even though he had more chips than me at the time and (I thought) he was a better player than me. In those circumstances, doing the deal seemed a no-brainer. My bankroll is now $1694.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

My flat search, my brother’s job search, and 19/1/12

January 20, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a nippy Thursday morning here. I took this picture just before my lesson which started at eight. You can see the hoar frost on the trees and the near-full moon. The days are noticeably pulling out: a fortnight ago it was almost pitch black at that time.

I haven’t had much luck getting new students at the start of 2022, but yesterday I got a call from the mother of a 17-year-old girl, and I agreed to give her daughter tuition for her C1 Cambridge exam. Teaching for advanced-level exams is not my forte – they’re basically a game in which I lack experience, rather than a simple test of English – so I might not be much help.

No maths lesson with Matei this weekend – his family are going away. It’s been interesting being back in his room again. The huge world map on his wall always fascinates me because it makes Europe seem so small. He told me that his grandmother, whom I often had conversations with, is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. She must be almost eighty. That’s sad.

I saw the doctor on Tuesday to get my pills. I mentioned my headaches and gummed-up nose, but after seeing 35 Covid patients in a single day, his focus was on the virus which wasn’t my issue. (I took a rapid Covid test last week, just in case. I was negative.) He gave me the requisite temperature and oxygen saturation checks, and even checked my blood pressure and gave me a once-over with a stethoscope, and everything was fine. He then prescribed me a drug called Quarelin for my headaches. If I can’t rid of this head pain, and the frequency and duration reach the levels that Dad had to deal with when he was my age, life might not be worth living. I’m serious. Dad had a wife and family. I don’t.

I’ve finally dismissed that flat which initially seemed so promising. The lack of sun isn’t something I can risk. I look back at all those places in Auckland and Wellington, and the correlation between natural light and my mood – if not necesarily a causation – is definitely there. I’m interested in three more places and I’ll make some phone calls later today.

My parents told me that they heard a loud bang last Friday. What the hell was that? It was the Tongan volcanic eruption. They could hear it from 1500 miles away? Holy shit. The scenes following the eruption are of total devastation.

My brother wants to leave the army. He’s had enough of his courses that take him away from home five days a week and hardly inspire him anyway. He recently applied for a job which he didn’t get (unfairly, he thinks). He’s invariably grumpy and uncommunicative at the moment, so I really hope he can find something to cheer him up.

Poker tournaments. Since Christmas I’ve had one win and five second places. What a shame it isn’t the other way round. At the weekend I was heads-up in a $4.40 pot-limit badugi. My opponent covered me, just. I got dealt the 204th best hand in the game. That doesn’t sound very good, and it’s not, but heads-up against an aggressive opponent it shoots up in value. It was just a bit too good to fold. We got all our chips in, he turned over the 203rd best hand (!), and I had to be content with another runner-up spot. My bankroll is now $1562.

It’s now ten years since my grandmother died, four months prior to her 90th birthday. How time flies. I often wish she could have seen me in Romania. I sometimes dream about sitting in the square with her, having a coffee or a glass of wine, watching the world go by.

Buying property - Films - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

A real headache

January 16, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

In a follow-up to the previous Thursday, I had a really really shitty start to this week – headaches and just no energy. On Wednesday, even though my headaches had pretty much gone, I’d taken a hammering from having what felt like a screwdriver jammed up my nostril for two days, and I couldn’t steel myself do anything outside my online lessons. On Monday I did manage to make it over to the apartment for a second look. It ticks a lot of my boxes – it would be great for teaching, I think – but the sun is a big issue. The flat has windows facing both north and south, but unfortunately the south-facing windows look out on tall apartment blocks that cut out the sun. I thought about this earlier today when the sun was streaming through my south-facing window as I washed my lunch dishes. Now I’m about to get the sun through my west-facing living room window. Before moving to Romania I faced ongoing battles with mental health. I now have that under control, and I hate to make a change that puts that in jeopardy.

Talking of weather, we got a fair dump of snow last weekend and early this week, making for picturesque scenes. On Thursday morning we plummeted to a rather brisk minus 12. This was as my parents were down in Central Otago to deliver paintings. Dad sent me a picture taken at a café in beautiful Ophir which I visited seven years ago.

On that awful Thursday – nine days ago – I watched the star-studded Don’t Look Up on Netflix, though I had to take it in chunks because the headaches were making me ultra-sensitive to light and sound. Some reviewers have panned the film, but it’s rather cool to pan something like that, and when all is said and done it’s likely to end up in four-star territory. Don’t Look Up is a pretty good parody of the post-truth times we live in, where everything is up for debate, everything must have two sides, social media is dominant, and the music is unbearably awful.

Even the Djokovic saga has polarised people, when it has no need to. The last ten days have been a bad look for everybody involved: the man himself, and the Australian government in its entirety. A 500-watt light has been shone on Australia’s pretty barbaric (and US-style) immigration practices. If Djokovic had any sense (I used to think he did), he’d have gone home by now of his own accord, but his ego is obviously too big for that.

Poker. I had another tournament win on Wednesday, which was nice. I’ve now had four goes at razz – a fourth place (which got my confidence up), a good run but far from the money, and two very early exits. My bankroll now stands at $1523.

Buying property - Life :) - Other sports

The most promising place so far

January 5, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve finally found a flat that might fit the bill. It’s fully furnished, just in case you haven’t had enough Fs yet, and it’s on the third floor of a block built in 1986, just off Calea Aradului, one of the arterial roads through the city. I say just off, but it’s pretty much on it. I had a look at it yesterday. At 110 square metres, it’s big for just one person – the same size as the place in Wellington that I’m thankfully no longer burdened with. I found that too big, but in my new situation bigger is better: I need the space for work. This place has three bedrooms (I could convert one of them into an office) and two bathrooms – or rather one bathroom and an additional loo. Crucially it has a hall with the rooms leading off it, unlike more modern designs. I shouldn’t have problem parking a car there, if and when I eventually get one, assuming I haven’t completely forgotten how to drive. As always, there are minuses. The third floor is right at the limit when running a business in a lift-free apartment block. The location is very handy to everything, but it’s not exactly quiet. (I even went back there this afternoon and stood outside the block with a decibel meter that I’d downloaded as an app. Over five minutes the average reading was 76, and when a truck went by it hit 90. Where I live now, slap-bang in the centre of the city, we average 72 in the daytime.) I’ll have very little of the green space I’ve enjoyed in the last five years, although there is a park within walking distance. I’m still unsure how much sun the place will get. So there’s plenty to think about.

New Year’s Eve with the neighbours was nice, if a little tiring. By two o’clock I could not longer stay awake, and I really didn’t need all that food. I realise now that under normal circumstances (that means no jokes or obscure subjects) I can manage fine in Romanian. I should be proud of that, I guess, even if I’m far from fluent. For the second year running, Covid put paid to the big fireworks display, so a lot of people let off their own. Hospitals had a busy time of it. On New Year’s Day I met Mark, the teacher, in town. We sampled the food from the market – mutton, which was a first for me in Romania – and then went for a beer.

Last night I stayed up to watch the darts final on a temperamental stream. A good match, with Peter Wright beating Michael Smith 7-5, taking home £500,000 for his efforts. (Smith got £200k.) The second leg of the match was almost like two blokes down the pub, it took so long for someone to finally hit double one, but the level improved markedly from there. The best match of the few I saw was Wright’s 5-4 quarter-final win over youngster Callan Rydz, needing a tie-break to just about get over the line.

Here are some pictures from my New Year’s Eve bike ride. Below is the semi-derelict church at Bobda. I sent the photo to Dad, who said I shouldn’t put in an offer on it.