Yesterday I got a phone call from Florin, the guy I play tennis with. They’re seeing in the new year at the same place as last year. They already need numbers. Do I want to come? Of course I don’t, but it’ll only be a few hours and won’t it be good to at least show my face? It couldn’t have been that bad last time, surely? Luckily I have this blog to remind me, and there it is, in black and white and orange. It really was that bad, and I even vowed not to put myself through that again. The difficulty is finding an excuse. A way out. There’s also the prospect of Christmas in the UK. A horrendous time of year to go there or be there. My brother doesn’t particularly enjoy Christmas with his wife’s family because they really go to town with party games and other activities he can’t stand, and I totally sympathise with him. I hope if I decide not to travel there for Christmas and instead go over at Easter, he won’t think I don’t care. Sometimes I really miss Covid.
The UK Covid inquiry resumed this week. Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Advisor, spoke unflatteringly of Boris Johnson. The former prime minister didn’t get the concept of exponential growth, or a heck of a lot else by the sound of things. In Vallance’s words, he was bamboozled. I liked Vallance’s comment about the heavy bias in government towards people with humanities backgrounds at the expense of science and maths. He said that it should be a 50-50 split, emphasising that a bias towards science and maths wouldn’t be a good thing either. Next week should be an absolute doozy – twat-in-chief Matt Hancock will be making an appearance, among others. The inquiry, or the bits I’ve seen so far, have thrown into sharp relief how dangerous the ministers and senior advisers were. The contrast between them and the general public, who were extremely compliant, could hardly be starker.
Maths last night. Plenty of bamboozlement there, as I started teaching my 15-year-old student the basics of probability. There are very few things in this world that I get, or that I’ve come somewhere close to mastering. Probability might just be one of them though, so you’d think I’d be on pretty firm ground. But there was one snag – this is Romania, and probability involves a whole ton of fractions. She really doesn’t get fractions, even at the most basic level. A half plus a quarter? Huh? I learnt about basic fractions when I was six or seven, before I ever touched decimals, but Romanians obviously didn’t, so when they join a British school where fractions abound in their maths classes they face an uphill battle. I’m in the middle of making a fractions worksheet (or workbook, as it might end up being). These things are all over the place online of course, but they’re (understandably) targeted at rather younger age groups.
Romania won their final qualifier against Switzerland 1-0 to finish their group in first place, with an impressive haul of 22 points from 10 games. It’ll be Romania’s first appearance in a major tournament since I arrived here. It was funny to watch the game against Israel on TV, where the local commentators didn’t even attempt to appear impartial.
A nippy start to the day as I had my lesson with the boy on the fifth floor. The lesson went well, though. Next week I’ll be starting lessons with her husband (a total beginner, she says, but I’m always skeptical about that).
I managed 32 hours of lessons last week. I was my first time over 30 for a while. I always think of 30 as a good benchmark for a full, productive week, but cancellations had kept me below that level. After I got home from Dumbrăvița on Saturday I emailed Mum a logic problem about odd and even numbers that I’d given to Matei. She replied with the right answer. (It wasn’t immediately obvious to Matei that if you multiply two whole numbers and you get an odd number, both the numbers must be odd.) I thought about the night classes in maths she took when I was little, half her lifetime ago. She’d show me her book full of xs and ys. It would be nice if she could do something similar now.
At the weekend I read an article about the rise of English. It is undoubtedly the dominant language in the world, and is likely to remain so for some time. Most of this is down to American culture. Just look at Romania. As the country develops, slices of America keep popping up everywhere, with “Drive-Thru” and “Wash & Go” spelled out in English. Twenty-year-olds grew up on Cartoon Network. Teens (and even pre-teens) are all over TikTok – Chinese-owned but loaded with American popular culture. There were plenty of comments on the article, and some people said that the dominance of English isn’t only due to America, but also because it’s simply easier to communicate in than most other languages. “Me no like the cats” is very wrong but perfectly understandable to a native speaker. They’re partly right – English has few inflections, it lacks grammatical gender, and English text takes up less space than most other languages that use the Latin alphabet. But that’s only a small part of the story. Bad English is easy for us to understand precisely because we’re used to non-natives speaking English, or attempting to. We even simplify our language in return. I remember in Bali 30-plus years ago, where the locals often knew English but at a very basic level, Dad would say things like “Many motorbikes here” or “Takes long time?” It’s not the same with less widespread languages. If I utter a very bad Romanian version of “I don’t like cats”, my Romanian listener won’t have heard anything like that before in his life. He’ll be thinking WTF? So that puts a barrier in place to anyone trying to learn Romanian – you have to get to some kind of reasonable level before you can even start using the language. Its very pervasiveness is what makes English one of the easier languages to learn; in 2023 you’d have to be living under a rock to not know like or love or stop or OK. You get a lot of English for free, and that gives you a heck of a head start.
I don’t often watch football these days, but on Saturday I watched Romania’s Euro 2024 football qualifier against Israel, played in Budapest. It was originally meant to be played in Israel, but got moved for obvious reasons. If Romania avoided defeat, they’d qualify for next summer’s competition in Germany. Israel took the lead in only the second minute, then Romania equalised in the tenth. That dramatic start set up a very watchable game. Romania took the lead midway through the second half and held their advantage until the end. They probably should have won by more – a player by the name of Mihăilă missed a sitter and then got himself sent off just before the end. Romanian football, and sport in general, has been in the doldrums for a while, so it’s nice that they qualified. Beneficiaries of a pretty easy group it must be said, they’re unbeaten in nine games (five wins, four draws) and if they can get at least a draw against Switzerland in Bucharest tomorrow night they’ll top the group and in theory have an easier ride in the final tournament.
This song popped up on YouTube – Sleeping Satellite, Tasmin Archer’s one-hit wonder. It came out in 1992 and was the very first song on Now 23, one of the first tapes I ever had. A complex song, unique in many ways, with levels of rhyme adeptly woven into the lyrics. It brings back memories of a more optimistic time.
Last night I watched the first episode of the new series of Charlie Ottley’s Flavours of Romania. It’s on Netflix; I thoroughly recommend it. I hope to get a few ideas for road trips, for when I finally do own a car. I also watched Noel Philips’ trip from Amsterdam to Paramaribo (the capital of Suriname) – a nine-hour flight on an Airbus A340.
My brother called me on Saturday. My nephew was bouncing around, on the verge of walking. A very happy chappy. He’s fascinated by the cat, though the cat seems less fascinated by him. I’m thinking of going over there for Christmas, but can I face it? What I’ll really want are about four days with little risk of having to see or communicate with anyone.
When Mum was on the way to Christchurch to pick up Dad on Tuesday, she dropped in on her mother’s cousin Pat who now lives in a care home in Ashburton. Pat is 106 (!) years old – she was born during the First World War – and remarkably still has all her marbles. In this meeting Pat told Mum about her car journey from Christchurch to Dunedin at the age of four. A car journey of that distance would have been a mission back then, and something quite astonishing for a four-year-old; I can see how she still has a clear memory of it more than a century later. What was the car? Her family wasn’t wealthy as far as I know, so how did she end up in that car in the first place? What were the roads like? How long did it take? I’ll ask Mum the next time I speak to her; our conversation quickly moved on to the building work. Last year the local radio station had a phone-in where anyone who remembered Elizabeth’s coronation (in 1953) could call in and regale the listeners of their memories of the day. Pat called in. “I remember when she was born?” Um, sorry, what, you’d have to be at least a hundred. “Yes. Do you have a problem with that?” That might not have been exactly how it went down, but I know there was disbelief on the part of the host.
Yesterday I had a late finish – a face-to-face maths lesson between 7 and 9pm, followed by an online English session. In our maths lesson, among many other topics (her schoolteacher switches between topics at a maddening rate) I helped my 15-year-old student divide by decimal numbers smaller than one, without using a calculator. We think of division as sharing – that word was used at school, I remember – and sharing money or sweets or bottles of orange juice between two or three or ten people all feels natural. But sharing between half or a tenth or 0.08 of a person – what on earth could that even mean? When you divide by something less than one, you end up with more than what you started with, and that messes with people’s heads. It goes against what people intuitively feel that division does. By chance, earlier in the week I stumbled upon a blog post that used bottles of juice as an intuitive basis for dividing by small decimals. When I explained how to divide 24 by 0.08, I asked her first to imagine 24 litres of orange juice and (big!) 8-litre bottles. How many bottles would all that juice go into? She correctly said three. Now imagine the bottles are 0.08 of a litre. You know, tiny, the size that you could take through airport security. You’d need loads of ’em, right? Turns out it’s 300. Move the decimal point two digits to the right, or in this case add two zeros. I told my English student about my maths lesson – she’s an accountant and has a strong mathematical background – and she couldn’t understand how my student didn’t just know to do these division problems. She’s fifteen, for crying out loud. Can’t she just think of that decimal as a fraction and go from there? No. So much of being a good maths teacher is empathy. Just because you got it at a young age and it all seems obvious to you, that doesn’t mean they will. And I certainly wouldn’t want to introduce fractions into the problem – fractions seem to frighten the living bajeezus out of Romanian teenagers.
Earlier today I watched this video of somebody multiplying and squaring numbers showmanlike, faster than a calculator. His party piece came at the end: working out 37,691 squared in his head. I actually paused the video and tried to do this. It’s not the worst five-digit number to have to square. It’s 9 away from 37,700. The repeated 7 helps. All (!) you have to do is square 377 and tack on four zeros, then find 18 lots of 37,700 then take that away, then add on 81. Hey presto, Bob’s your uncle. But there’s a catch. You end up with a ten-digit number, and my brain is nowhere near capable of storing that many digits while also carrying out calculations. I gave up. He can also calculate the day of the week that a particular date falls on, which is something I saw people do at the autism groups I used to attend. I recently had a go at this 21-question hard mental arithmetic test. I tried to do the questions as fast as possible, and got 17 correct.
The weather is wet and nasty. I had to go out in it this morning, for a lesson with a 12-year-old boy who lives on the fifth and top floor of a block of flats with no lift. He’s a nice kid. We mostly did the simple past tense in all its glory.
I’ve just had an argument with Dad on his last full day in the UK. We talked about him and Mum possibly making the trip in six months’ time. “We have to consider the cost.” No, Dad, you really don’t. I’m fully sympathetic to all the factors that make the trip difficult for you, but the cost isn’t one of them. It isn’t even close to being one of them. Dad will visit his sister later today – it might be the last time they meet.
Last night I saw a comedy play at the theatre with Dorothy and Sanda. I got wet on my bike ride to Scârț, a place that houses a bar, a museum of communism, and an amateur theatre company called Auăleu. (Auăleu is a Romanian exclamation, used similarly to “Oh my god”.) The theatre sat 50 people; I was on the front row (of two) next to Sanda, but wished I was on a hypothetical tenth row. Being that close to the stage was rather intimidating. The play was called Grand Hostel Timișoara. Guests of various nationalities booked in, and the comedy came from all the national stereotypes as well as local jokes about Timișoara in 2023 (supposedly it’s the European Capital of Culture, though you wouldn’t know it) and other in-jokes, only some of which I got. After the interval the guests came back to the hostel having visited the city and suffered all kinds of mishaps. Some of the actors could clearly actually speak the native languages of the guests – German, French, Hungarian, and so on. The play was partly improvised and was very clever and well done, though it wasn’t quite my thing. Being in Timișoara for “only” seven years didn’t help, and political jokes about Schengen or neighbouring countries’ accession to the EU left me cold. I’ll happily go back though and see something else if the opportunity arises.
Plenty of interesting lessons last week. One was with a woman who is always ever so busy in her work as a middle manager at a large bank, to the point where she often has to cut short her meetings with me. I still haven’t figured out the purpose of our sessions. Business English? Well, she’s got that down to a tee already. A simple chat? Maybe, but our discussions rarely stray from the corporate world. Last Tuesday she talked about how good it felt in her previous job to be given so much power; in that job she was the sole determiner of who got what access to vital IT systems at a company she didn’t even work for. With no sense of irony, she said “I felt like a rock star.” That responsibility would terrify me. I could, like, accidentally press something that shut down everyone’s access at a stroke. Then on Friday I helped a woman prepare for a job interview in English, which she has tomorrow. The first thing I did was browse her CV. She, like many Romanians, uses an automated CV system which produces personality-free walls of text in a tiny font. Her first inscrutable wall of text related to her current job. “So, what do you actually do?” Robots. Directing robots. Fixing robots. Ordering new robots. “Why, then, are there over a hundred words in this paragraph and not one mention of robots?” Robot is a fun, eye-catching word, even if it’s a bit scary. (Incidentally it comes from a Czech word meaning “forced labour”.) But I couldn’t persuade her to move away from that dreadful vagueness. I then saw that at the bottom of the CV she said she was at a C1 level in English listening, but B1 in all the other disciplines (reading, writing and speaking). Why the big gap, I wondered. (C1 is miles better than B1.) I can understand anything anyone says. That’s why I’m C1. I suggested that she visited a British pub and tried to follow a conversation – jokes, regional accents, people arguing and talking over each other. It became apparent during our interview practice that she didn’t really know what she’d be doing if she got the job. Not her fault – the job description was hopelessly vague. I’m so glad I’ve left the corporate world behind.
Another highlight was an 11-year-old boy’s piece of creative writing, in which he said there were “cloudy clouds” in the sky. Then yesterday I had maths with Matei. Fractions reared their ugly head again. He can add, subtract, multiply and divide them, but conceptually he hasn’t the foggiest, and that’s starting to cause a problem.
I’ll soon be playing tennis for the last time in 2023.
Yesterday I went to tennis but nobody showed up. As I was waiting in vain, Dad called me. He’d just come back from my brother’s place in Poole, and was tired after a seven-hour bus journey full of traffic jams. He said he wouldn’t want to live in the UK again. New Zealand is on a human scale, he said. I see what he means. I remember seeing a road sign around Wanaka: “Christchurch 424 km”. In Romania you see signs showing similar distances. But travelling through southern and central England, you rarely see much above 60 or 70 miles, or 100-odd kilometres. Everything is on top of each other – there are no gaps that allow you to breathe. Dad enjoyed seeing the family – he had nothing but positive words for his grandson – but his (and my brother’s) mental energy was taken up with sorting out his email and phone; he’s always got some tech issue. As soon as he got back, he saw his sister who was surprisingly chatty.
Yesterday I made a cottage pie (something British!) and quince crumble to give to Viorica and Petrică, the couple in their late sixties who live on the top floor. Viorica has been so helpful to me. Without her, I’d be having cold showers all through winter. This is too much, she told me, and spooned half of the food onto some plates, leaving me with the other half. A few minutes later my doorbell rang, and she handed me back almost all of the half that she’d originally taken. “I appreciate the gesture,” she said. But not the food, obviously. When I gave her the pie she asked me where the beef had come from. Kaufland, I said. Maybe she sees supermarket meat as poor quality or something. Older Romanians have these ideas, I’ve noticed. Oh well.
On Saturday I only had one lesson – two hours of maths with Matei. He’d just got an A grade in a test, which will allow him to take the extended GCSE maths paper. He only needed a C for that, so in other words he smashed it. That’s obviously great. I still think he can improve though. He’s good at following processes – move this over to the other side of the equation, now square both sides – but still lacks a good understanding of how numbers fit together. When I say numbers, I mean fractions, decimals, percentages, roots, powers, the lot. He reaches for the calculator at the first opportunity. Funnily enough, one thing that helped me with this when I was growing up was a crappy calculator with an eight-digit display, which my maths teacher called a “Noddy calculator”. Tap in 1 + 2 x 3 =, and it would tell you 9, not 7. So I’d learn about the order of operations, which at the time we called BODMAS. My Noddy calculator preferred SAMDOB. Divide 2 by 3 on that same calculator, and you’d get 0.6666666. Multiply that by 3 and it spat out 1.9999998. As the real answer is clearly exactly 2, that taught me something about the perils of rounding. A handy feature was being able to quickly repeat an operation over and over again by mashing the equals button. If you started at 1 and repeatedly multiplied by 2, you’d see that (a) the final digits cycle through 2, 4, 8 and 6, and (b) the numbers get very big very fast – just like the grains of rice on a chessboard – until they got too big for the screen. Dividing by zero was an immediate no-can-do. Why was that, I wondered? On fancier Noddy calculators with a square root button, you’d see that repeating square-rooting brought you closer and closer to 1. Now kids have better calculators – even the ones on their phones are way superior to Noddies – but the old Noddies gave you a better idea of how numbers fitted together. Plus you could tap in 5318008, turn your screen upside down, and have a giggle – this doesn’t work on your phone. After maths on Saturday, I really did play tennis. This was singles again with the other Florin. I lost two games out of the 23 we played.
I’ve now been in Romania for just over seven years. In my head, I split that time into four phases. Phase one was from the moment I arrived (October 2016) until the summer of 2018, when everything was new and exciting. The sights, the sounds, the smells. The regular trips back in time. That proper first winter. Living in the centre of such a beautiful city and trying to build my teaching business (all those phone calls, when I could hardly speak the language!) was like nothing I’d experienced before. I look back at that time with great fondness. Then came phase two. Timișoara and English teaching had become normal. Routine. The newness had gone. That lasted until the outbreak of Covid. Terribly scary, and horrific for many people, but (and this probably sounds awful) at least it was something new. I enjoyed the quiet of the lockdown. The parks in the springtime with the birds and the flowers. The focus on the simple things. That third phase lasted two years until we clambered out of all the lockdowns and restrictions into a world of having to achieve again, and in my case a move and feeling unable to cope. I’d really love phase four to be over. New Zealand – that feeling of newness, of something different – was wonderful, but it was just a temporary respite.
All of a sudden we’ve hit the last quarter of the year, the one that includes – gasp! – Christmas. It also includes sodding Halloween, which I’ll soon be forced to discuss in my lessons with kids. I don’t have a problem with Halloween in itself, but in Romania we could do without yet another American import.
Yesterday I had five hours of lessons in Dumbrăvița. I’d planned to head to the English Conversation Club after that, then onwards to tennis. Despite taking ages to organise myself I left in plenty of time, but then I realised I’d forgotten something important and had to come back for it. That meant I had time to grab some biscuits from Kaufland to take to the club, but not enough time to also drink a coffee from the vending machine. Normally I have two coffees on a Saturday morning in quick succession, one from Kaufland and another from Matei’s dad. Yesterday though Matei’s parents were out, so I ended up going without coffee altogether. I did quadratic graphs with Matei, interspersed with random chat, then I dashed back to Kaufland for a mochaccino and a quick bite to eat before my two hours with Octavian.
I worry that 16-year-old Octavian’s rather non-native-sounding accent may now be set in stone. Is that my fault? In part, probably yes. Or more accurately, when I started teaching him six years ago (!) I was too inexperienced to know I needed to focus more on that aspect of his English. He also still makes a lot of word order mistakes – We went yesterday fishing – which I can’t beat out of him however hard I try. It’s all a little frustrating given how good his reading and listening are. Octavian made two big overseas trips over the summer. He spent four weeks in the UK, then another three with his family in the US – they visited New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and probably somewhere else I’ve missed out. I chatted to his mum about their US trip and she was shocked at the extreme poverty in so many parts of the country and the depressing lack of nutritious food. She was glad to get back home. Octavian enjoyed it more I think. As for the UK, he said that his favourite place was Norwich. How interesting. I only visited twice and liked it a lot, too. The market with brightly-coloured covers over rows of stalls, all on a slope, was gritty and crazy at the same time. Best of all I liked Norwich’s position, away from the hopelessly congested area surrounding London. The air was noticeably different there. The second time I visited Norwich was for a job interview in 2002. It was at Norwich Union, an insurance company that now goes by Aviva in all its dismal symmetry. The firm was (and presumably still is) big – its offices occupied several edifices in a row on one street. I enjoyed the train journey from Cambridge to Norwich and the lunch I got from the market. In between was the interview which wasn’t so great, in part because I didn’t really know what the job was about.
When I was done with Octavian – we worked on an IGCSE reading paper – I had an hour with his six-year-old sister. You need to bring a lot of ammo to a lesson with someone that young. A colour-the-fish sheet might last five minutes if you’re lucky. While I was in the lesson, Dorothy messaged me to say that the English Conversation Club was off (yet again) because people had decided they had better things to do. Post-Covid everybody seems to have better things to do all the time. Not too far away is a place that sells second-hand bikes, and the cancellation allowed me to pop in there. Only two were for sale – apparently it’s the end of the season. I liked the look of one of them which was going for 1250 lei (£220 or NZ$450) so I may go back there. I then had time to kill before tennis. I went past the wooden-stick-making factory for the first time since I gave those lessons there years ago. The factory is still there, but so too is one of the many small malls that have sprung up around the city in the last five years.
Tennis. Singles again, with the same guy. From 2-2 and 15-40 on my serve I won the first set 6-2, despite not serving very well (with the exception perhaps of those two points in the fifth game). In the second set I led 2-1 but then he hit one of those purple patches to win the next four games. I closed to only 5-4 down and played a scrambling point to reach 30-all on his serve in game ten. I then made errors on both the next two points; it was disappointing to concede the set in that manner. What we managed of the third set (before darkness fell) wasn’t easy for me, but I’d built a 4-1 lead by the end. In theory you should only lose one time in nine with that lead, assuming both players are of equal skill and there’s no advantage in serving. Update: We played again this evening. We had the court booked for an hour, which only gave us time to play one long set after we warmed up. We went to a tie-break which I lost 7-4. I thought I played fine but he’s such a tough opponent when he’s on form. I look back at the people I played in that season in Wellington and all the passing winners I was able to make. No such luck with this demon at the net. The key game I felt was on his serve at 4-4. I led 0-30, he hit the baseline to win the next point, then played an extraordinary point that I thought I’d won several times, then found the baseline once again to move to 40-30. I lost the game five points later without doing a heck of a lot wrong. If he keeps this up I’ll really have my hands full. If the weather isn’t too hot, he ties his King Charles spaniel to a post while we play, but he’s now been told not to bring it (her) anymore. We laughed about how life gets harder with each passing week as barriers are continually put up around us. Next to us were some girls playing volleyball. One of them wore a top that read “Scorpions 1993 World Tour”. She wouldn’t have been born for another decade and a half. I’ve mentioned this phenomenon – that’s what it is – on here before.
I now have no hot water. That’s the next stage in the long and circuitous process of getting my central heating set up.
Someone trying to sell a saxophone (and other instruments) at the market last SundaySome quite beautiful baroque music on the Bega last night
I’ve just had a marathon – 81-minute – Skype call with my parents.
We spent the first part of our call discussing the latest shocking news, that my Wellington-based cousin has cancer in her jaw. My parents had noticed something was up when they met her at their tragically young relative’s funeral in late April, but never imagined it was cancer. Googling “jaw cancer” makes for sobering reading. Jaw cancer is rare and doesn’t exist per se; it nearly always starts somewhere else in the mouth and spreads to the jaw, meaning it’s usually in an advanced stage. The prognosis can’t be good. On Wednesday she’ll have an operation to remove flesh from her jaw and replace it, probably from her arm. I must send my cousin a message, but what do you say?
A good half-hour of our chat was spent discussing life admin. It’s making my parents’ lives a misery. They must get rid of both their flats in the UK. They must move to somewhere far simpler as soon as the building work on their current place is finished. They must do things that are financially sub-optimal, just to simplify their lives. Seeing them buckle under the weight of all this crap is upsetting for me, especially at a time when I’ve been overwhelmed by it all myself.
Yesterday I had my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița. When I turned up for the maths lesson, Matei’s father told me that the British school is hiring a maths teacher. I very much doubt I’d get the job anyway because I have no experience of teaching in a school, but if I did I’d have to Get Involved and coach football and heaven knows what else, and um, yeah, I’d have nice long holidays but no thanks.
After my lessons we were supposed to have the latest edition of the English Conversation Club, this time at my place, but just about everybody was away. Sanda, who ran the club in its previous incarnation, showed up at five. We chatted about wedding traditions and the word “venue”, and I gave her a Kiwi vocab matching game which she was somehow fascinated by. Then at 6:20 another woman, Ramona, turned up. She had lived some time in the US, and spoke English pretty well. At one point we discussed silent-b words: “subtle”, “debt”, “doubt”, and words ending in -mb such as “bomb” and “lamb”. Ramona told me, and I get this a lot, that “You don’t pronounce the b in doubt because you’re British. Sorry, but I learned American English and in America they pronounce it.” No, no, no, no, no. I may be British, but I’m also a teacher and I’ve taken the time to learn about pronunciation in different English-speaking countries, I also watch American films occasionally, and believe me, they don’t.
At seven, Sanda said she was going to the open-air museum to see Festivalul Etniilor, where performers based in the Banat region, but with different ethnicities, sang and played and danced. After tennis was cancelled because of the waterlogged courts, I decided to join her. There were Germans (Swabians or șvabi), Ukrainians, Serbians, Aromanians and Gypsies (Roma). It was a riot of colour as all the performers were dressed in their traditional costumes. The event was free and completely non-commercialised, unlike the much more publicised Flight Festival also taking place this weekend. The star of the show, Damian Drăghici with his group Damian & Friends, came on later. In the past he’s been a supporting act for the likes of Joe Cocker and James Brown. Towards the end he played the nai (a traditional panflute); the last song of the evening was Ciocârlia (the Lark), a very traditional Romanian tune – I much preferred last night’s version to the one in the link. I really enjoyed the evening; well, at least I did after the start – I was starving but grabbed a large langoș from a kiosk quite a way from the stage.
The GypsiesThe blind pianistThe flower stalls at the market, still open at 10:30 last night
I made a summer pudding for yesterday’s club which barely happened, and still have most of it. (We also discussed the word “pudding”. When I was growing up, we never used “dessert”. “Pudding”, or simply “pud”, covered anything that you ate after your main meal. For me, “pudding” sounds about nine times tastier than “dessert”.) The main benefit of yesterday’s “event” was that I made me tidy up the kitchen, living room, and main bathroom.
Lots of biking this weekend. This morning I met Mark at his place in Dumbrăvița and we cycled to the (relatively) nearby village of Covaci, then into the countryside, through fields of wheat and barley and rapeseed (though that had been harvested). As I realised we were at the highest point of a câmpie, a plain basically, I was reminded of Haddenham, a large village in Cambridgeshire and perhaps the highest point in that very flat county. (The Blossoms and Bygones open day held every May in Haddenham was really quite wonderful. The vintage cars, the traction engines, seeing horses being shod, trips on horse-drawn carts, going up the church tower and water tower, and best of all, cheap cakes and biscuits. This event seemed to run out of steam around the turn of the century, and Wikipedia tells me that it finished for good in 2013.) We saw two foxes and a hare (hares can run at around twice the speed us pathetic humans can) as well as several storks, and the puddles (of which there were many) were teeming with froglets. And, as always in Romania, so many insects. My old city bike, as opposed to Mark’s newish hybrid bike, coped OK with the narrow dirt tracks. Even on the paved roads there was gloriously little traffic; it was great to be away from the noise of people and their machines. We came back via another pleasant village named Cerneteaz (pronounced “chair-net-yazz“, or close to that; click for a late-eighties flashback) where we had a packed lunch. Traditional Romanian music was playing; we both agreed that we quite liked it.
Made from mud and glass bottles, it’s supposed to be like this
Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei, who had just got a D grade in a test at school. That disappointing result was little to do with him and a lot to do with his teacher who hadn’t really done her job properly. Her explanations had clearly been superficial, so no wonder when she dumped a demanding test on her pupils, they were mostly at sea. Matei showed me the unprofessional-looking test which had been cobbled together from at least four different past papers. The worst part was the marking scheme. Not every mark on every past paper is worth the same. One two-hour paper might carry 100 marks; another two-hour paper which has just as much stuff in it might only have 60 marks. If you’re going to just smoosh different papers together, you have to adjust the marks up and down accordingly. You’d think a maths teacher might have figured that out. After seeing Matei I met Mark at a restaurant called Astur, just off the main street of Dumbrăvița. Unusually there was a large, nicely mown beer-garden-style outdoor area. I was hungry so I had a carbonara and a beer as we sat in the full glare of the sun. (The tops of my legs certainly caught it.) As we were about to leave, my brother surprisingly called me and showed me my nephew, now closing in on nine months old and a different person from the previous time I’d seen him. He’d just uttered his first word: cat. He and the cat are best mates; they spend many hours in close proximity. It was a bit awkward to talk, so I called my brother back in the evening after tennis.
Mark and I soon parted ways, and I cycled to Giarmata Vii to look at yet another Dacia, this time a bright blue one from 2005. It was going for 1500 euros. It had one or two small spots of rust, and only had two weeks left on its ITP (MOT in the UK, or WOF in New Zealand). The owner took me for a ride around the village, and it seemed fine. I don’t know what to do. On Tuesday I looked at another car that seemed fine on the surface, but I found out that it had been in a crash that damaged both the right doors and the pillar and cost a lot to repair. At this rate, buying a car is looking as hard as buying a flat was. (I still have awful flashbacks to that meeting in the lawyer’s office on 5/5/22. My stress levels were off the scale.)
On Friday night I had my lesson with the guy who lives in London. He’d recently been to Alton Towers. I went there twice, in 1999 and 2003. The more famous rides, such as Nemesis, and Oblivion which was brand new in ’99, are still running. He’d also been back to Romania with his family to attend a wedding. They stayed in a hotel which he’d booked on booking.com. The hotel was dire and he duly left a one-star review. The hotel owners then tracked him down, found where he works in the UK, and gave his company a one-star review. What bastards. After he read articles about Boris Johnson and Philip Schofield, he said he’d read The Noonday Demon, a 2001 book about depression that I’d been meaning to get hold of. He said his wife suffers from depression but is denial of it. We had a very interesting conversation about the subject, in particular the number of people who are affected indirectly.
Tennis. I played last night for the first time in two weeks. I played with the teenage girl; her father and 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra were on the other side. We won 6-1, 7-6 (7-5). The local tradition of swapping the side you receive from with your partner every second game is weird and against the rules of tennis, and gets very confusing during a tie-break. Our first set point at 6-3 in the tie-break was the most incredible rally I’ve been involved in for some time; the fact that a near-nonagenarian was also involved made in even more remarkable.
It’s 24 degrees as I write this – a perfect temperature. Soon we’ll have the strawberries and cherries and big juicy tomatoes and I’ll hardly have to visit the supermarket. Can’t wait.
First thing yesterday morning I worked on my Romanian. I must do this regularly. We’ve had two lessons so far using an intermediate textbook and they’ve been great, but as I tell my English students, it’s what you do outside your lessons that really counts. Learning all the little fiddly bits that you have to weave into your expressions to say who did what to whom is a real challenge to me, probably because of how my brain works. I can remember actual words because they have a shape to them. For instance the word morman came up in our last session. It means a big physical heap of something, and was a new word for me. There are many ways of making a visual or sound-based connection between the word and its meaning: mormânt means “grave” (as in a burial place) in Romanian, there’s Mormon, there’s mammon, there’s marmot, there’s moșmoană (a brown Romanian fruit that you see here in December) and so on. The possibilities are just about endless. But with these little bitty bits, there’s nothing to grab hold of. It’s a bit like the time I tried to learn Chinese – everything there is shapeless utterances – or the 1300-odd three-letter Scrabble words which turned my brain into mush, even though I had an easier time with the longer words. When it comes to Romanian, I’ve just got to keep at it, not shy away from using the fiddly stuff in speaking, and accept that I’ll make mistakes.
After making up a bunch of Romanian sentences, I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița. He got 81% on the homework I set him the previous week, and that made me happy because I don’t exactly make it easy for him. At one point I explained the different sets of numbers – natural numbers, integers, rationals, and reals – and he wanted to know if pi being irrational meant that you’d eventually get a million ones in a row or, if you convert numbers into colours, the Mona Lisa. I love those questions. I told him that no, pi being irrational doesn’t necessarily imply that, but most people think you will indeed get what he suggests, though there’s no proof as yet.
When the maths was over I had a bite to eat, then a more nondescript two-hour English lesson. Then I met up with Mark, and his two dogs, on the edge of the wood near his home. It’s amazing how much the wood teems with life considering its closeness to a main road. We saw two hawks swooping, you could hear a cuckoo in the distance (you could almost never do that in the UK), and there was the constant satisfying croak of frogs. We stopped for a beer at the nearby bar where we chatted about how cool Romania is, and then I cycled home.
I’ve been thinking about why I chose Romania to live. Some of it was the language. Băieții? What madness is that? I need to immerse myself in it. Now! But a lot of it was the undeveloped nature of Romania relative to other options I might have had, for instance Poland. I knew that Romania would be more raw, it would be rustier and flakier, the markets would be more pungent, the cobblestones would be super cobbley, my bike trips would be bouncy. Romania would engage my senses more than other countries I might have settled in; it would much better for my mental health than somewhere all done up and pristine. And precisely because it was less developed, I’d be almost the only native English teacher here so I could teach how I wanted. I could be totally in charge. My only real disappointment has been how little I’ve managed to travel around the country, and that’s why I’m looking at ads for 15-year-old (or more) Skodas and Golfs and Dacias. To see the country and engage my senses further.
If I do get a car, I’ll have to go through the registration process which means a shedload of paperwork and a new set of number plates. For a small fee you can choose the three-letter combination at the end of your plate; there are 99 plates for each combination in each county, except in Bucharest where there are 999. I often find myself weaving through such delights as FUK, ASS, HIV, and DIE, sometimes all in a row. It seems anything goes here, as indeed it should. I think there are banned combinations, but if you’re willing to pay enough for, say, SEX, you can probably get it. (I did see it one time on the road.) I’ll have to think what I should get, if I don’t decide to just get a random plate. There’s no way I’ll get anything based on my name, even though I like my initials. Yesterday I saw parked car with a local plate that I hadn’t seen before: ROM. I’m sure it’s on the dodgy list because “rom” means gypsy in a load of languages. Some years ago, Romania even changed their official country code (used in the Olympics, for example) from ROM to the nonsensical French-based ROU, because they were fed up with the association with gypsies. “Rom” is still used in a lot of company names, however, and all ROM means to me is Romania, the country that has already given me so much. Heaven knows where I’d be if I hadn’t come here. If I do get a custom combination, it’s certainly on my shortlist.
When I browse cars online, I narrow my search quite substantially, but it’s amazing what comes up that fits my criteria, like a 1986 “Mr Bean” mini, advertised as such. (Mr Bean has a kind of cult following here.) The big surprise was seeing this 1962 beauty, which my brother, an off-road vehicle recognition guru, identified as a Soviet GAZ. (Apparently it’s not a GAZ – it’s Romanian-built, but based on the GAZ.) He said he’d love one. I suggested I buy it and drive it to the UK, and he could pay me back. It’s asking price is €4500, or about £4000. Honestly with how tricky it has become to fly there, that might be my best bet if I want to see my brother and his family.
Update: Some more thoughts about Romania. When I arrived, there was political turmoil: fallout from the Colectiv tragedy and all the business with Liviu Dragnea and the prison pardons which prompted huge numbers of Romanians to take to the streets during my first winter here. Some of what I’ve seen here since then is maddening. I’ll never get used to the indiscriminate dumping of rubbish everywhere. Just ugh. The low vaccine take-up cost thousands of lives and nobody seemed to care. But – touch wood – Romania is extremely safe, especially my city, and mostly the country just goes about its merry way, unlike (obviously) some of its near neighbours.
The word rom in Romanian also means rum, and they’ve taken advantage of the double meaning to name a popular patriotic rum-flavoured chocolate bar:
Here’s the petrol station near me that also has rom in its name:
To illustrate what I was saying about those number plates, this was outside the tennis courts this evening:
And here’s a much nicer picture of the Bega this evening:
I look forward to posting more pictures when I get this car and start travelling around. Sorry this ended up being such a long post.
Unusually for a Saturday, I only had one lesson today – maths with Matei. He and his family got back from their trip to beautiful Valencia on Thursday, then yesterday their five-year-old dog died suddenly. At his parents’ request I’d given him a hard test to complete for homework. He got 6 out of 23 but thankfully was unfazed by that. On my way home from the lesson, the rain pelted down and I got soaked to the skin.
Yesterday wasn’t a great day to put it mildly. I didn’t have any lessons until 3pm, but I had plenty to be getting on with. Preparation for Matei’s lesson, the dictionary, cleaning my flat, going to the notary to get yet another authorised copy of my passport so I can maybe retrieve my tens of thousands of quid from Barclays. The only problem was that I was low on both mental and physical energy. I was slow to get going. I decided to work for a while on the S and T sections of the dictionary, then see the notary in Piața Unirii. When I got to the notary’s office, I was met by a sign: “Closed. Back on 6th March.” I thought, this is just like one of those dreams, only there weren’t any tangled weeds, nor was there a year – something like 2098 – appended to the end of the notice. No problem, there are other notaries in the vicinity. I visited another office, but doamna – the notary lady – had popped out. Then I tried a third office, which the sign strongly suggested was upstairs. I climbed the rickety stairs to a courtyard, but there was no notary up there, but then there was an archway and some even shakier wooden stairs leading to the second floor – this was quite beautiful in its way. No, this definitely isn’t it. It was on the ground floor all along, but once again doamna wasn’t there. At the fourth place I tried, doamna was there, but “you need a translator, not us, those are the rules” and with that I went home. On the way back I must have shouted, hit a road sign, and nearly hit several pedestrians. Once again, I was out of control. I stopped off via the market, and that helped calm me down a bit. I bought a loaf of bread, some goat’s cheese, some mandarins and some onions, then went to get some spicy sausage from one of the meat stalls. The youngish woman thought I was pointing to the pork scratchings, and I thought, what the hell, I’ll get them instead. Three hundred grams.
Last week was a bad week for cancellations. It was half-term, or the Romanian equivalent of that, so some people were away skiing as Romanians with money like to do at this time of year, then others got sick, and a few cancelled at the last minute for some unknown reason. Not much fun for me, because it’s really my work that’s keeping me from going under right now. I thought going back to my old antidepressants might have steadied the ship, but yesterday was another shocker.
Though I now have a diagnosis of sorts for my “sinus” problem, my nose runs like a tap and I have a lot of low-level pain, so even when I don’t have one of those debilitating migraines, my quality of life takes a hammering. Monday’s diagnosis didn’t do much to solve that.
I don’t mind if this dreadful weather continues tomorrow, because after my early lesson I really have to tidy this place up. On Tuesday I bumped into Bogdan – the guy who lives in my old apartment block. He asked why I moved out of there. I sometimes wonder the same thing. He was heading home – via yet another pub – to watch the snooker on TV. I said we should try and meet up for a drink this weekend. It might be nice to spend time with someone who isn’t coping with life either but doesn’t care. I called him this morning but got no reply.
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