Driving

Driving - Family - Language learning - Life :)

If we come over

March 19, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum’s scan was all clear. A relief: it isn’t colon cancer. But what now? She’s already seen the doctor since then (great that it was so quick) and she’ll now have a colonoscopy. Dad has been more insistent of late – it won’t just magically go away if you ignore it – without bugging her to the point where she gets angry. On Monday Dad said “If we come over…”. If. Yikes. It’s seven weeks until they’re due to arrive. I told my brother that they’ll still probably make the trip – I said an 80% chance – but he thinks I’m being optimistic. If they do cancel, the first thing I’ll do is book a trip to New Zealand. For my brother, who can’t simply do that, it would be pretty devastating. (My parents know this, you would hope, which is why I’m saying 80%. Also, Mum’s pain hasn’t got any worse.)

Last week I got a reminder to renew my car insurance. Seriously? It’s been a year? I clearly remember the day I picked up the car. All that gubbins at the town hall in Sânandrei, then actually having to drive the thing. It was fine to begin with, but then I hit the city traffic and am I even going to survive?! It’s been seven years. When I finally parked it after a hair-raising 20-odd minutes, I was distinctly clammy. I remember my drive to Recaș the following week – on a sunny day – and how exciting it was to visit another town at the drop of a hat like that. Then there were those trips to the mall to get all the paperwork done. These state-controlled offices are always so forbidding, and the vehicle registration office was no exception. I did end up with a comedy number plate, so there was that, and it was worth paying for a broker to sort me out. Without her, I’d have been sent from pillar to post without having a clue what was happening. I’ve been really happy with the car and the added freedom it’s given me, but at times on my various trips last summer I thought, you know what, it would be quite nice now chugging along on a train and looking out the window or reading a book. As for driving in Romania itself, well that all seems pretty normal now, though roundabouts (there are so many of them) still feel kind of weird here, and I’m not the world’s best parallel parker. I suppose I very rarely park in the city, parallel or otherwise, so I don’t get much practice.

Last weekend there was a fire at a nightclub in North Macedonia which killed at least 59 people. It happened at a club called Pulse in the town of Kočani, which only has around 25,000 people. The fire was caused by a pyrotechnic display, but a raft of safety violations contributed to the terrible death toll. It’s all very reminiscent of the Colectiv fire in Bucharest, not long before I came to Romania, which killed 64. Just like the one in North Macedonia, Colectiv only had one exit. Of those 64 deaths, most of them didn’t occur at the club but later, in hospital. The hospitals had diluted disinfectant which was a dreadful scandal in itself. (When I was a student in Birmingham, there was a popular club called Pulse. I only went there once. That was enough for me.)

I had my weekly Romanian session on Monday morning. The truth is I’m not learning anything anymore. If anything I’m going backwards, and I’m at a loss to know what to do about that. (One-on-one sessions, which I had for a short time in the autumn, would certainly help. Dorothy is at a higher level than me, and her involvement doesn’t help.)

Books - Cat - Driving - Maths teaching - Other sports

Good car news but still none the wiser about Mum

February 21, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Monday Mum saw a new doctor who she seemed to like, but she still doesn’t know “what it is” yet. She has major ups and downs, from severe pain to basically being fine. It’s eleven weeks until they’re due to land in Timișoara, but last night on the phone I heard the dreaded words “if we don’t make it over”.

Good news about the car. I got the new thermostat put in, and yesterday I drove to Recaș (25 minutes) and back without any problems. Fingers crossed it stays like that. They’ve given me a three-month guarantee which I don’t remember ever getting in New Zealand. After that sporadic juddering on the way back from Serbia I’d braced myself for something expensive.

I should take my car out during the week more often. On Sundays, my usual day, all the towns and villages that are otherwise bustling are pretty much dead. I went to Recaș yesterday because they have the barbecue stall on Wednesday. It was certaintly bustling. I got two mici, a pork chop, chips and several slices of bread – I saved half of that for dinner.

When I spoke to my brother on Tuesday, I mentioned my cat’s penchant for biting. He jokingly wished that his cat would give his son a good nip. My nephew has been rather heavy-handed with their cat, as well as with his baby sister.

I had my first session with new maths student yesterday. An hour and a half, not the half-hour her mum said she wanted. It seems nobody in Romania understands fractions. In fact, that’s what we spent our initial session on. This 11-year-old girl showed me she could add a quarter and a fifth, which is nothing to be sniffed at, but didn’t fully understand what a quarter or a fifth actually were.

She didn’t know whether or not the shaded area above represented a quarter.

I bought Diary of a Wombat online, thinking it would be fun for the kids, and it is a fun book, but it’s not that non-native-speaker-friendly:

I got a bunch of other animal-related books, including this one:

On Tuesday night I watched Blues’ EFL Trophy semi-final at home to Bradford. A tinpot trophy, or so they say, but the final is played at Wembley. Blues won 2-1 to give their fans a big day out in April against either Wrexham or Peterborough. (The other semi takes place next week.) A good game, I thought. Bradford, from the league below, gave it a damn good go. Jay Stansfield, the talismanic striker, gave Blues the lead on the stroke of half-time. The main flashpoint came early in the second half. Stansfield was bundled over and Blues surely should have had a penalty, but instead Bradford went straight down the other end and equalised. Stansfield was down for eight minutes before being stretchered off. Apparently he’s OK. Finally it was Lyndon Dykes who scored the winner. There was obviously loads of injury time and the game even kicked off late, so it wasn’t exactly an early finish.

Cat - Driving - Family - Maths teaching - Travel: Europe

Not this again

February 11, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum isn’t well. She’s got stomach trouble and has been in pain for more than a week. She’s been given something for constipation, even though that isn’t the problem as far as I can see. She’s appallingly evasive though, so really I’m just guessing. Her next port of call might be A&E. She didn’t even tell my brother so I let him know last night. That wasn’t fun when he’d just had a tough day with the kids. He’ll probably now pretend that he doesn’t know.

I have no respect for her desire to keep her health problems secret. None whatsoever. All it does is cause unnecessary worry. And what, she’s coming 76. She’s an old lady. It would be weird if she didn’t have something wrong with her at that age. At this rate, they might not even make it to my part of the world in May. Dad, for his part, has a cancerous lump on his leg which isn’t the sort that spreads, and he’ll have that removed on Friday.

This is why you don’t embark on building renovations in your 70s. Actuarially, a couple at that age can only expect to have a handful of healthy years together. (It’s basic probability. If you’re both equally healthy, the chance that either one of you comes a cropper in the next x years is nearly twice the chance that just you do, as long as x is fairly small.) So it’s best not to blow half of those precious years on some pointless exercise which makes it much harder to see your family.

I started this year filled with optimism, at least at a personal level. Now with Mum being ill and the possibility of them cancelling their trip (again!), and the books maybe going up in smoke, the feeling that I was entering a new phase now seems a cruel mirage.

I drove to Novi Sad on Sunday. Fifty minutes to the border, then an hour and a half on the Serbian side. The border crossing at Foeni was very quiet. When I parked in Novi Sad I didn’t know where I was. I walked in what I guessed was towards the city centre. I had no Google maps – my phone had become a brick with a camera. I asked an oldish man. Centar? Stari grad? He pointed and rattled off a whole load of Serbian that included “take the bus” (the rest I didn’t understand) so I went back to the car where at least I had GPS. I parked roughly in the centre. Parking was free on a Sunday. The temperature hovered around zero and the wind whistled. I explored the main streets and squares. There was a makeshift shrine to the 15 people and one dog who lost their lives when the roof of the railway station collapsed in November. I had some dinars left over from my last trip to Serbia (pre-Covid) which came in handy. I ate at a Serbian restaurant which had traditional bits and bobs on the walls and played local music. I had a beef goulash and bread. Absolutely delicious bread and lots of it. You don’t imagine that something as simple as bread could be so tasty, but on this occasion it was. Novi Sad sits on the Danube, which is one of its big selling points. I crossed one of the three bridges and wandered around the fortress on the other side. It was all very nicely preserved. I didn’t do much else after that apart from grab a burek from a bakery near my car.

The drive back. Not fun. I went back a different way, to make things more interesting I suppose. Many miles from anywhere but a long way from the Romanian border, my engine overheaded. I had coolant, thankfully, otherwise I’d have been in a right mess. In it went, and I was back in business. Or so I thought. I’d got the temperature down, but the car started to judder at random intervals that became more and more frequent. I got home OK, if a bit later than planned, but it was far from the pleasant drive I’d hoped for. My brother, who knows more about cars than I do (that’s not saying much) gave me some ideas for why the car could stutter after overheating, but in all likelihood I’ll need to take it in, probably to the same people who sorted out my brakes last summer. I should also mention that my car got a full-on inspection at the border. It was the first time I’d endured that.

Matei’s dad got talking with the head of maths at British school. They’re interested in taking me on, either full-time or part-time. I’ve thought about it, and no. It would be a terrible move for me. The lifestyle that I now have suits me down to the ground. Throwing all of that away for a bit of extra money wouldn’t be worth it in the least. I can picture my first lesson now. Bogdan, would you mind getting off your phone. … Seriously mate, who do you think you are? Get off your fucking phone and listen to me. By all accounts, the environment at that school right now is chaotic, even toxic, and I certainly don’t want that. Also, because the fees are sky high, a lot of the kids who go there are spoilt and can’t be arsed with schoolwork – because their parents are so wealthy they don’t feel they have to be.

Kitty is almost back to normal now. She was easier to look after when she was hampered and she just lay in her bed in the small bathroom. Wonderfully hassle-free. Why can’t she have an operation every week? It’s been fascinating in a way to have a creature that’s so robust and lithe and can bounce back from anything. Nobody needed to tell her to do stretching exercises after surgery; she just knew.

Some pictures of Novi Sad next time. And maybe something about Birmingham’s heroic defeat at the hands of Newcastle.

Driving - Life :) - Other sports - Romania - Tennis

Coming unstuck

January 29, 2025 plutomanby 0 Comments

The last few days we’ve had incredible weather. Today it was blue sky all day and we got to 18. I don’t think they’re getting much more than that in Geraldine.

On Sunday I managed to get myself into a slight pickle. I was in Blajova, a small village a half-hour drive from me, when I somehow backed my car out over a culvert, leaving my front wheel hanging in the air. A woman opposite heard me revving the engine (to no avail; I was stuck) and came out. Could you or somebody else help me? No. OK, thanks, have a great day. This is fantastic, I thought. I’m in the middle of nowhere here. I had a weak signal and called some tow truck people. They didn’t even know where Blajova was until I sent them my location. Right, we can come in 45 minutes. It’ll be 500 lei. Ugh, that’s a bit much. More than I earned all day yesterday. Surely someone here can get me out of this. The car isn’t damaged, I’m hardly in the bottom of a ditch or anything, it just needs some manpower. I wandered around and as luck would have it there was a guy in an orange hi-viz vest, the kind that David Cameron used to wear, and he was willing to help. He got his two mates and the three of them pushed but it wouldn’t budge. I’ll get my Jeep then. Within two minutes he’d got his Jeep and attached the rope, and I was free. I tried giving them 100 lei but they wouldn’t take it. In this place we help each other. We’ll help anybody.

These villages are full of farmers and practical people who tow stuff on a daily basis. Before I got stuck, I was walking along the road in the village when an older gentleman wound down the window of his car. He wanted to know how an unknown person could possibly be wandering through his village on a Sunday morning. Being defensive, I said I was a tourist from England. I’ve been to Romania a few times before, that’s how I can speak a bit. He was very pleasant and asked if I was going to the church service which was about to start. When I told him that I thought his village was beautiful, he added, “but poor”.

I was in Blajova because it was close to a nature reserve called Lunca Pogănișului and I wanted to go for a walk through it. After getting stuck I nearly went back home, then remembered the men’s final in Melbourne was going on. I saw that Jannik Sinner had taken the first set against Sasha Zverev and the second was close. If Zverev gets the set I’ll go home because there’ll still be plenty of tennis to watch. If not and Sinner goes 2-0 up, I’ll go for my walk. Sinner won the second set on a tie-break. Walk it is then. But the track down to the Lunca was so hopelessly muddy that I soon went home anyway. By the time I got home, Sinner had completed a comprehensive win. It’s a shame I couldn’t see the women’s final which saw Madison Keys pick up her first grand slam in a brilliant match with Aryna Sabalenka. I was happy that the American won, as was Mum when I spoke to her. Keys came through a bunch of three-setters on the way. Madison Keys, by the way, sounds like some somewhere just off Cape Cod where you’d moor your luxury yacht and that no mere mortals could afford to live in. (It’s getting on for ten years since I visited Cape Cod. That was a good day.)

In my last post about the FA Cup, I meant to mention the match I saw in January 2000 between Aston Villa and Leeds United in the fifth round. I didn’t (and don’t) support Villa, but that game was one heck of a spectacle. Villa twice came from behind to win 3-2, Benito Carbone scoring a hat-trick. We saw four of the goals down our end. (I went with some other uni students.) I remember Paul Merson being an absolute beast in that game. For some reason I also remember Carbone’s blue boots which I thought looked pretty damn cool. Villa Park was rocking towards the end of that game. The Cup was already on the wane even by then, but 25 years ago it still meant a lot. (Villa made the final that year, losing to Chelsea in the last FA Cup final at the old Wembley.)

When I spoke to my parents this morning, Dad talked about the destructive potential of AI. I don’t use AI myself (I keep meaning to for curiosity’s sake, but I can’t be bothered) and am scared of what it might unleash, outside the realm of medicine where it seems to be beneficial. Dad said that at least he won’t see the destruction in his lifetime. It’s all happening to fast though that I wouldn’t be so sure.

Before I finish, some sad news concerning Romania. A band of thieves blew up the entrance to a small museum in the Netherlands and stole some extremely valuable (and extremely old) Romanian artifacts that had been on show there. It was the last day of the exhibition. One of the artifacts was a 2500-year-old gold helmet which I suppose the thieves planned to melt down, though the value of the helmet far exceeds that of the gold.

I’ve been sleeping better and have had more energy as a result. Not Kitty-level energy or anything crazy like that, but a normal level, which is definitely something.

Driving - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music

A hot mess

August 20, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s all got a bit crappy today. I got up at 6:30 after nowhere near enough sleep (three hours? four? That’s been pretty standard in this heat) and then started shouting and crashing into stuff. It was like 31/1/23 (that date is etched in my mind), but not quite as bad. It’s been coming. Although I’ve been to places and (sort of) done stuff lately, I’ve been going through the motions. Yet again. I’ve got a sodding master’s degree in going through the motions. No enjoyment, nothing means anything, everything feels like an obligation or even a chore, and the cherry on the top is a complete inability to relax.

Today I did actually get some stuff done. Three lessons, totalling 5½ hours, including maths with Matei in Dumbrăvița. Last week he got his IGCSE results; he got a B in maths and maybe I could have got him up to an A but it was a question of too much to do in too little time. It didn’t help that the buggers at his school didn’t let me see his mock paper in which he got a D – that would have been invaluable to me. (By the way, a B is the third-highest grade; the top grade is an A-star.) This afternoon I had two hours with a 13-year-old football-obsessed boy who lives in Spain but is in his native Romania for the summer. His English is good. In other words, he’s pretty much trilingual. We went through a English textbook of his with instructions in Spanish, most of which I could understand without too much difficulty.

Something else I got done today was get my car battery replaced. It was dead when I got back from the UK – the heat doesn’t help. There’s no such thing in Romania (as far as I know) as the AA which I was always a member of in New Zealand. Over there my battery would die, I’d call them up, and a man with a van would be round in minutes. Here it’s more complicated and that stressed me out no end. I’m supposed to be going to Slovenia on Thursday. A man did come over with some jump leads and I drove to another part of the city where I got a replacement. It was early afternoon – already crazily hot – and I felt shattered.

On Saturday they had a free concert in Parcul Civic. I wish I’d known that Zdob și Zdub were the opening act because I really like their music. I did get to see Passenger though. Or kind of. He was a speck in the distance. Passenger isn’t a band, he’s just one Englishman with a guitar. And a distinctive voice. He shot to fame in 2012 with his Let Her Go. You only miss the sun when it starts to snow. Or however it goes. He had three or four other songs on his album that I liked, but that one hit was the making of him. (He talked about what an extraordinary lucky break that was for someone who was a busker up until then.) He started his set by saying, “Is this a normal temperature for you? I’m from England where it never gets this fucking hot.” This was after 8pm and it was 35 at least. The crowd never properly got into his stuff. I don’t think he realised that only 5% of the crowd properly understood him and all his idioms. Even though I really like him, I just wanted to get home. I wasn’t in the mood for anything. Certainly not Rita Ora who came on after Passenger. She’s British too, but her stuff isn’t my thing at all.

Yesterday I met Mark at Berăria 700. I hadn’t seen him for ages. It was great to catch up and have a laugh. That didn’t stop me from feeling like utter crap a few hours later, though. I wish I knew the secret.

It would help if it would just cool down. Being outside in nature or even among the architecture we have here is hugely helpful if you’re prone to iffy mental health. But when the infernal heat imposes what might as well be a curfew on you…

I had a rather brief catch-up with New Zealand on Saturday. Dad had a sore throat and could hardly speak. Everyone else was suffering too. As for Mum, she didn’t have a cold (yet), but she was exhausted. I hope their fortunes improve.

My first lesson tomorrow is at 11am, so I’ll get on the bike beforehand. That’s if I get some sleep first.

Driving - Other sports - Travel: Romania

Maramureș și mai departe — Part 2 of 2 (with photos)

August 7, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’d been to Maramureș twice before, and it still felt a world away. In every village you saw babe – old ladies who probably weren’t even that old – dressed almost identically in dark clothes and a shawl. Once I saw a woman spinning wool with a spindle and distaff like I’d seen in videos. But on Friday morning I left the region and made my way to Turda (which is nicer than it sounds), only 30 km from the major city of Cluj-Napoca.

It was a three-hour drive or so. The first half of the journey, which took in the beautiful county of Bistrița-Năsăud, was a pleasure, but after hitting the town of Beclean it all became dull and industrial. I reached Turda earlier than I’d told the apartment owner I’d be there, and tried to park in the city but the payment on my phone didn’t work. I wished we still had self-explanatory coin-operated meters. Then I found a Dedeman which is one of the most useful things in the whole of Romania. As well as being a hardware store which sells anything you could possibly want in that vein, you can also park for free, pee for free (a big deal in Romania) or get a coffee for not far off free. The apartment was in a pretty seedy part of town to be honest, full of brutalist blocks and semi-derelict shops. I hung around a bit more, finishing my book, before calling the owner who let me in. As is often the case, it was much nicer on the inside than the outside. It had everything I could possibly have needed.

We don’t want your dirt here

That evening I watched a bit of the Olympics which I haven’t otherwise bothered with. They were showing the athletics. Mixed relay – what’s this? The British stadium announcer did a great job. The world and Olympic records for the women’s 800 metres appeared on the screen. Some Russian set those records in the early eighties and they haven’t been equalled since. All totally undodgy, nothing to see here, according to the Romanian commentator. The event I got into the most was the decathlon high jump. So far Romania have claimed seven medals (three gold, three silver and one bronze), all of them in water – five in rowing and two in swimming.

From the museum. On Sunday morning I tried to visit the Roman site – the castrum – but it was closed off.

On Saturday I visited a museum in town; I was the only customer which meant I was watched the whole time. Turda was conquered by the Romans, at which point it was called Potaissa. I was impressed with the presentation of the museum, and the translations into English were excellent. My only gripe was a lack of way-finding signs; this meant I was constantly told to go this or that way, to my slight embarrassment. After the museum I tried to get a coffee from a bakery, but the woman there was spectacularly unhelpful. Olympic-level stuff. Eventually I did get my hands on a simple coffee.

The main reason I visited Turda was to see the salt mine. Salt was extracted there over centuries; the mine closed in 1932 but was opened as a tourist attraction in 1992. After standing in a half-hour queue, I entered through a tunnel and descended into a cavern which is now a sort of theme park with a ferris wheel and assorted games, then went down another 13 flights of stairs to the bottom where you could row boats on a salt lake. I guessed it was 200 feet deep in total, but in fact it’s about twice that. I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series 20-odd years ago and the whole place seemed somehow Pullmanesque. I rushed back from the depths of the tunnel to avoid going into a third hour of parking fees. I had lunch in the car on the hillside just outside the town centre; it was pretty there in a Romanian sort of way. Then I hung around the town for the afternoon; I had a very nice boysenberry-like ice cream.

I bought a melon from one of the least helpful stallholders I’d ever encountered (this anti-service still takes me aback after all these years in Romania), then grabbed a shaorma for dinner. I ate it in front of the judo finale – France beat Japan in a sudden-death tie-break to win the team event – then it was back to the athletics. I couldn’t get properly into it. I realise how anti-big I’ve become in the last eight years; the Olympics, the Champions League, the soon-to-be-expanded football World Cup, it’s all got far too big for me. (Olympic controversy has erupted here in Romania – I only knew about it when a student told me. The 18-year-old gymnast Ana Bărbosu won bronze and celebrated with the Romanian flag, only for the Americans to successfully appeal a minute later. The American got a 0.1 boost to her score, shunting Bărbosu down into fourth. She was in tears. Now we’ve got Nadia Comăneci weighing in and the Romanian prime minister boycotting the closing ceremony.)

On Sunday morning I drove back home. The super-fast motorway made this the easiest trip of the lot. (Romania’s motorways are great. There just aren’t very many of them.) My Peugeot was very happy bombing along at 130 km/h. On the way I stopped at Deva. Back in 2016 it was the first Romanian town I visited after Timișoara. Its main feature is the fortress on the hill. Eight years ago I took the lift to the top, but this time I walked up. If there was a proper paved track, I didn’t see it. I practically hiked to the top, then when I got up there I bushwhacked 300-plus degrees around the wall of the fortress before eventually finding the entrance and other people. Then I scaled 240 (?) steps to the actual top, took a few pictures, and walked down via the paved track like I did in 2016. A couple of hours later I was home.

Two students have so far raised eyebrows at my decision to go camping alone. Boring? Ever so slightly dangerous? (At 30 lei per night, it was certainly cheap. It was basic but it had a hot shower, a fridge, and even low-G internet. I saw a deer but no bears came near the tent.) The trip as a whole was fine, but I never felt I could fully relax. Very early tomorrow morning I’m flying to Luton; relaxation is the entire goal of my stay in St Ives. Very few places to go or people to see; it should be great. (Unfortunately I’ll miss my brother who flies to New Zealand on Saturday.)

Driving - Travel: Romania

Maramureș și mai departe — Part 1 of 2 (with photos)

August 6, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I got back yesterday from my latest trip. It was interesting in many ways but I struggled to relax, probably because a trip like that requires a certain level of organisation, and being organised is always something I have to work at.

On Tuesday I did 487 km getting up to Bârsana. A few more than I needed to; for that I can blame crappy signs (or lack of them) and myself for not using GPS. The campsite was two kilometres up a steep lane from the town of Bârsana. It was basic and when I arrived it was pretty empty. There were three host cats; the woman at the entrance was slightly surprised that I didn’t have a dog. I pitched the tent between apple and plum trees. My first night was starry like I hadn’t seen in years – I wish now I’d stayed up to watch the meteor shower – which also meant it was much colder than I’d bargained for. There was the pleasant clang of cowbells, and in the early morning the sound of cockerels. Over breakfast the next morning I chatted to a French couple, using a mix of English and French. After speaking French for a bit, or trying to, I then had to talk to the campsite owner in Romanian; what came out of my mouth was pure gibberish, as it often is when I have to switch between two foreign languages.

Just up the hill from the campsite, shortly before sunset

The nearby cemetery. The big shots from the Bârsan family are buried there.

On Wednesday I visited the 600-year-old wooden Orthodox monastery in Bârsana – there was wooden everything for miles around, making the whole region visually distinctive. There was a lot to see outside the engine room of the place which was closed to visitors. I then drove to another, much smaller, monastery on the other side of the Iza river; not much to see there, so I sat for a bit by the river and read my book – Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. The author is a clever bugger. After that I spend a couple of hours in the town of Ocna Șugatag, whose name conjures up images of a childhood game. (An ocnă is apparently a salt mine; I’d visit one of them a bit later.)

The monastery had a pair of peacocks

I was more prepared for the cold on the second night. The following morning was the most strangely fascinating part of the whole trip as I visited Cimitirul Vesel – the Merry Cemetery – in Săpânța. A well-known tourist attraction, this consists of an ornate church surrounded by hundreds of brightly painted wooden gravestones.

Each “stone” has a naive picture of the deceased, usually illustrating what they did for a living, and below that a poem giving the story of the person’s life, sometimes in informal dialect rather than strict grammatically correct Romanian, and always in the first person. These poems could be amusing (merry if you like) but often they told tales of great sadness. Accidents, long illnesses, lost loved ones, the running theme that these people did everything they could. They died young, or they lived to a good age but saw their friends and family die young. One or the other, mostly. Worst of all might have been a three-year-old girl, together with an illustration of the tractor that ran her over. It was interesting to see people’s jobs – there was the occasional picture of a teacher at a blackboard but for the most part they worked on the land, as they still do now. No management consultants, no business development managers, no actuaries. And no pure housewives either; the women did (and do) hard physical work, just like the men. (It’s a very common sight in a village to see women carrying rakes and scythes.) It isn’t clear how this unusual tradition of painted stones came about. They’re made in a workshop nearby and each one takes considerable time.

Above is one of the happier stones. Irina was a part-housewife who weaved woollen cergi (rugs, I suppose) as you can see in the picture. She taught her children, enjoyed her time with her grandchildren, and wishes nothing for the best for them all. She hopes they grow old like she did. She lived to 93.

All the saints’ days, including (in this shot) my birthday

I spent the rest of the day at Sighet, or Sighetul Marmației to give it its full name. It was my third time there. I visited a small museum and read more of my book in the park.

Above are just some of the tennis trophies in the museum. There was a local champion in the over-70s.

Above is a selection of locally produced board games. They all got published; presumably they were crowd-funded. One of them uses a whopping 72 dice.

A scaled-up version of those 72 dice. Yes, I counted them.

A few pictures from Sighet. Dogs in doorways seemed to be a theme.

After a third night in the tent, in which it rained, it was time to make tracks.

Driving - Family - Travel: Romania

Sad news about my aunt

April 11, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

My aunt passed away on Monday at the age of 76, just a week after I’d visited her in the home. My brother had brought his son along only a few days before that. We had no inkling that we would lose her so soon. Her oxygen levels were very low, as a result of her cancer, and she couldn’t be kept alive. That’s probably why I had such a job waking her when I saw her.

It is some consolation that my brother and I saw her, and had good conversations with her, during her final days. The other consolation is that she was very well looked after and she didn’t really suffer. Considering she was bedbound and spent her days staring at the ceiling, she was strangely at peace; perhaps that was the morphine. Since I heard the news I’ve been thinking of all the happy memories I have of her: the times when she made me smile and laugh. She had quite a knack for that. One time that springs to mind was when I joined her and my grandmother in southern Spain in January 2000. She had an interesting way, shall I say, of transporting her mother in a wheelchair. At a restaurant that served breadsticks, she started shoving them up her ears and nose and other orifices besides.

I don’t know yet when or where the funeral will be, or whether I’ll go over for it. (British funerals are sometimes weeks after a person’s death.) Dad won’t be travelling from New Zealand; he did his bit in the autumn when he visited her almost daily for a month.

Understandably, Dad’s mood has been low. He’s been struck by the realisation that, on his side of the family, it’s only him left of his generation. His cousins have gone too.

I went back to Recaș today with the plan to get a barbecue lunch which they serve there on Wednesdays. I called my parents from there. I thought that the blue sky in the background might lift Dad’s mood – we’ve had glorious whether here since, and even before, I got back. I showed Mum my car – she didn’t believe that my bright blue Peugeot had POM on its number plate. I didn’t have lunch there after all because I got a splitting sinus headache and just wanted to get home and take some Advil and have a banana sandwich which was all I could manage. On the way back I turned onto the motorway by mistake, so I got a surprise first taste of Romanian motorway driving. The road was mostly empty; the speed limit here is 130 km/h, more than I’m used to. Thankfully the Advil did the trick.

On Sunday I went on a much longer trip, first to Lipova by the Mureș River, then east, then south, then west, then north and finally back home. Over 300 km in all. I went on all manner of back roads, passing through villages with roads flanked by donkeys, goats, and old ladies whose reaction made me think that a real person passing through in a real car was quite an event.

The route I took on Sunday

A stork’s nest – a common sight – in Mașloc

Not much risk of flooding in the Mureș at Lipova with the weather we’re having

Today I took delivery of a 2009-edition road atlas of Romania. The scale is 1:300,000 or nearly five miles to an inch. It didn’t realise it would be such a vast tome; it also contains smaller-scale maps of the rest of Europe. I’ll buy a GPS gizmo too, though a physical map allows me to plan better and is just a nice object to have.

Driving - Family - Music - Photos

About to shoot off, but I think I’ll be here a while

March 28, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s my last day before my Easter break – one of the windiest days I can remember in Romania – and it’s going by in slow motion. I say Easter break, but in fact it’s the first of two Easters I’ll celebrate this year. Due to the vagaries of moon phases and an obsolete calendar, the gap between this year’s “normal” Easter and Orthodox Easter is five weeks – usually it’s just one week, and sometimes they even fall on the same day. My second Easter, when I won’t have to see anybody or do a whole lot, will feel like more of a break than the first.

To get my driving confidence up, I need a window of a few hours so I can get the hell out of the city. A trip around the block won’t do it. This isn’t Geraldine; around the block involves the main road right outside my block of flats (turning left onto it is horrible, I’ve realised) with 18-wheelers bearing down on me. After this afternoon’s trip I got straight into the white wine I bought from Recaș last week. Getting out on the open road though is a whole heap of fun. At this point it seems my car is going to be pretty economical, as French cars often are. (Last night a student told me there’s a saying in Romania that you should avoid the letter F when it comes to cars. That means Ford, Fiat, or French.)

I met Dorothy in town yesterday. We talked about Timișoara and how it suits us both down to the ground. There’s so much to like here: the architecture, the parks, the river, the markets, the funny hole-in-the-wall shops, all the imperfections that make you feel more alive. Add in the welcoming people and the fact that it’s safer than almost any city in the UK. (If you don’t feel safe in a city, everything else falls away.) Plus all the signs being in an exotic language is massively cool. Having everything in my native English would now seem humdrum and tame. Returning to live in the country of my birth is a complete non-starter; New Zealand is an option but unless things ramp up horribly a few hundred miles east, I’ll be in Romania for a while yet.

Dad sent me a video of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, an extraordinary piece of music by The Band. I was more familiar with Joan Baez’s rendition of the song, but The Band’s original version is really quite something. In fact The Band have produced amazing stuff all round; I’ll probably end up adding one of their albums to my collection. Last night Dad told me about a programme he’d been listening to on the radio, all about accents, or more specifically what causes people to keep them or change them when they move. Mum certainly softened out the edges of her Kiwi accent when she moved to the UK; attracting the nickname Iggy based on how she pronounced “egg” might have given her the impetus to do that. Being a teacher must have been a driver too. (My brother’s name contains the same vowel as “egg”; Mum made a conscious effort to say it in the English way so it didn’t sound like a certain pulse that is sometimes preceded by “Mr.”)

I’ll be up at four tomorrow to get a taxi to the airport. Today my brother has taken the little one over to see his great-aunt in the home. My cousin was concerned that if he had a sniffle and his mum were to catch a cold, that would likely be the end of her. I’m planning to cycle over to her place on Monday.

Here are some snaps I took yesterday – a slice of Holland in the middle of Timișoara.

Driving - Family

Blueberries and pomegranates

March 23, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A miracle occurred about the time I got back from New Zealand. (Coincidence or not?) My left nostril had been running almost constantly for 18 months since about when the Ukraine war started, then magically it stopped. It still runs if I’m outside in cold weather or when I exercise, and I still take paracetamol most days for low-level pain, but otherwise it’s a spectacular improvement and one I didn’t expect.

Last weekend I emailed a friend from Wellington. He’s such a nice bloke, but I hadn’t heard from him since just after the 2020 US election, so I wrote only a couple of lines, not expecting a reply. But to my delight he got back to me. I hope we can keep in touch now.

On Wednesday my brother passed on a short video of his son. His mum was feeding him – Weetabix with blueberries – and he made a decent attempt at saying “blueberry”. He came out with something like “blubby”. I talked to my brother about this, saying that the repeated B is nice and baby-friendly. I also wondered what he’s doing getting blueberries in March, the spoilt little chap. We never got them in any month. My brother said that if it was up to him, his little boy wouldn’t be getting them either. Under six days till I see them all; I’m looking forward to that a lot.

Today I had to make two trips to the mall for all my car insurance and paperwork. And new number plates. I got to pick my three-letter combination from about two dozen options all around the middle of the P series. (I could have got pretty much any combo if I’d been willing to fork out for it.) When I saw POM among a load of all-consonant blends I went straight for it. It’s easy to remember and it’s hilarious honestly when I look back at all my Kiwi cousins and classmates in Temuka calling me a stinky pom or something even less flattering. By the time I started working over there, I felt quite proud of the term – Britain was cool back then. In fact I even mentioned it in a post in late 2022. In Romanian, a pom is a fruit tree. (Wouldn’t it be nice to have a garden with pomi one day?) A non-fruit-bearing tree is a copac, though sometimes I hear non-fruit trees being called pomi too; languages are complicated. By the way, that’s the closest I’ll ever get to having a vanity plate. They were popular and advertised all the damn time on the radio in New Zealand; they always seemed a great waste of money.

That was the fun bit. Letters and words always are to me. The rest of the process was just weird and confusing, like so much of Romanian bureaucracy. People (my students, mainly) told me to use one of the several brokers in the mall because doing it myself would be a massive struggle. The extra cost would be worth it. They were absolutely right; I’d have been stuffed on my own. This morning there were crowds of people carrying files full of paper. Two supermarket trolleys laden with old plates were wheeled into some kind of oblivion. There was a policewoman with five stripes on her epaulettes – how do you get that many? There were counters that the broker lady could go to but I couldn’t, and vice versa. They’re sending me an updated talon – a kind of log book – that you must have on you when you drive. But because changing my address at the immigration office has proven impossible, they’re sending it to my old address. I’ve asked my tennis partner (he still lives in the block) if he can somehow intercept my mail.

I’m now worried I might have picked up a cold from the girl who has come here for two-hour maths lessons two nights running and will be back for round three tomorrow.