Life :)

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Social struggles

March 28, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today I had lunch with the tennis crew and some of their friends. The wife of one of the guys I play with sings in a choir at the church in Piața 700, and some of them were from there. All in all, there were 14 of us, including Domnul Sfâra, the 87-year-old man who still (somehow) plays tennis from time to time. Most of them hadn’t caught up with each other since the pandemic started. At one point there was a go-round-the-table thing, where everyone was expected to speak in turn, and amid the jokes that mostly zoomed over my head, there was much discussion of everyone’s medical trials and tribulations, Covid-related and not. Romanians are far more open than Brits when it comes to discussing this stuff, though the woman who sat next to me – white as a sheet and no more than seven stone – didn’t say what she’d been through. It wasn’t until it was my turn that I realised the round-the-table thing was actually happening. “So I have to speak now?” Yes. How did you end up in Romania? Always this question, which never gets any easier to answer. When I told people what I did for a living, there was then a short discussion of the English language. And and end are pronounced the same, somebody said. No no no! Just no! Two different vowels. Miles apart. On a daily basis I deal with people who think that send is something you find on a beach, or that a bet hangs upside down, because for some historical reason Romanians and speakers of other central and eastern European languages use their e vowel to represent our short a vowel, when it would serve them better to use their a instead. We stayed from twelve till about three. It was great that everybody got to see each other after such a long time, and they all seemed such nice people, but that sort of thing is never easy for me, even in my own language.

Romania has now suffered 65,000 Covid deaths. Because some of them would have died anyway, it’s hard to gauge the impact of vaccine refusal on that number. However, we know that two-thirds of the deaths occurred after the vaccines became readily available in spring of 2021, and the vast majority of those who died once the vaccines were available hadn’t taken them, so we’re looking at a very large number of preventable deaths, orders of magnitude greater than other tragedies like the Colectiv nightclub fire which killed 65 people on the night and in the weeks afterwards. It’s utterly appalling.

I’d planned to play poker this morning, but once I knew this lunch was happening and I wouldn’t be finished in time, I decided to play last night instead. I was pretty tired this morning after that, and putting our clocks going forward didn’t exactly help. I haven’t played a lot since I had the stones, though last week I did make $76 in a tournament for finishing second and snagging plenty of bounties. My bankroll is $2005.

Yesterday I lamented the end of extended final sets in tennis. It’s not an earth-shattering change; just look at the 2012 men’s Australian Open final. It was a titanic battle – no match has been quite that gladiatorial before or since – and it didn’t even get to 6-6 in the fifth set. (Djokovic beat Nadal 7-5 in the decider.) But it’s a symptom of what’s been happening in sport in general. Everything now has to be neatly packaged and shiny and pristine. Remove the kinks and imperfections and mud, and play it all in soulless air-conditioned stadiums in sodding Qatar. I find myself losing interest.

Here are some pictures of Timișoara in early spring:

The old Banca de Scont (Discount Bank), now done up nicely
The map stone in Piața Unirii, showing where the fortress used to be. This isn’t old; it was laid in 1987.
The Bega boats are back in business
Pink magnolias in bloom
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

No more marathons, and more’s the pity

March 27, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got my TV tuned to BBC news, with the war now centred on Lviv in the west after the Kremlin said they’d concentrate on the Donbas region having been pushed back by the Ukrainians. Since the first morning of the war, none of this has made any sense at all. Joe Biden has just made a speech, saying at the end that “for God’s sake this man cannot remain in power”. Whenever I see Biden speak about the Ukraine war, I wonder what the orange turd might have come out with.

Today I had my maths lesson in Dumbrăvița – he did well on a practice exam paper – and then when I got home I had a last-minute cancellation, meaning I just one had English lesson before stepping on the tennis court. I played two sets, both with the woman who struggles a bit with her footwork, so I had to run a bit, which was no bad thing. It was a lovely early evening for tennis, and it’s been a great week of weather all round. Blue skies every day.

Yesterday I called my aunt, and this time she answered. I remembered to add “Auntie” before her name. She was much better than she can be. In the past she’s seemed unaware of anything beyond her four walls. She’ll say the weather is bad, I’ll then mention that it’s fine and sunny where I am, and then she’ll almost seem put out by my mentioning other weather. Incorrect weather, as she sees it. I got none of that yesterday. We spent most of the ten minutes or so discussing the war. She still did her usual trick of ending the “conversation” when I still had things I wanted to say.

My aunt would get on well with the eight-year-old girl in Germany whom I teach on Skype. Yesterday’s lesson with her was especially hard because her father was with her the whole time. I made what I thought were fairly strong noises to say that I’d prefer it if he’d damn well go away, but he paid no notice. Half-way through the hour-long lesson her mind wandered. She must be tired, I said to her father. No, she’s just bored, he said. There might not be a whole lot I can do about that. Her English has got noticeably better in the time I’ve taught her. I think that’s down to YouTube more than me; her accent is very American.

Wednesday saw the return of Zoli, my first-ever student here, way back in November 2016. I hadn’t seen him since the very start of the pandemic in Romania, two years ago, when I joined him on a trip to the mountains. As we drove there, he told me that the hut had been closed because of the virus and we’d have to sneak in, and I got angry at him for not telling me before. Though it was beautiful up there in the snow, I was aware that a tsunami of disease and death was about to hit us. I thought I might never see him again, so it was a great pleasure to receive a text from him to say that he wanted to restart lessons. Wednesday’s meeting was hardly a lesson: it was a chat followed by a game of Bananagrams.

I’ve ordered a Samsung phone to replace my iPhone 5½ (as I call it) which I got as a present almost five years ago. My present phone doesn’t charge unless I place a heavy book on it, and then its battery runs down almost visibly (actually visibly if I’m making a video call, say), so I end up not using it much. It’s a low-end Samsung, called an A13 (it cost about NZ$300 or £150) but it seems to do everything I could ever want and much more. What it won’t do, however, is FaceTime, so I’ll have to switch to Skype or WhatsApp or something for keeping in touch with my parents. FaceTime has been so convenient.

Amid all the news of the war, they’ve been showing the PR disaster that is P&O, the once-proud British shipping company. P&O stood for (and presumably still does stand for) Peninsular and Oriental, a name that conjures up the world’s great trade routes and general intrepidness. Now it’s Dubai-owned (ugh), and the name makes me think of an outfit that lays off 800 of its staff on Zoom without giving any notice, and now has a ship that is deemed unseaworthy.

And finally, back to tennis. Ashleigh Barty has decided to retire from tennis at the age of just 25, at the pinnacle of the game. After winning Wimbledon and then her home grand slam in Melbourne, she probably thought, just what else can I achieve, and why not play cricket or golf or any of the other sports I’m ridiculously talented in. Tennis will miss her, though; I remember not long ago hearing some commentators suggesting that she might be too nice to ever be a champion. In other news, the no-tie-break final set, which has produced extraordinary drama over the last half-century, is no more. The movers and shakers of the tennis world thought we’d all be better off without that suspense, and now all four grand slams will be (quote) enhanced by a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-all in the final set, as the Australian Open has employed since 2019. I’m always wary of that marketing-speak word enhance. The new system has been billed as a one-year trial, but you don’t usually trial something in the biggest events on the calendar. It’s possible that, say, Wimbledon reverts to what they used before, but in all likelihood this will be a permanent change. Well, until someone else comes along and decides to shorten things even further.

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.

Life :)

Stone me

March 2, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My doctor gave me an abdominal ultrasound last night. All my internal organs looked the right shape, size and colour, but my intestines are all gassed up, and I’ve got kidney stones. Three of them – two in my right kidney and one in my left, and they’re all small – 4 mm or less. He recommended that I just keep taking the painkillers and drink lots of water. Actual bottled water for the time being, not the stuff I get from the well. The procedure was painless and only took a few minutes. I ensured I didn’t eat anything for several hours beforehand. Then I got on the table where he greased my tummy, and images of my organs appeared on the screen, to which he took a virtual tape measure. I can have no complaints at the medical care I’ve had in my five years in Romania. It’s been bloody awesome, honestly.

I’m far better than I was, but I’m still struggling, and I suppose I will be until I pass those stones. That could be painful.

I’m watching the BBC World News channel. Amid rolling reports of the awfully primitive war in Ukraine, they just had a short “this week in history” segment. The event that caught my eye was the ferry disaster that took place in March 1987, killing 193 people, nearly 40% of those on board. A ferry called the Herald of Free Enterprise, operated by Townsend Thoresen, sank as soon as it left Zeebrugge, after someone (who think was asleep) hadn’t closed the bow doors. That August we took one of the company’s sister ships from Felixstowe to Zeebrugge – a six-hour journey – on the way to a very enjoyable ten-day camping holiday in Belgium. Travelling in Europe – well, anywhere – was so much fun then.

Life :) - New Zealand

Seismic times

March 1, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On a snowy last day of February, I’m definitely feeling better. That might just be because the painkillers are kicking in, but I’ll take it. I’m taking a concoction of drugs right now. One of them comes in a partly pink box that looks like it should have a feminine hygiene product inside. Another has a name that sounds like somewhere Putin would like to invade, and consists of tiny amber-coloured pellets. But yes, I’m better. Last Monday, when the lesson with the twins rolled around, I was in pain and really didn’t want anything do with it. Today I managed to complete all my lessons at my desk instead of on the sofa. Tomorrow I’ll have my stomach ultrasound, which I bet won’t show anything.

The Ukraine war is mental, and unbelievably sad. Ukrainians are losing their lives all because of some twisted fucker whose delusions know no bounds. As my brother said, Putin has lost the plot. (He thinks one of his henchmen might take him out.) When I woke up on Thursday, it was like a magnitude-10 earthquake had jolted Europe. I googled Ivano-Frankivsk, a city 150 km from Romania’s border, whose airport had been bombed hours earlier. Google Street View showed a bustling city in summer, with shops and bars and a popular confectionery market.

The war is providing a grisly backdrop to everything. I’m grappling with all these Ukrainian names I’d never heard of before – all these harsh Vs and Ks. I’m not even quite sure how I should be pronouncing Kyiv, the Ukrainian (and therefore accurate) version of the city I’d always called Kiev (the Russian name). Yesterday morning there were at times both Ukrainian and Russian players at my online poker table. Last night Dad was complaining to me about the awful Australian-owned banks (and they really are profit-gouging bastards), and I jokingly suggested that the NZ goverment should kick them out of SWIFT, a system I’d only vaguely heard of a week ago.

Europe is increasingly uniting against evil. (I had serious doubts over this.) Germany finally got on board with sanctions over the weekend, and is now providing weapons to the Ukraine. I must say I liked seeing the rouble plummet to one cent against the US dollar this morning. Roll on half a cent. It’s bad that innocent Russians – many of whom already live in poverty – are going to be hit hard by this, but what’s the alternative?

I bought some shoes today, on the way to the supermarket. They’re leather, blue and brown – well mostly anyway – and made in Romania. A super-rare impulse purchase (and another sign I’m feeling better). They were 130 lei, or about NZ$45. A bargain.

I’m now seriously considering a trip to New Zealand in August. NZ is feeling the full force of Omicron right now, but with such high vaccination rates it should be much less painful than it was (and still is) here. Then normality, we all hope.

Life :) - Poker

Here’s some better news

February 28, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

As promised, here’s the good news. My sister-in-law is pregnant. She had her ten-week scan last week, and I got a suite of photos showing something clearly moving. Animated. It’s miraculous when you think about it. I knew that she was pregnant a month ago, but I didn’t mention it here. She also got pregnant last summer, but lost the baby after six or seven weeks. That was devastating for her. This time I’ve got my fingers and just about everything else crossed. My sister-in-law will be 37 in April.

Day nine for me. A better day. After another chat with my parents (we’ve been talking a lot lately) I fired up two poker tournaments, and I’ll be damned, I went and won the same one that I won last Sunday. I made a $75 profit from the session to go with last Sunday’s excruciating $69, and my bankroll is now $1904. In the intervening week I never even considered logging on. After that, I felt physically closer to normal than at any point since this all started, so I went for a proper walk.

In my next post I’ll write about the Ukraine invasion, which I’ve had plenty of chance to follow in bewilderment on TV.

Life :)

This isn’t going away

February 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

After I wrote that last post, I had a horrific night. I woke at 12:30 in agony, and couldn’t sleep for hours. I woke up from my short sleep to see that everything had kicked off in Ukraine. It’s now day eight and the pain has moved from my lower stomach to my groin. I have the symptoms of kidney stones, but it might not be that. I did manage to see the doctor this morning. I nearly took a taxi, but in the end walked, slowly. I pressed the button on the door, and the doctor – not my normal doctor but another man in his fifties – let me in. His nurse and the cleaner were there, but no other patients. Great. I lay down on the bed. Does it hurt here? What about here? And why are you so tense? (I’m on my own, in pain, and have been for over a week. And I’m having to explain myself in a foreign language. Tension would seem utterly logical.) He prescribed me some pills to reduce the pain, counteract all my gas, and improve the flow of my pee (which seems fine anyway). Then he told me to get an abdominal ultrasound, which I hope I’ll have early next week.

Since I last wrote, I’ve been reading, watching the terrible news coming from our European neighbour, and struggling to cope with lessons. There is some better news though, which I’ll talk about next time.