Life :)

Coronavirus - Life :) - The UK

A dark place

October 19, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

Molvania400px.jpg

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

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker

Walls and doors are good

October 17, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a look at another flat on Thursday. It was only three years old. At €100,000 (NZ$165,000), it was cheaper than the previous one I looked at, but the layout, with the kitchen and living room all together as one room, made it a non-starter. “Look! You can have your lessons here,” the agent said to me. Just no. I need my office to be accessible without entering the kitchen area at all, and certainly not inside the kitchen. The shelves in one of the bedrooms were loaded with fishing trophies. Dozens of them. I then met the current owner who wore a kind of fishing tracksuit. He showed me to the garage, which was predictably full of fishing gear. For some reason I asked him if he also had guns, and he answered no, unequivocally. I wasn’t a big fan of the area either, but as there’s a nice park nearby, I didn’t dismiss it entirely. But the unremitting newness of everything would have got to me. “See, they’re building a big supermarket, and a kind of mall. Right there,” the agent said, pointing out a large steel skeleton. Great. Timișoara is not exactly lacking in that department already.

Viewing that flat was useful, as now the agent knows what is and isn’t suitable for me. She told me that almost all new builds have that open space, with a combined kitchen and living area. That just means I need something less new. The trend is for fewer walls and doors, but walls and doors can be good a lot of the time. I recently watched breakfast TV, where they did a piece on people in various countries returning to the office as the Covid situation improved, and when I saw an open-plan office I just about broke out in a cold sweat. I worked many years in that environment, but how long would I survive now? I could do six months, if I knew it was only going to be six months. They also showed an office full of cubicles, which looks more austere, but it’s actually less awful to work in. Even mini-walls help. (As for hot-desking, don’t even get me started.)

After a week of mostly crappy weather, it’s a bright, sunny mid-October morning. I had some decent lessons last week, but I still wouldn’t mind one or two new students. The low point was on Thursday when my student (a guy in his mid-thirties) got a phone call from his father to say that his 83-year-old great uncle (whom he was very close to) had died from Covid, after his doctor had told him not to get the vaccine. (Just wow.) I suggested that we stop the lesson, and after pressing on with a translation exercise for a little longer, he agreed. He was understandably struggling to concentrate. Yesterday my student, a woman of 26 (I think) told me that her 74-year-old grandfather had survived a three-week battle in hospital with Covid. Petrică (mid-fifties) from the tennis club had a kidney condition, then was hospitalised with Covid last winter, before the vaccines came. He’s now on dialysis three times a week. He told me he hadn’t had a pee since March.

For my parents and anybody else living in New Zealand, especially the South Island, the virus must still feel abstract, a bit like it did for me in the early days. But it not, it’s killing people and doing long-term damage to those who survive it, and it’s coming your way. I was delighted to read that 2.5% of NZ’s population got the jab on a single day, in a high-profile Super Saturday “vaxathon” campaign. They were late to get started on vaccinations in NZ, but they’re certainly making up for lost time now.

I spoke to my parents yesterday. They’d just been down to Moeraki. Mum has sent me some pictures of the boulders, some broken and filled with water. I was happy when they told me they didn’t do much there apart from read. With all the house stuff, they really needed the break. We talked about our globetrotting experiences from 30-plus years ago, a subject that comes up quite often. Modern long-haul flying involves mega-hubs where you’re basically cocooned in airportworld. It didn’t used to be like that; the process was slower and more arduous. Dad remembered a time we landed in Jakarta (either ’86 or ’89) and just breathing in the air told you that you were in some faraway land. Airports were fascinating places then (the smells!), before they got all Guccified. Planes themselves were different too; if you didn’t want to be stuck in your seat you could slink off to the area around the galley – my brother did this all the time. You saw more out of the window too – the crew didn’t enforce artificial night-time. My younger students are amazed when I tell them that you could smoke in the back half-dozen rows of the plane. That would be unthinkable now.

Poker. I haven’t been able to make much headway of late, but I’m only down a few dollars for the month so far. My bankroll is $987. Staying up late to play seems to give me headaches, so I’ll try and avoid that.

I’m meeting the British teacher this afternoon. (Should I be worried about this, even though we’re both vaxed and he’s had it? He sees kids all day. These are the sorts of things I have to concern myself with.) Then I’ll be playing tennis.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Dying of ignorance

October 14, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I remember the powerful British AIDS campaign from when I was little: billboards with Don’t Die of Ignorance in big, unmissable capital letters. Now, thousands of Romanians are doing just that. It’s upsetting to be living in a country that has completely given up on something so fundamental – keeping its citizens alive. Romania was fortunate at the start of the pandemic – being outside Europe’s main traffic routes afforded the country more time, and they used it to good effect. Masks were mandated in shops in late April here in Timișoara, some time before they became law in the UK, schools were closed, and we came out of the first wave in good shape. In autumn 2020 as cases rose again, masks were made mandatory even on the street. In spring 2021, we had another lockdown which kept a lid on things. So far, so good, or at least not absolutely awful.

But since then it’s been a complete disaster zone. The vaccination campaign has been feeble, and the victors have been a lethal cocktail of religion, fake Facebook “news”, and Antena 3 (Romania’s version of Fox News, whose viewership is made up almost entirely of old people who are most at risk of Covid). Right now, two-thirds of Romanians are fully exposed to the Delta variant, and most of them are going about their business as normal. You can hardly blame them for not giving a toss when the government doesn’t either. In last December’s elections, a right-wing anti-vax, anti-everything party gained significant representation. Eighteen months ago we had the police checking every vehicle that drove by, and even an army presence, but now there’s nothing. Restaurants and bars are still open. We have a curfew – you’re not allowed out after 8pm if you’re unvaxed – but is that even enforced anywhere? About 400 people are dying from Covid every day, 90% of whom are unvaxed, and that only counts hospital deaths as far as I’m aware. (A lot of Romanians avoid hospital at all costs, and that’s understandable. I mean, you might burn to death there.)

Of course some people will say that killing a few hundred people every day is worth it if you save the economy. That stopping the spread of the virus (at least within reason) doesn’t actually help the economy in the long run has been the biggest lie of the pandemic, and Romania doesn’t do long-term thinking. The big obsession right now seems to be “Horeca”, which is an acronym of hoteluri, restaurante, cafenele. Gotta keep Horeca moving, no matter what.

The beeping Happy Zoo grab-a-toy machine, which is in the area outside the supermarket where I pack my bags while trying to keep away from everyone, still creeps me out. It’s like something out of a Stephen King novel.

Another creepy thing is this song that my neighbour has been playing, almost on a loop, day and night, for weeks. Thankfully it’s been at low volume, but what is it? DUM-dum-DUM-dum-DUM-dum-dum. Today I managed to get close enough to the wall to Shazam it – I was the eighth person ever to do so. I imagined it was an old song, but it’s a brand new Romanian song called Nu Mai Spune Nimănui, by Pragu’ de Sus. It’s quite a nice song outside the saturation-level rotation that I’m experiencing. (One of my favourite Romanian songs, by Kumm, has an almost identical title, Să Nu Spui Nimănui.)

Tomorrow I’m looking at another flat, but it’s in an ultra-modern area which just isn’t my thing.

Life :) - Romania

Pipe Day

October 8, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s Pipe Day today, the one day every year that you start to hear the hot water gurgling through the pipes that run from top to bottom of this apartment block, marking the beginnings of winter. It will probably be my last Pipe Day. I’ll miss this place when I leave.

It’s also the fifth aniversary of my arrival in Romania.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker - Politics - Tennis

How exciting!

September 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My uncle – another one – is celebrating his 80th birthday today. He and my aunt visited Timișoara after coming to the UK for my brother’s wedding. A retired (or semi-retired) farmer, he still does a ton of physical work. The idea of slowing down is alien to him. I guess he’s been lucky – he’s lived ten years longer than either his older or younger brother, who both died of cancer. Ten years ago I went to his previous big birthday bash – in the middle of the rugby World Cup, and we watched the All Blacks’ first match against France. Israel Dagg (what a name) was probably man of the match. The world has spun off in an altogether darker direction since then.

Mum and Dad are now in their new place. It was weird seeing them on FaceTime with the new backdrop. So much wood everywhere, including on the ceilings. Dad described parts of the new house as “horrendous” and in dire need of renovation, but his horrendous is my kind of meh. I would just about kill to have their new place, as long as I could transport it out of Geraldine. Just before the definitive move, they had a horrendous day where their lawnmower broke down and my uncle’s (birthday boy’s) trailer, which Dad had borrowed, also needed expensive repairs.

I need to move away from this flat but I don’t want to. That’s the situation I’m in. Again, I’m having flashbacks to 2011, although then I didn’t actually need to move. It’s just that society had told me that someone of my age should buy a property – you’re a failure if you don’t – and my job, which gave me the licence to buy, was a ticking time bomb. And yeah, I thought it might actually make financial sense. But there was no excitement then, and neither is there now. The phrase “How exciting!”, as it relates to buying property, drives me mad. My biggest worry with this move is that it could kill my mental health, which has been so much better ever since I moved to Romania.

Last Monday I did have a look at a place in the Bucovina area, near where I once had lessons. The agent led me up to the fourth – and top – floor of a Ceaușescu-era block. Pinned to the walls of the staircase, bizarrely, were pictures of islands and beach resorts with golden sand and deep blue sea. It was something you might have seen in a prison cell. At the flat I was greeted by an elderly couple who had lived there for 35 years, and a very yappy dog. Everything in the flat had a seventies or eighties feel about it. There was even an old typewriter. The flat was easily big enough, but it would have needed serious work. I mean, it would have been OK for me, but potential students would have found it a turn-off. No lift either (again, I would have coped), and perhaps the biggest minus was a lack of any sort of view.

Then on Thursday I tried to visit some agents. This isn’t like New Zealand or the UK; they’re not really interested in dealing with the public. The first place had an intercom system which nobody answered. They didn’t answer their phone either. Fantastic. Just round the corner was another agency, located in a modern fourth-floor office. It was the same company that I rented this place from when I arrived. A woman took down my details and we had a chat. She told me that the young employee who had just two lessons from me in 2016, but honestly changed my life by tipping me off about the flat I’m in now, had left the company to train as a psychologist. I told her about some of the areas I liked, then inevitably she started peddling brand new apartments in the south of the city. I’ve been to that area, and nothing is more than five years old. I’d worry that living there, even if it might be good for business, would leave me depressed. Maybe not, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

What else? There’s a Hungarian festival on in the city, perhaps the last thing that’ll be “on” before the plug is pulled. Last night we had country music at Piața Operei and there was even a re-enactment of a battle. They’re selling various bits and bobs, Csiki Sör beer, and overpriced food.

I played singles tennis last night, again with that super-fit near-60-year-old. We only booked the court for an hour, and at the end I was up 6-4, 4-2. I lost the first three games. The first game went 16 points but was almost devoid of rallies. In the third game I had a break point, and hit a shot I thought he might struggle to return, but he ripped a cross-court forehand that was out of the top drawer, and the next two points slipped from my grasp too. It was all happening too damn fast. I made sure I had a good sit-down before coming up to serve. The games had been close, and there was no reason why I couldn’t come back. It was overall a good game with plenty of winners from both of us, although he lost concentration in the middle.

Poker. Back-to-back second places, and big comebacks, on Friday, though I made such bad starts to both tournaments that I couldn’t get many of those damn bounties. After blanking all three of last night’s attempts, my bankroll is $979.

Work. It’s OK but I could do with more of it. (Someone called me wanting only face-to-face lessons. Um, there’s like this thing on the news that you might have seen.) Thursday was a good day, however. One boy in particular has come on so far in his English since I started with him that it blows me away. He’s gone from a kid who knew a few words and didn’t say boo to a goose to an intelligent teenager who has a bloody good command of English. It’s so pleasing to see.

Justin Trudeau has been re-elected prime minister of Canada despite his party losing the popular vote. Their system isn’t nearly as awful as the US one (stupid amounts of money, stupidly long campaign, stupid everything basically) but it still ain’t great. The Germans are going to the polls right now.

Boris Johnson resorted to his schoolboy Franglais shtick again last week. “Prenez un grip”, “donnez-moi un break”. Mildly amusing to an Englishman for whom mumbling pointless French phrases for five years was an iconic part of his upbringing, but it would have fallen flat elsewhere.

It might just be me, but I can’t see how we’ll ever escape from the environmental mess we’re in. Humans are just terrible at dealing with problems that happen incrementally over periods of time greater than a lifetime. We still think we can consume our way out of this. We can’t.

Sorry for making this post so long.

Coronavirus - Family - Films - Life :) - New Zealand

Nearly half a lifetime ago…

September 12, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Twenty years ago today I was recovering from a nosedive brought on by recurrent panic attacks. In late June I was basically fine, but by mid-July I was plummeting at a thousand feet per second. But by now the drugs had started kicking in, and in an attempt to clamber out of the pit I’d fallen into, I was working nights at a sorting office. Dad picked me up every morning at four; I’m eternally grateful for what he did. In a few weeks I’d be starting my final year of university. (It looked for a while that I’d have to delay it. I just couldn’t function.) We couldn’t get Kylie’s latest hit out of our heads. So at half-two on a Tuesday afternoon I was at home with Dad, who was working in the studio. Then the phone rang. I picked it up. It was my grandmother, telling me to switch on the TV. I did, and told Dad he needed to watch it. For a few minutes we thought it might have been an accident. And then we saw the second plane hit. It seems that almost every American old enough to remember can remember where they were.

Staggering but true: neither of the two women’s US Open finalists was even born when 9/11 happened. They’ve both come utterly out of nowhere, in particular 150th-ranked Emma Răducanu who qualified and has therefore won nine straight matches to reach the final, without dropping a set. Răducanu (born 13/11/02) has a Chinese mother and a Romanian father (hence her name), was born in Canada but moved to London when she was two, and now plays for Britain. And there I was thinking I was a mongrel. Her opponent Leylah Fernandez (born 6/9/02), part-Ecuadorian, part-Filipino, and playing for Canada (!), is ranked only 73rd in the world and has gone to three sets in each of her last four matches. Far fewer surprises among the men, where Novak Djoković is one win, 18 mere games, from walk-on-water status. Nobody has won the calendar grand slam since 1969 because it’s damn near impossible to do. For one, Djoković had to overcome the undisputed King of Clay in Paris. Now he’s on the verge of being the undisputed King of Tennis.

Mum and Dad have been busy moving, shifting, lifting. They’re almost there, ready to move into their new house, which is actually reasonably old by NZ standards. If it was up to Dad they wouldn’t be moving at all, but I’m with Mum on this. Their current place seems unmanageably big, with a two-acre garden. If it isn’t too much yet, it soon will be, and right now they still have plenty of emotional energy (how?) for the move and everything that will come after.

If I’m really lucky I might one day see my parents in their new abode. They’ve managed to contain the latest outbreak in NZ, for now at least, and the South Island has remained Covid-free. No such luck in Romania, where they’ve practically given up. Cases are doubling every seven to ten days, and everyone’s going about their normal business in the NZ equivalent of level one-and-a-bit. The NZ opening-up plan is to vet travellers to the country based on rates of disease and vaccination in their home country and any other territories they’ve visited in the previous fortnight. Romania will surely be blacklisted. My idea, assuming the UK is on the green list by then, is to fly to the UK for two weeks before then flying to New Zealand. I’ll need an internet connection in the UK though. It’s hard not to feel some anger at Romanians. A warm, friendly, welcoming bunch of people, but somehow they’re willing to fuck up people’s health and their economy and their kids’ education and the country’s reputation and everything and everybody just because of their flat-earth beliefs.

On Thursday I called my aunt. I was shocked to get through; she hardly ever picks up the phone these days. I was almost as shocked that we had a normal conversation. She mentioned getting an MRI scan for her painful back, and the extreme difficulty of getting medical attention at all in the UK. The collateral non-Covid-related damage caused by the disease is immense.

Last Saturday I went to the film festival in the Summer Garden just across the road. I saw Nowhere Special, a drama based in Belfast and partly produced in Romania, and I didn’t have to pay a penny (or, as they say here, a ban). I won’t give any spoilers here, but it gets a big thumbs up from me. The Belfast accent isn’t the easiest to get right but James Norton certainly pulled it off.

It’s another glorious day here. I’ll be playing tennis a bit later.

Life :)

Time for a new pooter

September 8, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Writing that blog post about the Mocăniță was the last thing I did before my laptop went totally kaput. A fifth and final variety of blue screen, then something telling me to choose my keyboard layout. Armenian, Assamese, Inuktitut. Whatever I chose I was locked out of the system. I took it back to the repair shop but I decided I really didn’t trust the bloke there. Googling and writing a message on a forum got me nowhere – all the information out there might as well have been in Inuktitut – so on Thursday I cut my losses and bought a new laptop – an HP with plenty of storage space and RAM. At 3700 lei (NZ$1350 or £650) it was hardly the cheapest out there, but a laptop isn’t something I can skimp on, and heaven knows I skimp on enough. I took possession of it yesterday afternoon and ran a successful lesson from it almost immediately. So far I’ve been very impressed with its file transfer speed. My only battle so far has been trying to de-link everything from the bloody cloud. If I could get the old laptop in usable condition (at 4½ years, it’s not even that old), then it would give me protection from any future technical meltdowns.

In the short window between writing that last blog post and everything going phut, I got my old bike back (would you believe). This old, long-haired guy was wheeling two old bikes, including mine, near this apartment block. You’ve got my old bike! You nicked it, didn’t you? I’ve told the police. He said he’d bought it from the market (what a coincidence) and then gave it back to me without putting up any sort of fight. That’s a shame. Yeah, OK, have it back. I’ve just put it on OLX, Romania’s version of TradeMe. My new one is so much better.

On Saturday I met the British teacher again, this time at his place in Dumbrăvița. His wife wasn’t around. We went for a walk with their gangly dog (really her dog) in the wooded area nearby. It’s a popular area for mountain bikes, and there’s even a track that takes you all the way to Serbia. Their apartment, which they’re renting, is in a different league to mine. It was built two years ago on the edge of Dumbrăvița furthest from Timișoara. Next to the development, where the streets are named after scientists like Newton and Kepler, are fields that probably won’t be full of sunflowers for much longer. Housing estates in Romania grow much more organically than in the UK, where you might see 200 virtually identical houses cheek-by-jowl on rabbit warrens of far-too-narrow streets. Their two-storey flat is modern and airy, with all mod cons. They have three bathrooms with spas and jacuzzis and showers where you can have your favourite radio station piped through. They even have a reasonable-sized garden. What I really couldn’t abide though was all the ghastly word art in their living room. I’m guessing it was already there – they don’t strike me as do-the-things-that-make-you-happy kind of people. On the mantelpiece were four plasticky foot-high letters spelling out LOVE. I would have rearranged them to read VOLE. A nice friendly water-rat. On the wall was “Life is short, break the rules.” A sign telling you, ordering you to break the rules, isn’t the irony of that just wonderful? It’s all very corporate, like the company where I started in 2004 in which “FUN!” was one of its values; why people decided in about 2010 to drag that depressingly awful corporate shite into their homes I have no idea.

On the way back home I went through the old part of Dumbrăvița: the old church, the park, the town hall. It’s all very pleasant. Just like in the Mehala area and I’m sure many others too, the main street of old Dumbrăvița has plum trees and the odd quince tree lining the berms. (Now berm is a word I never used before I moved to New Zealand.) I picked four kilos of plums but could have snagged forty.

We’re having sunny and serene early-autumn weather. Calm before the storm that will soon hit us, as Covid numbers keep climbing.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

I’m not a therapist

August 31, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had my 225th two-hour lesson – or should I say therapy session – with a woman who is becoming a giant pain in the arse. I would love her to go away. I have lessons with her son too, and those are highly productive, in complete contrast to anything I have with her. It amazes me how bright and well adjusted he is, considering both his parents are messed up in their own different ways.

Last Thursday I had a lesson with a guy in Brașov; these lessons are always productive and a pleasure. We spent the second half of the session on phrases to use at restaurants. One of these was “the hamburgers are off”, meaning “we’re out of hamburgers”. (Confusingly, we also use “off” to say that food has gone bad.) He said that if he was told that the hamburgers were off, he’d tell them to damn well turn them on then.

Having a bike again is a massive help. It speeds up my life, gives me more options. On Sunday I made a trip to Sânmihaiu Român, for the first time in ages, and got back just before the downpour. The rain totally wiped out the weekend’s tennis.

Poker. Well it hasn’t been that easy to play of late (see next paragraph) but I’ve had a good, or should I say lucky, August. My bankroll is $930, up $226 on the start of the month.

My laptop has been repeatedly crashing. Endless blue screens. CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED. Doesn’t sound good, does it? DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE hardly gave me warm fuzzy feelings either. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Not less or equal?! Why not just say it’s more, for crying out loud? But more than what? Why be cryptic and meaningless at the same time? At UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION, the fourth blue screen error, I noticed my hard drive was pretty chocka so I dumped a load of my photos onto flash drives, thinking that might help, but it didn’t. Yesterday morning I took my laptop into the repair shop, and they told me I’d need to reinstall Windows 10. It crashed again the moment I switched it on when I came home; it gave me that crap about not less or equal. At that point I gingerly reinstalled Windows 10, and since then, touch wood, it hasn’t crashed. I rely on my laptop for everything. Without it I can’t do my job, it’s that simple.

Last night I talked to one of my students (mid-forties) about this general malaise that seems to have set in around the world, or the western world at least. From a collective standpoint, what’s there to look forward to anymore? What’s the new, big, positive change on the horizon? In the early nineties the Soviet Union broke up, Europe opened its borders, and the internet age began. Greater peace and prosperity, we all hoped. What have we got now? He said he was excited about the prospect of computers becoming more intelligent than humans and starting to dominate us. That doesn’t excite me, that’s for sure.

I was going to write the last part of my trip report, but I’ll tackle that in a separate post.

Life :) - Poker - Romania - Tennis

Blunders and bikes

August 24, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

After my lessons on Saturday I met up with Mark, the teacher from the UK. He’s just starting as a music and ICT teacher at British School where his wife will be teaching English. He said that they’ve so far been wined and dined and given the red-carpet treatment. They’ll certainly be wanting something in return. I’m sure I would crumble under the weight of all that expectation, not least from the parents who are paying top dollar (or euro, or leu) to send their kids there. Mark and his wife are in a different financial league from me. On Saturday we drank in the beautiful Piața Unirii at places I wouldn’t dream of going to normally. He seemed impressed with my command of the local language as I ordered drinks. He’s also clearly impressed with Timișoara, and Romania in general, although he wasn’t a fan of Bucharest. He said (and I agree) that most Brits’ preconceived ideas of Romania are founded on nothing but ignorance.

On Saturday evening I played tennis for 90 minutes. Another geriatric player has joined the fray. This bloke, I later found out, once played for the Romanian national rugby team before emigrating to the US. He’s now 79 and back living in Romania. When he heard that I was British, he introduced himself to me as Simon and we had a bit of a chat in English. Now he plays senior tennis competitions. Yesterday he told me about a match he’d played that morning, which he lost in a third-set tie-break – a real third set, none of that ten-point shoot-out crap. I could tell he just felt good about being out their competing, win or lose.

When I got home from tennis I fired up some poker tournaments. At a very late hour I made a horrific blunder in a pot-limit badugi tournament. I was chip leader with 13 players remaining, but inexplicably got all my chips in the middle against the second-biggest stack with a marginal hand, and that left me nearly chipless. I was extremely lucky to finish sixth after that, but that was still a far cry from where I could and probably should have ended up. I made $24 from that tournament, taking my bankroll to an even $900, but I was still reeling from that awful decision, which was all the more frustrating given how well I felt I played in the rest of the tournament.

I dragged myself out of bed yesterday morning and staggered off to the market at Mehala to look at bikes. And guess what, I bought one. It’s a seven-speed racing bike, from the nineties I think, and it’s in very good nick. It’s bigger than my other one which was a tad too small, and it isn’t fitted with tyres that give me an allergic reaction. The make is Union; I still can’t tell if that’s German or Dutch. It cost me 400 lei (£70, NZ$140) and I’m happy so far with my purchase. It should make a big difference to my life. I just need to make sure it has a damn good lock.

Today I’ve struggled to stay awake in the hot weather – the temperature is now forecast to drop. Tomorrow I’ve got four lessons. After they finish at 9:30 I’ll play one of the $11 WCOOP (World Championship of Online Poker) tournaments, so it could be another late one. No lessons on Wednesday morning, thankfully, or I wouldn’t be playing it at all.

The Covid numbers in Romania are climbing again. This Delta variant is an altogether different beast, as even New Zealand is finding out.

Life :) - Travel: Romania - Writing a book

When I get back…

July 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My last day before I go away is a soggy one. We had yet another thunderstorm overnight. I had a lesson with a UK-based guy on Friday night, and he was even more adamant than my previous student that I should have booked a flight instead of spending an eternity on painful Romanian trains. Why would you do that to yourself?

Right now, instead of thinking about my trip, I’m contemplating everything I need to do when I get back.

I’ve written 400 pages of my “tricky English words and phrases for Romanians” book (it needs a better name!), but I’ve hit the wall in the middle of the S section. The Romanian teacher from the university was helping me but gave up on me late last year, and it’s hard to keep motivated when you get unspoken feedback that what you’re doing is pointless. But heck, I’m on the S section. Three-quarters of the way through. It would be crazy not to finish it now. Once I’ve finally dealt with the word zone, it’ll still need a lot of tidying up. Have I repeated myself? Have I put in adequate cross-references? Can I make my example sentences a bit more fun and enticing? And so on, and so forth. Z won’t be the end of it. And I won’t have anybody else to help me. As is almost always the case no matter what I do, I’m on my own. I’ve promised myself to work on the book for a minimum of 15 hours a week.

Then there’s moving. Scary stuff, but if I want to move on with my teaching business, I’ve got to do it. I need to view houses and apartments and see what’s really out there. On Friday I met an ex-student who now lives in Austria but was back in Timișoara for a few days. She told me to avoid the trendy new apartment blocks because they’re overpriced and the build quality is lacking. That was my instinct too. However, she said she didn’t trust the vaccines, particularly the messenger RNA ones, and although she’ll be visiting several countries in the next few weeks including Sweden, some others have been scrubbed off her list because they require vaccination. As we were drinking our coffees, a man walked by wearing a T-shirt covered in handwritten Romanian text: “I’m unvaccinated and proud of it. I will not be controlled! Covid is a big lie!” And there was more. I asked my ex-student if he was one of her mates. Anyway, I’ll draw up a comprehensive checklist and get the ball rolling on the house stuff.

I also want to improve my language skills. Ten hours a week of that is the goal. Romanian, Serbian, Italian, French. So much is in one ear and out the other, because I don’t keep it up. Obviously I do keep my Romanian up by actually speaking it, but I’m improving slowly if at all. Languages are definitely a case of little and often, and that’s part of the plan. In the case of Romanian, the next item on the list would help…

Finding somebody. If only that involved just a checklist and x hours a week. Any tips from my many long-term readers would be much appreciated.

What I won’t do until September is advertise for lessons. A relative lack of work will help me kick-start the other stuff in August, and it’s pretty rare that anybody wants to start lessons in August anyway. I’m better off not wasting money on online ads, and instead waiting until the start of the new academic year.

Poker. I’ll still play on a Sunday morning and the occasional evening if I happen to free of work, but that’ll be it until I get the other stuff sorted. I haven’t played much lately anyway, and my few attempts haven’t been particularly fruitful. My bankroll is $704.

And one more thing. I must buy a bike. I had a look at some at Mehala Market. There was a modern racing bike I particularly liked, but at 1500 lei it was out of my price range. Now, thinking back, I probably should have just bitten the bullet and bought it.

That was going to be just about it, but this morning I had a “lesson” with a woman who was depressed and will be flying to Bucharest tomorrow to see a doctor. The whole session was devoted to that. Like many people who suffer from depression (especially women?), she goes round in circles when she talks, going over and over and over things that happened years ago. I was worried she’d do this with the doctor tomorrow, so I wrote down a list of bullet points (in Romanian, in an English class) so she could just present them to her.

After my lesson I called my parents. Dad had received an email from my cousin (his niece). She’s 50 and got married last year. They’ll soon be going on their honeymoon (it was delayed by the pandemic) and she asked Dad to contribute to the cost of it. She and her husband, who had been married before, aren’t short of money. Dad said he’ll ignore the request which is utterly outrageous. I mean, seriously.

Before I forget, I mentioned spelling bees in my last post. The documentary Spellbound, which charts the progress of eight youngsters from radically different backgrounds in the 1999 national bee, is a must-watch. It’s hard not to get emotionally worked up by it.

It’ll be an early start in the morning. My train will take me to Oradea and Cluj, before heading through the mountains on the way to Suceava and finally to Iași. The mountainous stretch should be very picturesque, and I’ll certainly post some photos of that and the rest of my trip. The city of Iași, the monasteries near Suceava, the mocăniță, and plenty more I hope. I don’t know if I’ll post while I’m away because it’s so cumbersome on my phone. We’ll see.