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Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Travel plans

July 28, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother this morning. He now has a beard. Yesterday was his 37th birthday. He and his wife have just put their house on the market: they might soon be expanding. The UK has been experiencing a heatwave the likes of which they haven’t seen since 1976.

I’ll have four work-free days in a row soon, so at the end of next week I’ll take the opportunity to do some travelling within Romania. I plan to visit the medieval town of Sighișoara, which is pronounced roughly “siggy-shwara”, just like the place I now call home is “timmy-shwara”. The -șoara suffix is some kind of feminine diminutive, and it comes up in a lot of place names, as well as in words like Domnișoara, which is the equivalent of the English Miss. (Mrs is Doamna.) Because of its prevalence in place names, I got really confused when I saw scorțișoară pancakes for sale. Where’s that, I wondered. The word in fact means cinnamon.
The only trains from Timișoara to Sighișoara take a circuitous route, and they all leave at an ungodly hour. Unfortunately I’ll miss the annual festival, which is taking place right now, so I might end up going somewhere else. But it’s been on my list for some time.

Six games of Scrabble since I last wrote. Three big wins against lower-rated opponents, two of whom resigned before the end, but the others were all close. In one game I found an early low-scoring bingo but my opponent drew both blanks, bingoed with each of them, and kept scoring heavily enough to snuff out my comeback chances. I lost that game by 27. My next game showed that bingos aren’t everything. Both times I bingoed, my opponent had the tiles and the presence of mind to make big scores immediately afterwards. I clung on to win by 22. I was particularly pleased to find BLOOPED in that game. B and P don’t go well together, and it’s easy to give up with a rack like that. I won my final game by just 11 points after going over time by a few seconds and getting stuck with a W. My score of 323 was my second-lowest in a winning effort since joining ISC.

Update: I’ve since had a nightmare game which I had in the bag with both blanks on my rack, only to lose by seven. But for the ten-point time penalty, and possibly the sinus headache I was grappling with, I would have won. Time management is a massive problem for me. Well, it’s not time management as such, it’s just that I can’t see the best plays fast enough, especially towards the end of the game when the board gets blocked. My opponent played all his words in just six minutes. Straight after that horror show I had a lesson with an Italian guy. He didn’t want to do our customary IELTS writing exercise so I half-jokingly suggested we play Scrabble. He agreed. He went first, played SPENT, and on my turn I found SPINDLES through the P. I then had to explain what a spindle was.

Update 2: It’s getting worse. Three more losses on ISC, by 51, 16 and 8.

Update 3: Now two wins! By 27 and 16. Could easily have lost both of them. In the first game I was 133 points down (that’s a lot!) before I remembered from somewhere in the recesses of my mind that CANG was a word. That allowed me to play GLUMmER and gave me just a glimmer. In the second game I led by 109 but was swamped with consonants and swapped tiles three times, and only because my opponent was overrun by consonants at the end was I able to sneak a win.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

It ain’t coming home

July 13, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s staying right where it is. Football, I mean. I had a lesson last night from 8 till 9:30. The semi-final started at 9, and as both my students are big football fans (and play regularly), we decided to watch the start of the match. They predicted 2-0 and 2-1 England wins, while I picked a simple 1-0 England victory. After five minutes that was on the cards; England dominated the first half-hour or so and could easily have led by more than one goal. But in the end, after 120 minutes and an inexplicably long final period of stoppage time, they were beaten by a better side. Oh well. Making the semis, even with a kind draw, is no mean achievement, and hopefully it’ll be seen as such when everyone has calmed down a bit. England still have to play the third-place play-off (which, in Romania, they call the “little final”). Before last night’s match I would have picked France to be champions no matter who they faced in the final, but now I’m not so sure. I don’t expect Croatia to be hindered that much by having to endure all those extra time periods, effectively a whole game more than France have played.

If one or two of Colombia’s penalties had been placed an inch higher or to the right, England’s campaign would undoubtedly have been seen as a failure. Knockout football often hinges on such tiny margins. Grand slam tennis, on the other hand, can sometimes be a bit more clear cut. The scoring system tends to magnify small differences between two players, especially in the men’s game where they play best of five sets. Roger Federer cruised through his opening four matches, for the loss of 8, 9, 10 and 9 games. Yesterday, in his quarter-final with Kevin Anderson, he won the first set 6-2 and negotiated a tricky tie-break to win the second set. Anderson’s chances of coming back were incredibly slim. But he did. Even after facing a match point. I was glad to see a “Fedexit”, mainly because I really can’t stand his Wimbledon fan base, who are often disrepectful to whoever happens to be across the net from their hero. I also enjoyed Nadal’s match with Del Potro, where he just squeaked out a win in another marathon encounter. In three days Wimbledon will be all over, and my rekindled interest in sport will be snuffed out.

This morning I had a lesson with a guy who comes from Italy originally but has lived in Romania for 15 years. We talked about bike usage, or rather the baffling lack of it. Timișoara is almost dead flat, and almost perfect for bikes. But you don’t see very many of them. He said that in Romania, riding a bike is (increasingly) an admission that you’re a failure. Successful people drive cars. He told me about his friend in nearby Arad, who works in a fairly senior role in a large company, just 500 metres away from her home. Sensibly she cycled to work, on a smart and expensive retro-style Pegas (a revived Romanian brand, which in Communist times was all you could buy here). But she was told to drive instead, because her bike (any bike) didn’t project the right image. That attitude is what’s sending the planet to hell in a handcart.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Sport that matters

July 9, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Twenty years ago I’d have just about watched televised coverage of two flies crawling up a wall, but in recent years I’ve gone off most sports. The dominance of money, and changes to society, have made the whole experience of watching sport less interesting to me. Who wins hardly matters. But as Wimbledon is in full swing and England have made the semi-finals of a World Cup for the first time since I was ten, now is a bit of an exception.

Yesterday, while battling an intense headache caused by my right sinuses, I watched Simona Halep – French Open champion, let’s not forget – lose in freakish fashion to Su-Wei Hsieh of Taiwan. She led 5-2 in the third set, but after Hsieh had held authoritatively in the next game, the remaining four could all have gone either way. But they all went Hsieh’s way, including at 5-4 when Simona had a match point. Hsieh was one hell of a tricky customer, playing two-handed on both sides. She was a far cry from the kind of ball-basher Simona is more accustomed to. Incredibly, nine of the top ten women’s seeds are out of the tournament. Serena Williams is still there, and so are Kerber and Ostapenko.

From the tennis I switched over just in time to see England take the lead against Sweden, and they ran out comfortable winners. England’s campaign has already been quite something. Suddenly there’s a sense of real optimism: “It’s coming home!” In the bread shop today I met an American who has a Romanian wife. As soon as he realised I was English he mentioned the football. I talked to Mum yesterday about the heat wave they’re experiencing in England, as their team progress through the rounds in Russia. She said that should they win the World Cup, the summer will become the stuff of legends. “Do you remember the Summer of ’18?” Mum and Dad will be back in New Zealand by the time the final kicks off.)

Today has been a day of sport-free bliss: a rest day at both Wimbledon and the World Cup. I spent most of the day creating a new board game for my younger students (well it’s not new at all: Dad came up with the basis for it circa 1993), reading a book by the frog pond, and sheltering from a storm.

Five lessons scheduled for tomorrow.

Life :)

Getting by, somehow

July 7, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just sent off my New Zealand income tax return. I offset my various expenses against my rental income; my body corporate fees came to more than $8000 for the last financial year, including all the so-called “special levies” that will be the norm until, one way or another, the seismic shit resolves itself. Looking at that enormous figure made me wonder how I get by at all.

I need some more work again. Wednesday has been my only full day this week, and a productive day it was too: five lessons, including three with kids. (How did my mum cope with about thirty kids, all at once, day in, day out?) On the way to Dumbrăvița I grabbed a coffee from a machine in one of those charming little shops (like dairies in NZ) that you find everywhere. The woman behind the counter was lovely, and she reminded me to put the cup under the nozzle of the machine. Outside the shop were benches, and large empty paint cans and tins of olives that were being used as rubbish bins.

As I write this, they’ve just turned on the big screen across the road. The first of the quarter-finals, between France and Uruguay, is about to begin. That shoot-out to conclude England’s match with Colombia was hard to watch: such a fine line between success and failure, with the mood of a whole nation riding on events that are essentially random. It’s crazy when you think about it. I was happy for Gareth Southgate whose own penalty miss 22 years ago will sadly live with him for ever. Just imagine if England go on and win it now.

I had a cancellation this morning, so I popped over to Piața Badea Cârțan, my favourite market, in probably my favourite part of the city. At this time of year it’s just oozing with amazing fruit and vege. One of this evening’s lessons (with three people) has also been cancelled: I was cheesed off with that, not just because of the loss of work (and income), but also because one of my students could have given me some much-needed fishing advice.

My parents are staying at my brother’s place in Poole. On FaceTime it all looked very housey, in contrast to the humble apartment I live in.

Update: I didn’t watch the France–Uruguay match and I don’t think it had much to recommend it anyway, but what an absolute belter the Belgium–Brazil game was! A real cracker of a match. I was glad to see Belgium hang on, by the fingertips of their goalie, but really the final score could have been almost anything.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Vară în Timișoara

July 2, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s not a bad day to be in Timișoara. The temperature has dropped into the very pleasant low twenties. (That’s only a reprieve, surely.) Earlier this afternoon I was in Piața Libertății, reading the start of Tender Is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald, when a man in his sixties came up to me, impressed that I was reading a book in English. Then the mayor, and presumably his wife, walked past. They were eating an ice cream. Walking alongside the School of Music at the northern end of the square, on the other side of the tram tracks, I was treated, as always, to the sounds of vigorous practice in just about anything you can strum or tinkle or blow into.

I read that the boats (vaporașe) on the Bega, which they were trialling when I arrived here 21 months ago, will finally be put into action. There had been some bureaucracy emanating from Bucharest that threatened to put the kibosh on the whole thing.

This morning I had a lesson with my Italian student, taking my total for the week to 20 hours. After all those interruptions, I’ve lost some momentum, but I’m relatively confident I can build it again, even if August (the big getaway month) is only one month away. As my student and I completed an IELTS writing exercise, I saw the man with no legs ride his hand-cranked wheelchair to the cathedral, park it beside the steps, and painstakingly clamber up all twelve of them. For god’s sake (literally), can’t you build a bloody ramp?! Some things about Romania make me angry.

My student was disappointed that France beat Argentina yesterday, citing the number of black and Muslim players in the side. How bigoted. He also unashamedly cheats in his exams. But he has a lot of lessons with me, so I don’t complain too much. Friday was my best day of the week – four lessons, including one with three people. For that lesson I sat on what is probably called an ottoman, because I only have three chairs.

The World Cup continues to delight. Both of yesterday’s matches were crackers. Long may it continue, while the spectre of 2022 looms darkly in the form of Qatar Airways advertising hoardings surrounding the pitch. From a personal viewpoint, there is some well-founded optimism this time in the England camp. For once they have a non-Delboy-like manager with a good tactical brain, who hasn’t had to be imported from Sweden or Italy. On Tuesday they face Colombia, who (like four years ago) have been one of my favourite teams so far. I’d quite like to visit Colombia, if this 1997 video of the song Demons by Super Furry Animals is anything to go by. In the same original group as Colombia, I was disappointed to see Senegal go out by virtue of accumulating two more yellow cards than Japan, after both sides had amassed four points, scored four goals, conceded four, and shared four in their head-to-head encounter. Yellow cards are dished out too subjectively to be a good tie-breaker. If some sort of play-off game is unfeasible (and I don’t totally believe it is), flipping a coin might actually be better. As for the Mannschaft, which still sounds like part of the male anatomy, they just weren’t quite good enough. The victims of very un-German complacency, perhaps.

Fishing. One day I’ll know what I’m doing enough to spend a pleasant, relaxing morning by the water. One day I’ll even catch a fish. But today is not that day.

Life :) - Other sports

Last gasp

June 24, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Wow. I’ve just watched Germany get out of jail against Sweden. With only ten men and staring probable elimination in the face, a jaw-dropping last-gasp free kick winner from a crazy angle on the edge of the box means they’ll make it to the knockout rounds now in all likelihood. I felt sorry for Sweden.

For me, this feels like the last-ever World Cup, so I’m trying to enjoy it. Everything is wrong about Qatar, the hosts in four years’ time. Then in 2026 the competition will expand to 48 teams, planned to be drawn into 16 mini-groups of three. Too many teams. Terrible format. Just ugh.

During tonight’s game the Romanian commentators kept referring to the German team as the Mannschaft, which sounds pretty funny in English. Sometimes they would put it into (I think) the genitive case: mannschaftului. Plenty of other languages have borrowed this German term (it probably sounds very German), but curiously the Germans don’t use it themselves: for them it just means “team”. Or rather, they didn’t use it until after they won the last World Cup. They then rebranded the national team as Die Mannschaft for marketing purposes, capitalising on the popularity of the term in other languages. This reminds me of the term Bahasa, which some English speakers use to refer to the Indonesian language, presumably because it sounds cooler than “Indonesian”. But in Indonesian, bahasa just means “language”.

I should have mentioned that on Tuesday night we all tried a papanași, a quite wonderful dessert that’s a bit like a rum baba, but without the rum, and bigger. Delicious, and well worth the long wait before we eventually got it.

Tomorrow morning I’ll try my hand at fishing, without Dad’s help. Who knows if I’ve rigged up my rod in a way that it won’t all fall apart.

Family - International travel - Life :)

Mum and Dad’s visit — Part 4

June 24, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

In our last two evenings in Belgrade we ate in the main square. It was full of life. Young people who walked fast, mainly. We saw surprisingly few people on their phones. Eating there simplified things: we were starting to get fed up of eating out, which I’ve always thought is overrated anyway. Mum was still grappling with the badly-designed local currency. They have nine denominations of notes, ranging from 10 dinars (worth roughly 8 pence) to 5000 (almost £40). With that many values, it’s impossible to distinguish them all based on colour alone. As for the virtually worthless coins, they were identical in shape and colour, and very similar in size too. On Saturday night we got ice creams from the bar next door to our apartment. The woman who served us, if you can call it that, was miserable. We saw two ice cream prices: 30 and 70 dinars, but I couldn’t work out what the Serbian alongside each price meant. It turned out that the cone itself was 30 dinars and each scoop of ice cream was 70. That was a new one on me.

Serbia beat Costa Rica 1-0 in their opening World Cup game, thanks to a stunning free kick, and we expected to see wild celebrations in town, but they weren’t forthcoming. Sadly they conceded a late goal to Switzerland last night to lose 2-1, and are probably out of the tournament now unless they can pull off a huge upset win over Brazil.

On the last day we went down to the waterfront, and saw some fishermen with a decent haul. By this stage I was feeling a bit claustrophobic. Mum and Dad were quick to judge and criticise everything they saw; many things that annoyed them didn’t really bother me. The city had been ravaged by war only twenty years ago; of course it won’t be like Paris. It’s also much cheaper than Paris, and for that reason, as well as the interesting language, I’d quite like to go back there by myself. Perhaps I could then take the train to Bar, on the coast of Montenegro. That trip is supposed to be spectacular.

On Monday the bus was again an hour late, but at least I had a working phone. We weren’t held up very long at the border this time, but the journey still took over three hours. I had a lesson that evening. The next three mornings I did a spot of fishing with Dad, and was gradually getting the hang of it, but the fish weren’t having a bar of our rubberised sweetcorn bait. We did see people catch sizeable caras, a.k.a Prussian carp, using maggots, which I’ll need to get my hands on.

I had my 71st two-hour session with Matei on Tuesday. I’m running out of things to do with him. I prepared a piece on Ronaldo, who I thought was his favourite footballer. I thought it would be timely after he’d just scored a hat-trick for Portugal against Spain. But either I’d forgotten or Matei had changed his mind, and apparently he can’t stand Ronaldo and instead Messi is his favourite. Oh well.

My parents’ experiences here, and in Belgrade, were pretty positive on the whole. Things inevitably became strained on occasions – Mum doesn’t cope well with stress and that’s just the way she is – but she and I never had any real arguments. It helps that I’m more relaxed myself these days. They left on Thursday. I ordered a taxi, the woman on the phone said “four minutes” before I had the chance to specify a time, and before I knew it they were gone. That was a shame.

Mum and Dad are making another trip to the UK for Christmas, so I should see them then, not that I’m overly enthusiastic about enduring a horribly commercialised British Christmas.

We’ve had thunderstorms lately, and today has seen a welcome drop in temperature. I’m looking forward to everything being back to normal once more.

Family - Life :)

Mum and Dad’s visit — Part 1

June 23, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Two weeks ago my parents arrived in Timișoara after a six-hour train journey from Budapest. Meeting them off the train, in what is now my home town, was one of the loveliest things. Two days ago they took a taxi to the airport. Seeing them go was really quite sad. It didn’t help that the taxi came almost immediately after I ordered it, so we weren’t able to properly say goodbye. In between, Dad taught me how to fish (or sort of – there’s still a hell of a lot to learn), Mum rearranged (i.e. hid) various items in my flat, I received a bunch of clothes that I didn’t really want, and we spent five nights in the lively city of Belgrade.

Mum and Dad’s train from Hungary was three-quarters empty and it arrived, surprisingly, bang on time. We walked from the station to their apartment, the same one my aunt and uncle stayed in at the end of May, on the fourth floor of the Communist-era block next door to mine. The entranceway to the building isn’t the most salubrious, but the floor tiles and time-worn stencilled walls give it some charm. The process of tapping in a code to retrieve their apartment key from a box – seemingly by magic – reminded me of the brilliant nineties game show The Crystal Maze. In contrast to the exterior, their apartment was rather nice.

The next day was a hot and relatively lazy one. We bought some fruit and vege from Piața Badea Cârțan, watched the world go by from the local café, and wandered through the surrounding area. Dad took numerous pictures of the figure dancing on a ball atop one of the many decaying buildings – he thought it could make a painting. It’s a beautiful piece of architecture, and it’s amazing that it’s still standing. He was also impressed by the pharmacy building, now also in a state of disrepair – it has housed a pharmacy for all of its existence, and a snake-around-a-spike (officially known as a Rod of Aclepsius) adorns its roof. It was good to see these architectural marvels through somebody else’s eyes. In the afternoon we watched Nadal chalk up yet another French Open title on the 50-something-inch TV in my parents’ apartment, and then Mum cooked a lovely dinner using the food we’d bought from the market and some of my leftover bits and pieces. Unfortunately, after that first evening we ate out, and with Mum that’s always a fraught experience.

On Monday I had a full work day – 8½ hours of teaching – so my parents were left to their own devices. The following day I only had one lesson, in the early evening with Matei, so in the morning I had my first attempt at fishing. After I’d shown an interest, Dad was keen for me to pursue it, and he kindly packed a telescopic rod in his suitcase for me. We were on a canalised or channelised (what is the word?) section of the Bega river, but really I was all at sea. I had visions of landing a ten-pound pike, but only very fleeting ones, and to begin with I was struggling to even cast the line. On Wednesday morning I popped in to the fishing licence place across the river, to pick up some kind of additional permit. I had a good chat with the woman at the desk. When I told her what I do for a job, she and one of the customers each took one of my business cards. She informed me of the various fishing quotas, and when I said I very much doubt they’d come into play for me, we had a good laugh.

International travel - Life :)

Just dropping in…

June 15, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m writing this from Belgrade, where I’m staying with Mum and Dad. It’s Mum’s 69th birthday, the first anniversary of the Grenfell disaster, and the first day of the World Cup, which saw Russia thrash Saudi Arabia 5-0. In a few days I’ll write some proper-ish posts of my time with my parents in Romania and Serbia.

Life :) - Scrabble

Friends with benefits

June 10, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a stormy, muggy day here. There’s also a sense of déjà vu in the air, as Simona Halep faces off for the fourth time in a grand slam final. I’ve got a feeling that this time she’ll do it, mainly because she’s played with noticeably more aggression in her run to the final.

I’ve had some interesting lessons this week. My UK-based Skype student (he lived in Bucharest when I started with him in January) was complaining that his Kiwi boss wouldn’t let him use Facebook at work. Good on him, I wanted to say, but thought better of it. My student seems to like our lessons. Every week I pick out an article from a news website and prepare questions based on it. I have another student of 24 who is moving to the UK next month. He told me that he’s only really interested in making friends over there, or anywhere, if they can benefit him in a tangible (i.e. financial) way. I can believe that. I met somebody who worked for a bank; when I told him I taught from home, he shoved a bunch of credit card application forms in my hand for me to give to students. Um, are you serious?! I get the feeling that the guy with whom I used to play tennis gave up on me as a friend when it became obvious that I had no business contacts that he could use to his advantage. It’s a year since I last saw or heard from him.

I played three games of Scrabble last night. In the first game my opponent made bingos on his opening two turns, but even then I felt I could have beaten him. I knew I had high-probability bingos on my rack that included a blank, but somehow they eluded me. I did find a bingo at the end but it was too late; I fell to a 64-point loss. In game two it was a similar story: two early bingos by my opponent. Only this time he scored heavily, unremittingly, on his non-bingo plays too. A third bingo followed. Even though I found two bingos of my own, I fell to my heaviest defeat yet: 369 to me, a whopping 564 to my opponent. In contrast game three (12-minute clock) was a nailbiter, and as usual in sub-15-minute games I struggled with time management. I made two bingos but my opponent scored heavily with his X and Z and I held only a slender lead. I was soon behind when he later found a bingo. In a dramatic finish I spotted a place for my N with just three seconds remaining to eke out a three-point win, 413 to 410. That’s my closest game to date.

My parents’ train is due to arrive at 9:30 tonight. Dad emailed me to say that he was struggling with a bad headache after a very good run of relative freedom from them.

Update: At last! Simona did it! It didn’t look very likely at 3-6, 0-2, but she employed more variety and was more aggressive, while Stephens tired ever so slightly. What an absolute beast Simona is defensively though. Leading 3-0 in the final set but with Stephens holding a point to keep her in with a sniff, Simona was ludicruously out of position on her backhand side on each of the next three points, but was somehow able to win all of them. Quite remarkable. And a well-deserved first grand slam, finally, for the Romanian.