Life :)

Life :)

Have a great Christmas, everybody

December 25, 2019 by 0 Comments

This morning I had a Skype chat with a friend in Auckland, then I got a phone call from my parents. It was quarter to ten at night there, and they’d parked their car somewhere in Hampden where they could get a signal. On the way they’d been to Pleasant Point for Christmas Eve mass.

The next port of call was the penultimate tram stop on Line 4 to pay my rent, but I was engrossed enough in a book that I missed my stop and got off at the end of the line. It was only a five-minute walk back. My landlady was in tears when she told me that her husband, who suffers from severe depression, will be spending Christmas Day in hospital. On the trip back there was a bloke singing Christmas carols – he got a few lei here and there.

Egg vending machines. These are dotted around the city, and I finally plucked up the courage to try one (for Christmas, the time of year famous for all things egg-related). I inserted 6 lei into the slot, tapped in a number, and at that point I half-expected my carton of ten eggs to go ga-doonk. But no, the arm gradually lowered the box to the armhole at the bottom of the machine. They’re locally produced (you can tell that from the TM code) and are cage-free (the digit 2 tells you that), so the egg machine might become a regular thing.

Yesterday as I saw two pigeons picking at a corn cob that somebody must have bought from the Christmas market, I reminded myself that “corn” and “pigeon” have the same root in Romanian: they’re porumb and porumbel, respectively.

On Sunday my student asked me if I had a pension plan and how I’ll manage “when I’m eighty”. I try not to think too much about that.

In my next post I’ll tell you how my first real Romanian Christmas turned out.

Life :)

I won’t be lonely this Christmas after all

December 24, 2019 by 0 Comments

Exciting news. I’m going to be experiencing, for the first time, a Romanian Christmas. Sarmale. Cozonac. I really don’t know what to expect, but it should be fun no matter what. One of my ex-students invited me to have dinner with her family, once I’d told her that I’d otherwise by spending the day on my own. And best of all, I should get to speak plenty of Romanian.

In the last week Timișoara and Romania have been marking thirty years of freedom from communism. Millions of older Romanians would prefer to be unfree. When I first came here, I thought these people (who were in far greater numbers than I’d imagined) must be mad. Totally barking. But little by little, it’s begun to make sense. The biggest difference to most people’s lives since 1989 has been the ability to consume more pointless shit more easily, while becoming less and less connected to one another. Life under communism wasn’t exactly a ball for most people, but it was probably less shallow than it is now. Earlier this evening I had a lesson with a bloke just three days older than me. He talked about how special his pre-revolution Christmases seemed compared to the hyper-commercialised ones we know today – of course I don’t know how much of that is down to lack of commercialism and how much is because he was at most nine years old.

I took the tram to the mall (eughh!) this morning. It was a grey, drizzly, English morning, but extremely mild for the time of year. (I’ve just looked back at my posts from 2016. It was brass monkeys back then.) Every time I take the tram I notice a new shop or some other edifice designed with the purpose of facilitating the consumption of unnecessary crap. Today it was a corner shop on Strada Victor Hugo. I’m sure I had a coffee from there one time in the summer of 2017 when I was traipsing up and down streets putting flyers in people’s letterboxes, but then it didn’t have a big shiny sign in English: “Be smart, buy quality”. I’ve learnt not to trust anything that describes itself as smart. At the mall I bought hardly anything Christmassy and instead grabbed a load of files and other stationery. At the cheese counter I simply gave up, and I later got my block of sheep’s cheese from the old lady at the market.

My steady stream of lessons has predictably slowed to a trickle, and I’m fine with that. I’ve been using the extra time to beef up my Romanian language skills. A useful resource to improve my listening are podcasts, and I’ve recently found a regular podcast called Pe Bune, where famous and semi-famous Romanians from the film, theatre, music or art world are given interviews lasting nearly an hour. The best thing is that the transcript is available.

Outside I can hear drums banging, whistles peeping and trumpets tooting. It must be Christmas time in Romania.

Life :)

What does this mean for me?

December 17, 2019 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother last night. He’d been skiing in France (Les Deux Alpes) with his army mates. I ended up speaking more with my sister-in-law than with him. She’s a lovely person; it still amazes me how he managed to find someone as nice as her. After that I had a long chat with my parents. It was good to talk to my mum for a decent length of time. Dad’s headaches are still unremitting. He survives cancer, and now this? Every day?

Yesterday one of my students called me to say she was at the Christmas market with her husband and eight-year-old son. Would I like to join them? That was kind of them, and I was only free because another student had cancelled. They’re from Bucharest, came to Timișoara for work, and are now itching to go back. I had some mulled wine and sarmale, and tried some șorici, or strips of pork rind. I couldn’t stomach it. There was a march commemorating the 30th anniversary of the revolution. My student and her husband thought it was all a waste of time. “It’s been thirty years!” As if that’s somehow a long time. It was clear that they’re part of the modern generation of Romanians, happy to forget their past.

On Friday I bumped into the elderly couple who live on the sixth floor. A different generation, a different world almost from the people I met yesterday. They lamented the benign December we were having, and longed for the Decembers of fifty years ago with snow up to their knees. According to them, Timișoara was going to hell in a hardcart, judging by the way people dress (flip-flops!) and their lack of respect for one another. I felt sorry for them as they told me about their aches and pains, and even more sorry when they said they had a son who had lost contact with them. However, I enjoyed the chat, and I came away feeling a certain pride that I was able to communicate in Romanian with people from a very different background without too many problems.

The election result. I saw it coming. An 80-seat overall majority for the Conservatives. I don’t think Brexit affected the outcome so much as Jeremy Corbyn, who was deeply unpopular. He’d been vilified. One of my students sent me a link to a Daily Mail article written in August about Corbyn’s choice of summer holiday destination. Corbyn had visited, guess where, Romania. An ex-communist country! And we know he’s a communist. But regardless of that, going to Romania proves that he’s weird. Not like you normal people reading this column who wouldn’t even be able to locate Romania on a map. And what’s more, he flew Wizz Air! How can you be a prime minister if you use a budget airline?

Labour picked up the wrong message from the 2017 election. Yes, they overperformed expectations and importantly prevented a Tory majority, but Corbyn was not the man to build on what was still, after all, a defeat. It reminded me somewhat of the 2005 general election in New Zealand, where National under Don Brash (in his mid-sixties) bounced back from a devastating loss in 2002 to only lose narrowly, but National realised they needed to hand over the reins to somebody younger and fresher. Labour (in the UK) are now in a pretty bad place. Corbyn’s acolytes are front and centre in the party. Unless that changes, we’re looking a whole decade of Boris and his mates.

So what does this all mean for me? Honestly I’ve got no idea. In a few months, my registration certificate with an expiry date of September 2022 might not be worth the paper it’s written on. I plan to visit the immigration office tomorrow, but I bet the bloke at the desk won’t have a clue.

Three cancellations so far today. Oh, and guess what, I bumped into S on Thursday, not long before my worst election fears became reality. I thought that if I hadn’t seen her in all this time, I perhaps never would, but I was cycling back from a lesson and there she was. She told me her grandmother, who must have been nearly 90, had died. Perhaps we’ll meet up again after Christmas.

Language teaching - Life :)

Muriel

December 9, 2019 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I had coffee with one of my ex-students, who now lives in Vienna but is in Timișoara for three weeks. (She never really needed me. She was almost entirely fluent.) She told me, insistently, that given my potential I shouldn’t still be giving lessons to people in ones and twos. I need to be doing more. But do I? We discussed my book idea, and she said she could help me with the Romanian translations, so it could have legs. Last week I had half a dozen cancellations – a frustrating number – but I’ve got a busy schedule for the start of the coming week.

This morning I had a Skype chat with a friend who lives in Auckland. I promised him a zoomed-in version of a new mural (or Muriel, as he called it) I posted a couple of weeks ago. So here she is in full:

Timișoara is a pretty good place to see Muriels, and weddings too, for that matter.

Today it was foggy all day. I went to the mall to see the film about Maria, who was Romania’s queen, but it had sold out. The mall keeps expanding. They don’t even call it a mall anymore: Iulius Mall has morphed into Iulius Town, which contains a park – built at great expense, and for now in immaculate condition, with endless piped music – that reminds me of Singapore. One of my students told me that the centre of gravity of this city is changing. Even when I arrived, the central area where I live was the centre, but it will soon be at just one corner of a Bermuda triangle, with the mall, sorry, town, and a big multi-storey housing development forming the other two vertices.

An ad for bottled water on a mega video billboard at Iulius Town. More plastic bottles. Just what we need.
It’s two words. And you can keep it.
A trio near Piața Libertății. On the left is a well, for refilling those plastic bottles.
Ice skating and dodgems in Piața Libertății
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Not cutting it

December 1, 2019 by 0 Comments

The final month of the decade, which I still haven’t got to grips with at all, is almost upon us. In New Zealand it already is. I feel firmly entrenched in 2005, or perhaps a few years earlier. I feel grateful that Romania, in some ways, has let me step back in time.

It hasn’t been a bad week of lessons. Before my usual 90-minute session with the teenage boys, I had a half-hour “taster” with their mum, who told me she could understand English but couldn’t speak it. Then I asked her to at least have a go at speaking it, and of course she could. “I have forty-four years,” she said. Well OK, that’s not perfect, but it gets the point across, and for any of you reading this blog now, just you try to say your age in Romanian. Bet you wouldn’t have a clue. Yesterday I had the session with the two younger boys, and their mum is now happily hands-off; she knows I don’t need a translator.

I made an appointment for 2pm on Thursday to get my hair cut. The place I went to the last two times has closed down, so I thought I’d try this new place. But when I got there, they weren’t having any of my shoulder-length hair. They told me that either it’s a number 4 or whatever, or it’s no can do. My hair is part of who I am now, so I walked away. I’ll try another place next week.

I had a long chat with my dad on Thursday night. We talked at length about my aunt, whose tale is a rather sad one. In her (much) younger days she had the fortune (or misfortune, perhaps) to be handed everything. The looks, the brains, the lot. She was on all the sports teams, received a string of top grades in her O-levels, and so on. Then she met an RAF officer while still in her late teens, and she was married before her 22nd birthday. She trained as a physiotherapist, but never practised. In fact she’s never had a job at all. Her husband earned enough to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, and being married to the RAF was her job. Mindless lunches and parties and balls. She had two children, who were conveniently shipped off to boarding school at the age of eight, and neither of them now have any time for her. They see her at Christmas, but it’s a chore. Her adult life has been dogged by a complete lack of purpose. Everything she’s done has been play. And probably as a result, she’s suffered from ongoing depression. Unfortunately she’s never listened to anyone – as Dad says, she transmits but doesn’t receive – and has lacked the presence of mind to think, oh shit, if I carry on down this path things are going to turn to something pretty custardy pretty damn fast, so I’d better do something to arrest the slide.

Sometime in the nineties my aunt developed a drink problem, to go with her smoking habit, and that hasn’t exactly helped. She used to shop till she dropped, to give her a high about as temporary as the alcohol did. Her husband, an intelligent, kind man who at least provided some semblance of stability, died of lung cancer in 2002. When I saw her in 2008 on a trip out from New Zealand, she seemed positively evil and more than a little mad, and thankfully she isn’t like that anymore, but her world has gradually shrunk. She’s now almost completely isolated. Both my brother and I get on perfectly fine with her (unlike her children, she doesn’t perceive us as a threat) and I’d have been happy to spend Christmas with her, or heck, bring her out to Romania, but anything along those lines is a total no-go.

The UK election isn’t far away now. Right now I’d say there are three broad scenarios: (1) a sizeable overall Tory majority of 50 or more; (2) a smaller Tory majority, perhaps even just a working majority; and (3) a hung parliament. And I’d attach roughly equal probabilities to all three scenarios. (A Labour majority would require a massive shift from where things currently stand, and is highly unlikely.) I’m pinning my hopes on scenario 3.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Take the money and run

November 24, 2019 by 0 Comments

After a no-show this afternoon (there’s nothing more annoying than that), I finished my week with 29 hours of teaching. It felt more than that – there was a lot of biking to lessons this week, and maybe that tired me out. I didn’t put an end to my lessons with that slightly weird woman after all. She told me yesterday that she’d kept pages of notes in pencil about me (what?!) and in particular she wanted to know what was going with my face. She asked me if I was a drug addict. What a question. (I’ve had flaking skin on my face for the last three weeks or so. How being a drug addict would cause that I don’t know.) After yesterday’s session I figured she was strange but ultimately (hopefully) harmless.

On Thursday I had my second lesson with the English teacher. She was marginally better this time, but now says she’d like to do two sets of exams, IELTS and Cambridge, both in the spring. She asked me how long it would take to get her up to her desired C1 level. I was honest – I said nine months at a push. This week I had – yet again – somebody who said her dream destination was Dubai. Women seem to really home in on that furnace of flagrant fakeness. I just don’t get it. For me, it would be way down at the bottom of any list that didn’t include war zones.

A popular discussion topic with my older and younger students is something I’ve called What If?, where they have to imagine what they’d do in certain situations. One of these hypothetical scenarios is where they find a package containing a large sum of cash. A majority tell me, unashamedly, that they’d take it. One of them even said, “well, I’d buy a car,” never considering an alternative to taking the money. There’s been a story in recent days of mystery bundles of £2000 turning up at random in a small town in north-eastern England, which was discussed on local radio today. The host was amazed that people were really handing the money in to the police.

Duolingo. I’m beginning to see its limitations now. A lot of intricate grammatical concepts are introduced too early, without any real explanation. In contrast, many very important words and phrases come into play too late, if at all. The Romanian course has fewer resources put into it than more popular languages do, and I don’t think the English sentences have ever been sense-checked. Some of them are worse than bizarre, they’re just meaningless non-English. At the higher levels the sentences often comprise ten or more words, and can be translated in many ways, but only some of the possible answers are marked as correct, so you’re forced to play a frustrating guessing game. The Italian course is better than the Romanian one. I’ll continue with both languages for now; the Romanian exercises have already been useful for drilling pronouns that I struggle so much with.

One of the best resources for learning Romanian I have at my disposal right now is the local radio station, Radio Timișoara. My favourite programme, when I get the chance to listen to it, is between six and seven on weekday evenings, where they play lots of older pop and rock music. This morning I listened to the sport show, even though I hardly follow sport these days. There were slightly amusing regular updates from Timișoara Saracens’ rugby match in Constanța, which the Saracens won 111-0. I heard the surname of their kicker (who must have got lots of practice in today’s match) is Samoa. The Saracens are perhaps the best team in the country, and they often make the European competition, but they’re no match for British and French teams.

Tomorrow is election day in Romania: the second of two rounds which will determine the president for the next five years. Klaus Iohannis is the incumbent, and he is facing off against Viorica Dăncilă, who was prime minister until the government fell last month. My students have quite strong opinions about Dăncilă. They aren’t flattering. They think she’s stupid and she’d be a disaster for Romania if she became president. From what I’ve seen of her, I can hardly disagree. But she came second in the first round, mopping up votes in rural parts of the country where people have lower levels of education on average.

Dad’s stunning sales in Geraldine have given him a shot in the arm. It’s great to see him (and Mum) so positive. Thinking he’s found the winning formula, he’ll be churning out rhododendron paintings like nobody’s business.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

It’s only just begun

November 20, 2019 by 0 Comments

This morning I picked up some ink cartridges that I’d had to order, and the man who served me said, “Sărbători fericite” meaning “Happy holidays”. A few minutes later I was in Carrefour, where Slade’s famous Christmas song was blaring out. This evening I was sitting at my desk next to the window when two people, just about close enough to touch, were up a crane fixing the festive lights to the lamp-posts. There had been little sign of Christmas until it all hit me today. Ten days from now, the market sheds will be going up, and with the waft of chimney cakes and mulled wine soon after, it’ll really feel like the festive season, particularly if daytime temperatures do eventually fall from the balmy mid-teens.

I had a new student yesterday. She actually teaches English to groups of beginner adults, but if I’m being brutally honest, her knowledge isn’t quite what it needs to be. I’d put her no higher than a 6 on my 0-to-10 scale. She told me, “I have teached English for three years.” Oh yes. She then got confused between “taught” and “thought”. She didn’t know the word “narrow”. As it turned out, we had a very productive lesson, covering acres of notepaper in our 90 minutes, on all kinds of matters to do with vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, and I hope I can get her up to speed. I’ll be seeing her again on Thursday. The crazy thing though is that she wants to improve her English to help her get out of her English teaching job! She also plans to take the IELTS exam in March, which is pretty soon. Tomorrow I’ll have my last lesson with the woman who sent me that strange text.

Dad has had a successful local exhibition, selling a number of high-value paintings. Spring and the run-up to Christmas make it an opportune time to hold a show. There are quite a few people in the area who have sold family farms for colossal amounts of money, and I think that money was burning a hole in their pockets. My latest conversation with Dad was all very upbeat until we discussed my predicament in Wellington. My body corporate’s self-imposed deadline for me to sign the sale agreement is Friday. That ain’t gonna happen.

A new mural on an abandoned factory by the Bega
Life :) - New Zealand

Saying no

November 18, 2019 by 0 Comments

Six cancellations last week – pretty frustrating, but withstandable: I still racked up a reasonable 26 hours of teaching. I might soon be needing some new students, however. On Friday I got long, and bizarre, text from the woman I played tennis with last month. She seems to like me. “This is a delicate situation. We’ll talk about it when you’re ready.” I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready. But I am ready to stop having lessons with her, a married woman in her early forties whose twelve-year-old son I also teach. I think I’ll have to pull the plug on the lessons with the boy too, and that’s certainly a shame because we’ve been making good progress. Despite the money, it isn’t worth the risk. Her husband seems quite an aggressive man, and things could get ugly for me if I carry on. On Wednesday I’ll see her for one last time, explain the situation as nicely as I can, and that (I hope) will be that.

Committee members of my body corporate in Wellington are badgering me to sign the collective agreement to sell our apartment block. They’ve imposed a deadline of this Friday. I simply don’t want to sign. Maybe I’m just stupid, but none of the arguments I’ve seen so far convince me that now is a good time to sell the only property I’m ever likely to own, while I’m receiving over NZ$2000 a month (net) in rent. (If I ever do buy another place to live, it’ll almost certainly be in Romania. In either of the other two countries I have connections with, property will be far beyond me.) I had a Skype chat with one of the owners (she’s lived there since 1997) and she’s not keen on selling either. If she sells and I’m the only hold-out, perhaps I’ll be forced to.

My sister-in-law recently invited me to have Christmas at her parents’. That was a nice gesture, but it’s a non-starter. Getting down there would be an enormous hassle at any time of year, let alone over the festive season. Dad asked my aunt whether she’d be interested in having me over, but she apparently she’s going through one of her “black dog” periods and doesn’t want to see anybody. So it looks like I’ll be on my own. I’m sure I’ll manage.

Language teaching - Life :)

Isolation (again)

November 11, 2019 by 0 Comments

It’s year four in Romania for me. Some things change. Most don’t. One thing that hasn’t is my success in meeting new people. (Well, actually, I had more luck when I arrived than I do now.) There are three reasons why it’s a struggle. First, it’s really tough to break into a society where everyone has their obligations and close-knit groups, even in a city where people are as open-minded as perhaps anywhere else in the country. Second, my schedule is hopeless for meeting people. So much of my work is in evenings and weekends. Third, and perhaps the biggest problem of all, as that I’m quite happy being on my own most of the time I’m not working (and I never have the urge to interact with dozens of people all at once). I simply don’t need much human contact (but I need a bit!). I don’t know what the answer is. If I found any of this stuff easy, I doubt I’d be in Romania in the first place.

As I’ve said before, this job (or the way I choose to do it, at least) involves printing, cutting and sticking, sometimes on a near-industrial scale, as well as thinking about exactly what to print, cut and stick. One example of this is Taboo, a game you can buy, where you have to describe a word to somebody without mentioning any of the other words on the card. My handmade version of Taboo has been a success, and it works especially well with my pairs of students. I’d made ten sets of 36 cards, at various levels of difficulty, but I’m in the process of making another four sets. In total, that’ll be 504 cards.

Last Thursday I had another difficult lesson with the pair of young women, one of whom cried in the previous session. The other woman (not the one who cried) was so vacant throughout most of the lesson that I wondered why I was even bothering. She’s 27, but she was like a 14-year-old sitting in the back of a maths class, waiting for it to be over. She’d checked out. Are you bored? Tired? Would you rather we did something else? I did tell her that if she doesn’t participate, there’s really no point. Other than that (and the cancellations), I had some quite productive lessons.

A week ago a pair of 50-foot masts appeared in front of the cathedral, and last night two huge flags were hoisted on them: a flag of Romania and another showing Timișoara’s coat of arms. I wish they could have spent the money on a ramp for the poor man with no legs who has to crawl up the steps (and the numerous others with mobility problems) instead of pointless frippery.

I spoke to Dad yesterday. Mum was in Alexandra, on her annual golf trip. Unfortunately we only spoke for ten minutes because I had a lesson to get to. Somehow we got onto the subject of sanitation and wooden water pipes. After that, he sent me an email saying he’d been quoted several thousand dollars to get the engine on his MG repaired, and he wasn’t looking forward to telling Mum.

I pay virtually no attention to memes. I almost never use social media. But in the last ten days I’ve been hearing a lot about “OK, boomer”, a phrase used by young people who are fed up with the attitudes of baby boomers. Last week a New Zealand Green MP in her mid-twenties used the phrase in parliament. This inter-generational conflict is all a bit silly, really. We’re all products of the world we’re born into, which we have no say in. It does annoy me, therefore, when wealthy older people deny the role that luck has played in getting them to where they have, and instead (ridiculously) talk of overcoming adversity. We had 15% mortgage interest rates! Well, big deal. You also had annual salary increases of almost that. Sure, it was a struggle to pay off the mortgage in 1980, but by 1995 you were laughing. Of course, I’m not that young myself anymore, and things have got even harder since I went to university and entered the workforce. Degrees have become vastly more expensive, and less valuable, in the last two decades. Would I have even gone to university in today’s environment?

These generational differences crop up in conversation in lessons. Many of my students are surprised to learn that in the Anglosphere it’s often older people who have the money.

Books - Family - Life :) - Romania

Three years on, it’s still a great feeling

November 5, 2019 by 0 Comments

It’s a beautiful Tuesday morning here in Timișoara. Earlier I went to Piața Badea Cârțan where I had a coffee and bought some vegetables. Three years on, being amongst the fresh produce on a sunny morning, and watching the world go by, is still a wonderful feeling. As I sat on a bench near the market, I had a view of a brick wall I hadn’t noticed before. I couldn’t read what remains of the writing on it, but it looks like the letter to the right of the emblem is a W. So it’s probably more than a century old, dating from when Romania was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Back then, Timișoara was trilingual (Romanian, Hungarian and German), and German is the only one of those languages to use the letter W.

The writing on the wall

Yesterday’s weather was grim in comparison to today’s. My parents had ordered a book for me ages ago: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I think it will be a very good read, when I get around to it. But getting it in the first place wasn’t easy. It had come from Australia, via who knows where. Last Wednesday I finally got a note in my letterbox telling me that it was ready to be picked up. The next day I went to the main post office, where parcels normally go to, but I was told I needed to pick this item up from a different office, next to the railway station. On Friday afternoon I went there, only to find it closed at 1pm on Fridays and I was too late. Yesterday I went back – I got there ten minutes after it opened at 9:30. I went up to the first floor (where there was a poster telling me about the “new” notes and coins that came out in 2005) but was told I needed the customs office on the second. I spent the next half-hour in a forbidding waiting area, in which time six or seven other people collected their parcels before it was my turn. The room is what Romania must have been like under Communism. Everything was painted beige and brown, seemingly in about five minutes total. Aggressive-looking, bizarrely-printed signs adorned the walls. On the floor were some old scales, made in Sibiu in 1975, which had all the number fours printed in a typically Romanian way. I imagine they still work fine. The loud bang of metal doors closing in other parts of the building reverberated. I thought, I would not like to end up in prison in this country. When it was my turn, I entered another room, I handed over my passport, a man opened the package with a knife, decided there was no contraband inside, and I was free to go with my book.

When I got home I called my parents to tell me the book had arrived. We then moved on to the subject of Duolingo. I mentioned to Mum that I’d given 28 hours of English lessons in the past week, and she’d spent about as long on that site. I said it was an inefficient use of her time if her goal is to actually learn French, and she’d be better off doing 10 hours of Duolingo and 10 hours reading news articles, or something along those lines. Even the occasional conversation with me, perhaps. Suffice to say, this suggestion didn’t go down well. She wouldn’t speak to me. (That’s the way she’s always handled anything I say that she doesn’t want to hear. Even on a subject as unimportant as this.) I was just trying to help her. I honestly think it’s great that she’s trying to learn a language, and if she could get to the stage where she could go to France and communicate with people there, that would be fantastic. But I do have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t (it’s kind of, you know, my job).

After our chat, I bought a few bits and pieces from the supermarket, and on the way I popped into the second-hand clothes shop. Every six weeks or so, on a Monday, they have a new collection of stuff. I picked up a bronze-coloured leather jacket, made in Palma de Mallorca, for 70 lei (£13, or NZ$26). Yeah, I like this. It’s had some use, but not much. I thought it was pretty damn good value. It’s worth rummaging around in there sometimes. Beats going to the mall.

Although winter is around the corner, the markets are still full of tasty produce. Right now there are mountains and mountains of cabbages. Sometimes I buy a ready-pickled cabbage and try to make sarmale.

Two cancellations yesterday. I try not to let that kind of thing frustrate me too much.