Life :)

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Another terrific Tuesday

February 14, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

On the weird off-chance that anybody from Romania actually read my last post, I didn’t mean to have a go at your country, which I absolutely love. It’s more that I really want Romania to succeed, and an upswing in tourism (return tourists, in particular) would go some way to making that happen. The present standard of service frustrates me because most Romanians I’ve met outside the customer-facing world have been extremely welcoming.

Talking of frustration, the family who live in Moșnița Nouă cancelled both their lessons yesterday afternoon, less than an hour before we were due to start, depriving me of 160 lei. Their daughter “wasn’t in the mood”. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood either. I’ll have a chat with them if and when I see them next to let them know what my ground rules are. If they don’t like them, they can find another native English speaker in Timișoara to teach them. Good luck with that.

Today I had an early start with my beginner-level student. The clock ticked well past our 7:30 start time, and then finally the doorbell went. Phew. Waiting for that bell to go is the most stressful part of my job. I speak a fair bit of Romanian in my lessons with him. This morning we talked about our ancestors and where they came from. He was amazed to learn that it was summer in New Zealand and that people ski there, but not now. My next lesson was at noon: my 21-year-old female student has come on a lot. She knows how to learn, and that makes all the difference.

Next was the lolly-stick company. Last Thursday I gave two of my students a test, as required by the training company I work for. They both only managed percentage scores in the forties, and today I had to hand back their papers. I tried to reassure them that their results really didn’t mean that much (they’re more a reflection on me than on them). I even suggested that as a team they got an awesome score, but I’m not sure how that went down. The third student took his test today and I’ve yet to mark that. From the company I trekked more than a mile, including that muddy, rubbish-strewn track; every time I squelch my way through there I can see it’s been updated with more household junk from people who don’t give a toss. I arrived at Matei’s place just after five. In his room he now has a tank with two freshwater turtles; watching them eat was strangely fascinating. Every week he has something new. Last time it was a Google assistant. As usual, we didn’t do an awful lot of intense English. We read two chapters of David Walliams’ Billionaire Boy. I have the book in English; he just happens to have the same book in Romanian. For the first chapter, I read a chunk (a half-page or so) out loud in English and he read the same chunk in Romanian, and we took turns until we reached the end of the chapter. For the second chapter we swapped roles. Matei suggested a modification to the rules of my Space Race game – some sort of bonus if you get all three of your spaceships in a row – and it’s certainly worth considering. At the start of my lesson with Matei I got a phone call from a prospective student and I’ve booked her in for Friday morning.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

“Customer service” doesn’t translate into Romanian

February 12, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got no real news, probably because work tends to get in the way of news. My most memorable lesson last week was one in which I complained about how Romanian banks (locally-owned or not) charge for everything: incoming payments, cash withdrawals, or even having just an account in the first place. Their commissions often run into several percent of the value of whatever payment you’re making or receiving, and many people must surely avoid the banking system entirely as a result (as I manage to do most of the time, because I usually get paid in cash). I expected my students to say, yes it’s bloody ridiculous, banks are just parasites that make far too much money, but instead they thought all the fees were completely justified. There’s a wider point here: by and large customer service in Romania is shit. Romanians are extremely used to it being shit, to the point where they don’t expect anything else but shit, so there’s very little incentive for anybody to provide service that’s non-shit. Except of course, when dealing with tourists. In her scrapbook, my friend described the “ice maiden” she encountered at the tourist office here in Timișoara; she might have been the same lady I dealt with on my arrival, who managed to be very aggressive and defensive at the same time when all I wanted to know was how the tram tickets worked. People’s customer service experiences in a new country have a huge bearing on how they view that country; Romanians don’t seem to have figured that out at all yet. (

I’ve got five lessons scheduled for each of the next three days.

 

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A potential problem I never expected to have

February 5, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I taught for almost 32 hours last week, my busiest week to date. It wasn’t easy as I battled sinus problems, diarrhoea, and general feelings of lethargy. At the last minute, my students asked me to postpone this morning’s lesson, so I hopped on the number 7 tram and browsed the bustling Flavia market, but didn’t buy anything. I went there several times during my first winter in the city; at that time there was an entrance fee of 2 lei, but that’s since been bumped up to 5. I also went to Shopping City, as much as I dislike malls, and at the checkout in Carrefour was an old student of mine whom I failed to recognise initially. We had our rearranged lesson this afternoon.

I’m very likely to beat last week’s record in the coming seven days, and may even smash it, but I’ve got to be a bit careful here. As nice as it is to have heaps of business, if it becomes stressful over a prolonged period then the purpose of my coming here in the first place is mostly defeated. I won’t be able to enjoy the city because I’ll either be stuck at home or rushing to get to my next lesson, probably in Dumbrăvița. I’ll certainly need to take some time off every now and then (at least I’ll be able to afford to), and on that note I’ve booked a few days in the UK over Easter. Not Easter as I know it, but Orthodox Easter which is the following weekend.

The face of Timișoara, or at least some of it, is changing quite rapidly. A monstrous 1200-apartment complex, complete with three schools, is going up at a rate of knots on Bulevardul Take Ionescu. A nasty triangular corporate behemoth with M-shaped sides sprung up last year outside Iulius Mall. And on a smaller scale, premises that don’t seem to belong are popping up all the time. “Go Nuts 4 Donuts” operates from a twee pink caravan, and looks totally out of place next to all the refreshingly untwee kiosks and stalls of Piața 700. A few days ago a shop selling Scandinavian clothing brands, but whose products have almost certainly been nowhere near Copenhagen, opened just 100 metres from me. Before long shops like that will probably be the norm.

No, Simona didn’t win. I only saw the tail end of the second set, where she was in the ascendancy. What a titanic battle it must have been. I saw rather more of the men’s match, which never really scaled the heights despite going five sets. Cilic played very well, especially on the important points, and I thought at the start of the the final set that there was every chance he could pull off the upset that I was hoping for. Alas, the protracted games at the start of the decider all went Fed’s way, and that was pretty much that.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Inevitable

January 6, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It was going to happen eventually, wasn’t it? The last few days I’ve been feeling a bit down. Not depressed as such, but just this general bleeugh feeling. I’m sure I’d be fine now if I’d managed to get away for a day or two and spend several hours reading a book on a train, but my illness put paid to that. Last year Timișoara was all new and fun and mad and exciting; it hasn’t stopped being all kinds of awesome, but it’s still a biggish city that I need to get away from every once in a while to break up the routine. I was thinking that if I’d gone to the UK and endured what would surely have been an absolutely awful Christmas and New Year, I’d probably be fine now too. This morning there was a tell-tale sign that things weren’t right: I had no recollection of having made myself a cup of tea two minutes earlier. That’s how life used to be week in, week out, doing things like grocery shopping and, um, trying to hold down a job, with a similar memory span to a fairly retentive goldfish. The good news is that I’ll soon have a lot more lessons again, and so far there has been a very strong positive correlation between how much work I have and how I feel.

The couple who bought me that hamper won’t be having any lessons until 2nd February. That’s a bugger. But I do now have some new students. A brother and sister (he’s 10, she’s 13) will have their first lessons with me on Monday. They live in Dumbrăvița, five doors down from the ten-year-old boy I started with in October. I’ve also got a new bloke starting on Thursday. Yesterday I had a call from a woman who I really struggled to understand. She talked so quickly and at such a high pitch that she reminded me of when I was a kid and I’d mess around with Dad’s record player, putting one of his 33s or 45s on 78. She seemed to think I knew what she was saying, but I could hardly understand a bloody thing. Cât costă? How much is it? Phew, a question I understand. On that note, I’ve had no choice but to put my prices up. In my first few months here it felt like an inflation-free zone, but in the last six to nine months everything has gone up. The leu has weakened somewhat against the euro, and oil prices have shot up. Just around the corner is a kiosk where they sell shawormas (I’ve seen about five different spellings for shaworma, which is a bit like a kebab). For the last few months I’ve been waiting for them to increase their price of a large shaworma from 11 lei, and finally on Wednesday I saw they’d put them up to 12.

Today is Epiphany, or as they call it here, Boboteaza, which to me is a funny word. Right now there’s a snaking queue of at least 100 people around the cathedral, waiting to get their hands on water that is supposedly even holier than bog-standard holy water. Tomorrow is St John the Baptist’s day, which probably a million Romanians called Ion or Ioan or Ionuț or Ioana will celebrate. People here often celebrate both their birthday and their saint’s day, if they have one. Slightly confusingly, the expression “La Mulți Ani” is used on someone’s birthday, their saint’s day, and for New Year. Just like last year, although this time I was in the middle of a lesson, the local priest and his accomplice dropped in and blessed me and this flat. I gave him 8 lei, up from 6 last year.

My watch strap is broken, and because it’s a Swatch I can’t replace it anywhere in Timișoara. Believe me, I’ve tried. Even the shop that sells Swatches couldn’t do it. When I leave the house without a watch I feel just about naked. I know my phone shows the time in quite large digits, but it doesn’t compare. Yesterday I tried to find a cheap watch to use as a stand-in until I get the Swatch strap replaced, with no luck.

The weather is incredible for this time of year. Our expected high today is 13. And I feel a bit better now.

Life :) - Scrabble

Happy New Year!

January 2, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night’s New Year celebrations seemed even more chaotic than last year’s. Probably 50,000 to 100,000 people (but how do you count them?) crowded the city centre, many of them cracking open bottles of bubbly as the clock struck twelve. Some people set off fireworks randomly, both before and after the main ones. Mum asked me if I was going to stay up for it. Well, if you live where I do, going to bed before 1am isn’t a serious option. You certainly won’t sleep.

When I was younger I disliked New Year’s Eve because of all the clubbing and partying you were expected to do; more recently I’ve disliked it because it’s a reminder of the passing of time. Shit, it’s twenty-what now, and what have I done with my life?! Nothing! At least this time around I actually had done something in the previous twelve months, but I still felt a bit sad not to be seeing in the new year with somebody.

Earlier today I called my brother to wish him a happy new year. In under five months, touch wood, he’ll be married. His fiancée turns 35 (I think) in April, so I doubt they’ll hang around with the whole family thing. It’s very likely that Mum will become a grandmother a few months either side of her 70th birthday.

As for me, I had a good end to 2017 work-wise. I checked my records, and my half-way point in terms of hours was the middle of September (I got as much work after mid-September as I did prior to that date). I hope the early part of 2018 brings me as much joy. There’s also a whole bunch of stuff outside work I’d like to work on, but I don’t yet know where or how to start.

After feeling like utter crap for a week and a half, I’ve now just got a normal cold. As much as I like Timișoara, I had planned to get away for a day or two, but my illness put the kibosh on that. I shouldn’t complain too much; I was lucky that it happened during my downtime.

I’m still Scrabbling. Yesterday I played four games, recovering from a pair of losses to win my last two. In the final game I smashed my record, winning 540-326 thanks to three bingos: WAsHIER, LAUNCHES and COTERIEs. Yes, I drew both blanks along with most of the other good stuff. The aggregate score of 866 in that game is just two points off the highest of any game I’ve played in; that came in a 389-479 loss in which my opponent slapped down three bingos. I’ve played just one game today, an 83-point win that took my rating into four figures once more, at 1001. I’ve now installed Quackle, an extremely useful tool that, among other things, lets you review previous games.

Life :)

Haz-nots

December 30, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

In my last post I said my cold was getting better but it was a false dawn. I’ve had a rough time the last eight days, with all the symptoms of bronchitis: wheezing and hacking up thick dayglo yellowish-green slime; lack of energy; a mild fever. I haven’t been in the mood to do much apart from read and play the occasional game of Scrabble online. I was very glad that I could let Christmas be a non-event. Today, after a welcome 8½ hours’ sleep last night, I might actually be on the mend.

My parents didn’t have the best of Christmases either. Dad had a bad headache on Christmas Day which they celebrated at their place in Moeraki. Not that celebrate is the right word. It was largely wrecked by my 45-year-old cousin, the elder sister of the cousin I stayed with in upstate New York in 2015. She doesn’t have kids but she’s done well both in her career and in the property market. And she’s a self-obsessed arsehole who blames her mother – a very intelligent, practical and down-to-earth woman who I have a lot of time for – for just about everything. Which she did at my parents’ place. My aunt was in tears, and I think my uncle (76, and the only one of Mum’s three older brothers who is still alive) was speechless.

From my Romanian book I learnt a new word (or rather I relearnt it after forgetting it): haz, meaning fun, joy, merriment. I said to Dad that none of us had an awful lot of haz over Christmas. Dad said, so we were the haz-nots. Very good.

Life :) - Scrabble

Sorted for Christmas

December 24, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

A quickish update from me, on a beautiful cloudless Christmas Eve in Timișoara. It’s good to see the sun again after four or five cold, grey and foggy days. I heard that it reached an utterly ridiculous 29 degrees in Wellington on Friday.

I’ve been very lucky not to lose out on lessons due to illness all year, but right now I’ve got a nasty cold. I’m hacking up green and yellow gunk. Living on my own has numerous advantages for me, but when I get sick I kind of think, yeah, I wouldn’t mind having just a little human contact. So I pressed ahead with my lessons on Friday and yesterday – just one each day, thankfully, and I didn’t have to leave the house on either occasion. Had I been in any of my old office jobs, I wouldn’t have thought twice about taking a sick day. I am slowly improving: on Friday I felt so weak that I struggled to put one foot in front of the other.

It’s been great to see all the Romanian Christmas traditions from the vantage point of my apartment and the square (I moved in a few days too late to see last year’s festivities), and it would be rather nice to actually involve myself in them one time, but it’s hard to make that happen without a family connection. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a girlfriend in 2018. I can but dream.

Yesterday’s students, who will be moving to Austria next month but still hope to keep up their English lessons via Skype, bought me some beautifully presented chocolatey bits and pieces, along with a book: 27 de Pași (27 Feet), the autobiography of a Romanian ultra-marathon runner who had a rather colourful life before that. So with a Romanian book, some Scrabble, and all the sugary food I now have, I should be sorted for Christmas. I also have plenty of alcohol, but with the way I am right now, I’ll leave that alone.

After a bit of a break I played seven games of Scrabble yesterday, losing five, even though I outscored my opponents by 50 points overall and slapped down twelve bingos to their seven. My only wins came against players rated significantly lower than me, so my rating took a bit of a hit. In golf parlance, my long game is fine but my short game could do with some work.

I called my brother on Friday night, even though (or maybe because) I felt like crap. He wanted to talk about the wedding. He still resents his aunt and uncle, who have had zero contact with him in the last twenty years, inviting themselves, and I don’t blame him one bit for feeling that way. He’ll be spending Christmas with his fiancée’s family.

Life :) - Romania - Scrabble

Condemned

December 11, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Towards the end of last week, our body corporate sent out the latest estimate for strengthening our apartment building. The figures were eye-watering: $10 million to strengthen to 100% of new building standard; $8 million for 67%. And that’s just the bit that I live in. The other section, which abuts our building but is separate for seismic purposes, has recently been reassessed as even less earthquake-safe than ours, close to red-sticker territory. So strengthening is no longer a serious option. At the weekend the body corp had a brainstorming session to figure out what to do next, and I’ll expect we’ll probably sit it out now until 2028, when the complex is due to be demolished if it isn’t up to scratch by then. The amazing thing to me is how accepting everybody has been of their fate. (During the eighties, when the English-speaking countries changed from societies into dog-eat-dog economies, everyone became more submissive; there has been some backlash in recent years but it’s been weak and misdirected.) To avoid a repeat of the CTV building collapse, which this policy will fail to do anyway, they’re financially crippling thousands of people. If you’re reading this blog, you might think it’s perfectly fair for apartment owners to foot the bill – however much – to make their homes safe, and if they haven’t got the money, tough. They made a bad investment, right, just like the person who bought shares in a company that goes belly-up, or the guy who went to Las Vegas and put his life savings on red. But that’s eighties thinking again: your home is no longer primarily a place to live but is instead a financial instrument to be bought and sold like any other. As affected Wellington apartment owners, we should be getting together as a group and lobbying the government to end this insanity. This is the capital city after all, and there’s a new (more compassionate?) government in charge now.

It’s hard not to feel somewhat bitter about all of this. My cousin, for instance, makes bucketloads of money by helping make parasitic American drug companies truckloads of money. She works exceptionally hard, is driven beyond what I or most people will ever be, and is extremely well qualified. All of that deserves to be rewarded, and I get on very well with her, but the fact remains that her work is of questionable benefit to actual human beings. And her million-dollar house isn’t affected by the earthquake policy at all, because it’s a house, not an apartment. Just imagine the furore if people’s $2 million mansions in Eastbourne (many of which would be matchsticks in the event of a magnitude-8 quake) suddenly came under the scope of the policy and were effectively condemned overnight!

The apartment business might have had a silver lining though. Perhaps it gave me the impetus to say “sod this”, where I might have otherwise muddled along in a string of jobs, inevitably in disorienting (for me) team environments where the only good outcome would have been to avoid bad ones. If I’d carried on in that vein, then in the words of Bob Marley, one day the bottom would have dropped out, probably with disastrous consequences. Instead I’ve completely changed my life and to write that still feels bloody amazing.

I had 21½ hours of teaching last week. I was chuffed with that after all the cancellations I had in the early part of the week. Unfortunately this week it’s déjà vu: two cancellations already and it’s still Monday morning.

Last week King Michael, Romania’s last monarch, died at the grand age of 96. He became king before his sixth birthday, but was forced to abdicate in 1947 with the advent of communism. Today Romania is a very divided country – we had anti-government protests here last night – but the death of the king seems to have united the country temporarily and might help the current government to survive.

I’ve started getting frustrated with Words With Friends. I live in an awkward time zone for all the Americans who populate the app, so many of my games progress very slowly or sometimes fizzle out completely. Also I recently had to download Words With Friends 2, a more gimmicky version of the app that veers into Candy Crush territory, and I hate it. I’ll still play my cousin from time to time because I like to keep in touch with her, but apart from that it’s a waste of time. So instead I’ve started playing real Scrabble, with a clock, on the Internet Scrabble Club (isc.ro), a site that was set up by a Romanian in the nineties and visually has never been updated since then. But the server is actually very robust, and it attracts some of the best players in the world. It’s altogether a more high-octane experience than Words With Friends. I’ve so far played seven games, winning five. My very first move of my very first game was BUM, which turned out to be possibly my best move of the whole game, a 70-point loss for me. My other loss (by just 18 points, 396 to 414) was a fantastic high-scoring game. I had quite a dramatic game yesterday where I struggled with the tight 14-minute clock, and incurred a ten-point penalty for running over time, but was able to play out for a 36-point win before forfeiting the game altogether (which is what happens if you go over time by a minute).

The cancellations mean my only lessons today are this evening, from 6 till 7:30 and from 8 till 9:30. Unless they get cancelled too.

Language teaching - Life :)

Space Race

December 7, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m having a slightly frustrating week thanks to all the cancellations I’m getting, but if I’m lucky I’ll still hit the 20-hour mark. These days I seem to have temporary frustrations, and isn’t that great? At the sprightly hour of 7:30 this morning I had a lesson with a beginner who intends to move to Edmonton in Canada next year. It’s a pleasure to work with him, but it’s always interesting getting him to read. What comes out of his mouth is at times independent of what’s on the page. It reminds me of Mum trying to teach my brother to read, or this bit from the Royal Variety Performance a couple of years ago (fast forward to 4:24, or alternatively watch it all – it’s pretty funny).

Last week Octavian, my ten-year-old student, told me that as much as he loved Crazy Rabbits (the board game I made), he’d quite like to play something else next time. That meant I had to make another, probably more complex, game (or buy one, but that would be more expensive and less fun). I had to make something that would stand the test of time. I thought of making a space-themed game, and found a fun-looking spacey board online which was supposed to have 100 spaces but only had 94. It was also watermarked, meaning I’d need to pay a subscription (no thanks) to download the unadulterated version. I painstakingly removed the watermark as best I could using a slightly better (and free) version of Paint, and squeezed in an extra six spaces in such a way that you wouldn’t notice. I numbered the spaces in fives – each space represented five light years – and then I had to figure out the mechanics of the game. The goal, I decided, was to be the first to drive all three of your spaceships the 500 light years from start to finish. The skill, such that it exists, is in choosing which ship to move on which turn – you have to decide before you roll the dice. Some spaces give you extra turns or get you to draw cards that make good or bad things happen to either you or your opponent. I tested the game on Tuesday with Matei – it was my 51st lesson with him, so the risk that he wouldn’t want to see me again if he hated the game didn’t seem too great. He liked it but found some of the rules a bit counterintuitive (move 25 light years – five spaces – if you roll a four, for instance) and wished we used two dice instead of one. So I added a second die and simplified the rules quite a bit, and played it with Octavian yesterday. Space Race. He seemed to be a fan.

Something has been puzzling me. I followed one of the Cambridge textbooks with my Skype student (ex-student, thankfully), and one section was on travel. It gave a list of the “fifty places you must visit before you die”, of which my parents live in number four, and asked the student to pick his or her must-see places from the list. To my surprise, my ex-student put Dubai at number one. Last week I reached the same section of the book with another student, and once again Dubai was top of her list. Seriously, what is the fuck is going on here? The probability that they’d both choose Dubai at random is 0.04%. All-out nuclear war in the coming year is far more likely than that. I can understand why you might want to work in Dubai for a limited time (to make loads of dirhams), but not everyone goes to Dubai for work, or to visit friends and family who are working there, or even as a stopover to break up the journey between two places that actually have human rights. No, significant numbers of people go to Dubai to go to Dubai, to lurch from one soulless air-conditioned shopping mall to another, and then come home. How bizarre. I mean, I know bits of Timișoara are a bit shit, but at least they’re real shit.

The Christmas market is in full swing, and the pungent but pleasant whiff of mulled wine fills the air. Last night some young women in traditional Romanian dress were singing what I imagine were traditional Romanian Christmas carols.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

La mulți ani, România!

December 1, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been absolutely bloody hopeless with this blog thing, and for that I apologise. Last week was another busy one for me: 29 hours of teaching, and that was without any at the lollipop-stick-making company. This week I’m looking at 24 or so.

Right now we’re in a middle of a four-day long weekend. Yesterday was St Andrew’s Day; today is Romania’s national day, the 99th anniversary of Romania in its current format. Before the downfall of communism, the national day was celebrated in August instead, for some reason unknown to me because my knowledge of Romanian history is shamefully crap. The parade of military vehicles will start at eleven so I’ll pop down for that. Last year my feet were like ice blocks after standing around in zero degrees, so I might put on an extra pair of socks. Tonight there will be a firework display in the square. I asked one of my students what might be in store for next year’s centenary, and he said possibly an extra tank, and maybe they’ll add a screamer or two to their pyrotechnic arsenal. He said the parades of aging vehicles, which should be in museums, demonstrate what a joke Romania’s military is. I said, yeah, sounds a bit like New Zealand. Some people will be going to Alba Iulia for the day. I visited that city in August. In the middle of the citadel is where the declaration of unity (or whatever they call it) was signed in 1918, so it’s effectively Romania’s Waitangi. Today there will also be protests, timed for maximum visibility.

The Christmas market has just started in the main square, and will run until about 10th January. There will also be two smaller markets in the other squares that weren’t a feature last time around. It’s slightly weird that I’m now talking about last year. Everything is coming around for a second time – how did that happen?

The weekend before last, one of my students took me to the winery in Recaș, and we filled bottles of wine straight from the tap. She filled five-litre bottles. I can’t possibly drink those sorts of volumes by myself (although when I lived in France I did just that), so I just filled three two-litre bottles – two reds and a white – at between 13 and 15 lei a bottle, which is extremely cheap. When I showed the bottles to my brother last weekend on FaceTime, he thought they were hilarious. “Are you sure that one isn’t piss?” But I’ve almost finished the dry red which has been the best wine I’ve had since I arrived here.

I still play Scrabble, or more accurately Words With Friends, on my phone. I’m now leading my cousin by 52 games to 24, with one draw. Against a complete stranger I just played EQUALiZE across two double word squares for 143, my highest-ever score on one turn. I do find Scrabble fascinating from a tactical perspective, and I’m thinking I should take the plunge and actually attempt to play it seriously, which of course means learning those god-awful words.