Life :)

A bad week on the teaching front was capped off by my trip to Strada Timiș yesterday. The 17-year-old girl was there but her little brother was elsewhere, and their mother hadn’t bothered to tell me. I helped my one student with her homework on bird and animal idioms (such as “to watch somebody like a hawk” and “the straw that broke the camel’s back”) and phrasal verbs. She had several sheets to get through, which consisted almost entirely of matching exercises. At times I gave her clues as to what the answer might be, but I could tell she was thinking, Just give me the bloody answer, would you? The more sheets we got through in 90 minutes, the fewer she’d have to do by herself. We get on well and our sessions are productive, but once again we were interrupted by regular dings and beeps from her phone. I told her she was obviously very popular. She said that those messages came from five social networks. She also made it clear that Instagram, not Facebook, is king among people born around the turn of the century. Of course Facebook own Instagram. They also own WhatsApp. At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if either Facebook or Google buy out Coca-Cola or Boeing.

S. Yes. She’s 33, five years younger than me. She works for a large multinational and is currently in the middle of a two-week business trip in Prague. She doesn’t eat meat. Last weekend I asked her how on earth she survives in mici-fuelled Timișoara as a vegetarian, but she assured me it isn’t actually that hard. Her English is almost entirely flawless; she’s developed an Irish-like accent with an appealing lilt. (In some ways her fantastic English is a pain. I want to improve my Romanian.) She isn’t sporty in any way (either playing or watching) but is into all the cultural stuff. She’s been all over the place but was born and bred in Timișoara, which by now she’s understandably fairly blasé about. We’ve been in contact every day since she’s been away.

Only 16 hours of work last week. That won’t cut it, unfortunately. That kind of volume neither brings in enough income nor gives me that pleasant feeling I get from being productive. For the coming week I’m a bit more optimistic – I could have two new students.

It’s been a bit of a crappy week from a teaching perspective: too many cancellations. Earlier today I phoned that utterly obnoxious guy who came over last weekend, on the off-chance he might want to come back, but I got a very decisive “no”. That was probably for the best. As a teacher it’s a great feeling to see my students succeed under any normal circumstances, but I don’t wish success on this person any more than I wish success on Donald Trump. After this latest “one and done”, I delved into my (entirely manual) records of my lessons and produced some stats on how long my students stick around. One in eight give up after one lesson. Plenty more call it a day soon after that: 35% don’t make it past lesson number five. After 15 lessons we’re into coin-flip territory: 49% make it past that point. When my students have put up with me for that long, we’ve normally built up some kind of rapport, and they tend to come back. By the 30th lesson, 36% of my students still remain, and 17% even survive beyond the 50th. These are still fairly small sample sizes and it’ll be interesting to see what happens to those stats in the long term.

It’s been a beautiful autumn day here. Not a cloud in the sky. I wandered back from Piața Traian, suddenly with all the time in the world after yet another last-minute cancellation, and met a part-British, part-Romanian family who were trying to figure out how the timetable for the Bega boats worked. They all seemed lovely people.

There’s a referendum on same-sex marriage in Romania this weekend. Oh wait, there isn’t; we haven’t magically been transported to the 22nd century after all. There is, however, a referendum on changing Romania’s constitution so that the definition of marriage explicitly excludes same-sex couples, i.e. so that it reads “between a man and a woman” instead of the current “between spouses”. (When the constitution was drawn up, “between a man and a woman” would have gone without saying.) If the vote passes, any changes will be purely superficial, because Romania is unlikely to recognise single-sex relationships in the lifetime of any of its current gay citizens, no matter what’s in the constitution. There will almost certainly be a whopping great majority in favour of the amendment, but the vote also needs a 30% turnout in order to pass. That sounds extremely low, and crazy, because casting a “no” vote could allow the threshold to be met and for “yes” to win. So the people who oppose the amendment are asking people not to vote at all. Last weekend I talked to S about this, and like me, she finds it insane that same-sex couples can’t get married in this day and age. That we agree on this bodes well. I want to write more about S in my next post.

Baseball: we’re down to the final eight. The Brewers, who have been involved in some seriously exciting games, are on an incredible tear. And the Yankees made it through their wild card game and face the Red Sox in a five-game series starting tonight.

I’m looking forward to the lessons with the kids tomorrow. Sunday will be the second anniversary of my arrival in Timișoara.

I’ve got a cold, and it’s bad enough that I’d have taken sick days in my previous life, but in my current incarnation I can sort of just muddle along unless I’m really sick. In fact, work helps matters. Yesterday I had four lessons, including one on the seventh floor of an apartment block on Strada Timiș in the Dacia area of the city, with the boy of nearly nine whose big sister I recently started with. To begin with I wasn’t optimistic – he was rolling around on the sofa in the living room, saying he didn’t want to do it, exhibiting (when I think about it) the sort of behaviour you sometimes see in autistic kids. But it turned out he was a fairly standard kid who liked basketball and pizza and Fortnite and Roblox, whatever the hell those last two are. He’s close to bilingual – Romanian and German – and sometimes he’d throw me by slipping in a few German words. The first lesson is always tough because you never know what they know, or whether they might decide they just hate you, but we only had an hour and I muddled along.

On Saturday I had my second lesson with his older sister, but it was more therapy than anything educational. She talked, at some length, about the difficult three months she recently spent in a school in Vienna. Her stories reminded me of the time I spent at that school in Temuka at a much younger age. All my reading and grammar exercises swiftly went out the window, and before I knew it our 90 minutes were up. From there I walked to Mehala market to look for a bike, and found an old green single-speed German one, probably dating from the late seventies or early eighties. It seemed in good nick. Pretty cool, I thought. I bought it for 250 lei and have already found it way more fun than my mountain bike. It’s also a good deal more practical – and faster – when I just want to get around an almost flat city. It only has a front brake and that will take a little getting used to.

On Friday I met my Tinder friend (from now on I’ll just call her X) and a café on one of the side streets off Piața Libertății. It wasn’t my kind of place – it had English signs everywhere and I usually avoid those kinds of places like the plague. I bought a flat white (only those kinds of places offer that) and when I was about to put sugar in it the barista stopped me in my tracks. You need to taste it first! I was given a piece of paper showing the origin of the beans: Cajamarca in Peru, which happens to be a place that featured in a lesson early this year and would be incredible to visit. Anyway we chatted, mostly in English this time, and she invited me to a board games session on Sunday evening at the apartment of her brother and his wife.

I was kind of looking forward to the board games night, because how scary can board games be? But the answer to that is actually quite scary when you’re playing with frequent gamers who even speak a different language to me. They did speak good English, but that was more of a hindrance than a help I think. We played Ticket to Ride, which I’d played years ago in Wellington, just twice if memory serves, and the mechanics of the game had long been forgotten. I took what to them must have seemed an eternity over my moves. “Oh, it’s my turn again. How did it come round so fast?” My strategy was far from optimal. After that we played two rounds of some head-messing Monty Python-themed game, one of which I won without even realising it. X’s brother and sister-in-law lived in a new apartment block in the south of the city, and their flat gave off a whiff of sophistication. Even modern-style board games are the domain of a certain type of person; by Romanian standards they’re expensive for a start. X’s sister-in-law had a habit of dropping English words into Romanian sentences, perhaps to sound sophisticated. I found that bloody annoying, I must say. Interestingly there were a lot of homemade alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, some of which I tried, as well as hand-knitted bits and pieces dotted around the place. Next time I go there, if there is a next time, I hope I’ll be a bit more relaxed. The experience did however make me a bit nervous about ever showing X my place.

After an incredible Indian summer, autumn is well and truly here now.

Like any other app or site whose main purpose is to connect with people, Tinder is a bit scary for me. Scary enough that I started scheduling time each day to ensure I’d actually use it. Monday: an hour of Romanian practice, then my lesson at nine, then coffee, then shopping, then Serbian study for an hour, then lunch, then an hour of Tinder before I prepared for my evening’s lessons. Only I didn’t last the whole hour because I got my first ever match which means we both liked each other, and then some chat thingy popped up on my screen. Uh, what happens now? She sent me a message, I replied, and we eventually agreed to meet at a café in the square on Tuesday evening after I’d finished work for the day.

Tuesday ended up being a pretty good day. In the morning I met up for coffee with a young couple who used to have boatloads of lessons with me, but worked over the summer. They’re about to start their final year at university. I met them at the same place I’d be meeting my Tinder match later in the day; that was a deliberate choice on my part. We had a lovely chat, speaking Romanian the whole time. I’m not sure if they’ll find the time to have any more lessons with me. After lunch I was off to Dumbrăvița for a lesson with my eleven-year-old, and when I arrived there all my lesson plans went out the window (that’s OK though; I can use them next week). My young student had a friend over to play Risk, or Risc as it is here, and they wanted to involve me. His friend was only ten, and almost entirely fluent in three languages: Romanian, French and English. I didn’t do a whole lot of teaching, and somehow got paid to play a board game with a couple of kids for two hours. They had some utterly bizarre house rules that I had an interesting time navigating. I won the first of our two games by sheer luck.

When I got home I had another lesson where I did my fortnightly fill-in-the-gaps lyrics game, this time with REM’s Losing My Religion, and then read and discussed an article on the obesity epidemic in the Western world, which I talked about last month on my blog. At eight it was time to meet my match. By five past, I wasn’t overly optimistic. She works in Corporateville, and when I told her how I make my living, her initial reaction seemed to be, what have we got here? As for her, she didn’t look quite the same as in her various selfies taken in exotic locations including Easter Island. But then everything, somehow, changed. We talked, half in English (hers is immaculate), half in Romanian, and we seemed to feel at ease with each other. When I told her that I shun social media and use a manual diary to organise my lessons, she called the hairy man opposite a hippie. I didn’t mind that one bit. We chatted for nearly two hours. We’re meeting again for coffee tomorrow morning.