Life :)

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Romania - Tennis

Heading into the home straight

August 31, 2018 by 0 Comments

It’s the last day of August, the final day before we hit those similar-sounding month names that signal the home stretch of the year. As yet, there’s little sign of autumn. Our expected high today is 31 degrees.

Yesterday morning I got a phone call during my lesson. The number was unknown and I couldn’t answer it. I rang him or her back straight after the lesson, but the number was busy. Later I’d need to see my landlady, or to be more accurate my landlord’s intermediary (my actual landlord is based in Israel), to pay my rent in euros and my expenses in lei. Having to trek across town at the end of each month to physically hand over cash in two different currencies doesn’t seem any less ridiculous now than it did nearly two years ago. I walked to Piața Badea Cârțan where I handed over 1390 lei in return for €300 at one of the many exchange offices, picked up some fruit and vegetables and a 2.25-litre bottle of Timișoreana, and then read the final chapters of Station Eleven. I called my landlady to ensure she’d be home, then hopped on the tram (Line 4) just around the corner from the market. It was the hottest part of the day by then, and it was steaming inside that old tram. The only respite I got was when it stopped and the doors opened.

For the first 17 months I met my landlady at her work, the power company which is situated almost next door to the Timișoreana beer factory and conveniently close to Piața Badea Cârțan, but she no longer works. She lives with her husband above a pizza restaurant, almost right outside the penultimate tram stop on the line. Her husband seems to be suffering very badly from depression, perhaps with additional complications, but severe depression is more than enough on its own. The last few times I met my landlady at her office, she broke down in tears. I called her again when I got off the tram, and I could hear a small child in the background. Her husband came downstairs to meet me. I asked him how he was, and immediately regretted it. “Sick,” he said. He took my money, said goodbye, and that was that. I went home on Line 7. When I arrived home I called that unknown number back. After several rings a young woman answered, and said she’d found another teacher in the intervening few hours, almost certainly a non-native speaker.

I had four lessons on Wednesday, two of them back-to-back with the brother and sister in Dumbrăvița, and then two with adults. The lessons with the kids went pretty well; the ones with the adults less so. My 6pm session was with a bloke who is just one day younger than me. His wife used to attend too, but I think she took a dislike to me during a lesson in which we discussed Romanian customer service. She got a job in Vienna soon after that, although she’s since moved back. As for him, he’s had a tough year. His father, who lived in Spain, died in June after a long illness. On Wednesday he was very tired. I wasn’t at my best either, getting myself all confused about the meaning of “repatriation” in a particular context. At 8pm I had a lesson with two beginner-level guys in their early thirties, and I probably made most of the lesson boring, hard and confusing, all at the same time. The final part, where we discussed the habits of British people (football, beer, tea, and so on) possibly just about saved me.

When my aunt and uncle were in Timișoara, I took them to the Museum of the Revolution. The woman at the desk was called Simona, and my aunt said that one of their rhododendrons had the same name. When she was back in New Zealand, my aunt emailed me a picture of the Simona flower, for me to pass on to its namesake at the museum. I don’t think my aunt realised how many Romanian women carry that name, including one of the most famous right now, Simona Halep. Unfortunately for Romanian tennis fans, she fell at the first hurdle at the US Open. It’s been a brutally hot first week in New York.

The Red Sox appear to be back in business; they lost six games out of eight but have now won their last three, including Wednesday night’s game in which they belted a colossal eleven runs in one inning.

Life :)

Flyers and food

August 25, 2018 by 0 Comments

This morning I posted 250-odd flyers in people’s letterboxes in a part of the city that I’d picked essentially at random last night. I’d only posted three or four when I ended up in a longish conversation with a man of 79 (he said) on the corner of Strada Mangalia and Strada Johann Nepomuk Preyer. The man mostly wanted to talk about the history of western Romania, and what he perceived as a gradual brain drain in the region since it became part of Romania a century ago. I rarely got a word in edgeways. He seemed a perfectly nice bloke though. I’d missed last year’s flyer postings, when I’d get to walk down picturesque streets and try not to be attacked by dogs. I still had several hundred flyers left, so I thought I’d give it a go once more. There were fewer dogs today than I remembered, but quite a lot of chickens. Eventually I saw these two signs, which looked like they were for a place that used to serve food. The bottom sign was so faded I couldn’t work out what was FREE!! anymore. (It didn’t matter of course; if you have to buy something to get the free stuff, the stuff ain’t free.) To my surprise the place was still running, and I dared to walk in. Or around the back, and then in, to be more accurate. The place was extremely basic, and traditional Romanian music was playing. The meal was absolutely fine though; noodle soup (supposedly containing chicken), fried potatoes, pork schnitzel, some salad, and a small sweet pastry, all for just 10 lei (as advertised). I’d happily go back.

I didn’t use the loo there. I was happy to wait till I got home. The signs were pink for girls and blue for boys. Bărbați (“men”), which you can see on the right of the picture above, literally means “bearded”, which I currently am. There are two words for “man” in Romanian: bărbat (“man as opposed to woman”) and om (closer to “human”). The plural of om is oameni, which means “people”.

During my walk today I was thinking that having lived for nearly two years in Timișoara, visually imperfect but with a heart and a soul, I couldn’t possibly face living somewhere like the North Shore of Auckland again, with all its utterly depressing open home signs. (It’s interesting that Romanians’ desire for home ownership is just as great as in New Zealand or the UK, and not at all like Germany and France where people are happy to rent, but the property market here lacks any in-your-faceness.)

I spoke to Mum recently; she was frustrated after a bad day on the golf course. I suggested that she took up tennis seriously, and played golf purely as a hobby. If she really tried, she could do extremely well in tennis against people her own age, and the challenge of competition could be quite stimulating for her. She doesn’t have the same potential in golf, and at any rate the world of a golf club is a rather artificial one. I’m sure everything I said fell on deaf ears.

I’ve recently watched two streams of Red Sox home games. The first was dire (for me; I’m still unable to appreciate a pitching duel) and the second (last night) was heading in the same direction until the Red Sox broke out for six runs in a single inning on a flurry of doubles. Even when the action is exciting, it’s nothing like being there was three years ago. Still, seeing the vendors wander through the stands selling Sam Adams and Harpoon (another of their local beers) brought back happy memories. In fact, I was in Boston exactly three years ago. Today might have been the day I visited Cape Cod.

Life :)

A national tragedy

August 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

Today I heard the news that Greg Boyed, the New Zealand news presenter, had died while on holiday in Switzerland with his family. He had a very good job that gave him national recognition and respect; he had a wife and two kids. But he also had depression. That eventually got the better of him. So very sad. I’ve just watched the short but very moving tribute that his colleague Daniel Faitaua gave on TV One.

Suicide rates in New Zealand are a national tragedy and something of a mystery to me. I did however stumble upon this web page, whose authors clearly have even less of an idea than I do. One thing I do know is that the previous government gave progressively fewer shits about mental health with each of their nine years in power, and the current bunch need to make reversing that trend a top priority.

My own mental health has improved massively since I left New Zealand. As the recent article I read about “shit-life syndrome” spelt out, I had plenty of reasons to be depressed over there. No family, no real sense of home, few friends, and unsatisfying jobs where I spent the day looking at one computer screen or another and attending pointless meetings where I tried not to look stupid. And most of those things are still true now in Romania! Work is a biggie, though.

My mental health problems haven’t completely gone away, and I still take antidepressants, but by making a complete lifestyle change I seem to have escaped that endless desert of despair. My dad sometimes talks about the risks I took in moving to Romania, but it would have been bloody risky to have carried on what I was doing in NZ.

Life :)

Ajunge!

August 20, 2018 by 0 Comments

This morning I went to Mehala market to look for a racing bike, but didn’t find anything in my price range (which isn’t very high; purchases from that market are high-risk ventures). It got pretty hot there with all the mici smoking away on top of the air temperature which had already hit 30. On the way back I picked plums from a tree until I got shouted at: Ajunge! (Enough!) I must have collected four or five kilos.

Yesterday I Skyped my cousin in Wellington. We had a great chat, and I got to see the whole family. Her middle son had changed almost beyond all recognition. They thought similarly of me, as I now have a beard. I went through a spell of leaving it for a few days and then getting sick of it, but I’m well past that point now and I’ll probably keep it. I recently played I-Spy with Matei. He said he could spy something beginning with B.

When I heard the news that New Zealand were banning foreign ownership of property, my reaction was extremely positive. Under the previous government there was far too much tinkering around the edges when it came to the housing market, probably because many of their voters benefited from prices remaining sky-high. On a not totally unrelated note, this morning Dad sent me this article from the Guardian about the bluntly but accurately named “shit-life syndrome“. The UK is sadly following in America’s footsteps when it comes to shitness of life. My aunt suggested to me that Mum and Dad might come back to the UK to live permanently, what with both their children in this part of the world and the possibility of a grandchild or two. I think they’ll make regular trips to the UK, sometimes staying for months, but I’d say a permanent move is a non-starter.

On Friday my Skype student discussed the heavy-handed tactics employed by the armed police in Bucharest seven days before. It’s become something of a national scandal.

Four lessons planned for tomorrow.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The big debate

August 16, 2018 by 0 Comments

Four lessons today, three of them with kids. My favourite moment was probably with the boy who never really wants to be there. We were discussing jobs, and he told me (in Romanian; he rarely speaks English) that he wanted to be either a hairdresser or a cook when he grows up. When I got home I was reading the Guardian and found an article by George Monbiot about obesity, where he notes the distinct lack of fat people in a photograph of a packed Brighton Beach during the heatwave of 1976. He said that excessive eating and lack of exercise are not the main drivers of the epidemic, and surprisingly the average British person consumes fewer calories than they did 40 years ago. Instead he blames the proliferation of sugary, processed foods. Whatever or whoever the culprit is, it’s obvious to me that only some of the blame lies with individuals. OK, so the choices we’re making now are making us fat, and 40 years ago they weren’t. Does that mean we’ve become stupider, lazier and less responsible in that time? I doubt it, and even that were the case, what’s the reason for that?

It’s kind of three steps forward, two steps back, as my teaching volume slowly picks up again. By mid-September I should be back to something like normal.

Since I last posted, the Red Sox have won all five of their matches, including a wild 19-12 game in Baltimore. That score wouldn’t be out of place in rugby. Last weekend also saw an ultimate grand slam, the 30th in the history of the Major Leagues, and something I got all excited about three years ago.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Saddle sore

July 30, 2018 by 0 Comments

I’ve just got back from my bike trip to Sânmihaiu Român. I’m glad to be back: my arse was starting to really feel it, and I’d slightly underestimated the amount of water I needed on a 30-degree day. Just like me, my bike isn’t quite up to the job. People regularly eased past me in a blaze of lycra. (There wasn’t nearly as much lycra as you’d see in New Zealand though. This is Europe. You’re allowed to ride bikes even if you’re not training for a sodding triathlon. In fact a lot of the blokes who whizzed past me were bare-chested.) At the other end I grabbed an insanely cheap beer, spoke to my parents on FaceTime while at the bar, and read a book in a small park next to the town hall. For some reason my book piqued the interest of two kids.

goat_on_car
There’s something very Romanian about a goat standing on an abandoned car.

This morning I had another attempt at fishing. Still no luck. I’m competing with people who use four rods each, the maximum allowed, and one particular dynamic young fisherman who casts his line, reels it in 30 seconds later, and rides his bike to a different spot nearby to repeat the process. My latest batch of maggots had died in the fridge almost instantly, but I imagine fish will eat dead maggots just like live ones.

I’ve got a new student. She’s coming tomorrow evening. We spoke Romanian on the phone; she described her level as intermediate. People tend to underestimate their level, or are just modest, so I expect her to be quite good. On Tuesday I’ll have my first lesson for a while with Matei. He was telling me on the phone about his new dog, a pug.

My Skype lesson on Friday was interesting. My student was happy with my idea of studying a song. I chose Hotel California for him, and sent him a link to a YouTube video which showed the lyrics. I expected him to casually peruse the lyrics, but no, he memorised them all. Had them down pat. I was blown away. That song has a lot of words, some of which are pretty opaque. “Tiffany twisted”? I used that song with another of my students in one of our fortnightly “song and articles” lessons. That time I removed about 15 words from the lyrics, made a list of the missing words, and asked him to fill in the gaps. On Wednesday I had my usual double bill of lessons with brother and sister. The girl went first, and our 90-minute session passed without a hitch. As usual, however, the hour with her little brother was much more of a struggle. Anything that looks vaguely educational is strictly off the menu, as far as he is concerned. He’s getting bored of Last Card now. I’ll bring in the Formula 1 game next time; it’s certainly been a hit with one of the other boys I teach. In fact I’ll try it out on Matei too.

Scrabble. So yesterday I ended up with four losses, including two Jean Van de Velde-style ones, and finally two wins. To hopefully sort out my time troubles I’ll attempt a bunch of quick-fire, five-minute games on ISC. I’m bound to lose a lot and my rating is likely to plummet, but they should benefit me in the long run. My favourite word yesterday I thought was FILLIP. Six-letter words are relatively uncommon, but this one got rid of some very unpromising tiles and scored well, 32 if I remember rightly.

It’s now raining, and I can hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. It’s just as well I got out on my bike when I did.

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

Travel plans

July 28, 2018 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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.