Life :)

Life :) - The UK

The Big Day and trip report — Part 1

June 1, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Thursday morning I found out that my odds of making it from Luton to Plymouth that evening had been cut from slim to nil, thanks to a sudden shift in UK train times. I found a relatively cheap place to say on Booking.com, some way from the airport. Having booked it, you can imagine my dismay when I received an email requesting a £15 cleaning fee on top of the £40 I was quoted. What a joke.

In the afternoon it was off to the airport. Timișoara airport is in two parts. Before you go through security you’re still in Romania, but beyond the checkpoint is Airportland, where everything is priced in sodding euros. My flight was with Wizz Air. I had to laugh the last time I flew with them, when a group of Romanian travellers commented that Wizz Air “wasn’t as good as Ryanair”, as if Ryanair was some kind of gold standard. This time my flight was delayed by an hour and 40 minutes, so any chance of getting to Plymouth would have been blown out of the water, no matter what the train times were. Wizz Air flights from Timișoara “board” about an hour before take-off, but then you’re kept in a sort of pen until you finally board for real. The experience isn’t very pleasant. I also had to put my hand luggage in the hold.

Two and a half hours after taking off, we touched down in Luton. I then waited at the luggage carousel. And waited. I got to know all the uncollected bags from the previous flight intimately. The carousel took two minutes and ten seconds to complete each circuit: 80 seconds inside and 50 outside. I was in the middle of estimating its speed when bags, including my tiny one, suddenly appeared. I then bought a return ticket to Plymouth from their “travel centre” for a rather ridiculous £112; luckily there was a man supervising the machines who advised me what sort of ticket I should buy. It’s 15 years since I last lived in the UK and I’m now totally clueless.

I then had to get to my accommodation. I’d printed out a Luton map (an anagram of my online name) which only really became useful once I’d exited the confines of the airport. The walk was about 2.5 km. I arrived just before eleven, barely in time to grab a tasty but meagre Chinese takeaway from across the road. The rooms were numbered G (ground floor), F (first floor), S (second floor) and T (third floor). I’d never seen such a system before, and it would have broken down if the building was any taller. I slept well in room S24, but I’ll still hammer them when I come to “rate my stay”, on account of the underhand way they imposed their cleaning fee.

Life :) - Scrabble

The big day is fast approaching

May 21, 2018 by 0 Comments

My parents flew in to the UK two days ago, and I’ve just spoken to my dad, who said he was coping surprisingly well with the jet lag. He was standing outside the library in St Ives. It was 7:20am so the library hadn’t opened yet, but he could get a wi-fi connection there. (English teacher note: It’s now become really common for Brits to say “he was stood outside…” in that situation. “He was sitting” has become “he was sat“.) Mum was back in the flat, and the first thing he did was take the once-in-a-few-months opportunity to talk about her misery-inducing stress levels. Then he talked about the ridiculous army stuff my brother has been forced to do by ridiculous army people, almost on the eve of his wedding. He’s had to travel through the night to Newcastle, at the other end of the country, for some stupid course. He and his fiancée are understandably angry.

Yeah, the wedding. People will be absent who I might have expected to be present, such as my dad’s sister. And people will be present who certainly should be absent, like my Auckland-based aunt and uncle, who were last in contact with my brother in 1997. I don’t think they should be within a thousand miles of Plymouth, and more importantly, neither does my brother. OK, they’re family, but so what? As my friend from Auckland said in our Skype conversation yesterday, they’re going to see and be seen, and to have a holiday. Maybe I’m just being curmudgeonly (now that’s a good word). It all promises to be a very happy occasion, obviously, even if I’m sure I’ll be breathing a sigh of relief when it’s all over.

At the weekend I bought a nondescript shirt and tie to go with the suit I picked up in Cambridge, and what I’d like to think are a nice pair of brown shoes, made right here in Romania. I bought the shirt in H&M at the mall. I remember way back when (early 2000s, when I actually bought clothes) that H&M had stuff that I liked. Now everything there is horribly drab and normal, often emblazoned with slogans with (for some reason) th vwls mssng.

I fly out on Thursday evening. I have no idea at this stage whether I’ll be able to get to Paddington in time for the last train to Plymouth, or whether I’ll be forced to stay the night in Luton and go down the following day. On Monday night I fly back to Timișoara with my aunt and uncle (69 and 76) who live near Geraldine and who I’ve always got on well with. I’m really excited that they’re coming over. I bet they never thought they’d go to Romania.

Not much news from my end. Just 27½ hours of teaching (it’s funny that I’m saying just, but it’s below my recent average). The “expansion” to my Space Race board game appears to be a hit. On Friday I had a Skype lesson with the guy who has moved to London. After our lesson, which involved an article on emotional support animals, we spoke in Romanian. He told me I was making mistakes and need to be using words like cărora. I know I’m all at sea there, and avoidance is how I try to get by. (Cărora is one of the many forms of “which”. Looking at an online dictionary, there appear to be exactly ten “whiches”.) He also noticed I now have a bike, and suggested I join a cycle club. My bike would seem comically cheap for that kind of thing, and besides, I can’t see myself in Lycra. Yes, I know I need to find a way of meeting new people, but a cycle club isn’t it.

I broke 500 in Scrabble for just the second time last night, with the aid of just one bingo. I also made JInX for 73 and two 50-point plays. I was extremely fortunate to draw nine of the ten power tiles. My rating now sits at exactly 1200. My two real handicaps are time management (I struggled recently in a 12-minute game and haven’t yet dared go lower) and knowledge of obscure words. Someone suggested learning definitions, even if they’re bogus, just to tie the words to something. (The word “bogus” came up in our Skype lesson.)

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

You must be looking forward to it

May 14, 2018 by 0 Comments

One day I’ll ride to Serbia. Yesterday I got a bit further along the track that leads there, going just beyond the village of Utvin and almost reaching the town of Sânmihaiu Român. I did about 23 km in all, with the ribbit of frogs and the call of cuckoos in the background. Those endorphins certainly kicked in afterwards. Heavy-ish exercise: now that’s something I need more of.

Last night I managed to see România Neîmblânzită (Untamed Romania) at the cinema. The screen downstairs seems to have closed down, so it’s now impossible to see a film in Timișoara without visiting a bloody shopping mall. The film was great though. How often do you see nature documentaries at the cinema? It was all in Romanian, obviously, and at a David Attenborough-esque pace that I could mostly handle. The film showcases Romania’s incredible biodiversity throughout the regions and the seasons, and also serves as a warning: shit, if we carry on like we’re doing, look what we’ll lose. I must visit the Danube Delta. Perhaps that’ll happen next year if I can persuade my friends from St Ives to join me.

My brother’s wedding is almost upon us. Twelve days away. You must be looking forward to it. Aarghh! Seriously, I’m so happy for my brother, and when I look back and think how he nearly married a complete arsehole a few years ago, I’m even happier. His fiancée, almost my sister-in-law now, is just lovely. But as for the wedding itself, it’s an event with lots of people, 85% of whom I’m not going to know. And because I’m, y’know, his brother, I won’t just be able to slink into oblivion. So me being me, of course I’m not looking forward to it. In a way, it’ll be a test for me. I’m more comfortable in my own skin now, and hope I’ll be able to relax a bit more as a result. My one duty on the day is to read a poem taken from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a book I started but never finished.

Yesterday I spoke to my cousin. She regaled me of their recent family trip to Tonga (which did sound fantastic) and the kids’ many extracurricular activities, including, of course, underwater hockey. Do they ever televise that, and if so, how? Somehow she seemed more than 11,000 miles away.

Last week was quite full-on: I had 35 hours of lessons. On Wednesday I caught up with someone from the training company who lives in Bucharest but happened to be in Timișoara. We met at Starbucks in Iulius Mall – why you’d ever go there is beyond me – and she wasn’t in the mood for much of a chat.

The weather is still fantastic. Let’s hope it’s a while before it gets too fantastic (i.e. too hot).

Language teaching - Life :)

Some spring snaps

May 7, 2018 by 0 Comments

We’ve had July-like weather for the last two to three weeks; Timișoara has really come alive. It’s a beautiful city and I still feel extremely lucky to have landed right in the middle of it. After practically a year and a half, I’m in no way blasé about that. Today I’ve got four lessons scheduled in quick succession between 2 and 9:30 pm; there’s a fair bit of preparation to be done yet. One of my lessons is with a new pair of students, my 39th and 40th people through the door since I began this venture, assuming they turn up. I quite like teaching couples: there are more possibilities for role-plays, games and exercises with the extra person. I don’t have to talk as much either (that can be a little exhausting). And I get paid more.

Last night I went to Cinema City in Iulius Mall to see the documentary film România Neîmblânzită, or Romania Untamed, at the advertised time of 7:10, but in this wild land advertised times don’t mean a whole lot. I’d have needed to wait another two and a half hours, so I did my shopping instead. Mum asked me recently if the people at the checkouts know me yet. I do my grocery shopping at about ten different places, depending on where I happen to be at the time, so I’m still almost totally anonymous. At Piața Badea Cârțan, one of the female cheese mongers or merchants or whatever you want to call them does know me, as does one of the blokes at the dive in Piața 700 where I get whatever soup is on offer as long as it’s not tripe, but that’s about it.

Here’s a picture of the first of those two snakes that appeared in my lesson. I didn’t get a snap of the second snake because all hell broke loose as soon as my student saw it; she wouldn’t have appreciated my taking a photo.

Here are some photos of a monster flying beetle that landed at my feet as I was reading in a nearby park yesterday afternoon. The coin is a 50 bani, the largest of the few coins we have, almost an inch across.

And here are some snaps from Timfloralis, the recent flower festival:

Language teaching - Life :)

Winding up

April 30, 2018 by 0 Comments

Last week was lighter than usual. My biggest job, which took several painstaking hours, was creating a test for the people at the lolly-stick company: something that covered a good chunk of the course and had listening, reading, writing and speaking components and could be completed in 90 minutes and was fair and gave them a good chance of passing despite the ridiculously high pass mark of 75% which I had to enforce. In practice, this meant marking the subjective parts of the paper (speaking and writing) generously: saying or writing anything vaguely on-topic would have given them at least 8 out of 15 for each part. My students got 89%, 81% and 77%; had any of them fallen just short of 75% I’m sure I could have eked out an extra mark or two somewhere. They’re all lovely people, as far as I can tell, and I really wanted them all to pass. (This must be an issue that school teachers face all the time.) On Thursday our 40-session course came to an end, but they all seemed keen to do another course with me. There’s one snag however: the company I work for isn’t paying me nearly enough. To begin with I was happy to do it for the experience, in spite of the rubbish pay, but I’m past that stage now. I’ve asked for a 60% pay increase and will see what happens.

More of my students (mostly in their twenties or early thirties) want lessons in business English. I’m happy to oblige, but it isn’t my favourite discipline. I left that world behind ages ago. One nice thing about business English is that it’s fairly “by the book”: I can just dip into a textbook, including the one I used for the lolly-stick people. Occasionally somebody wants words and phrases specifically related to their line of business (such as construction or car parts) and that’s actually way more interesting.

I had quite a funny lesson last Monday (for me; not so much for my student). It was a balmy evening and she wanted to sit outside on the bank of the Bega. Great. We were sitting near a bar and she offered to buy me a beer. Fantastic. While she was away a small grey snake, perhaps nine inches long, appeared on the bank. It was almost camouflaged by the stone. I pointed the snake out to her when she returned, and she just about freaked out. When she recovered we moved down the bank a little way, to an area that was hopefully snakeless. But lo and behold, a larger black snake, nearly two feet long, swam towards the bank. That was it. Seeing that second snake was a truly traumatic experience for her. We moved away from the Bega altogether, and after about half an hour she was in a fit state to read the article from the Sun that I’d prepared. Where does that intense, deep-seated fear of snakes, rats, spiders and other creepy-crawlies come from?

Yesterday the temperature must have been pushing 30, but there was a pleasant breeze. I didn’t have any lessons. I rode my bike down to the frog pond, not that far, and just sat there for a while. It was very peaceful. The centre of town was heaving with people all weekend, with long snaking (!) queues for the Mr Whippy-style ice cream. The Timfloralis flower festival was in full swing, and because Tuesday (1st May) is a public holiday, many people are making a four-day weekend of it.

Life :) - The UK

UK trip – Part 2 (and some goals)

April 17, 2018 by 0 Comments

As much as I’m enjoying the warm weather, my flat is approaching sauna territory, so I’m currently shirtless.

On Thursday I made my monthly trip to the out-of-hours doctor and the next day I picked up my drugs from the pharmacy, including (of course) the antidepressants. Going to the pharmacy here is always fun, because you get to see the tremendous array of over-the-counter medicines available. You can get the wonderfully-named Spazz, which comes in a yellow and black box, or better still, Codamin. Who knows what Codamin does, but judging by the box alone, I know I want some.

My life isn’t exactly terrible right now, but my time in the UK made me realise it could still be better. Here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Use the internet less. Way less. Of course sometimes I really do need it – it’s kind of important for my job – but not having it in the UK made me realise what a time-waster it can be. (My internet is currently down for some unknown reason, so I’m tapping this out in Word.)

2. Get up at seven, at the latest, every weekday (sometimes I have lessons which force me to get up earlier than that).

3. Lose some weight. Last month I stepped on a set of scales for the first time since I moved here. I pretty much dismissed the reading out of hand. I mean, the first digit was an eight! That couldn’t be right. Obviously. But then I tried to get into two pairs of trousers I’d left at my parents’ flat. I wriggled my way into one of them, just, but I had no chance with the other. Mainly I need to eat smaller lunches, as much as I love the salami and cheese and eggs I’ve become accustomed to, and far less bread in general.

4. Wear (and in some cases buy) clothes that I want to wear. Not what I think I should wear. Shit, I’m my own boss now. I’m the only person doing what I’m doing in this whole city. I can do what I like (and if I do, I’ll feel better for it).

5. Join a tennis club. For social reasons. Outside work, I’m not meeting enough people.

I was going to write about the rest of my UK trip, but not a lot happened. I did a fair bit of reading (by my standards), met up with my friends who came to Romania last autumn, bought a suit in Marks & Spencer’s in Cambridge for my brother’s wedding, watched Masters golf and snippets of the Commonwealth Games on TV (watching sport is a bit of a rarity for me these days), and got wet. Other than the day I spent in London, the weather ranged from iffy to atrocious. I found a new appreciation for St Ives – if you ignore the northern two-thirds of it where most of the people live, it’s very pleasant and at times bustling town that I was blasé about when I lived there. On my last day I got my brother’s old racing bike pumped up and took it for a pleasant ride around Houghton and the Hemingfords. It was locked away in a shed with a yellow “Danger of Death” sign on the door. He assured me it was safe and the sign was a deterrent only, but I admit I did get a second opinion from somebody else who lived in the complex.

Flying back from Luton was horrible. Flying from major airports is such a rigmarole now, and there are simply too many people in too little space for too long. This time we faced a 90-minute delay because our plane was late arriving from Tel Aviv. Probably 95% of the passengers were Romanian and when I got chatting with a family in their native language, I thought, you know what, I’m not doing too badly here. So that was something. But it was a low-stakes situation, and I need more of them. The in-the-air bit was fine, and as for arriving to the sounds and smells of Timișoara, well that bit was bloody fantastic. Even if it was after two o’clock in the morning. This place felt like home.

Life :)

Collapse

April 3, 2018 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I paid my rent and expenses (a mixture of euros and lei; yes it’s crazy) at my landlady’s work, near the Timișoreana beer factory. My charge for gas and electricity was higher than usual even though my power usage was completely normal. I paid up anyway. My landlady burst into tears as she has on about the last six occasions I’ve visited her. It seems to be something to do with her husband, who she described yesterday as a vegetable. On leaving her office, I saw a man of about sixty collapse in the street. I tried helping him to his feet, and soon got some assistance. I could smell the alcohol on him. A lady from a nearby office brought out a chair. I called the ambulance and handed my phone to another woman. While we waited for the ambulance (it took about five minutes to arrive) the man was sick on the ground, and the rich plummy aroma of palincă filled the air. The paramedics found the situation mildly amusing; they’d clearly seen it all before.

My Romanian seems to have stagnated. On the odd occasions I get to chat in a relaxed situation in Romanian, I manage fine, but those occasions are very odd indeed. Weekly, perhaps even fortnightly. And that’s the problem. I could really do with some formal lessons too, but they’re hard to come by.

Tomorrow I’m off to the UK. It’ll be my first taste of Wizz Air. I expect to arrive in St Ives around 9pm. I’ll have an early start the next morning as I’ll be meeting my university friend in London. We’ll probably meet outside the British Museum, but after that we have no real plans.

Language teaching - Life :)

On my bike

April 2, 2018 by 0 Comments

I gave my bike its first proper run today, and yes, it does work! I rode to the end of the Timișoara cycle track, which morphed into the 37 km Timișoara-to-Serbia route that was opened three years ago. It was lovely cycling along the Bega, and I felt great afterwards, so biking is something I’ll want to do a lot more of. This time I turned back just two kilometres up the Serbia track, but next time who knows?

On Monday I had a session with Timea, not at home but at Scârț Loc Lejer, a hippie hangout (yes, we have them here) that I’d read about in 2015 but had never dared go to before. Its walls are covered in all kinds of Communist-era memorabilia. When the weather is nice you can sit outside on a bench or in a hammock. The guy who runs the place has his fingers in two other pies: a theatre company called Auăleu which tours the country, and the Museum of Communism. So hopefully I’ll go back there.

Tuesday’s lesson with Timea’s anagram-mate Matei was hardly my finest hour (or two) as a teacher. He said he was going on holiday in Dublin with his parents, on the same day that I go to the UK. I asked him what he’d be doing and seeing there. He had no idea. I had my laptop with me, so I played him a Youtube video of the top ten Dublin attractions, or tried to. “This video is boring me! Turn it off!” You ungrateful little shit, I said. I immediately regretted that, of course, even if it was accurate. It’s not exactly becoming of a teacher, is it? Matei is a nice kid really, and quite sensitive. The problem is that his parents are wealthy by Romanian standards, and he’s an only child, so he gets everything handed to him on a plate. That includes extra English and German lessons (and French too, perhaps) that he might not actually want. This was my 63rd lesson with him.

Earlier on Tuesday I had my hair cut. A lot. Er…just the back and sides…but before I knew where I was, zzzzz, and it was too late. When we spoke on FaceTime, Mum said I looked more Romanian. Mum and Dad were about to head to Dunedin to see Ed Sheeran. It’s not their thing at all but there were some spare tickets going.

I spoke to my aunt this morning. She seemed pretty lucid (she doesn’t always). She said I should create a blog about Timișoara, or as she calls it, Tiramisu. I don’t think she knows about this one.

Three games of Scrabble this weekend, and three wins. My rating has nudged over 1200 for the first time. But if I’m serious about improving further, I’ll have to actually learn words, something I’m not keen on doing.

Some teaching stats: I had 371 hours of lessons in the first quarter of 2018, with a cancellation rate of 16%.

 

Films - Language teaching - Life :)

New set of wheels (only two, so don’t get too excited)

March 26, 2018 by 0 Comments

Today I bought a second-hand mountain bike from Mehala, the market in the west of the city. It cost me 200 lei. The bike is made by Professional, a UK company. Its previous owner’s name, Allen (first name or surname, I can’t tell) is scrawled all over it, but you only notice that if you’re up close. I rode it home, so at least it works, but there are still bits and pieces I could do with getting. A good lock, for one. The best thing is that if the bike falls apart on me, 200 lei isn’t the end of the world.

Last week was a pretty good one. Articles on Stephen Hawking, games of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a piece on the oldest man ever to ride a rollercoaster, some construction-based vocabulary, my Space Race game, practice IELTS speaking tests, Simon Says, and Canadian driving theory test questions all made at least one appearance. The difference between last week and the sense of complete barrenness I use to feel every week, year in, year out, is almost indescribable. Of course I felt knackered by the end of it, as always. At one stage I had 15 lessons in just two and a half days, and I finished at 9:30pm every day from Monday to Friday.

Our clocks went forward last night. Yes, we’re now on summer time. After the unseasonably cold weather we’ve had over the last week to ten days, with snow blanketing the city, “summer time” sounds like a bad joke. The EU stipulates that all countries must change their clocks at the same time. In the UK, Ireland and Portugal, this means that 1am becomes 2am; for central Europe 2am becomes 3am; and for those of us out east, 3am becomes 4am. I happened to be awake for the switchover, and I lay in bed wondering just what the cathedral clock would do. Would it strike three or four? Surprisingly it did both, and even more weirdly it did the four first, then the three. I looked at the clock which clearly said 4:00, so who knows what those bells were playing at.

The change of clock did bring with it a change of weather and a palpable change of mood in the city today. Hopefully winter is finally over. Unfortunately, unlike last year, it looks like being a bad year for fruit.

Last night I watched Metrobranding, an interesting documentary on Romania’s manufacturing industry. Factories that employed thousands in Communist times have since mostly fallen into disuse. The documentary was in five parts, covering sewing machines, bicycles, tennis shoes, mattresses and light bulbs.

 

Life :)

Snake oil

March 20, 2018 by 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago one of my students texted me to ask if I’d be interested in trying some pumpkin seed oil. I was in the middle of the lesson at the time and replied with a very quick yes, without even noticing that she’d mentioned the price of the stuff, and promptly forgot all about it. Last Monday she came with two half-litre bottles of the oil, which was only marginally cheaper by volume than printer ink. I paid up, and was actually glad I did. (If I’d seen the price I almost certainly would have refused, and would have missed out on trying something new.) I’ll give my friends in St Ives a bottle when I go over there in two weeks. Talking of expensive food items, I saw salak (a.k.a. “snake fruit”) on sale at Carrefour yesterday, at something like 70 lei per kilo. Plenty of people were picking it up, smelling it, stroking it, but not buying it.

This morning I saw a small brown dog, probably a mixed-breed stray dog (or vagabond dog as they say here) using the pedestrian crossing during rush-hour. It was fascinating to watch in a way, as it strode across into the middle of the road, scurried back, and then (with no urgency whatsoever) ambled to the other side. When my friends came over in the autumn, the roadsides in places were strewn with dead dogs.

I took a 180-point beating in Scrabble yesterday, my worst on ISC to date (I’ve still played less than 100 games). I performed a post-mortem on my thrashing in Quackle, and it turns out I didn’t play that badly. I did miss one bingo I should have spotted. I’ve only just started attempting to learn bingos. Up until now my focus has been on the short words.

It’s the second half of March. And it’s snowing.