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Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Romania - Tennis

Back to nature

June 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Lots of biking this weekend. This morning I met Mark at his place in Dumbrăvița and we cycled to the (relatively) nearby village of Covaci, then into the countryside, through fields of wheat and barley and rapeseed (though that had been harvested). As I realised we were at the highest point of a câmpie, a plain basically, I was reminded of Haddenham, a large village in Cambridgeshire and perhaps the highest point in that very flat county. (The Blossoms and Bygones open day held every May in Haddenham was really quite wonderful. The vintage cars, the traction engines, seeing horses being shod, trips on horse-drawn carts, going up the church tower and water tower, and best of all, cheap cakes and biscuits. This event seemed to run out of steam around the turn of the century, and Wikipedia tells me that it finished for good in 2013.) We saw two foxes and a hare (hares can run at around twice the speed us pathetic humans can) as well as several storks, and the puddles (of which there were many) were teeming with froglets. And, as always in Romania, so many insects. My old city bike, as opposed to Mark’s newish hybrid bike, coped OK with the narrow dirt tracks. Even on the paved roads there was gloriously little traffic; it was great to be away from the noise of people and their machines. We came back via another pleasant village named Cerneteaz (pronounced “chair-net-yazz“, or close to that; click for a late-eighties flashback) where we had a packed lunch. Traditional Romanian music was playing; we both agreed that we quite liked it.

Made from mud and glass bottles, it’s supposed to be like this

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei, who had just got a D grade in a test at school. That disappointing result was little to do with him and a lot to do with his teacher who hadn’t really done her job properly. Her explanations had clearly been superficial, so no wonder when she dumped a demanding test on her pupils, they were mostly at sea. Matei showed me the unprofessional-looking test which had been cobbled together from at least four different past papers. The worst part was the marking scheme. Not every mark on every past paper is worth the same. One two-hour paper might carry 100 marks; another two-hour paper which has just as much stuff in it might only have 60 marks. If you’re going to just smoosh different papers together, you have to adjust the marks up and down accordingly. You’d think a maths teacher might have figured that out. After seeing Matei I met Mark at a restaurant called Astur, just off the main street of Dumbrăvița. Unusually there was a large, nicely mown beer-garden-style outdoor area. I was hungry so I had a carbonara and a beer as we sat in the full glare of the sun. (The tops of my legs certainly caught it.) As we were about to leave, my brother surprisingly called me and showed me my nephew, now closing in on nine months old and a different person from the previous time I’d seen him. He’d just uttered his first word: cat. He and the cat are best mates; they spend many hours in close proximity. It was a bit awkward to talk, so I called my brother back in the evening after tennis.

Mark and I soon parted ways, and I cycled to Giarmata Vii to look at yet another Dacia, this time a bright blue one from 2005. It was going for 1500 euros. It had one or two small spots of rust, and only had two weeks left on its ITP (MOT in the UK, or WOF in New Zealand). The owner took me for a ride around the village, and it seemed fine. I don’t know what to do. On Tuesday I looked at another car that seemed fine on the surface, but I found out that it had been in a crash that damaged both the right doors and the pillar and cost a lot to repair. At this rate, buying a car is looking as hard as buying a flat was. (I still have awful flashbacks to that meeting in the lawyer’s office on 5/5/22. My stress levels were off the scale.)

On Friday night I had my lesson with the guy who lives in London. He’d recently been to Alton Towers. I went there twice, in 1999 and 2003. The more famous rides, such as Nemesis, and Oblivion which was brand new in ’99, are still running. He’d also been back to Romania with his family to attend a wedding. They stayed in a hotel which he’d booked on booking.com. The hotel was dire and he duly left a one-star review. The hotel owners then tracked him down, found where he works in the UK, and gave his company a one-star review. What bastards. After he read articles about Boris Johnson and Philip Schofield, he said he’d read The Noonday Demon, a 2001 book about depression that I’d been meaning to get hold of. He said his wife suffers from depression but is denial of it. We had a very interesting conversation about the subject, in particular the number of people who are affected indirectly.

Tennis. I played last night for the first time in two weeks. I played with the teenage girl; her father and 88-year-old Domnul Sfâra were on the other side. We won 6-1, 7-6 (7-5). The local tradition of swapping the side you receive from with your partner every second game is weird and against the rules of tennis, and gets very confusing during a tie-break. Our first set point at 6-3 in the tie-break was the most incredible rally I’ve been involved in for some time; the fact that a near-nonagenarian was also involved made in even more remarkable.

Only four full days until I go away.

Books - Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

What the hell is it this time?

May 30, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today started off with a Romanian lesson. I made my fair share of mistakes, and only got into the swing of things when (alas) the 90 minutes were almost up. If I somehow had whole days of making conversation in nothing but Romanian – something approaching proper immersion – I could make great strides, but in the absence of that I keep hitting an unbreakable ceiling.

After Romanian it was back to English, with four lessons. My 16-year-old student is going to Bucharest tomorrow – a 12-hour journey – to get her hair dyed. As you do. The single pair of twins who live in the dark apartment near Piața Verde wanted to know about Mrs and Miss and Ms. This topic comes up surprisingly often. They were in fits of hysterics every time I said Ms, so of course I kept saying it, and in an increasingly exaggerated way. “So it was really as a result of discrimination that Mmmzzzzzz came about.” The girl said that Ms might even be her new favourite English word, supplanting her previous favourite, queue. One of my adult students says that her favourite English word is the rather banal although, because it sounds so delightfully English. An ex-student of mine, a man of about fifty, said his favourite was foreshadow. When I got home I had two online lessons, one with a man a little older than me and another with Octavian, the teenager who started at British School two months ago and says his classmates are hopelessly spoilt.

I spoke to my parents three times last week. Mum seems tired so often these days, as if she’s collapsing under the weight of life admin. I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish they could simplify everything, financially extricate themselves from the UK forever, and enjoy their remaining years. Their capacity to enjoy anything is hugely reduced by all this crap. I sympathise with them because it’s happening to me too. (I mean, international travel just to sort out a problem with my bank – and there’s no guarantee even of that – is crazy.) We’re all being bombarded by crap from all angles. I don’t do social media, I’m not in any active WhatsApp groups, and even I just want to punch a permanent mute button. I get yet another anxiety-provoking instant message and I’m thinking, what the hell is it this time?

Of course there’s always new tech that forces you to act in a way you’d prefer not to. On Friday, when picking up some overpriced ink cartridges, I was faced with the latest trick – a jumbled-up PIN keypad. Yeesh. For the previous ten years I’d been typing in my PIN instinctively as a series of finger movements without ever thinking what the numbers actually were. But this time the digits were arranged 562 904 317 8 or whatever. What actually is my PIN? I was relieved to get it on my second go.

We’ve had atrocious weather – bad enough to hit the orange alert level and make my phone emit ear-splitting noises. Tennis was a washout on both days at the weekend. This evening I was seriously worried about being struck by lightning on my bike. And there’s no respite in sight.

I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. For some reason the previous owner of this flat had left a copy of the novel, printed in 1981, several years before she was born. (She left many other books behind and even – weirdly – a load of old photos of her as a child.) Not my thing really, but I’ve been enjoying (in a way) the depiction of Oxford University with all its obscure terminology that, as far as I know, still persists. The vernacular is similar at Eton and some other prestigious public schools. Given that so many senior British politicians took the Eton-and-Oxford route (or something close to it), it’s no wonder the political class over there is so hopelessly out of touch.

At the weekend I read an article about Nick Drake, a folk singer-songwriter who was underappreciated in his lifetime but has found considerable posthumous fame. He suffered badly from depression, and I sometimes listened to him (perhaps unwisely) during my own depressive spells before coming to Romania. He studied at Cambridge. I read an extraordinary letter that his (obviously highly educated and intelligent) father wrote, imploring him not to drop out of university. Nick Drake died of an overdose at the age of just 26.

I said I’d give up looking at cars until I got back from New Zealand, but tomorrow morning I’m going to have a look at a black 1.6-litre Dacia Logan. After that I’ve got my appointment with the neurologist. I wonder if anything will come of that.

Life :) - Music

The queue of despair

May 26, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It hasn’t been the best of weeks so far; at times it’s been utterly dismal.

After Sunday’s debacle, I looked at another Dacia the following day. Although I’d spoken to the vendor half an hour earlier, when I got there he told me he’d already sold the car but would give it to me instead if I paid extra. Bullshit. The people I have to deal with here, jeez. It would have been a bit of fun to bomb around Romania for a bit before my trip to New Zealand, and on Sunday my chance of doing that was in excess of 90%, but with all the other crap I’m dealing with I’ve decided to delay my pursuit of four wheels until September.

On Tuesday morning I was free of lessons, so I got up bright and early to visit the immigration hellhole, attempting to get the address on my residence permit updated so that Barclays could have proof of where I live. I set my alarm for 4:40, had breakfast, and was there at 5:30. By “there” I mean outside the office (if you can call it that) which opens at 8:30. They’d drawn up an informal numbered list of people in order of their arrival; I was ninth. One man was incensed because apparently there had been another list which someone had ripped off during the night. I chatted to a young Serbian man who was studying at the university. He was a linguist. His English and Romanian were both impeccable. Eventually staff arrived and the doors opened. EU citizens, of which I’m no longer one of course, had priority. They only have one person processing everybody, so the queue moved at a snail’s pace. Then disaster struck. A group of eleven Vietnamese workers arrived, and because their boss was Romanian they could jump the queue. During my fifth hour in that inhuman cesspit where everything is yellow and brown and falling apart, it dawned on me that maybe I’d never reach the front at all before the office closed at 12:30. And that’s exactly what happened. What a waste of seven hours. There was anger, not least on my part, but the real shocker was the older Romanian couple in front of me in positions seven and eight on the list. Forty years ago they would have routinely queued for several hours just to get bread. Why they were in the office I didn’t know, but I went up to them and said, “You do realise that the office closes soon and we’ll have got out of bed at a ridiculous hour for absolutely nothing?!” They didn’t care. If it closes, it closes. Wake up, you fucking loons, I wanted to say. Perhaps I did say it, I can’t remember now. I bet you don’t vote in elections either. A country of incredible beauty, but one in which its bureaucratic systems and processes demonstrably fail to function. (The immigration office did function, up to a point, during Covid when virtually no workers were entering the country. Now they are arriving daily from India and Pakistan, and obviously Vietnam too.) That evening I saw the after-hours doctor and I came back via the office. It was 10pm, and people were already queuing outside for the following morning, all relying on a lack of Vietnamese or Pakistani shelf-stackers.

So, Barclays. I called them later on Tuesday. I was told that yes, if I visit a branch in the UK then I can get my ID documents certified and hopefully my money back. So, having exhausted all options that don’t involve actually being in the UK (I’m not going back to that office again until my residence permit expires in 2026; heaven help me at that point), I bit the bullet and booked a trip over there. I’m leaving on 9th June, two weeks today, and will come back on the 13th. I hope to meet my university friend there. Before I booked my flights I asked him which of my two options (the 9th and the 23rd) would suit him better, and he said clearly the 9th. Then he told me why. His girlfriend, in only her early thirties, has been diagnosed with breast cancer and will be starting a course of chemo later in the month. He said it’s been caught early and the prognosis is very good, but yeesh. What a shock. A lovely person too. Hearing that put my wasted hours in a queue into some sort of perspective.

Tina Turner has died. An extraordinary talent, a million miles from a modern diva, and in the eighties a superstar. And all after a tough upbringing and an abusive relationship. Yesterday morning Tonight, featuring Tina Turner and David Bowie, came on the radio. A beautiful song. And now they’re both gone.

Life :) - New Zealand

… or no deal

May 21, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

So I met the guy in the McDonald’s car park again and went with him to the mall. He was more friendly this time. When we got to the mall though and it became apparent that I didn’t actually have the equivalent of 2000 euros – almost 10,000 lei – in cold hard cash, his mood quickly turned sour. He accepted a bank transfer, but wanted it done there and then, and the sum was above the limit set by the banking app. My bank even has a branch at the mall that’s open on Sundays, but they wouldn’t allow me to withdraw that amount at the desk. The guy then got angry with me for not sorting all of this out beforehand, and at that point I decided to walk away. He asked me for 100 lei for wasting his time, so I gave him 50 and was relieved to get out of there relatively unscathed. Like so many Romanian men, he resorted to sheer aggression to get what he wanted. One of the guys from tennis recently lamented the “softness” of young people who live in cities. “They’re so much more aggressive in the country.” Aggression is seen as a positive attribute here. Well, this guy’s aggression cost him a sale. There’s one more car I’m interested in, and if nothing comes of that I might wait until I get back from New Zealand.

Last week there was a fire in a hostel in Wellington, just a stone’s throw from where I used to live. It was almost certainly arson, and at least five people were killed. The building had no sprinklers – amazingly, given how stringent New Zealand’s safety regulations tend to be across the board, it was exempt from them. Very sad and a total failure on a number of levels, but to put it into perspective, fatal fires are probably a weekly occurrence in Romania.

I’m just about to meet Mark in town. Apparently there’s a “festival” of overpriced “street food” going on. It’s such a nice day; it’s bound to be heaving there.

Family - Life :)

A Dacia deal

May 20, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It looks like I might have bought a car. I met the owner in a McDonald’s car park earlier this evening. He intimdiated the hell out of me, after seeming quite personable on the phone. This red 2006 Dacia Logan looked in good nick, but what do I know, really? I offered him €2000, which was my absolute limit, and he accepted. It isn’t finalised yet – we’re going to meet in Iulius Mall to hopefully go through the process on Sunday. I expect to be intimidated again. The car has air con – an absolute must here – and interestingly it runs on both LPG and petrol. It starts on petrol and then uses LPG as long as it still has some in the tank. I expected the LPG tank to take up half the boot, but that wasn’t the case. I hope that the LPG will provide a fuel saving for me. Frustratingly I wasn’t able to test-drive the car properly. I drove it in the car park – literally two or three turns of the wheel – and that told me nothing apart from that car parks at one of the busiest times of the the week are horrible places to be when you’re out of driving practice.

This was the third Dacia I looked at this week. On Tuesday I took the bus into the depths of Calea Șagului to look at another red one. After hanging around an industrial park and eventually finding a coffee machine, I met the owner and gave the car a proper test-drive. I liked what I saw and felt. The major sticking point was the price. He wanted more than it was advertised at. Are you trying it on just because I’m foreign? Whatever the reason, bugger you. Then on Wednesday I looked at a navy blue Dacia in the south of the city, but discounted it immediately because it didn’t have air con.

Timișoara gets pretty congested at times, so I’m hardly salivating at the prospect of driving in town. Outside the city, though – well, that’s the whole point.

When I got home from viewing the car, I watched the first episode of Wild Carpathia on YouTube. Not quite as enjoyable as Flavours of Romania (you can find that on Netflix) but still well worth watching, especially for the bit at the end with the future king.

Mum and Dad were in a dull mood when I spoke to them this morning. All the banking stuff was getting them down, especially Mum. She looked shattered.

A busy Saturday in store tomorrow, with four lessons.

Life :)

Romanian customer service

May 16, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I went to the mall today to get my licence converted, and to my surprise all my paperwork was in order. (There’s usually some unforeseen problem.) Everything got rubber-stamped and I just had to pay 89 lei. Out came my wallet. “You can’t pay here. You’ll have to pay at the post office. Go to the end of the corridor and turn right.” Fine. But the post office was in the process of being moved next door, and nothing was set up for anyone to pay or do anything. I was told to pay using the machine outside – the roboțel, they called it – but it wasn’t working. So I trudged back to the licence office to tell them what had happened. The large uniform-clad woman in the back started laying into me. How do you expect us to issue you a licence if you don’t pay?! “Look, I tried. This isn’t my fault.” Of course it’s your fault. How can it not be your fault?! Just pay, for god’s sake. “I’m a human being, not an animal.” She, or was it the other less awful woman, said that there were other roboțele around the mall, but I couldn’t see them, and they probably wouldn’t have worked even if I had. The only solution I could find was to visit a normal post office away from the hideous bright lights and muzak of the mall. I might have to queue up, but it least that should work. Half an hour later I was back with proof of payment, the awful woman was gone, and I had a piece of paper authorising me to drive (in Romania only) until my real licence arrived. Great.

So today I had yet another experience of a person in uniform who had no idea how to deal with human beings. Maybe she’s got kids and when she takes off her power costume she turns into a delightful mother.

Tomorrow I’m going to look at a Dacia on Calea Șagului. It currently has red number plates, which apparently mean that it isn’t properly registered or certified or whatever yet. That, and the whole idea of driving again after all these years, is filling me with apprehension.

It’s my first anniversary of moving into this flat.

Life :) - New Zealand

Off the map

May 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today has been a catch-up day after a tiring week. Yesterday I had a pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița followed by a 90-minute one at home, then I went to the second meeting of the English Conversation Club to give a presentation on New Zealand. I’d had to prepare the talk and also give a translation into Romanian because one of the women in the audience (of four!), whom I’ve started teaching, knows very little English at this point. I went on for 20-odd minutes and could have gone longer. I also prepared a Kiwi vocab list – chocka, crook, dairy, Eftpos, feijoa, heaps, jandals, munted, OE, pom, she’ll be right, stoked, tiki tour, togs, wops, and more. One of the women found this list fascinating, especially the bit about chips meaning both hot chips and cold chips. A young bloke knew about the All Blacks and the haka, but otherwise people knew very little. New Zealand is off the map to most Romanians. (It’s literally off the map to many people, it seems.) One woman was amazed to learn that there exists a side of the world with reversed seasons. Skiing in August? You having a laugh?

Plenty of work for the rest of the week too, and not nearly enough sleep. I felt pretty good though, for a number of reasons. We had good weather (that today has turned sour). My shipment of second-hand clothes arrived. I got my bike fixed (again, at a cost of nearly 300 lei, even more than I expected). I felt the eager anticipation of getting on the road and seeing more of this amazing country, the place I now call home. And the biggie – lately I’ve stopped feeling blasé about what I did by coming to Romania. It’s nothing to be blasé about, is it? Coming to a place where I don’t know a soul and can hardly communicate, to do a job I’ve barely dabbled in before and do it full-time. Utterly batshit mad, on the face of it. But I did it, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Before I came here, people were incredulous. Why Romania? Why not do what thousands of other native speakers do and teach in tried-and-trusted Japan? Or Korea? No no no. Precisely because of the thousands of other teachers. I’d have been part of a teaching farm. Competing against people better than me and feeling like a failure again. Sod that. Romania was blissfully off the map. After 6½ years it’s still just me doing this, in a city the size of Wellington. I’ve got this whole wonderful place to myself, which is utterly batshit mad. Should I put my prices way up? I do think about it. On Thursday one of my students – a teacher – was about to go to Greece for a teaching conference. She showed me the programme, chock-full of life-sucking buzzwords and acronyms. Look what I’ve escaped, I thought.

Tomorrow I’ve got my appointment to get my British driving licence converted to a Romanian one. If everything is deemed to be in order, they should give me a temporary licence to tide me over until I get the proper one in the post, and I’ll look at buying one of those Dacias.

Language teaching - Life :)

Face the fax

May 9, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

The coronation pictures that were beamed around the world didn’t do much to help the stereotype: it always rains in England. I get that practically every time it rains here. You must be used to this. It’s like England. Hahaha. Of course I haven’t actually lived in England for almost twenty years, and we got pretty low rainfall where I lived anyway. The iffy weather meant they unfortunately couldn’t do the full fly-past over Buckingham Palace.

After a terrible night’s sleep I rose to England-ha-ha-ha weather. An early lesson where I got my student to translate an article about magic mushrooms from Romanian to English. It tipped it down all morning, then magically cleared. A glorious afternoon. My eighties Dutch bike had been playing up again so I took it in to the repair shop; they said I’ll need a whole new rear wheel at a cost of about 200 lei. It should be ready tomorrow. So I had to use my even older German bike (late seventies?) to get to my lesson with the single pair of twins. I hadn’t ridden it for ages. It seemed very tough going; how did I ever manage on that thing? But the lesson was so much fun and gave me such an energy boost that on the way back home I wondered what the problem was. One of the questions in the lesson was from an oldish textbook – it mentioned sending a fax. What the hell is a fax? Do you mean facts? Flax? Flex? Ha. They’re twelve. I had a low-tech upbringing thanks to my parents who didn’t want to spend the money. My brother and I eventually persuaded Dad to buy a fax machine, and I still remember the man-on-the-moon feeling in the living room when we received our first fax. In 1997!

I still can’t get over how dark the twins’ ground-floor flat is. Permanently. Not a shaft of that wonderful sunlight penetrated their apartment this afternoon. I looked at a few places to buy in that area, and I’m glad I didn’t go any further than that. It’s handy to everything, but the traffic there is horrendous, and nothing there is older than about 1980. The lack of anything old would have got to me. As for the real new suburbs, I just couldn’t.

On the way to the twins I dropped off my British driving licence with a translator. To get it converted to a Romanian one, my British one has to be translated, even though there’s nothing to really translate, then notarised. I had to pay 85 lei up front. I hope they actually do it and I get my licence back. That’s the problem with living here: you constantly have to trust people. (Currently they have two licences; one that allows me to drive and another that allows them to print money.) I wasn’t happy with having to shell out so much today. At least the bike people actually do something useful instead of purely bureaucratic.

One of my evening lessons was online, in which I played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with a bright nine-year-old girl. She actually texted one of her friends for the phone-a-friend lifeline. Her dad was there, and he said in English, “Don’t ask him, he’s dumb.” Charming.

A red 1.4-litre Dacia Logan has just popped up in my search results. That would be just right for me.

Language learning - Life :) - Maths teaching - Photos - Romania

Still learning the lingo, why I came here, and some car stuff

May 8, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s 24 degrees as I write this – a perfect temperature. Soon we’ll have the strawberries and cherries and big juicy tomatoes and I’ll hardly have to visit the supermarket. Can’t wait.

First thing yesterday morning I worked on my Romanian. I must do this regularly. We’ve had two lessons so far using an intermediate textbook and they’ve been great, but as I tell my English students, it’s what you do outside your lessons that really counts. Learning all the little fiddly bits that you have to weave into your expressions to say who did what to whom is a real challenge to me, probably because of how my brain works. I can remember actual words because they have a shape to them. For instance the word morman came up in our last session. It means a big physical heap of something, and was a new word for me. There are many ways of making a visual or sound-based connection between the word and its meaning: mormânt means “grave” (as in a burial place) in Romanian, there’s Mormon, there’s mammon, there’s marmot, there’s moșmoană (a brown Romanian fruit that you see here in December) and so on. The possibilities are just about endless. But with these little bitty bits, there’s nothing to grab hold of. It’s a bit like the time I tried to learn Chinese – everything there is shapeless utterances – or the 1300-odd three-letter Scrabble words which turned my brain into mush, even though I had an easier time with the longer words. When it comes to Romanian, I’ve just got to keep at it, not shy away from using the fiddly stuff in speaking, and accept that I’ll make mistakes.

After making up a bunch of Romanian sentences, I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița. He got 81% on the homework I set him the previous week, and that made me happy because I don’t exactly make it easy for him. At one point I explained the different sets of numbers – natural numbers, integers, rationals, and reals – and he wanted to know if pi being irrational meant that you’d eventually get a million ones in a row or, if you convert numbers into colours, the Mona Lisa. I love those questions. I told him that no, pi being irrational doesn’t necessarily imply that, but most people think you will indeed get what he suggests, though there’s no proof as yet.

When the maths was over I had a bite to eat, then a more nondescript two-hour English lesson. Then I met up with Mark, and his two dogs, on the edge of the wood near his home. It’s amazing how much the wood teems with life considering its closeness to a main road. We saw two hawks swooping, you could hear a cuckoo in the distance (you could almost never do that in the UK), and there was the constant satisfying croak of frogs. We stopped for a beer at the nearby bar where we chatted about how cool Romania is, and then I cycled home.

I’ve been thinking about why I chose Romania to live. Some of it was the language. Băieții? What madness is that? I need to immerse myself in it. Now! But a lot of it was the undeveloped nature of Romania relative to other options I might have had, for instance Poland. I knew that Romania would be more raw, it would be rustier and flakier, the markets would be more pungent, the cobblestones would be super cobbley, my bike trips would be bouncy. Romania would engage my senses more than other countries I might have settled in; it would much better for my mental health than somewhere all done up and pristine. And precisely because it was less developed, I’d be almost the only native English teacher here so I could teach how I wanted. I could be totally in charge. My only real disappointment has been how little I’ve managed to travel around the country, and that’s why I’m looking at ads for 15-year-old (or more) Skodas and Golfs and Dacias. To see the country and engage my senses further.

If I do get a car, I’ll have to go through the registration process which means a shedload of paperwork and a new set of number plates. For a small fee you can choose the three-letter combination at the end of your plate; there are 99 plates for each combination in each county, except in Bucharest where there are 999. I often find myself weaving through such delights as FUK, ASS, HIV, and DIE, sometimes all in a row. It seems anything goes here, as indeed it should. I think there are banned combinations, but if you’re willing to pay enough for, say, SEX, you can probably get it. (I did see it one time on the road.) I’ll have to think what I should get, if I don’t decide to just get a random plate. There’s no way I’ll get anything based on my name, even though I like my initials. Yesterday I saw parked car with a local plate that I hadn’t seen before: ROM. I’m sure it’s on the dodgy list because “rom” means gypsy in a load of languages. Some years ago, Romania even changed their official country code (used in the Olympics, for example) from ROM to the nonsensical French-based ROU, because they were fed up with the association with gypsies. “Rom” is still used in a lot of company names, however, and all ROM means to me is Romania, the country that has already given me so much. Heaven knows where I’d be if I hadn’t come here. If I do get a custom combination, it’s certainly on my shortlist.

When I browse cars online, I narrow my search quite substantially, but it’s amazing what comes up that fits my criteria, like a 1986 “Mr Bean” mini, advertised as such. (Mr Bean has a kind of cult following here.) The big surprise was seeing this 1962 beauty, which my brother, an off-road vehicle recognition guru, identified as a Soviet GAZ. (Apparently it’s not a GAZ – it’s Romanian-built, but based on the GAZ.) He said he’d love one. I suggested I buy it and drive it to the UK, and he could pay me back. It’s asking price is €4500, or about £4000. Honestly with how tricky it has become to fly there, that might be my best bet if I want to see my brother and his family.

Update: Some more thoughts about Romania. When I arrived, there was political turmoil: fallout from the Colectiv tragedy and all the business with Liviu Dragnea and the prison pardons which prompted huge numbers of Romanians to take to the streets during my first winter here. Some of what I’ve seen here since then is maddening. I’ll never get used to the indiscriminate dumping of rubbish everywhere. Just ugh. The low vaccine take-up cost thousands of lives and nobody seemed to care. But – touch wood – Romania is extremely safe, especially my city, and mostly the country just goes about its merry way, unlike (obviously) some of its near neighbours.

The word rom in Romanian also means rum, and they’ve taken advantage of the double meaning to name a popular patriotic rum-flavoured chocolate bar:

Here’s the petrol station near me that also has rom in its name:

To illustrate what I was saying about those number plates, this was outside the tennis courts this evening:

And here’s a much nicer picture of the Bega this evening:

I look forward to posting more pictures when I get this car and start travelling around. Sorry this ended up being such a long post.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - The UK

One man’s obsession, and travel hassle

May 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

After I heard what had happened to my friend in Auckland, I wanted to find out more. He was bipolar and had a horrific time with that before I met him, though he seemed to have it under control. Sometimes during our Skype chats he’d come out with “I don’t know if I can be bothered with life”, but in a surprisingly upbeat way; I didn’t for one minute think he’d actually do it. I emailed the author of that blog, and he quickly got back to me. This guy mentioned my friend’s obsession with the two Malaysian incidents, and his delusions about the book he was writing on the subject. This book, jam-packed with conspiracy theories, was going to be a bombshell to rock the world of civil aviation. He said he had video conferences around the world and around the clock with the real movers and shakers. The reality was that only a handful of other conspiracists might have wanted anything to do with his book which he’d spent years on, and maybe the realisation of that sent him over the edge.

Without a doubt, my friend had a high IQ. He was eloquent, both in speech and in writing. He was also generous, often offering to pick me up or drop me off somewhere or other in his latest big swanky car. (His expensive cars riled the facilitator of the men’s mental health group. No job. Disability benefit. You’re gaming the system, mate.) The no-job thing was a biggie, as it is so often. Even a crappy job forces you to interact with people, it keeps you grounded, it keeps you in touch with the real world to some extent. I suggested that given his interest in aviation he should look for a job at the airport, but he never did. My aunt – Dad’s sister – married young and could afford not to have a real job, so she’s never had one. In fact she often childishly mocked people who had real jobs – “he does data, how boooring” – much to my annoyance. I’m sure her joblessness has come at a huge cost to her wellbeing. Anyway, I sometimes visited his house in a modern estate on the North Shore – not somewhere I’d like to live. His place was well looked after, but he’d put up weird signage everywhere, and he had about eight landline phones. In later years he bought a scooter, and I found a 2017 article about him patrolling the streets on his new vehicle. He was a nosy bugger, that’s for sure. He would come along to the mental health group tuned to police radio.

The author of that blog is a full-time conspiracist too – his posts are chock-full of anti-vax diatribes and lies about the 2020 US election being stolen – so I’ll give his little slice of the web a pass. Still, I appreciated him getting back to me so quickly.

I’d planned to visit the UK in July for my nephew’s christening, but the trip is becoming less doable by the day. I can’t find a flight back to Timișoara for much under £200. Before then I’ll have to get down south, somehow, probably taking a ludicrously expensive train. I’ll have to stay at least one night near the airport in Luton because the plane gets in so late. Then I wanted to get across to Birmingham and back to St Ives … it’s all just too bloody hard. I feel bad because I’d basically promised my sister-in-law that I’d be there, but what can I do? My best bet now is to stay two or three nights in Budapest when I come back from New Zealand in September, then go to the UK for my nephew’s first birthday.

On Wednesday I had my medical check-up for my driving licence. This included standing on one leg with my eyes closed and repeating whispered Romanian numbers with my hand over one ear. In all I had to visit six specialists in clinics on two floors. The whole process took 90 minutes including a fair bit of hanging around in a waiting room. I got the green light, so my next step is to go to Iulius Mall for the conversion. When I eventually get my hands on a Romanian licence I’ll buy a car, and that won’t be an easy task either. Registering a car is such a bureaucratic process, even for Romanians, that there are middlemen all over the city who you pay to do it for you.

The coronation is tomorrow. I’m not a monarchist, I’m not a republican, I have no strong feelings on the matter. For me, the royal family have always just been there. Still, I’m a little disappointed that I have to work and won’t be able to watch all the proceedings. From a pure visual perspective, it would have been great. I’d have enjoyed the talk of ampullas and sceptres and cherubs and tritons. Oh well. I’ll watch the highlights, or just wait until the next one.

The snooker. Yippee, it’s over! That was my first thought; it was enthralling, but such a time sink for me. What a final, though. Luca Brecel thoroughly deserved his victory, which almost nobody was expecting. Before arriving at the Crucible this year, he’d never won a single match in five attempts. Then he cleared up. A crucial moment of the final came in the last frame of Monday afternoon’s session. With the balls in extremely awkward spots, Brecel compiled one of the best breaks I’ve ever seen, and that put him 15-10 up going into the evening session. At that score, an awful lot needed to go right for Mark Selby and it nearly did. He won a tense scrappy frame to close to 16-12, then when he cracked open the reds in the following frame it was clear he meant business. Brecel hardly had a look in until the 32nd frame when Selby missed a black and then a brown, but finally the Belgian player was able to close out the match. I hope his win will help grow the game in continental Europe.

Letters of the alphabet sometimes rise to prominence in my lessons, Sesame Street style. Yesterday was brought to me by F and W. I’d like to do a series of posts on the alphabet because, unlike most normal people for which it’s incidental, letters and words have always been very meaningful to me.

Yesterday the mother of one of my students gave me ten eggs from the countryside, including a duck egg. In return I gave her two slices of pizza that I’d made. When I make pizza I follow Mum’s recipe – she’s always had a knack for making very tasty pizzas. I make the dough rather than buying the base – there’s something therapeutic about kneading it.

After two overcast days, it’s a beautiful day today.