Language teaching

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching

How times — and words — change

April 4, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

We had beautiful weather at the start of last week with temperatures in the 20s, but we’ve been plunged right back into winter on 3rd April. We even had a light flurry of snow earlier today. Tennis has been impossible this weekend. What a turnaround.

I’ve got my new Samsung phone. I’m enjoying the extra real estate of a 6.5-inch screen, the battery lasts what feels like ages after my recent iPhone experience, and the camera does its job. The bad news is that I’m constantly monkeying around with settings to stop it from doing really maddening things, and failing almost every time, but at least I have a working phone. On Monday or Tuesday or whatever day it was, I FaceTimed my parents for the last time on my old phone; when I hung up, the battery percentage was way down into single figures, and no book no matter how heavy would keep the cable in place for it to charge. Damn. What about my contacts? My students and stuff? I’d tried importing them before with no success, so now there was only one thing for it: I scribbled down all the names and numbers as fast as I could before the battery went dead, which it did 15 minutes afterwards, and then tapped them all into my new phone manually.

Some people are easy to teach. Others aren’t. The eight-year-old girl I see on Skype each week is firmly in the latter category. Seriously, what am I supposed to do with her for an hour? What can I even give her that she can’t already get from YouTube? (I know she watches a lot of YouTube videos.) You’re bored, she told me on Friday, in the second half of the session when her father was (annoyingly) present. You’re telling me I’m boring, aren’t you? No, she doesn’t mean that, her father assured me. Of course not. Yeah, right. None of this is her fault, and I can only imagine what primary school teachers went through when they taught online during the pandemic.

Yesterday morning I had my maths lesson with Matei. We’re going through past “checkpoint” papers, which are exams they give you in the UK at age 14 but don’t immediately count for anything. (He’s going through the British system.) At the start of the session his mother gave me icre – fish-egg paste on pieces of bread, and doboș, a Hungarian layered cake. At ten in the morning, I had to work my way up to the icre, like edging into sea water that I know is too cold, but I finally took the plunge and it was fine. The doboș was delicious. After the session, his parents told me about an online influencer who knew all kinds of magic tricks to get people to view your content, and I was made to watch a video about him on their smart TV. Mercifully, it was only a few minutes long. What makes you think I should see this?

I looked at another property yesterday, and will get to see one more tomorrow. The owner of the place – a lady in her seventies and no more than five foot tall – was lovely. She seemed a typical older Romanian woman, with all her preserves jarred and labelled in the pantry. Talking to older Romanians gives me a fascinating window on their lives, and makes a nice change from hearing about ambitious career plans and trips to Greek islands.

I’ve been watching a weird series on Netflix, with a weirdly long title to match: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. Some exercises I did last week on car parts made me think of some other weirdly long titles from the recently (and sadly) departed Meat Loaf: I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That), and Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are. Both those songs were on the hugely successful Bat Out of Hell II album, which came out when I was a teenager.

This was my attempt at yesterday’s Wordle:

I was lucky to get so close with my second guess, but as for the actual solution, I thought, when did people start using this word? Luckily, there’s something called Google Ngrams which shows you how word frequencies have changed over time in printed material. You can even compare words, such as trope and tripe. Trope has indeed exploded in my lifetime:

Below is how the spelling of the country I live in has changed in English over two centuries. I certainly prefer the current spelling, which only took over in the 1970s. Note how mentions of Romania (spelt in any way) peaked during the Ceaușescu era, and dropped off a bit in the 1990s.

My mother still sometimes refers to the sort of computer you hold in your hand, like the one I’ve just bought, as a telephone:

It used to be unprintable, didn’t it? It’s now six times as printable as it was at the turn of the century.

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

No more marathons, and more’s the pity

March 27, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got my TV tuned to BBC news, with the war now centred on Lviv in the west after the Kremlin said they’d concentrate on the Donbas region having been pushed back by the Ukrainians. Since the first morning of the war, none of this has made any sense at all. Joe Biden has just made a speech, saying at the end that “for God’s sake this man cannot remain in power”. Whenever I see Biden speak about the Ukraine war, I wonder what the orange turd might have come out with.

Today I had my maths lesson in Dumbrăvița – he did well on a practice exam paper – and then when I got home I had a last-minute cancellation, meaning I just one had English lesson before stepping on the tennis court. I played two sets, both with the woman who struggles a bit with her footwork, so I had to run a bit, which was no bad thing. It was a lovely early evening for tennis, and it’s been a great week of weather all round. Blue skies every day.

Yesterday I called my aunt, and this time she answered. I remembered to add “Auntie” before her name. She was much better than she can be. In the past she’s seemed unaware of anything beyond her four walls. She’ll say the weather is bad, I’ll then mention that it’s fine and sunny where I am, and then she’ll almost seem put out by my mentioning other weather. Incorrect weather, as she sees it. I got none of that yesterday. We spent most of the ten minutes or so discussing the war. She still did her usual trick of ending the “conversation” when I still had things I wanted to say.

My aunt would get on well with the eight-year-old girl in Germany whom I teach on Skype. Yesterday’s lesson with her was especially hard because her father was with her the whole time. I made what I thought were fairly strong noises to say that I’d prefer it if he’d damn well go away, but he paid no notice. Half-way through the hour-long lesson her mind wandered. She must be tired, I said to her father. No, she’s just bored, he said. There might not be a whole lot I can do about that. Her English has got noticeably better in the time I’ve taught her. I think that’s down to YouTube more than me; her accent is very American.

Wednesday saw the return of Zoli, my first-ever student here, way back in November 2016. I hadn’t seen him since the very start of the pandemic in Romania, two years ago, when I joined him on a trip to the mountains. As we drove there, he told me that the hut had been closed because of the virus and we’d have to sneak in, and I got angry at him for not telling me before. Though it was beautiful up there in the snow, I was aware that a tsunami of disease and death was about to hit us. I thought I might never see him again, so it was a great pleasure to receive a text from him to say that he wanted to restart lessons. Wednesday’s meeting was hardly a lesson: it was a chat followed by a game of Bananagrams.

I’ve ordered a Samsung phone to replace my iPhone 5½ (as I call it) which I got as a present almost five years ago. My present phone doesn’t charge unless I place a heavy book on it, and then its battery runs down almost visibly (actually visibly if I’m making a video call, say), so I end up not using it much. It’s a low-end Samsung, called an A13 (it cost about NZ$300 or £150) but it seems to do everything I could ever want and much more. What it won’t do, however, is FaceTime, so I’ll have to switch to Skype or WhatsApp or something for keeping in touch with my parents. FaceTime has been so convenient.

Amid all the news of the war, they’ve been showing the PR disaster that is P&O, the once-proud British shipping company. P&O stood for (and presumably still does stand for) Peninsular and Oriental, a name that conjures up the world’s great trade routes and general intrepidness. Now it’s Dubai-owned (ugh), and the name makes me think of an outfit that lays off 800 of its staff on Zoom without giving any notice, and now has a ship that is deemed unseaworthy.

And finally, back to tennis. Ashleigh Barty has decided to retire from tennis at the age of just 25, at the pinnacle of the game. After winning Wimbledon and then her home grand slam in Melbourne, she probably thought, just what else can I achieve, and why not play cricket or golf or any of the other sports I’m ridiculously talented in. Tennis will miss her, though; I remember not long ago hearing some commentators suggesting that she might be too nice to ever be a champion. In other news, the no-tie-break final set, which has produced extraordinary drama over the last half-century, is no more. The movers and shakers of the tennis world thought we’d all be better off without that suspense, and now all four grand slams will be (quote) enhanced by a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-all in the final set, as the Australian Open has employed since 2019. I’m always wary of that marketing-speak word enhance. The new system has been billed as a one-year trial, but you don’t usually trial something in the biggest events on the calendar. It’s possible that, say, Wimbledon reverts to what they used before, but in all likelihood this will be a permanent change. Well, until someone else comes along and decides to shorten things even further.

Buying property - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Is it worth the risk?

March 21, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just come back from my second-most expensive grocery shop in Romania. The only time I spent more was in the headless-chicken initial days of the pandemic. Everything has shot up in price. This reminds me of 2008 in New Zealand, when a block of cheese hit $16 and they were practically giving gas-guzzling Ford Falcons away: petrol had smashed through $2 a litre, which seemed crazy at the time. This morning I met up with Mark, the teacher. We had a coffee; he also had waffles. We had a good chat, mostly about teaching, but he didn’t have much time because he was going to a barbecue soon after.

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița, then two online English lessons when I got back, including one with a new guy who lives near Cluj. Most of my lessons are still online, but face-to-face is coming back gradually. After that I was on the tennis court for the first time this year. We’d planned to start back a couple of weeks ago, but we had a chilly first half of March. The tennis crew is depleted. Yesterday I partnered a teenage girl who is a national-level rower; we played against her father and the older guy I sometimes play singles with. We lost the first set 6-3, and in the second we’d fended off half a dozen match points to be at deuce for the umpteenth time in the tenth game, when time ran out on us. I wasn’t too bad. My serve needs some work; my only ace, which hit the sideline at 2-5 in the second set, came out of the blue.

A silver lining to those awful kidney stones is that I’ve dropped a few pounds. On Friday I had my first haircut since last June; the barber’s comb turned my long thick hair into unappetising grey spaghetti before it fell to the ground. I didn’t really want that much taken off, but hairdressing vocabulary is something I struggle with even in English. I do prefer the slimmer, less caveman-like me, though. (I still have the beard.) On Tuesday I’ll go back to the doctor, and maybe I’ll find out if my stones are still there. I don’t think I’ve passed them, but the pain has gone. Now I “only” have my intermittent sinus pain to deal with, plus the cold that never goes away. (If I’m outside on a chilly day, I have to blow my nose all the bloody time. When I played tennis yesterday I had to wipe my nose after every second point. That’s just life for me.)

That’s more than enough about me. My dad passed out on Thursday night, just after I wrote my last post. He somehow fell into the bath at about two in the morning, and blacked out. He was lucky not to injure himself. He came round, then eventually clambered out of the bath. The next day was a write-off as he had such terrible leg pain, but yesterday he assured me he was coming right. As for Mum, a rogue contact lens had got stuck up her eye, and when she extricated that she was fine. I wish I wasn’t so far away from them. I expect they’ll want to come to Europe at or around Christmas – there will be a new addition by then – but I’d like to make a trip to New Zealand too.

I want to move on with my life, which means finding a new apartment and running a proper teaching business from it, but last week’s near miss has made me even more skittish than I was before. The appalling war in Ukraine has made the local economy very uncertain, then when you add in that I don’t really know what I’m doing, and I’ve had my fingers well and truly burnt before…

I forgot to mention a horrific accident – or pair of accidents – that occurred earlier this month near the Black Sea in eastern Romania. It was a quiet evening, and I got alerts on my phone in Romanian, one of which made me do a double take. Is that really what it says? A MiG fighter jet went down in a remote area, in terrible weather, killing the pilot. Then a Puma helicopter flew out in search of the plane, and it too crashed. All seven on board the helicopter died.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

My flat search, my brother’s job search, and 19/1/12

January 20, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a nippy Thursday morning here. I took this picture just before my lesson which started at eight. You can see the hoar frost on the trees and the near-full moon. The days are noticeably pulling out: a fortnight ago it was almost pitch black at that time.

I haven’t had much luck getting new students at the start of 2022, but yesterday I got a call from the mother of a 17-year-old girl, and I agreed to give her daughter tuition for her C1 Cambridge exam. Teaching for advanced-level exams is not my forte – they’re basically a game in which I lack experience, rather than a simple test of English – so I might not be much help.

No maths lesson with Matei this weekend – his family are going away. It’s been interesting being back in his room again. The huge world map on his wall always fascinates me because it makes Europe seem so small. He told me that his grandmother, whom I often had conversations with, is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. She must be almost eighty. That’s sad.

I saw the doctor on Tuesday to get my pills. I mentioned my headaches and gummed-up nose, but after seeing 35 Covid patients in a single day, his focus was on the virus which wasn’t my issue. (I took a rapid Covid test last week, just in case. I was negative.) He gave me the requisite temperature and oxygen saturation checks, and even checked my blood pressure and gave me a once-over with a stethoscope, and everything was fine. He then prescribed me a drug called Quarelin for my headaches. If I can’t rid of this head pain, and the frequency and duration reach the levels that Dad had to deal with when he was my age, life might not be worth living. I’m serious. Dad had a wife and family. I don’t.

I’ve finally dismissed that flat which initially seemed so promising. The lack of sun isn’t something I can risk. I look back at all those places in Auckland and Wellington, and the correlation between natural light and my mood – if not necesarily a causation – is definitely there. I’m interested in three more places and I’ll make some phone calls later today.

My parents told me that they heard a loud bang last Friday. What the hell was that? It was the Tongan volcanic eruption. They could hear it from 1500 miles away? Holy shit. The scenes following the eruption are of total devastation.

My brother wants to leave the army. He’s had enough of his courses that take him away from home five days a week and hardly inspire him anyway. He recently applied for a job which he didn’t get (unfairly, he thinks). He’s invariably grumpy and uncommunicative at the moment, so I really hope he can find something to cheer him up.

Poker tournaments. Since Christmas I’ve had one win and five second places. What a shame it isn’t the other way round. At the weekend I was heads-up in a $4.40 pot-limit badugi. My opponent covered me, just. I got dealt the 204th best hand in the game. That doesn’t sound very good, and it’s not, but heads-up against an aggressive opponent it shoots up in value. It was just a bit too good to fold. We got all our chips in, he turned over the 203rd best hand (!), and I had to be content with another runner-up spot. My bankroll is now $1562.

It’s now ten years since my grandmother died, four months prior to her 90th birthday. How time flies. I often wish she could have seen me in Romania. I sometimes dream about sitting in the square with her, having a coffee or a glass of wine, watching the world go by.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Language teaching - Poker

Merry and bright

December 17, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a very long phone conversation with my friends in St Ives – the couple who came to Romania in 2017 – as the Omicron variant rips through the country just in time for Christmas.

An interesting day today. After two early-morning lessons, I had another look at an apartment. Fortunately the bike shop was on the way, so I took it in to have a new inner tube fitted. (It was the valve after all, not a puncture, so I didn’t risk changing it myself and buggering everything up. I’ll pick my bike back up tomorrow.) The apartment was right next to a pizza place. It was on the fourth floor of another liftless block, and that basically made it a non-starter. I took off my shoes when I went in, and the diminutive man who owned the place gave me some size-six slippers to wear. In the living room was a bar which was stacked with top-shelf liquor. For guests only, he said. The apartment was fine, as was the area with its pleasant little grocery shops and shoe repairer, but without a lift it just isn’t an option.

I had two more lessons when I got back. One was with a twelve-year-old boy; at one point I explained to him what Brexit was. He didn’t seem a fan. “But why would they do that?” That’s a very good question, I said. He’s learning French as well as English, and he got full marks on a recent French test. I explained that he’ll still be able to live and work in France. In one of my morning lessons I explained the meaning of “merry”. It’s a fun word, and it’s a shame we don’t use it more, outside the set phrases “Merry Christmas” and “the more the merrier”, and the odd occasion when we might say that someone got a bit merry last night. That made me think of the origin of Merryland, the name of a narrow street in St Ives with a pub on it. Cool name, and something I’d like to have in my address, but where did it come from?

Three poker tournaments yesterday. I felt all at sea in my first tournament – Omaha hi-lo – and it made me think that the win I had in that discipline last week must have been a tiny flash in an enormous pan. I never have the slightest clue what anyone else has, and in poker that’s obviously a problem. Then came single draw, in which I ran hot at the beginning and amassed a hefty stack, only to finish ninth for a small profit. Finally, I played pot-limit badugi, where I rode my luck at one point to rocket into the chip lead. With three remaining I was in second place, ahead of a short stack, but I was dealt a pat 98 and had no choice but to get all my chips in against the leader with a 66% chance of winning. I lost and I was out in third. Still, not a bad morning, and after a slightly barren patch, my bankroll is back up to $1260.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

Not fit for much

December 6, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got a cold, again, though this one is worse. My left sinuses are killing me, causing my eye to puff up slightly, and I’m inhaling steam to relieve the pain. It’s about time I got myself a neti pot. The only good news is that I slept very well last night – when was the last time I got nine hours? – so I felt more refreshed this morning. Today is a lazy day – add the rain to the pain, and I’m not fit for much other than online poker. I played three tournaments this morning, making two final tables in which I finished fourth and fifth. My bankroll is $1208.

I had a funny week of work. My brand new student, whose Skype name was something like (but not quite) “madi96”, didn’t show up. I don’t want be generationist, but those young people, dammit. Millennium Man, who started with me a few weeks ago, has given up on me too, without saying anything. On Thursday I started with the eleven-year-old twins, and the boy never showed his face for the whole 90 minutes. He said his camera wasn’t working, but I wasn’t too sure. I asked him to sit next to his sister (whose English was impressive), but he didn’t want to. On Friday I had a bad lesson with the seven-year-old girl in Germany. We normally have two half-hour sessions (on Mondays and Fridays), but last week she started swimming lessons on Mondays, so we had a full hour session on Friday. Bad idea. She was bored in no time. How many more minutes? Um, forty. She was clearly expecting a number like three. When I asked her a question, she didn’t even say yes or no, I just got grunts. Hunhnuh. So what do you want to do? I don’t know. Are you bored? Hunhnuh. Please make it stop.

I’ve been getting messages and phone calls from the father of Matei, the boy I taught for two and a half years. “Don’t forget about us,” he texted me this morning. Now he wants me to give Matei (aged 13½) maths lessons. The only time I ever taught maths was in Auckland in 2010. He wants lessons to be face-to-face, not online. (He and his family are all vaccinated.) I can do it I suppose – probably on a Saturday, and I won’t be playing tennis on that day until the spring – but it’ll takes me half an hour to get over there on my bike, so they’ll have to pay for it.

Mark, the guy who teaches at British School, invited me to join him on a road trip, but I simply couldn’t take him up on that offer. I’ll poke my head out the door now, despite the grim weather. That’s as far as I’m going.

Buying property - Language teaching - Music - Poker

We all need a lift

November 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a new and interesting discussion topic in this morning’s lesson: golf. My student lived and worked in the UK and still does a lot of business with corporate Brits. Football is their biggest small-talk topic; golf is number two. It’s amazing quite how much jargon there is in the golf world, and how many normal everyday English words take on a different, specific meaning on the course: club, drive, rough, bunker, eagle, and so on. Oh, and bogey. The sport is almost non-existent in Romania, and his knowledge of the game was unsurprisingly similar. We happened to talk about this as Mum was coming to the end of a four-round golf marathon. I suspect she’ll tell me how it all finished up when we talk tomorrow.

I had a look at another flat on Monday. It was in the same block – the delightfully named U4 – as the two apartments I viewed last Friday, but you access it via a different entrance. Just like the place I owned in New Zealand, this flat is on two floors – but unlike the Wellington flat which took up the bottom two storeys, this place is on the fourth and fifth floors, and the lack of a lift is a deal-breaker for me. Not for me exactly – I’d manage – but when you’re trying to run a business, liftlessness is a serious minus. What a shame, because this spacious apartment otherwise had a lot to recommend it. There were balconies on both floors. Everything looked much sturdier than I’d seen in previous viewings. The build quality seemed to be there. I’ll have to keep looking.

Poker. Another tournament win yesterday, my third in eleven days. It’s been feast or famine this month, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Three wins and little else besides, and you’ll do much better than a string of 7ths and 11ths and 16ths, which is more the norm for me. This latest win came in no-limit single draw, and I was extremely lucky to reach the final table, let alone run out the winner. I played four tournaments in all yesterday, including an attempt at pot-limit five-card draw (high), which came to a screeching halt when I ran my pat queen-high straight into a pat threes full. I spent some time on Tuesday working out an equivalence between very strong hands in badugi, five-card draw and deuce-to-seven lowball; in big-bet draw games, it’s vital to know just how strong – probabilistically – your hand actually is. I made $62 overall yesterday; my bankroll is now up to $1194.

My favourite album right now is the one Romanian folk-rock band Celelalte Cuvinte (which means “the other words”) put out in 1987. Listen to it here.

Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Trying to keep up

November 15, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had seven lessons scheduled for Thursday. That would have been a record, but by the Romanian law of low averages it was pretty unlikely that they’d all actually happen. In the end, only four did. The guy who probably didn’t have Covid cancelled, then the new woman cancelled because she’d had a fight with her boyfriend, then I got a message from the twelve-year-old girl’s mum to say that she was ill. In the final case I had no complaints.

Saturday morning was cold, with thick fog. I went to the market in Mehala, which isn’t a million miles from that house I’d looked at the previous day, but didn’t buy anything. When I came back I had my lesson with the young couple, which went fine. I then watched an episode of Black Mirror. Hang the DJ, season four, episode four. I nearly didn’t watch it because I knew it was all about relationships, something I find ever so slightly triggering, but it was great episode and I’m glad I watched it.

After Black Mirror it was time for some poker. A fixed-limit badugi tournament with a $5.50 buy-in and 96 entries. I haven’t run well in that tournament in general, and on multiple occasions I had one foot out of the exit door. But I kept surviving, and when we got down to six players, all my Christmases came at once. I amassed a big stack which I never relinquished, and although we had a protracted short-handed battle, I was able to run out the winner for a profit of $90 in a little under four hours. What a surprise that was. It was my first win in 90 tournaments – that sounds bad, but in the intervening period I had four second places and two thirds. Yesterday, normal service resumed – three tournaments in which I got precisely nowhere. My bankroll is now $1096.

I’ve been listening to End of the Line by the Traveling Wilburys. (When I was younger, I imagined it was Wilberries, a kind of fruit. It’s only one letter away from those wimberries that I picked over the summer.) It’s a great song, and one that reminds me of the simple Twizel house we lived in on Princes Street in Temuka in the winter of ’89, before moving to a place on Richard Pearse Drive. We had no TV, and made do with the radio that was tuned to either 93 Gold or Radio Caroline. We always got the results from races eight, nine and ten. The scratchings and quinellas and trifectas. Racing seemed a big part of Kiwi life back then. I’m pretty sure one of the bedrooms had a waterbed, which were all the rage in the late eighties over there. There was always the pungent smell of chimney smoke, which we never had in the UK.

I played tennis again yesterday. Once again it was singles with the guy of nearly sixty who is like the Duracell bunny. How does he never get tired? I won the first two games, then he won the next three. I edged back in front, and on his serve at 4-5 down, he led 30-0 but I levelled the game at 30-all. The next point was an exhausting long rally, which I won to bring up set point, but I hit long on both the next two points and he dominated the rest of the set. I think that long point ultimately cost me. I was soon in a deep hole at 5-7, 1-4, having lost seven games out of eight. I was struggling physically while he was as fresh as a daisy. I also couldn’t win the important points. He had a killer shot to my backhand corner that I found hard to combat, and he saved plenty of game points with it. Despite the fatigue and sweat, I clung on, and reached 4-4. At 30-all in the next game, I had him pinned to both sidelines before eventually winning the point ten shots after I thought I’d won it. But he played the next three points as if nothing had happened, winning them all. Quite extraordinary. He led 30-0 in game ten to move within two points from victory, but I won the next four points to break him. At 5-5 I held serve from 15-40, but then he held to love to force a tie-break. I won the shoot-out 7-4 and we finished all square, but I was left wondering how somebody of that age could be so fit. I saw that sometimes with the trip leaders on the day tramps I did around Wellington. Is it all in the genes?

Here are some pictures of abandoned Timișoara. There are ex-swimming pools dotted around the city. If you look closely you can see the name of Morărit CILT, an old flour mill.

A sunny afternoon along by the Bega
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Music

Don’t freak out!

October 28, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a beautiful Thursday morning here. I’ve already had two lessons. The Rapid Bucharest football team bus has just pulled up outside the cathedral. They’re playing Poli Timișoara in a cup game this evening.

During a lesson on Tuesday afternoon I started to feel less than 100%. A stuffy nose, a few sniffles, fatigue. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of that – they’re typical symptoms of a cold – but when I’m living in a country where daily Covid death tolls are in the 500s, that’s panic-stations territory. As it happens, I was paying the doctor my monthly visit that evening, and naturally I asked him if I should be alarmed. He took my temperature and measured my oxygen saturation level, and said I was probably fine. I slept badly that night and had all sorts of weird dreams, and the morning after I felt (and looked) pretty groggy. I called my parents and asked them not to freak out. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Covid but I got a rapid test from the pharmacy anyway. It isn’t easy to do the test – how to I swab my tonsils without wanting to gag, or twizzle the swab around several times in my nostril without sneezing? As expected, the test (which has a high false-negative rate) was negative. Yesterday I improved throughout the day, and last night I slept well. Mum called me back last night, and was glad I looked better. South Islanders are understandably mad that two cases of the virus are now in Christchurch. Why there are no restrictions on flights between north and south beats me.

I’ve got a new student – a 21-year-old guy – and I had my first lesson with him this morning. Yesterday he introduced himself on the phone as Răzvan, but he popped up on Skype as the rather non-Romanian-sounding Memet. Today he told me he was a musician – a saxophone player in a travelling band – and he’s still enrolled in high school after having to repeat whole years, although he never actually attends any lessons. He said he wanted a change of lifestyle. A job? A career? A salary? Oh no, he said, my only boss is God. He didn’t seem particularly well educated (failing whole years isn’t a good sign); when I used the English word “precarious”, and then gave him the translation precar which isn’t an uncommon word in Romanian, he didn’t know what I meant. But he’s already paid me for today’s session and now plans to have two lessons a week, so he should be OK.

Last night my student gave me the happy news that she’d passed her driving test at her first attempt, having only started learning about three months ago. She told me she still feels uncomfortable driving at more than 40 km/h. Getting a licence at that stage of the game would have been unthinkable for me. It took me ages to get mine (at my third attempt, not counting the test that was postponed because of snow). British tests were bloody hard. Atypical of young men, I was low on confidence and unmotivated to get my licence until I really needed to. Running and insuring a car in the UK was ridiculously expensive, even back then. I then moved to New Zealand where I would have been utterly screwed if I’d been unable to drive.

In one of my weird dreams, a song started playing. Heck, what is that song? Ah yes, it’s one of those songs that I voted for to be the UK’s Eurovision entry, a very long time ago, by calling an 0898 number. It might have been ’93 or ’94. It’s amazing what your mind can dredge up in a dream. Yesterday I found it on YouTube – it’s Lover Come In, a beautiful non-Eurovision-y song written and performed by Brendan Faye, a Liverpool folk singer. It just missed out on being Britain’s 1991 entry (even earlier than I thought), coming second to some forgettable poppy crap that came in the middle of the pack on Eurovision night. Had Faye’s song been nominated, it could well have won the whole shebang, and I’d be hearing it now on Romanian radio 30 years later. (Eurovision is big here, for some reason.) I wonder what happened to him.

The MicroMillions series has started on Poker Stars. It’s a series of small buy-in tournaments with big fields in a wide variety of games. I plan to play two of these tournaments tonight.

Coronavirus - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

Keeping my distance and some old Romanian

October 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

This afternoon’s lesson with the young couple was a no-go after their son got sick, then tennis got washed out, so I finally got round to watching the 2011 film Contagion on Netflix. It wasn’t in the same league as Station Eleven, the brilliant pandemic-based book that I read 18 months before Covid, but it would have been instructive had I seen it in the early days of our real-life pandemic. Some things were strikingly similar. In the film, Forsythia was touted as a miracle cure on social media, just like ivermectin is right now, at the expense of vaccines that really do save lives. There were bats and what looked like wet markets. There was much talk of R-rates. There was someone complaining that spring and summer had been stolen from her, just like people have done in real life. (I found spring 2020 to be blissful.) An interesting idea in the film was a Vietnam War-style vaccine lottery where people get the jab earlier or later depending on what day of the year they’re born. Actually, it would be an utterly crazy idea when you think about it for five seconds, but it does make the assumption that the population would be desperate to get their hands on the stuff.

Daily Covid deaths in Romania are hovering around 300. This morning on the news I heard the L-word (in English, while everything else was in Romanian) for the first time during this dreadful third or fourth wave, however you prefer to count these things. I’d be all for a lockdown. The mess we’re in is due to the unvaccinated people, but the rest of us (the minority!) are massively impacted by this too. When hospitals are stretched to this extent, it’s not just Covid that could kill us.

Even though I’m fully jabbed, I’m still keeping the hell away from people. Luckily I can in a way most people can’t. Last night one of my students said he’d been to the gym. It seems utter madness that gyms should be open right now, even if you’ve got your green thingy. This morning I went to an open-air market; mask wearing was universal among shoppers although not among stallholders. I was in and out in 15 minutes. That’s the limit to how exposed I choose to be right now. But most people seem to have a higher bar, even if they’re unjabbed. It’s a far cry from the panic you saw in the early days, when people were elbowing revolving doors and disinfecting surfaces, even though we faced a less contagious variant back then. Of course, 18 months ago we thought that surfaces (or fomites, as they explained in the film) were a major mode of transmission.

In the absence of tennis I thought I’d talk about Domnul Sfâra, the 86-year-old who plays. He’s tiny – he can’t be more than five foot three. In a game I hit the ball directly to him, preferably to his forehand, and plop my serve over. He used to be a teacher, at a university I think, and spent some years in Moscow. He has a number of catchphrases. After sufficient warming up, he says M-am încâlziiit, meaning “I’m warmed up”. (Încâlzit only has one i. I spelt it with three to show that he draws out that final vowel.) If somebody misses an easy shot, he says siguranță prea mare, which seems to mean that they played it too safe, although in reality it’s usually the opposite. At a score of 15-15, he usually says “fifty-fifty”, in English, presumably thinking that’s actually how we say that score. The -teen and -ty numbers cause Romanians no end of confusion (and me too; I often simply can’t tell whether someone’s saying 13 or 30, say, so I repeat it back to them in Romanian). He usually says 0 as nulă, which I’m guessing is an older term for zero, as is commonly used in Romania today. (Nula is the usual term for zero in Serbian, and it seems that Slavic terms have sometimes been replaced by more Latinate words in recent decades. Prispă, meaning porch, has largely been supplanted by the much more boring terasă, for instance.) He also says the number three as tri, as I sometimes hear from old men on the market, instead of the standard trei.) As for “out”, which Romanians have stolen from us, he pronounces that with two syllables, a short ah before launching into a prolonged ooot.

From next week I’ll be having two lessons a week with the twelve-year-old girl instead of just one. She and her mum think I’m doing a good job. It’s nice to get that kind of feedback. She has come on in leaps and bounds since we started 15 months ago.

I’ll probably play some poker tonight. It’s been a mixed bag of late, although I seem to be improving in Omaha hi-lo, which has been something of a nemesis for me. My bankroll is $997.