Language teaching

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Tennis

Amid all the gloom, I’m more bullish on the flat thing

October 3, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a rather depressing week. HMS Romania is sinking and the deckchairs are being rearranged as I write this. On Friday there was yet another fire in a Covid ward, this time in Constanța, killing seven. Smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, sprinklers, they’re practically a foreign concept here. The hospital’s fire safety certificate probably took some backhanders to get. (I spoke to my sister-in-law on Friday night, and she was incredulous that people actually died in a hospital fire. For the third time in a year.) As for Covid itself, nobody knows what you can and can’t do anymore, except that we now have the green pass which allows vaxed people to get into places that the unvaxed can’t, although I bet the “border checks” are pretty damn porous in places. I thought that tennis would be a no-go this weekend, but I got a call on Friday to say that I could play as long as I had my green pass. So yesterday I turn up at four, I show my green pass to the woman in the hut, and I’m good to go. Then Ionuț turns up, and hang on a sec, you haven’t been jabbed, have you? In fact I seem to remember you being vehemently anti. Hmmm, I bet he slips the woman a few extra lei and he gets to play. Fifty-fifty chance at a minimum. This is Romania. But no, sorry mate, no green pass, see you later. He didn’t complain, and a minute later he was off in his car.

The average daily death toll from Covid in Romania is nearing 200, and set to go much higher. How could it not when vaccination rates are so low and our restrictions are so watered down? In January I naively thought the pandemic would be just about over by now. I didn’t see Delta coming and I stupidly thought that people would jump at the first opportunity to get vaccinated just like I did. I mean, why wouldn’t you? The last six months have been a massive eye-opener.

I got a lot more enthusiastic about buying a flat last week. The agent sent me some pictures, and you know what, these are nice. Good locations too, outside the ultra-modern areas that might send me into a mental tailspin. Some of them were even fully furnished. They’re pricier certainly than the one I looked at two weeks ago, but I might just have to fork out the money. It’s money I have, after all. It’s been hard to tee up any viewings because of how things work (or don’t) here, pandemic or not, but hopefully I can see two or three in the coming week. I’ve got to do this.

I ended up getting into an argument with my parents this morning. Jacinda Ardern is now doing a pretty terrible job apparently, because of race relations. That’s Priority A to them, especially Mum. And everybody else in New Zealand thinks so too! Aha! There you go! I’m not saying that their concerns don’t matter, because they do, but from my vantage point New Zealand has far bigger problems than that, ones that affect people day to day. Number one is surely that it’s too expensive. How do you buy your first home? Maybe you simply don’t. But that’s hardly a problem my parents face, nor the people Mum talks to at the Geraldine golf club or her church coffee group. My point was that it’s dangerous to assume that everybody’s priorities are the same as yours, especially if 80% of the population don’t even live on the same island, and you rarely meet anyone under sixty. I remember my super-intelligent friend from university being almost certain that Remain would win the EU referendum by a mile because everyone he knew thought Brexit was a dumb idea. Same thing. “Everyone he knew” was a tiny cross-section. In 2014 I remember a colleague being shocked that National won the NZ election because “nobody voted for them”. Talking of 2014, John Key’s “hermit kingdom” comments were ridiculous. God, that “NZ Inc.” backdrop. I remember one of the CEOs I worked under (the only one who was a complete arse) used to go on about “En Zed Inc”, which I found nauseating.

Work hasn’t been bad, though I wouldn’t mind one or two more students. (A lockdown would help.) I had a whole hour with that seven-year-old girl. (Or perhaps more accurately, she had a whole hour with me.) She got through my exercises on numbers and colours and farm animals faster than I expected. Twenty minutes left. Now what? Some conversation, but it was hard. I’m hoping we have two half-hour sessions this week instead; an hour is a long time for someone of that age.

Sunny day today, with more Ionuț-free tennis (poor chap) in store for this afternoon.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker - Politics - Tennis

How exciting!

September 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My uncle – another one – is celebrating his 80th birthday today. He and my aunt visited Timișoara after coming to the UK for my brother’s wedding. A retired (or semi-retired) farmer, he still does a ton of physical work. The idea of slowing down is alien to him. I guess he’s been lucky – he’s lived ten years longer than either his older or younger brother, who both died of cancer. Ten years ago I went to his previous big birthday bash – in the middle of the rugby World Cup, and we watched the All Blacks’ first match against France. Israel Dagg (what a name) was probably man of the match. The world has spun off in an altogether darker direction since then.

Mum and Dad are now in their new place. It was weird seeing them on FaceTime with the new backdrop. So much wood everywhere, including on the ceilings. Dad described parts of the new house as “horrendous” and in dire need of renovation, but his horrendous is my kind of meh. I would just about kill to have their new place, as long as I could transport it out of Geraldine. Just before the definitive move, they had a horrendous day where their lawnmower broke down and my uncle’s (birthday boy’s) trailer, which Dad had borrowed, also needed expensive repairs.

I need to move away from this flat but I don’t want to. That’s the situation I’m in. Again, I’m having flashbacks to 2011, although then I didn’t actually need to move. It’s just that society had told me that someone of my age should buy a property – you’re a failure if you don’t – and my job, which gave me the licence to buy, was a ticking time bomb. And yeah, I thought it might actually make financial sense. But there was no excitement then, and neither is there now. The phrase “How exciting!”, as it relates to buying property, drives me mad. My biggest worry with this move is that it could kill my mental health, which has been so much better ever since I moved to Romania.

Last Monday I did have a look at a place in the Bucovina area, near where I once had lessons. The agent led me up to the fourth – and top – floor of a Ceaușescu-era block. Pinned to the walls of the staircase, bizarrely, were pictures of islands and beach resorts with golden sand and deep blue sea. It was something you might have seen in a prison cell. At the flat I was greeted by an elderly couple who had lived there for 35 years, and a very yappy dog. Everything in the flat had a seventies or eighties feel about it. There was even an old typewriter. The flat was easily big enough, but it would have needed serious work. I mean, it would have been OK for me, but potential students would have found it a turn-off. No lift either (again, I would have coped), and perhaps the biggest minus was a lack of any sort of view.

Then on Thursday I tried to visit some agents. This isn’t like New Zealand or the UK; they’re not really interested in dealing with the public. The first place had an intercom system which nobody answered. They didn’t answer their phone either. Fantastic. Just round the corner was another agency, located in a modern fourth-floor office. It was the same company that I rented this place from when I arrived. A woman took down my details and we had a chat. She told me that the young employee who had just two lessons from me in 2016, but honestly changed my life by tipping me off about the flat I’m in now, had left the company to train as a psychologist. I told her about some of the areas I liked, then inevitably she started peddling brand new apartments in the south of the city. I’ve been to that area, and nothing is more than five years old. I’d worry that living there, even if it might be good for business, would leave me depressed. Maybe not, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

What else? There’s a Hungarian festival on in the city, perhaps the last thing that’ll be “on” before the plug is pulled. Last night we had country music at Piața Operei and there was even a re-enactment of a battle. They’re selling various bits and bobs, Csiki Sör beer, and overpriced food.

I played singles tennis last night, again with that super-fit near-60-year-old. We only booked the court for an hour, and at the end I was up 6-4, 4-2. I lost the first three games. The first game went 16 points but was almost devoid of rallies. In the third game I had a break point, and hit a shot I thought he might struggle to return, but he ripped a cross-court forehand that was out of the top drawer, and the next two points slipped from my grasp too. It was all happening too damn fast. I made sure I had a good sit-down before coming up to serve. The games had been close, and there was no reason why I couldn’t come back. It was overall a good game with plenty of winners from both of us, although he lost concentration in the middle.

Poker. Back-to-back second places, and big comebacks, on Friday, though I made such bad starts to both tournaments that I couldn’t get many of those damn bounties. After blanking all three of last night’s attempts, my bankroll is $979.

Work. It’s OK but I could do with more of it. (Someone called me wanting only face-to-face lessons. Um, there’s like this thing on the news that you might have seen.) Thursday was a good day, however. One boy in particular has come on so far in his English since I started with him that it blows me away. He’s gone from a kid who knew a few words and didn’t say boo to a goose to an intelligent teenager who has a bloody good command of English. It’s so pleasing to see.

Justin Trudeau has been re-elected prime minister of Canada despite his party losing the popular vote. Their system isn’t nearly as awful as the US one (stupid amounts of money, stupidly long campaign, stupid everything basically) but it still ain’t great. The Germans are going to the polls right now.

Boris Johnson resorted to his schoolboy Franglais shtick again last week. “Prenez un grip”, “donnez-moi un break”. Mildly amusing to an Englishman for whom mumbling pointless French phrases for five years was an iconic part of his upbringing, but it would have fallen flat elsewhere.

It might just be me, but I can’t see how we’ll ever escape from the environmental mess we’re in. Humans are just terrible at dealing with problems that happen incrementally over periods of time greater than a lifetime. We still think we can consume our way out of this. We can’t.

Sorry for making this post so long.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Tennis

Making myself move

September 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been on the phone, and I should finally get to look at a couple of apartments on Monday. I need to do this, but motivating myself hasn’t been easy. It’s scary, honestly, and anyway I’m quite happy being slap-bang in the centre of town. While Covid is still ravaging the country it hardly matters that my apartment isn’t ideal for face-to-face teaching or that the cheap-as-chips furniture is on the verge of falling apart. The two I’m interested in are both in a similar area of the city, near a park. If I bought either of them, I’d still have over half the proceeds left from my Wellington apartment, so maybe I could look at buying a rental too.

On Wednesday I started lessons with a seven-year-old girl who lives on the outskirts of Stuttgart. She was born in Germany and speaks both German and Romanian. (By their standards, they’re getting cheap lessons out of me.) With someone that young, it’s never easy, especially online. I mean, keeping your arse on the chair is a skill at that age. In a trial lesson, I only did half an hour with her. I showed her a picture full of stars of various colours. How many blue stars are there? What other colours can you see? When there were still the purple and orange stars to count, I asked her: “Are there any more colours, or gata?” (Gata means “that’s all”.) “Gata,” she happily proclaimed. Her father called me back yesterday to say that yes, she wants to carry on.

The US Open finals. When you think you’ve seen everything in sport, Emma Răducanu goes and rips up the history books. She came from nowhere to win 20 straight sets, one of the greatest prizes in the sport, and $2.5 million. I didn’t stay up and watch her final with Leylah Fernandez but kind of wish I had. Djoković then had his chance to rewrite history too, but he was surprisingly overpowered and outclassed by Daniil Medvedev who hardly put a foot wrong until the last few games. Djoković was flat, and Medvedev, who moved so well for such a big guy (six foot six), took full advantage. The Serb had taken many more hours than his opponent to reach the final and it showed. He might also have been better off skipping Tokyo, where the heat got to him. Still, the crowd, who didn’t know to shut up when a player is about to serve, nearly allowed Djoković back in it. I was glad that Medvedev closed it out in three sets.

Sir Clive Sinclair, of calculator, computer and electric vehicle fame, died yesterday. He was something of a hero where I grew up, not far from Cambridge. There was a Sinclair factory just down the road, and every man and his dog got hold of a Sinclair calculator, which took a 9-volt battery, in the seventies. I think my father still has his, with its blinking red digits. This must have been the second version; the first iteration was famous among maths geeks because if you tried to divide by zero it would actually attempt the calculation and go mad. For a short time (I was maybe seven) we borrowed one of his Spectrum ZX81 computers with rubber keys and that badass rainbow logo. I remember getting it to spit out increasing powers of two, and playing a game called Manic Miner on our second-hand TV; this involved hooking up a cassette player which made weird noises as the game loaded. Clive Sinclair was clearly a clever bugger. I remember seeing him on Late Night Poker, a UK-based poker tournament with hole-card cameras, in the summer of ’99. That was the first time I’d heard of Texas hold ’em.

As for my poker, I’ve managed to get nowhere in my last nine tournaments, and I’m essentially even for the month, with a bankroll of $933.

Mum and Dad are about to move. They keep digging things up of mine, or occasionally my brother’s. This morning Mum asked me if I wanted to keep a nineties-era Wallace and Gromit figure which once contained shower gel. In the end I said yes. They’re now looking forward to finally moving out, although Dad will probably miss their home of 17 years.

The virus is ripping through Romania now, as I knew it would. There was never any doubt. While temperatures remain high and the sun is shining it doesn’t feel too bad, but when we’re surrounded by autumnal fog and the ambulances are blaring every other minute, life will take on the stark metallic grey hue that it did last October, but perhaps even bleaker.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

I’m not a therapist

August 31, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had my 225th two-hour lesson – or should I say therapy session – with a woman who is becoming a giant pain in the arse. I would love her to go away. I have lessons with her son too, and those are highly productive, in complete contrast to anything I have with her. It amazes me how bright and well adjusted he is, considering both his parents are messed up in their own different ways.

Last Thursday I had a lesson with a guy in Brașov; these lessons are always productive and a pleasure. We spent the second half of the session on phrases to use at restaurants. One of these was “the hamburgers are off”, meaning “we’re out of hamburgers”. (Confusingly, we also use “off” to say that food has gone bad.) He said that if he was told that the hamburgers were off, he’d tell them to damn well turn them on then.

Having a bike again is a massive help. It speeds up my life, gives me more options. On Sunday I made a trip to Sânmihaiu Român, for the first time in ages, and got back just before the downpour. The rain totally wiped out the weekend’s tennis.

Poker. Well it hasn’t been that easy to play of late (see next paragraph) but I’ve had a good, or should I say lucky, August. My bankroll is $930, up $226 on the start of the month.

My laptop has been repeatedly crashing. Endless blue screens. CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED. Doesn’t sound good, does it? DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE hardly gave me warm fuzzy feelings either. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Not less or equal?! Why not just say it’s more, for crying out loud? But more than what? Why be cryptic and meaningless at the same time? At UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION, the fourth blue screen error, I noticed my hard drive was pretty chocka so I dumped a load of my photos onto flash drives, thinking that might help, but it didn’t. Yesterday morning I took my laptop into the repair shop, and they told me I’d need to reinstall Windows 10. It crashed again the moment I switched it on when I came home; it gave me that crap about not less or equal. At that point I gingerly reinstalled Windows 10, and since then, touch wood, it hasn’t crashed. I rely on my laptop for everything. Without it I can’t do my job, it’s that simple.

Last night I talked to one of my students (mid-forties) about this general malaise that seems to have set in around the world, or the western world at least. From a collective standpoint, what’s there to look forward to anymore? What’s the new, big, positive change on the horizon? In the early nineties the Soviet Union broke up, Europe opened its borders, and the internet age began. Greater peace and prosperity, we all hoped. What have we got now? He said he was excited about the prospect of computers becoming more intelligent than humans and starting to dominate us. That doesn’t excite me, that’s for sure.

I was going to write the last part of my trip report, but I’ll tackle that in a separate post.

Language teaching - Travel: Romania

I’m not crap at everything (Warning: long post)

July 16, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night we had a thunderstorm, and that should take the edge off the oppressively hot weather we’ve experienced lately. I’m now getting ready for my trip, booking this, planning that. I’ve just booked two nights at a guest house in Gura Humorului, a small town which has a famous 16th-century monastery. One of my students, a really nice guy, thought I was positively mad when I told him about my 15-hour-plus train journey to Iași. (I’m saying plus from experience.) “Couldn’t you find a flight?” Flight? Everyone’s got to be bloody flying everywhere. I never even considered flying; for the purposes of this trip, slow is good.

I often wonder how I ended up here, washed up in some place nobody’s heard of. (As much as I’d like my brother to visit if and when Covid is over, I can imagine what he might say. What are you doing in this shithole? Come back to St Ives. I can hear his voice now.) I like it here, of course. My mind tends to focus on all the big, important, life-defining things that I’m rubbish at. It’s a pretty long list. I’m crap at building relationships. I’m crap at working, or even being, with groups of people. I’m crap at being with any people for an extended period of time. I’m often crap at motivating myself. I’m often crap at organisation. In the past, my memory and concentration would turn to crap as a result of all the other crap, and what ever job I happened to have at the time, which generally made me feel like crap anyway, became a steaming pile of crap and I’d have no choice but to get the crap out of there. Then I’d move on to another job, and a couple of years later the same crappy thing would eventually happen, and so on. Regarding my lack of motivation over the last 10 to 15 years, I wonder how much has been caused my parents’ affluence, as bizarre as that might sound. I’m sure it has been a demotivator to know that, short of winning the lottery, I’m taking a giant leap backwards relative to their position regardless of what I do, because of all the other stuff I’m crap at, and that (along with the crap with my apartment in Wellington which is now mercifully over) perhaps gave me the impetus to cut the crap and come to Romania.

But I’m not crap at everything. Giving thousands of English lessons to more than a hundred people has made me realise that I’m actually half-decent at a few things that are come in pretty handy in my job. First of all, I can spell. I pride myself on being a good speller, and I kick myself when I get a word wrong (as I did in a recent email!). When I was twelve, in the pre-spell-check era, Dad got me to correct his spelling (which, at the time, was atrocious) for a book he was writing. I can’t watch footage of a spelling bee, a tradition that goes back to the 1800s in the US, without thinking, damn, why didn’t we have these in the UK? I might have won something. Alas, I was hopeless at football and not a whole lot better at cricket. Spelling bees certainly were a thing in small-town New Zealand in the late eighties. When I went to school in Temuka, a girl from the top class did well in what must have been the South Canterbury regional bee. It was all over the Timaru Herald and I remember thinking, how cool is that? As a bit of a joke, our teacher tested us (a class of nine-year-olds, about three years younger than the spellers in the bee) on a bunch of words that had come up; most of them were impossibly hard. A girl and I tied for the highest score; we got barely a third of the words correct.

On a similar theme, I can look up a word in a paper dictionary in somewhere between five and ten seconds. That’s because I’ve had lots of practice. My parents bought me a dictionary as a Christmas present one time, and I was immediately fascinated by it. The best thing about it was the IPA (pronunciation) transcriptions; I quickly became fluent in the sounds that make up English. Of course, it’s 2021 and we have no end of excellent online dictionaries as well as Google Translate (boo!), so I could get by perfectly well without being a fast dictionary looker-upper, or even being able to spell all that well, but they’re extra weapons I have in my arsenal. Another is an ability to read upside down almost as well as I can read the right way up, and that’s surprisingly handy. I could do that from an early age. I loved the Mr Men books, and I remember that Mr Impossible could read upside down. Hey, I can do that too. It’s handy because my face-to-face lessons are often literally face-to-face. In the last few years I’ve often found myself in a less-than-ideal cramped kitchen or bedroom where I’m opposite my student. I once managed to impress a twelve-year-old boy by reading a paragraph in Romanian upside down. Occasionally I’ve even written words upside down in lessons, but that skill still needs some work.

So I possess some skills that are mostly useless in 99% of jobs in the 2020s, but what else do I have? Well, I’m reasonably creative. I’ve made a bunch of games and exercises that have kept my students engaged, and they have a manual, tactile quality to them that appeals, especially to the little ones. It’s nice to have a job that allows creativity, after having that beaten out of me during all those years in the office. Follow the process, don’t ask questions, and you’ll make life easier for yourself. Talking of kids, I’ve had more lessons with kids than I expected when I took this giant leap into the dark, and I’m better at teaching them than I thought I’d be. I can be quite animated, and I play games like Simon Says which they find fun, and it’s exciting to teach someone with a long future, a world of possibilities, still in front of them. (Whenever we do Simon Says, or Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, I think to myself, this is mad. Totally mad. And awesome. I was supposed to be a bloody actuary, wasn’t I?)

I’m also better at thinking on my feet than I expected I’d be. It’s a skill I didn’t really have when I started out, but I’ve picked it up along the way. It just comes down to experience, drawing on what I’ve done before. For instance, last night I did a lesson on ordering food at a restaurant, and I pretended to order for a table of six. Sometimes my lesson plans go out the window. I can tell my student is tired or has had a tough day, and last thing he or she wants is to learn the conditional forms. Or they might tell me that they’ve got a job interview, in English, the very next morning.

Another important skill I’ve partly picked up is being able to communicate in Romanian. With kids it’s vital – they didn’t ask for a strange man to enter their territory and start babbling away to them in a foreign language – so being able to speak Romanian goes some way towards winning their trust. But with anybody it’s extremely useful. I constantly get asked what the word for x is. And very importantly, it helps me understand why Romanians say what they do in English. Please open the lights.

Finally, my most important skill, dwarfing any of the word-play stuff, is being personable, tolerant, and flexible. I sometimes fail here – I have little time for hyper-arrogant people or, right now, anti-vaxers (who intersect with hyper-arrogant people) – but I take pleasure in teaching people from all walks of life.

That’ll do. Apologies for making this so long.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

Anti-vax: just don’t go there

June 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

At 2pm on Monday I felt awful. I Skyped the boy whose anti-vax mother had given up lessons with me, but no reply. I tried again. Still nothing. Oh god, she’s pulled him out of lessons with me too, without even telling me. What a shame. He’s a nice kid, his English never ceases to impress me, and we’ve now had 70-odd very productive lessons. Then at 2:10 he came on the line. His school lessons are all over the place as a result of the pandemic, so he was a bit late. What a relief. Yesterday I had a first – I’ve done plenty of interview practice, but I hadn’t had a student give a phone interview in English during a lesson. It was a short but tough interview, with unexpected questions, mostly about her experience with the English language. The interviewer didn’t do a great job, honestly. When my student asked her to repeat a question, she repeated it at the same speed. The icebreaker – “Tell me about yourself” – came almost at the end. I hope my student doesn’t lose confidence after that.

At tennis on Saturday I met a guy who was convinced that the vaccines were useless and didn’t believe that mass vaccination was our way out of this mess. Me, my wife, my two daughters, we ain’t gettin’ no stinkin’ jabs. (They happily involve their kids in this lunacy too.) Last night I had a lesson with a woman who is getting married later this summer. She’s had both doses. The government’s policy is to severely limit attendance at weddings and baptisms unless guests have been vaccinated. Sounds great to me. But she’s having to uninvite dozens of her relatives and so-called friends who would prefer to miss her wedding than get the jabs. So I don’t go mad, I’ll avoid the subject from now on, unless the other person brings it up. It just isn’t worth it. Plus I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt. If someone’s anti, I’d rather not know.

So why is Romania awash with these buggers? The UK’s initial response to the pandemic was lamentable, but the vaccine rollout and take-up have been impressive. Demand is continuing to outstrip supply. New Zealand is struggling to get hold of the vaccines, but I’m confident that over 85% of the population, perhaps over 90%, will get jabbed when they can. That should be enough for herd immunity. Western European countries made a slow start (mainly because the EU did such a crappy job at the beginning) but they’re getting their act together now. But in Romania we’re currently at about 25% and stalling. It comes down to education (or the anti-education that platforms like Facebook give you), wealth (poorer people travel less, so have less personal incentive to get vaccinated), and civil duty. In the UK, to refuse the vaccine is to opt out of being a decent citizen. In NZ it will be the same, I’m sure. But not so here. If anything, the social pressure in Romania goes the other way, especially outside the main cities. Get jabbed and you’re seen as someone who can’t think for yourself. Easily taken in by government propaganda. Naive. A sheep. Romania’s low turnouts in general elections – usually around 40% – again demonstrate a lack of civil duty.

When I’ve had a the chance (not very often) I’ve been keeping an eye on the French Open. There have been some wonderful women’s matches in the last couple of days. I managed to catch most of Barbora Krejcikova’s topsy-turvy win over 17-year-old Coco Gauff after my trip to the market, and now Iga Świątek has her hands full against Maria Sakkari. I expected her to steamroll to victory, but she trails 4-6, 0-2 and is taking a medical time-out.

At the local produce market this morning I bought strawberries, cherries, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes and goat’s cheese.

Poker. Not much has happened since I last wrote. I had a weird badugi tournament last weekend in which I clung on for more than two hours without ever making better than a ten badugi. My bankroll is $714.

Coronavirus - Language teaching

Lost an anti-vax student today

June 1, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

So often in the past few months I’ve bristled at people’s anti-vax stance, and today I just lost it. If you’re an anti-vaxer, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. Your actions are lethal, end of story. You are killing other people. The pro-vax and anti-vax positions do not have equal legitimacy. (She even mentioned her refusal to vaccinate her son, which is disgustingly irresponsible.) And that’s what I told my student in my tenth and last lesson with her today. I won’t go into any more details but it was an hour-long train wreck that I could (maybe) have avoided. Mercifully, it was only an hour. I was amazed when she pointed to a comment I’d made in a previous lesson about Romanians sometimes using English words in conversation because they want to sound sophisticated. She’d been offended by that. Like, how? If you get offended by that, I’m going to have a really hard time saying anything without piercing your tissue-paper-like skin. So that was it. I’m better off without her. I’ve also had lessons with her son, and they’ve always gone well. He has an impressive command of the language. I don’t know if we’ll continue. Pity the boy though. His parents have split up, and his mother seems a bit of an arsehole.

The anti-vax “debate” illustrates why we’d all be better off without social media. The evidence is crystal clear – just imagine where we’d be without mass polio vaccination. But so many people get all their “news” from Facebook that confirms what they want to hear.

It’s been a shitty day all round, really. This guy has been contacting me to help cheat on his English test in real time, and now he wants me to do his homework for him, as part of his stupid, nonsensical English course that won’t help him learn any English, not that he’s in the least bit interested in that. He just wants to pass. This morning I told him, this is not my job, but he insisted. I find him extremely aggravating.

My next lesson is in an hour. It’s with a guy I get on well with. Can’t wait. And Andreescu and Zidansek are at 7-6, 6-7, 7-7 in the first round of the French Open.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Poker

All jabbed up

May 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I got my second shot of Astra Zeneca on Wednesday morning. There were far fewer people there than the first time around. I think a lot of people became skittish about Astra Zeneca in March and April, and now Romanians who have taken Pfizer outnumber the AZ takers by eight to one. Because it was so quiet, I was done and dusted in no time. I entered the building at eight, the needle was in my arm at 8:10 – a young man administered my jab this time – and then at 8:25 my name was called and I could go. It’s always a bit funny having my distinctly English name called among all the Ciobanus and Popescus. They also called me by my middle name rather than my first name; that happens quite often and I don’t mind it – I like my middle name.

I was vaccinated in the youth centre, which is right next to the stadium where Poli Timișoara (the local football team) play, and just across the road from the main hospital. It’s also right next to the outdoor market which is full of local produce and is open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so that was convenient. In the same area is a sports centre with several clay tennis courts, and next to that is an abandoned piece of land which was supposed to be a university building but never happened. I know this because there’s an old peeling sign there, dated February 2000 (I was in my second year of university then). They got as far as putting in the steel rods, but then they presumably ran out of money. Now it’s a wild area, full of trees and birds and the intermittent ribbit of frogs.

After my first jab I didn’t feel any side effects apart from a bit of a sore arm. This time was different. On Wednesday night I shivered in bed so I put on an extra duvet and of course I was soon sweating. I didn’t sleep well. Yesterday evening I had a slight temperature again and suddenly felt very tired. Thankfully I had a good sleep last night and now everything is back to normal. My symptoms were all pretty standard and a good indication that the vaccine was doing its job.

Four more poker tournaments since I last wrote, with little success. On Tuesday I made good starts to all three but could only scrape a min cash in the PLO8. Last night I managed to bust out of the fixed badugi after just 30 hands without winning any of them. That’s a new record. My laptop crashed in the middle, so I didn’t want to rebuy just in case it happened again. My bankroll is $699.

I was able to play last night because my 19-year-old student has decided to give up his lessons with me. Honestly I’m OK with that – he was never the easiest to teach – but I have lost a few people lately and it might be hard to get replacements with summer on the horizon.

The newly renovated Lloyd building in the square
Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

Edging back to normality

May 16, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Slowly but surely, we’re edging back to something resembling BC – before Covid. Today, for the first time in ages, we’re allowed to roam mask-free in open spaces, with the exception of markets, bus stops and the like. I’ll get my second AstraZeneca jab on Wednesday (I’m one of relatively few takers of that in Romania – for most people here it’s Pfizer or nothing) and after that I’ll see about taming the great rodent-like mop on the top of my head.

Today I had my weekly lesson with the young beginner couple. After that I was thinking I’d benefit hugely from daily lessons with beginners. Think of all the Romanian I’d get to speak. I still get confused, as evidenced by the lesson with the eleven-year-old girl on Thursday. She asked me to translate whole sentences, and she could see I was struggling. (She can laugh as me as much as she likes, but if she pronounces “pie” as pee, I’m not really allowed to return the favour. I guess I did laugh when that boy pronounced “yanking” as wanking; I just couldn’t help it.)

I finally got through to my aunt on the phone. She said she’d been suffering from a bout of depression, although she seemed bright when we had our chat. She’s a highly intelligent woman after all. But ever since the nineties, when her husband was still alive, she’s fallen deeper and deeper into a cycle, and has lacked any sort of willpower to try and break it. For me, that was what coming to Romania was all about. I had to do break the cycle, goddammit, or at least try. It’s sad that despite her considerable brainpower, she’s never even sought a way out.

No sign of a buyer yet for my parents’ house in Geraldine, and winter is on its way. Maybe my cousin was right. Who would want to part with bucketloads of cash just to live in Geraldine? Every second time we talk, Mum and Dad go on about Maori issues. I have little to say about the subject, but it seems things have clicked into another gear, and one my parents find uncomfortable, in the time I’ve been away. As an example, look at how Maori, or should I say te reo, now dominates Wellington City Council’s home page. What I would say is that the last thing New Zealand needs is to be a divided country. There’s generally been an impressive lack of division in NZ. That’s mainly why they pretty much kicked Covid into touch. They’d do well to keep it that way.

Poker. I had two goes at that those SCOOP Afterparty thingies this week, and didn’t get very far. I started OK in the PLO8 but I couldn’t flop anything and I made a mess of my bust-out hand. Then in the single draw I was extremely card dead to begin with, and did well to still have 80% of my stack by the first break. I had a bad table draw – regulars, hyper-aggressive players, and even professionals – and I was just gagging for a table move that never came. After the break I made some half-decent hands, and at one point Mason Pye, a young British guy who promotes mixed games on the streaming platform Twitch, moved to our table. He got short and I called his all-in as a slight favourite. If I’d won that hand, maybe I’d have been in business, but I didn’t, I then went card dead again, and the end wasn’t far away. The good news is that I avoided those late nights and I had some time to look through my hand histories and figure out where I might have ballsed up. In my last dozen tournaments I’ve only managed one small cash, but my bankroll can withstand that kind of run and far worse. I’m sitting on $624.

Family - Language teaching - Poker

V-signs

May 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a good chat with my brother earlier today. We talked about his long-running course where he has to teach very scary army stuff and be assessed on his teaching ability, and then we chatted about old family photos. He sent me a picture from the VE Day 50th anniversary celebrations in 1995 (26 years ago yesterday, in fact), with our extended family, including my grandparents who’d been there. We were all giving a victory salute. I think that might have been the first time I got slightly drunk.

Thursday and Friday were a bit of a dead loss because I had heel pain which almost stopped me from walking. My shoes were to blame. I tried icing my heel but in the end I figured I just needed to rest it, and now it seems just about back to normal. I hope I can get back on the tennis court next weekend – the benefits of that are enormous.

Just before Orthodox Easter, a woman rang me asking me if I’d consider teaching at her language school. It sounded like the lesson times at the school would clash with my private lessons, but I thought there’d be no harm in meeting her, so we arranged a meeting. Then she called me to say she was going away for the long weekend, so could we meet on Tuesday, then I never heard back from her. That’s all pretty Romanian. When I arrived here I was offered a job at a language school, only for them to un-offer it to me just before I was due to start. Another very Romanian thing is that the new owners of my apartment said they’ll keep my rent the same until 1st May next year, after which they’ll put it up by 50%. Nothing much, just a slight increase. At least they’ve warned me. So that gives me a deadline to find somewhere else.

I’ve lost some students of late, so I’ve just put up a couple more online ads. I’ve also bumped my prices up, but not by 50%.

Poker. I’m going through a bit of a barren run. When that happens, I feel I don’t know anything anymore. How did I ever win? Last night I tried a new game called Big O, which is Omaha hi-lo with five cards instead of four. I first watched a stream from a live Big O game played in San Antonio last November, a few days after the election. Covid was raging in Texas then. Nine men, including the dealer, were huddled around a table, fingering chips and dollar bills that had been god knows where. OK, they were masked, but I wouldn’t have been within a mile of that table. I felt particularly sorry for the dealer who was just doing his job. I then found out that one of the players, a middle-aged bloke, has since died. I don’t know if it was Covid-related. My first go at Big O didn’t go too well – it played nothing like on the stream (people just wanted to gamble) and I was mostly card dead. In a rare bright spot, I had a decent run (and a small cash) in a standard four-card Omaha hi-lo game this morning. I plan to have a crack at a couple of big-field events in the next week, as part of the so-called SCOOP Afterparty. My bankroll is currently $635.