Language teaching

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Bikeless, and the joys of tennis

April 12, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a bit of a surprise on Wednesday, just after I wrote my last blog post. My bike was no more. It had been nicked. It was locked to the banister leading to the basement – not in my flat where the fumes from the glue on one of the tyres made me sick – but no matter, my cheap bike was gone. After that I walked many, many miles, to Decathlon (50 minutes’ walk from here), the police station (45 minutes; almost certainly a waste of time, but I got to practise my Romanian there) and the market at Mehala (45 minutes). Add all those times together, then double that. I didn’t find a suitable bike at either Decathlon or the market, which is where I picked up both that bike and my previous one. So I’m bikeless, which is a pain. I’m also pretty tired; I played a fair few sets of tennis over the weekend.

We’ve had a lovely weekend of spring weather, but after another fine day forecast for tomorrow, it’s predicted to turn to custard (as they say in Shangri-La) in a big way. I played tennis on both days, and today was really quite wonderful. In a flashback to pre-smartphone world, people on the sidelines were watching other people play, commenting, applauding. Bravo, Viorica. It was like being back at Belmont, circa oh-five. Somebody was following a handball game on his phone, but that’s OK. I played my first set for several months with Petrică. Last year he wanted to hit any and every ball; he was a pain to play with, honestly. Since then he’s had Covid, and he definitely isn’t the same man. In today’s set I took more than my share of shots. I served the first game, which we won after seven deuces. We then proceeded to lose the set 6-1, without ever getting to deuce again. I didn’t exactly set the world alight with my play either; I hit so many forehands out over the baseline. As it happened, that marathon first game wasn’t the longest I was involved in. In a mixed set, my partner served a game that went ten deuces, plus or minus one. The highlight of the early evening might have been Domnul Sfâra, who is probably 86 now. He just watched; it was great to see him again.

On Thursday morning I got some encouragement from my 13-year-old student. To illustrate a key difference between English and Romanian, I gave him an example of a Romanian sentence, adding “I hope I’ve got that right”. He said that of course it’s right, and I definitely shouldn’t be worrying about my Romanian. That was nice coming from him; I expect someone of that age to be more honest than somebody older.

Poker. I’ve been struggling to play much, but I got in four tournaments today. The first was Omaha hi-lo. I had a reasonable run but was out in 52nd, with the top 35 paying. Next was single draw (well, they overlapped). I was fortunate to chip up as I called my opponent’s shove with a nut draw and hit my monster to beat his strong hand. Then, very briefly, I had a big stack. I lost almost half of it when my 50th-best hand clashed with my opponent’s 49th, then soon after I made a terrible fold. Against the same aggressive opponent and with a bounty in play it was just awful. I thought I was dead and buried (and deservedly so) after that, but I got a reprieve when someone seemed to misread their hand. I made the final table where I was out in sixth. Pot-limit badugi next (again they overlapped), a less dramatic tournament but a similar result as I finished seventh. A bit disappointing not to hit one of the top prizes, but those little wins come in handy. After tennis I tried a tiny-buy-in satellite to tonight’s Omaha hi-lo SCOOP. I doubled up on only the second hand as I flopped quad kings, but it was all downhill from there. Having a maniac on my left most of the time didn’t help. My bankroll is $484.

Coronavirus - Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker

Our only way out

March 29, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had no side effects at all from my much-maligned (totally unfairly) Covid jab. A slightly sore arm for a day, and that was it. I know others haven’t been quite so lucky, but c’mon people, get the damn vaccine. It’s our only chance of getting out of this.

My conversations with Mum and Dad revolve around when, where and how we can meet again. It’s already been ages, to the point where I’m struggling to piece together the timeline of what has happened since. I do know the dates, but my whole concept of time has been warped. Dad’s cancer, my trip to Bosnia, a few months which passed for normal, then Covid, the new normal. A little over two calendar years, but what’s that in lockdown years?

Today I felt quite angry. We could have eradicated this virus by now, but modern society – greed, entitlement, selfishness – hasn’t allowed us to. All over the world, apart from New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea and one or two others, the wrong kinds of politicians have made the wrong kinds of decisions, and they still are.

Last week was my biggest for work in a while, with 36 hours of lessons, plus all the putting together of worksheets and what have you. When I’m locked down, I’m happy to take all the work I can get. Yesterday I had that 90-minute session with the young couple who are learning English from scratch, and it’s quite tiring having to speak a weird mixture of Romanian and English. One of the very nice kids I teach said he’ll be off to Egypt in a few weeks with his parents. Seriously, right now you can shove your pyramids up your arse. The bloke in the UK gave me a one-hour Youtube video of Romanian stand-up comedy to watch. That’s got to be one of the hardest things to understand in a foreign language. Shushushu zhuzhuzhu dududu. Ha ha ha ha ha! Um, I don’t get it, Toma.

Poker. I haven’t had much joy since I last reported. On Thursday I paid the price for my terrible passivity in a pot-limit badugi tournament. I was really kicking myself for failing to shovel chips into the pot. Today I had a similar spot and played much more aggressively. I got knocked out, but did the right thing I’m sure. My biggest problem continues to be how little I can play. My bankroll is $464.

Coronavirus - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker

Face-to-face? Are you kidding? And Romanian Commentary 13

March 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Someone’s just called me asking for a lesson on behalf of her husband. I managed to find a space in my diary on Thursday evening, and I was all set to pencil it in, but then she asked for my address. Er, Skype? Zoom? No, your actual physical address. We want face-to-face here. Fa-fa-face-to-face? No! No no no no no. Not until at least mid-April, three weeks after my first jab. I’m guessing these people might not be all that into jabs and stuff.

I’m starting to beef up my work volume again. Last week I got 30½ hours, and this week should easily surpass that (but you never know; sometimes it just rains cancellations). Some of my lessons are dead easy and don’t remotely feel like work, but others are a test of mettle. I recently started with a married couple who have a nine-letter, seven-vowel surname, and they want to learn from scratch. Hello, how are you, my name is, would you like a vowel? I have to speak a lot of Romanian in these lessons, and although I get by, I still make mistakes and get tongue-tied. For instance, last weekend I couldn’t say “he likes to run” correctly in Romanian. Sounds a simple sentence, doesn’t it? The verb to run is a alerga in Romanian (well, there’s also a fugi, but that’s more like “to run away”). Here’s how you conjugate a alerga in the present:

eu alerg – I run
tu alergi – you run
el/ea aleargă – he/she/it runs (notice the extra a before the r)
noi alergăm – we run
voi alergați – you run (more than one person)
ei/ele aleargă – they run

That’s great, but with sentences such as “he likes to run” we need to use the subjunctive, and for the third person (he/she/it or they) this is different from the normal form of the verb. The form I needed was alerge, not aleargă. The full correct sentence is Îi place să alerge. (The first word of that sentence, if you’re wondering, is an i with a hat followed by an i without a hat.)

By contrast, the very common verb a merge means to go, and it’s conjugated like this in the present:

eu merg – I go
tu mergi – you go
el/ea merge – he/she/it goes
noi mergem – we go
voi mergeți – you go (more than one person)
ei/ele merg – they go

If I wanted to say “he likes to go”, I’d once again need the subjunctive, and this time it would be Îi place să meargă. So the subjunctive ending of “to go” is just like the normal ending of “to run”, and vice-versa. I understand this, but I still get tripped up from time to time.

Another problem I have is stress. Not that kind of stress, but the way words are accented. Just like in English, it isn’t always obvious which part of a word gets the emphasis. I managed to confuse a kid this morning when I said “martor” (meaning “witness”) with the stress at the end, when it should be at the beginning. Unless it’s a word I use a lot, I often find myself guessing.

Poker. My biggest problem is how little I’m able to play. I haven’t run very hot since I last posted. In one tournament my laptop crashed five times – hopefully I’ve solved that problem. My bankroll is $470.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Poker

A shot in the arm

March 19, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

To my surprise I’ve managed to book myself a Covid jab. That’s exciting, honestly. I’ll be getting it bright and early next Wednesday morning – I never expected it would be so soon – and yes, it’ll be the Astra Zeneca vaccine. My second jab will be eight weeks later. I’m not counting any chickens until I actually get the needle in my arm, because there’s still a chance Romania will suspend the AZ vaccine like about half of Europe has done so far, crazily if you ask me. One of my students didn’t react well to his first AZ jab, and in the meantime he’s picked up Covid, which he says is far less severe than his reaction to the vaccine. We then did some exercises from a book produced by Oxford University Press. These are the same guys who concocted your awful vaccine; I hope you don’t mind. Everyone has become a vaccine expert – a vaxpert? – seemingly overnight. In Romania the numbers continue to climb.

Mum and Dad are now official owners of property number five. It would be nice if they could offload their big place, and until then they won’t be able to relax. I look back at my grandparents and think how much simpler their lives were, and I dunno, are all these extra complications really worth it? When I spoke to them yesterday, there was a lot of excitement about the America’s Cup, which had completely passed me by. It’s not a sporting event that’s ever captivated me, with the one exception of the time we went to New Zealand in the summer of 1986-87 and the Kiwi boat KZ7 was racing against an American crew to the sounds of Rod Stewart’s I Am Sailing. Both KZ7 and Rod Stewart were national obsessions then.

My aunt called me on Sunday. We chatted for half an hour; we rarely make it that far. She talked about my brother’s ex-fiancée and what a bullet he dodged there. Then she admitted that she had a drink problem. That’s a start, but like her other problems, she’s never seriously tried to solve it.

I’ve had some great feedback from my lessons in the past week or so, and that does make me feel good. In two recent lessons I’ve had that lovely feeling of seeing someone “get it”: the difference between for and since, or when to use the present continuous instead of the present simple. Last night someone said he’d learnt as much in that one session as he would expect in five. One of my advanced-level students enjoys the variety of listening, speaking, reading and grammar activities we cover.

Poker. On Monday evening I made a quick $25 from a cash game (nice), then decided I’d play a bounty tournament which started at 9:42. Normally it kicks off at 10:42, but the clocks had gone forward in the US. I was lesson-free the next morning, so I thought I’d give it a go. Big mistake. I was finally eliminated at 2:08 in the morning, finishing third for a $28 profit. As almost always, I did a bad job of collecting bounties. It’s not like I didn’t try. With four left, I got it all in as a 57% favourite with the short stack who had a hefty $20 bounty. My hand didn’t hold up, someone else soon got his bounty instead of me, and I was out almost immediately afterwards. The next day I was a complete wreck and had a terrible headache. I just can’t do late nights anymore; I’m getting old. My bankroll is now $489.

The crappy weather continues. This morning’s sleet turned to rain which hasn’t let up all day.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - New Zealand - Poker

Tough times ten years apart

February 28, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My friend from Birmingham emailed me yesterday to say that he’d just seen his mother (who lives in the same city) for the first time in months, all masked up and physically distanced. No hugs. His father died about seven years ago. That must be hard. My parents live on the other side of the world so seeing each other is hard enough, virus or no virus, but when your mum is just there… I have been toying with the idea of a trip to virtually virus-free New Zealand. (NZ likes to be free of things. GE-free, pest-free, predator-free, smoke-free.) I’d have to quarantine for two weeks, but I could work in isolation.

The numbers are going back up in Romania, no doubt about it. The more contagious UK variant is, slowly but surely, becoming the dominant one. The weather is rapidly improving – we’ve had glorious days that have felt like May – but we could be in for a spring just like in 2020, under national lockdown. Unlike the UK, Romania is employing a two-jab strategy, so while 600,000 Romanians have now received both shots of the vaccine, most people are still fully exposed. (Anybody who has only just had their first dose is fully susceptible, too.)

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the deadly Christchurch earthquake; 22/2/11. I was still living in Auckland then. Three weeks earlier I’d had an interview in Wellington for the job that I didn’t want. I was going through a bout of depression, though the previous evening I’d managed to play tennis. (Yes, tennis night was Monday. From memory I lost my singles but won the doubles.) I was in Devonport library when I heard the news, and a couple of hours later my boss at the insurance broker’s on Queen Street called me to ask if I wanted my old job back. I’d worked on claims for the first Christchurch quake until December. Yes, please! I was back there the next morning. A meaningful job with no bullshit (especially in such circumstances). I had a relaxing ten-minute ferry journey each way. Then in another three weeks they offered me the Wellington job, and with much (justified) trepidation I took it.

On Thursday I had one of those rare car-crash lessons. It was my first lesson with a woman who said she knew no English whatsoever. The charger port on my laptop had broken, and no matter which way I wedged the cable in the socket, it wouldn’t charge. I used some very good materials from the Lingoda site, but had to explain them in Romanian (with difficulty) while being distracted by watching the battery level drop like a stone. My laptop was about to die so I resorted to using my phone, and I must have seemed rather unprofessional. I’ve since managed to make a connection again – I daren’t move my laptop a millimetre from its current spot on my desk – and I hope I can get it fixed on Monday. Hopefully my new student hasn’t already given up on me.

Four more poker tournaments today. The first one (Omaha hi-lo) lasted barely ten minutes. A crazy five-way all-in on the flop, I had good equity, but none of it materialised. Then single draw, which came to an abrupt halt when my good hand was outdrawn. Then pot-limit badugi. I made a very fast start, then went card dead, then kept sticking around until I was the short stack with only three remaining out of 100 entries. I survived some hairy moments and eventually eliminated one of the other players for a useful bounty. (Makes a change.) I didn’t last too long heads-up, but I made a $48 profit for finishing second. This evening I played the limit badugi and chipped up well, but when my big pat hand got outdrawn in a monster four-way pot, that was pretty much that, and I fell four places short of the money. I’ve made a couple of hundred this month; my bankroll is $353.

We were supposed to restart tennis today, but someone decided to call it off because it was too windy. Too windy?! You gotta be joking. In Wellington, that would have been a joke.

I no longer own a property. I do however own a meaningful sum of money, finally.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

Not interested

February 1, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Friday was a tricky day. I met my student in the Botanic Park so she could pay me for two weeks’ lessons. I’ve mentioned this woman before on this blog several times. We’ve now had 177 lessons in which English has been second and therapy first. She flirted with me and yet again asked me personal questions about my mental health and illegal drug use (of which there is none, sadly). She’s married (he’s a dick, but makes good money) and has a teenage son, whom I also teach. Whatever she wants, I’m not in the least bit interested. She’s become a pain in the arse. When I see her online on Tuesday I’ll make it clear that any more of that rubbish and it’s game over. No more meetings with either her or her son (which would be a shame – he’s turned into quite an accomplished English speaker during our 108 lessons, and all the computer games he plays have helped too).

Also on Friday I got a surprise letter from the immigration office, written in OK-ish English, saying that yes I can apply for residency because I was registered here prior to Brexit kicking in. I just need to come armed with all the necessary documents. Excellent. But there’s nothing to say what the documents are. So very Romanian. An employment contract? A marriage certificate?! I’m sure I’ll sort it out, and crucially they’ve given me until the end of the year to get everything in place.

It’s been a funny weekend. Bright sunshine yesterday, tipping it down today. I had a good lesson with a different teenage boy this morning – we watched more of the series on the Challenger disaster on Netflix, and got to the end of a long (but very good) grammar book.

I played six poker tournaments over the weekend. They were brutal, every one of them, including the only one I cashed in. So much crashing and burning and colliding with other people’s big hands at just the wrong time. In one of the tournaments (triple draw, which is insanely swingy at the best of times), it felt like being slapped over the head repeatedly with a stinking wet fish for two hours. Imagine doing this stuff as a job, where the stakes are much, much higher. (My ex-student who said he played professionally described it as extremely stressful.) My bankroll is exactly the $152 I began the month with. Yes, even for the month, but it feels far worse.

I’ve changed my preferred well for filling up my water bottles. The water from the Central Park well started to have a brown sediment, maybe caused by the snow. The one in the rose garden, which I went to today, seems to be sediment-free.

I’ve got a new student starting tomorrow, my first in a while.

Update: I’ve just been on the phone to ANZ, to set up a new account for the proceeds of the apartment sale to go into. The guy had to read out a disclaimer statement. As he read it I was thinking, here comes the word, any second now… Ombudsman! Yes! There it goes, what a fantastic word. It’s fun to say, isn’t it?

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :)

Know-alls and have-alls

January 27, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Windows 10 is starting to infuriate me. When it wakes up from sleep mode, I find that all my programs have shut down. I can’t work like this. I’ve googled things and tweaked a few settings, but I bet it’ll make no difference.

There’s one problem, if problem is the right word, that I keep running into in my lessons. The Man (and it usually is a man) Who Knows Everything. Who knows what he wants and how to get it. I find these people offputting, and my usual motivation to help them isn’t quite there, partly because I feel unable to help them anyway. They also seem to have everything. They’re already winning. What motivation is there to help one of life’s winners to win by even more? The poker guy, who has disappeared from the scene, was a bit like that. The super-smart 18-year-old who I saw on Saturday is like that. Lessons with him are never easy. This time I went through some expressions like “money for old rope” and “kick the bucket”. The rest of the time he told me about the world of gaming and anime that he inhabits. When I asked him whether he was a risk-taker, he said he played gacha, so obviously yes. Umm, what’s gacha when it’s at home? A kind of Japanese toy vending machine, from what I can tell, that he must play in a virtual form. It didn’t occur to him that I might not know what what the hell he was talking about.

On Friday I had a lesson with the 31-year-old guy who lives on the outskirts of London. He and his wife moved there from Bucharest almost three years ago, and they have an 18-month-old son whose little brother or sister is on the way. They’d just put an offer in for a house. The first one they looked at. Nearly £600,000. As you do when you’ve come from Romania. Heaven knows where their money has come from. I’m thinking he might not need me either.

This all reminds me of the maths tuition I did in Auckland in 2010. It was an eye-opener to see the insides of the houses where these teenagers lived. I’m supposed to get excited about pushing your privileged Oliver or Olivia from Excellence to Excellence Plus, am I? They weren’t all like that, of course, and the exceptions were where most of my motivation lay. Here, so far, the Men Who Know and Have Everything are the exceptions, and long may that remain so.

On Sunday I had a session with the 13-year-old boy who lives in Dumbrăvița, which is joined on to Timișoara, and is currently in lockdown for the second time since the autumn. Here in Timișoara we’ve been lockdown-free since May. The prevalence of Covid in Dumbrăvița has been consistently higher than here, and I think I know why. By Romanian standards, Dumbrăvița is rich. I’ve heard that it’s Romania’s second-richest suburb. It’s all BMWs and Audis, with the occasional Porsche and even a Maserati thrown in. When you go to Dumbrăvița it’s mostly dead. They’re all jet-setting and doing business deals just like this boy’s dad does in Hong Kong. They’re highly economically active. Most of Romania isn’t like that at all, and that’s why (I reckon) Covid hasn’t quite been the disaster in Romania (yet) that it’s been in western Europe.

The Covid situation in the UK is still dreadful. More than 1600 deaths have been reported today; the overall death toll is now in six figures. My brother, whose optimism has evaporated, said we might all be facing lockdowns for the rest of our lives. His wife had her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine last week. In Romania we now have five cases of the UK variant. If that takes over – and why won’t it? – we really will be in deep doo-doo here.

It was a huge relief to see Joe Biden’s inauguration go off without a hitch, after what happened two weeks earlier. President Biden. Sounds great. The near-octogenarian has his work cut out but I’m sure he’ll give it a damn good go. I’ve now been in Romania for three US presidents and six Romanian prime ministers.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos - Poker

A few pics (and a spot of poker)

December 30, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s currently a ridiculous 12 degrees on the penultimate day of a crazy year, and the fourth anniversary of the day I moved into this flat. I remember that day well. All I had was a suitcase, a backpack, and a view. It was like a dream. I could have ended up anywhere but I’m slap-bang in the middle of this beautiful city. That’s mad. And then the next day the square was absolutely heaving. New Year is (under normal circumstances) a big deal here.

I’ve had a big last quarter of 2020 on the work front. A third of my hours this year have come since 1st October. To put that another way, my daily volume over the last three months has been 50% higher, on average, than in the first nine months. Yesterday I had five sessions (8½ hours) and felt I could have done better. I’d run out of things to do; I was winging it. Since I moved exclusively online, where there are fewer tools at my disposal, winging it has been a more prominent feature. One of my sessions was with the ex-professional poker player; he pointed me towards a database you can use to scout out fish in PokerStars hold ’em games.

Yes, poker. On Monday night I made $24 from a badugi tournament. I came fifth out of more than 100 players, surviving for 3¾ hours. It’s funny getting back into that again. The adrenalin rush of hitting a big hand or calling a big bluff. People made more moves than I remember a decade ago, or maybe they did then too and I just didn’t notice. I’m a better watcher of the game than back in the old days. My demise, or almost, came when I was dealt the 41st best hand in the game (which is better than it sounds), but my opponent made the 39th. That left me almost chipless, and two hands later I was out. After a couple of other cashes (and some non-cashes, of course), my bankroll is $97, which gives me just enough of a buffer to play the cash games. My goal isn’t really to make money (though that would be nice), but to enjoy the game and play a whole lot less robotically than I feel I used to.

When I called my parents last night, Dad had gone to Temuka to get his blood checked, so I was able to have a good chat with Mum. As long as we avoid all talk of Dad’s health, we get on extremely well. It will be a long time before I hug her again.

Here are some pictures of Timișoara (where else?):

Central Park, 20/11/20
This is Serbian. “Who is the fastest in the city?”
Some old maps of Timișoara Fortress
Gearing up for the “Romania without masks” protest.
Christmas dinner
Language teaching - Life :)

Hope I can spin and stay

December 17, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I went to the immigration office this morning after my lesson, but I didn’t get very far. There were five people in a queue, inches apart from each other. They wore masks, and the entrance door was open so ventilation was good, but I might have been there for hours. Time is so often the real killer. So I turned round and went home. I wanted to ask what exactly I need to do to ensure I can stay in Romania after the end of the Brexit transition period, but as I was basically expecting a don’t know, I decided it wasn’t worth it. I’ve had no luck emailing them or phoning them.

The Covid numbers are coming down here, but aggravatingly slowly, and they could easily shoot back up again after Christmas. If everyone was like me, staying out of everyone else’s way as much as practically possible, we’d now have a handful of cases every day, not a handful of thousands. It’s frustrating. But the fact that most people aren’t at all like me, for better or worse, is something I came to terms with ages ago.

They’re making the UK (or should I say England) Covid rules up as they go on, and I’m glad I’m here and not there. My student in Barcelona told me that things are stricter in Spain; you can’t move freely between say Barcelona and Madrid. But you can still happily get on a plane! Her boyfriend’s family are from Peru, and he’s flying there for Christmas. First to Amsterdam, then 12½ hours to Lima. You need a mask and a plastic visor and a negative Covid test and this and that, but just ugh.

During last night’s lesson there was a march to the cathedral steps for the anniversary of the Revolution that kicked off in Timișoara on 16th December 1989. “Libertate!” “Mai bine mort decât comunist!” I gave my student (who’s 38 and at least remembers the fall of communism even if he was too young to understand the whats and whys) a bit of a running commentary. Talking to Romanians about communism never ceases to be fascinating. Then we went through his translation of a difficult article from Romanian into English, before doing some work on prepositions, which are a minefield in both languages. For instance, I just got an alert in Romanian to say that Emmanuel Macron had tested positive for coronavirus. But the Romanian said “cu coronavirus” which usually corresponds to with in English.

I finally bit the bullet and deposited $40 on PokerStars. What’s it like these days, I wondered, ten years after I played regularly. I had to open a new account under their Romanian licence. The name “plutoman” was already taken, and adding numbers to the end looked kind of meh, but luckily they allow special characters, so taking a leaf out of Marc Bolan’s book I stuck an umlaut on the o: “plutöman”. (Not to mention Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, and a whöle bünch of others.)

Things have changed for sure. They’ve tried to Roulettify things a bit, to attract new players. The new big thing is the Spin & Go, a quick-as-a-flash three-person hold ’em tournament with a random prize for the winner. Most of the time the winner will only get back double the buy-in, but occasionally it’ll be bigger, and very very occasionally it’ll be in the thousands, even for a buy-in of a dollar or less. When you make your first deposit, they drip-feed you some free low-value Spin & Go tickets over a period of a few days. When you fire up one of these things, wheels spin like on a fruit machine (or the pokies, to go all Aussie or Kiwi) to tell you what the prize will be, then you start playing. It’s best to play maniacally. Anything half-decent and go all in. I spun the wheel four times yesterday. Once I got lucky and the prize (for a 50-cent stake) was $5. Despite playing atrociously on one hand when we were heads-up, I lucked out and claimed the five bucks. In another game I shoved with A-10 on the very first hand, both the other players went all in too, and I won, but the prize was only a $1 ticket. The other two times I bombed out. I can see how the little wins you get, and the sheer speed that everything happens, would make this format like crack for some people, but I’ll stay away once I run out of tickets.

No more health news from Dad. He’s had his 18-month check-up but hasn’t had the result yet. I hope he can get the blood in his urine (which is painless, and probably caused by his prostate) checked out ASAP.

It’s a lovely winter’s day here.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Why didn’t he tell me?

December 9, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

The busker outside has just been playing La Fereastra Ta (“At Your Window”), an early-eighties hit by Cluj band Semnal M. I remember hearing it when I listened to Romanian radio online in the months before coming here, and trying to make sense of the lyrics. In my letterbox I’ve just had a note telling me I have to pick up a small package from the post office. I was hoping it would be the books Mum ordered for me, but I think that because it’s “small” it’ll be the CD I ordered off Ebay: Mwng from Welsh band Super Furry Animals. The whole album is in Welsh. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. (I also bought one or two items of clothing on Ebay, but they seem to have vanished into thin air.) Talking of music, the Kinks song Apeman came on the radio a few days ago. A great song which expresses how I feel about 21st-century life, even though it came out fifty years ago. Leave modern life behind and massively simplify everything. In some ways, that’s what I’ve done. A funny thing though – they bleeped out the first word of “fogging up my eyes”. It does sound suspiciously like “fucking”, but in reality it isn’t, and at any rate I’ve heard expletive-laden songs in English on the radio here which have been left uncensored.

Romania’s parliamentary elections have produced a split decision. The PSD (clear winners last time) are the biggest party again, but with a far smaller vote share this time, and it looks like they’ll be locked out of a coalition. The forward-thinking USR-plus (who were in third place, and may form part of government along with PNL who finished second) came top in Timișoara. There’s also a new party on the scene called AUR (which means “gold”); they’re anti-lockdown, anti-mask, and anti even thinking Covid is real. AUR got 9%, nearly twice the threshold for entering parliament, in a shock result. My student last night said they only did so well because of their shiny name. Turnout was abysmal, even considering the pandemic: only about a third showed up. And we’re currently rudderless. Ludovic Orban, the latest prime minister in a long line of them since I washed up in Romania, has quit. We still have a president, though.

After my two tricky lessons last night, finishing at 10:15, it was a great pleasure to talk to the woman who lives near Barcelona this morning. The woman I saw last night at seven is always so vacant. The lights are on but nobody’s home. What am I doing wrong? Help me! When I gave up on grammar exercises and asked her about her Christmas plans, she mercifully turned her dimmer switch up a notch or two. Then it was the poker guy with a big-stack ego. He’s so bloody good and knowledgeable about everything and loves saying so. I had 90 nauseating minutes of that. (Apart from those two students, everybody else I have is great, so I can’t complain.) The woman in Spain told me she didn’t like weddings. Join the club, I said. (Except my brother’s.) I bet loads of people don’t like weddings but don’t dare admit it.

I’ve been scouring statistics about verb tenses. (That’s the present perfect continuous.) There are twelve tenses in English, and I’ve been teaching them, concentrating on what I think are the most important ones. In speaking, more than half our verbs are in the simple present. (Not the present continuous, which some Romanians use continuously. That’s far less common.) About 20% of what we say is in the past simple. When we write a story, we’re generally writing about the past, so the percentages tend to flip. In my last blog post, which included an account of a tennis match, roughly 60% of what I wrote was in the past simple. All the stats I saw online confirmed what I thought. Five tenses are important enough to warrant serious study, including the problematic present perfect. Another three are useful once you’re at a pretty decent level. As for the remaining four (like the past perfect continuous – “I had been waiting at the station all day”), you can get by perfectly fine without them.

I spoke to my brother last night. They were in the middle of laying their parquet flooring. Eleven hundred strips of wood, each requiring two screws. It looked like painstaking work. My sister-in-law should get a shot of Pfizer any minute. I recently had a strange dream about my brother, although he wasn’t actually there. No, he’d gone to the moon (!) and Mum was naturally worried about him. Why didn’t he tell me?!