Language teaching

Will the asteroid hit?

October 31, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

At the moment my days and weeks are passing in a fog of fatigue. Maybe I’m getting old, or more likely, I’m suffering from all the extra screen time. My lessons are now exclusively online. I preferred the face-to-face meetings and all the books and games and props. Now it’s a combination of Skype, Zoom and Google Meet. The latter two allow you to do all sorts of clever stuff; my younger students sometimes excitedly show me the various tricks which I promptly forget. Sometimes I feel like a schoolteacher in the eighties or nineties who struggled with the functions of a VCR. “Yes, miss, I know how to do it!”

My favourite lesson of last week was with a husband and wife whom I last saw nearly a year ago. I had my first lessons with them way back in September 2017. They’re really nice people, and it was a pleasure to see them (virtually, of course) in our three-way Skype meeting. They sat in separate rooms in their new house in Sânandrei, about ten kilometres from Timișoara. I’d always known the wife as Andreea, and was initially confused when she popped up on my screen as Eliza. Not that confused, because Romanians often have two first names which both get significant use. She explained that she’s Andreea to her friends but Eliza at work. She’s not a doolittle in the office, that’s for sure. Her whole day is taken up by answering emails of complaint, usually in English. She showed me a bunch of emails she’d sent that day, and I tried to help her iron out some kinks in her English and generally sound more human and less aggressive and robotic. “Photos unreceived,” she wrote at one point. Unreceived is in that grey area between a word and a non-word. In fact people in these multinational companies communicate all the time in this grey, lifeless, minimalist pseudo-English that would drive me mad. (This did drive me mad when I started working for an insurance company.)

The US election is almost upon us. It’s barely three days away. Biden is a pretty hefty favourite – in the “gold standard” Fivethirtyeight model, Trump has a one-in-ten chance of winning – not much, but it’s a 10% chance of something terrifying. It’s a bit like how I’d feel if there was a 1% chance of a giant asteroid impact in Timișoara. It’s also a bit like how some of us have felt about coronavirus, which Trump has so royally effed up on. I listened to a Fivethirtyeight podcast yesterday, and they said that if Trump wins, we’ve really got to question what any of this means anymore.

New Zealand voted against legalising cannabis in the referendum. The “yes” vote was around 46%, which will probably increase when the special votes come in, but it almost certainly won’t be enough. A missed opportunity, I’d say, and my guess is that if it wasn’t for the Covid-fuelled uncertainty, the result might have been different. I imagine they’ll revisit this in ten or twenty years. Interestingly, the assisted dying bill passed easily, and I would have voted for that too.

Mum has ordered me half a dozen books from Waterstones. Two of them are for my work. The rest are The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (a book about depression – just what we all need right now), The Sixth Extinction (which we’re currently in the middle of), The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel (if it’s anything like the other book of hers I read, it’ll be amazing), and Word Perfect by Susie Dent (she first appeared on Countdown in 1992 and is now a minor celebrity). The books aren’t cheap – they come to just over £100, mainly because of the two work books. Study materials are so damn expensive. It’s always a pleasure to receive these gifts, but it would be nice if at our respective stages in the game I was buying stuff for Mum and not the other way round, and there was a time when I’d order my parents maybe a multifunctional printer or a case of wine. That time was about 2005.

On Thursday I called my aunt on her 73rd birthday. She didn’t want much of a chat. It’s always a bit frustrating talking to her. In our conversations (if you can call them that) you only get faint hints that she might care about what goes on in other people’s lives, and when you get that glimmer, it’s inevitably snuffed out in the very next sentence.

That’ll do for today (Saturday). About to have two lessons, with the bloke in Austria and the woman in Bucharest. And by the way, the mother who was messing me around with dates and times decided to give up on me. No great surprise.

Coronavirus - Language teaching

Sirens

October 26, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

After a sunny week it’s been a dull, miserable weekend. It could be late October in England. Last night our clocks went back, and this morning it dawned on me that I might not have real face-to-face contact with another human being until they go forward again. Five months. Five mostly cold, dark months.

Romania had its first confirmed case of coronavirus on 26th February, eight months ago. It’s already been a long haul. In June we’d almost beaten Covid, in the west of the country at least, but now we’re riddled with the stuff. I live two kilometres from the central hospital and I’m used to hearing ambulance sirens. In that respect, living here has been a continuation of my experience in Wellington where the ambulances screeched around the Basin on the way to the nearby hospital. But yesterday was something else. So many sirens. I even started to hear sirens in between the sirens. In my Skype lesson with the boy in Bucharest I could hear sirens at his end too. It’s all quite anxiety-provoking. Every lunchtime I get the latest Covid update on my phone app, with varying numbers of beeps depending on how bad it is. Six beeps and I know it’s terrible. Since Timișoara entered the “red scenario” on Friday, I’ve also had ear-splitting alerts on my phone, which (as far as I know) are only avoidable if I switch it off.

The red scenario kicked in when we passed three cases per 1000 inhabitants over the last fortnight. Schools are now closed, as are gyms and cinemas. Indoor bars and restaurants will close tomorrow. Why tomorrow? Why wait until after the whole sodding weekend to close them? Utterly barmy. Have the Romanians been getting tips from Boris? Personally I found the lockdown in the spring quite easy to manage, and I wish they’d bring in another one now. Then the numbers will surely come down, and instead of those sirens I’ll just hear the pleasant rattle of the trams.

Last week I managed 31 hours of lessons. Thursday was my busiest day, with five meetings. Two women on Skype in the morning, then rushing around in the afternoon. I had a lesson on Calea Aradului with the eleven-year-old girl, then I raced back home (kind of) on my bike for a two-hour Skype lesson with the boy of thirteen, then I heated up whatever meal I made earlier and wolfed that down in time for my face-to-face meeting with the guy who wants to study in Amsterdam. That face-to-face lesson, in which he told me he’d visited Bali, was probably my last of 2020.

Friday was a funny day. For the second week running the mother of the boy in Bucharest decided to postpone his lesson at the last minute, and only after I texted her a reminder. I asked her, what about 9am on Saturday? No, he’ll be too tired then. What sort of people am I dealing with here? Well, I have a lesson that finishes at 3pm, so how about 3:15? Yes. OK then. Yesterday, after my two other Skype lessons with students in Austria and Bucharest (they both went well), 3:15 rolled around. No sign of the boy or his mum. He showed up on my screen half an hour late, but I still gave him a full 90-minute lesson. It wasn’t as hair-pulling as last week’s session. As the clock ticked round to 5:15, the boy mysteriously disappeared from the screen. His mum called me to say that he’d accidentally knocked a cable out. I took the opportunity to confirm a time for next week’s lesson. She said Friday at five, just like this time, but you understand that sometimes more important things intervene, like yesterday when we were out with friends and couldn’t just leave them and come home. Sorry, that’s not OK, I said. You’re saying that your time is more important than mine, aren’t you, and that really isn’t OK. She didn’t argue with me, and said I was in the right, although I think she was taken aback. I heard an uff, or was it an ooff? I was equally taken aback by how she thought that her “more important interventions” were something I should just accept. That episode left a sour taste in my mouth.

Today has been dark and dismal, but not cold. I got out of the city centre and headed west along the Bega where I could sit on a bench and read my book, and get some respite from the sirens.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand - Photos - Politics

A lot to zinc about (plus some pictures)

October 19, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

This morning I got hold of some zinc to go with my vitamin D. The wintriest-ever winter is on its way, and if I can boost my immune system inexpensively and harmlessly, I should absolutely be doing so.

Last week was quite a big one on the work front. Three new students. One of them is a friend of another student of mine – a Romanian who has lived just outside Birmingham (which is where I studied) for the last three years. I spoke first with her husband whose English was mindblowingly good – practically fluent, with a Brummie accent to boot. Then I had my two sessions with her on Skype – she’s one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. The other new people are Lucian, a bloke of about my age who works for a courier firm, and an 18-year-old guy (I had a rare in-person lesson with him) who wants to study in Amsterdam and needs an IELTS certificate. I’m trying to discourage face-to-face meetings. I had my work cut out with the ten-year-old boy in Bucharest – with no games or fun physical activities at my disposal, 90 minutes is an aeon.

Talking of Birmingham, I’ve been in touch with my university friend who lives in the centre of the city. I mentioned that tri-generational families are quite common in Romania, and there’s generally a fair bit of mixing between different age groups, to the point where the elderly are in danger of catching Covid from their children or grandchildren. He said that (of course) that isn’t the case in the UK outside Asian communities, and when I saw a heat-map chart that showed just how age-sorted Britain now is, I thought, isn’t that sad? (I talk to my parents two or three times a week, and I’m in regular contact with people aged between 10 and 85.) And it’s not just age groups where people are increasingly sorting themselves. Race, income, level of education, how they voted in the EU referendum, you name it. When I saw that chart, I thought it’s no wonder that UK is so fractured right now.

What a contrast between Britain and New Zealand. The UK’s response to Covid has been shambolic, and I can hardly blame Scotland and Wales and Manchester and maybe one or two others for giving central government the middle finger. I couldn’t follow the NZ election because I was working, but shock horror, you properly handle the biggest crisis facing your country in 75 years, you bring in the best scientists, your messaging is clear, you show compassion, and guess what, you’re rewarded in the polls. It’s not that complicated. Labour won the first majority under proportional representation, in the ninth election to be held under that system. Although it was a decisive result, there was a nice balance, with the Greens (climate crisis, hello?) and a resurgent ACT picking up ten seats apiece. It’s great they have a system that allows such balance unlike the US or UK.

I did catch up with my brother. He’d just got back from northern Scotland. He likes long drives, which is just as well. His phone has just about had it, so we struggled to communicate. What? Wh-what? I couldn’t hear a damn thing on the other end. He doesn’t want to spend the money on a replacement phone. His attitude to money has taken a complete one-eighty in recent years; in his twenties he got through more phones than I did hot dinners. Now he’s all into mortgage interest rates and stamp duty and whatnot. I found out that he had a dramatic time up in Scotland – he helped rescue an American destroyer, however the hell you do that.

I had an email reply from my friend from St Ives. She and her husband came to visit me in Romania in 2017. We hired a car and had a wonderful time. She was relieved that I’d finally been in touch for the first time in months, thinking perhaps I’d entered (Covid-induced?) depression. But no, it was a combination of forgetting and lack of news. In truth I haven’t had depression in Romania. Sometimes I’ve felt a bit down, but that pointlessness, that neverending desert, weeks, months, years of it, seems to be in the past.

After work yesterday I went for a longish walk through the parts of town I frequented when I moved here. It was quite nostalgic, which might seem a silly word but I’ve now spent 10% of my life in Timișoara.

No tennis this weekend. Some of the group have been unwell, and I might have given it a miss anyway after what happened with my knee last weekend. One of the guys brings his small dog along; here are some pictures from the tennis court, which isn’t in perfect nick as you can see, as well as a bunch of snaps from yesterday’s walk.

Opposite the old abattoir, just along by the guest house I stayed in, is a park. It’s pretty rough, as is the area as a whole, but I still remember being in this park on my second evening in Timișoara and seeing it packed with all the ping-pong tables being used.

This was a building site four years ago. There are 108 flats in this block, plus Guban, a locally-produced brand of shoes.

Above was once a bakery. You can just about make out the pre-1993 spelling pîine (bread, now spelt pâine).

The slogan above says “A Romania without theft”. We recently had the local elections, and we’ll soon be having parliamentary elections too. This new party, USR (literally the Save Romania Union), is on the rise.

This stone commemorates those who died during the 1989 Revolution.

Above is the Millennium Catholic church, completed in 1901.

This is where renowned writer Petru Sfetca lived.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

A beast

October 13, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

My brother’s in Scotland on heaven knows what exercise. I’ve just tried FaceTiming him, but no luck. Before that, I had two phone calls in quick succession from new students. I’m going to be snowed under with work at this rate. Five lessons scheduled tomorrow. My energy levels are depleted for whatever reason, so that might not be ideal, but at the moment I only have to leave the house twice a week.

Rafael Nadal. What a beast that man is. A ridiculous 13 Roland-Garros titles, and 20 grand slams altogether, tying Federer’s mark. Nadal and Djokovic were only in their fifth game of what was tennis of the highest order, when I left to play my own version of the game. I was a bit bummed honestly, because I could hardly take my eyes off what I was seeing. It took, I think, 46 minutes for Nadal to win the first set 6-0; that must be some kind of record for the longest whitewash set. In the whole match Nadal made 14 unforced errors. Fourteen. Extraordinary stuff. Interestingly, he won by dominating the shorter rallies. I wouldn’t be shocked to see Nadal reach 25 slams.

My tennis was eventful too. Domnul Sfîra wasn’t there. Perhaps he was watching the final. He’s a keen fan of the professional game. I played with the woman against two men, and I played one of the cleanest sets I can remember as we won 6-3, winning all our service games including all three of my partner’s. (By some crazy nonsensical tradition, she serves the first game of every set she plays. Always, always, always.) From memory I made only one unforced error, and I played quite aggressively, especially at the start. In the fourth game one of our opponents, who was serving, got mad. Because it was his first service game of the evening, the “double faults don’t count” rule was in play. He was struggling to get the ball in the service box, and his unusually high rate of lets weren’t helping either. Then I played another set with the same partner, though one of our opponents was different. Again she served the first game, meaning she served two games in a row. This time we weren’t doing so well – I think we were 3-0 down – when I abruptly changed direction to chase a ball, felt a jabbing pain in my knee, and almost keeled over. I decided to leave the game at that point, and maybe I’ll take break next weekend.

There are new rules in place for Timișoara now, as we’ve breached the threshold of 1.5 cases per 1000 inhabitants over a two-week period. Masks are now a must practically anywhere you go. In a recent John Campbell video, he talked about some of the secondary complications, sometimes long-term, of Covid-19. One of the more surprising is derealisation, when you feel that nothing is real, that you’re watching everything on a video. Campbell said he’s had that, and so have I. While playing tennis (more than once), while shopping at Sainsbury’s, and once even in a job interview. It’s scary stuff.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

Selfishness is killing us

October 11, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

On Friday one of my regular students – the one who said that she wanted to get Covid – told me that her husband had tested positive. They and their son have to quarantine for two weeks. She’d also had symptoms including a 39-degree fever. Brilliant. I was very glad I’d told her to stay away last week, but was she carrying the virus when she came here the previous Thursday? I wasn’t feeling 100% myself. Tiredness, lack of energy, the usual stuff. As for wanting to get the virus, she said look at Trump, 30 years older than me and he looks fine now. Where to start? That’s a sample size of one, and Trump has had a cocktail of about eight drugs and procedures including antibody treatment. Good luck getting that in Romania.

The Covid numbers are skyrocketing. (Just look at those graphs.) In a recent video, John Campbell talked about the selfishness of people hopping on planes in the middle of a plague, exercising their “unalienable rights”, as he put it, to go wherever they want whenever they want. It drove me mad to hear my students talk about their travels during the summer. Croatia, Greece, the Black Sea. There’s this, um, virus thingy which you might have heard about. And the jam-packed Black Sea resorts sound ghastly to me, virus or no virus. In the past I’ve gone up to five years without travelling internationally, but you buggers have gone away every year for the last ten. Is it really such a hardship to stay at home just this once? As for people complaining that they can’t get home from their jolly, I have zero sympathy. I think if we could have closed those resorts and basically sealed the borders, we wouldn’t have squandered the progress we made in the spring. But thanks to you selfish bastards, here we are.

I played tennis last night. We started with a typical set-up, me playing with the only woman, while on the other side were the 85-year-old bloke (Domnul Sfîra) and a younger guy. We got to 5-5, and because someone was waiting we played a tie-break which we won 8-6. After that, my memory is a bit hazy. Early in the next set I slipped and fell, and thought I might have torn a ligament in my left knee. I felt quite dizzy, and eventually staggered to the bench. Domnul Sfîra took over for a few games. One of the others had a knee brace so I put that on and gingerly joined the action. I iced my knee when I got home, and though it still hurts if I bend it fully, I should be fine.

So Iga Świątek won the French Open, beating Sofia Kenin comfortably in the end. Świątek was born in 2001 – yes, we now have people born this century winning grand slams. I watched the first eight games – that long eighth game was crucial – before playing tennis myself. I didn’t miss a whole lot; I think Kenin was compromised physically. Świątek played out of this world against Simona Halep and I’m not surprised she lifted the trophy, but heck, she didn’t drop a set the whole tournament, and every one of her seven matches was 6-something, 6-something. Amazing stuff. I thought she might suffer from stage fright in the final, but not a bit of it. She took home €1.6 million – less than Ashleigh Barty received last year, pre-Covid, but still a very hefty hourly rate. The most fascinating thing on both the men’s and women’s side has been the number of surprise packages that the tournament has thrown up.

I’m playing tennis again this evening, so I’ll miss most of the men’s final between Nadal and Djoković too. I have a habit of missing big tennis matches while playing tennis. The 1996 men’s Wimbledon final springs to mind. For me, the match of the tournament (so far – who knows what today’s final could produce) is the quarter-final between Dominic Thiem and Diego Schwartzman. What I saw was spellbinding. The drop shots (that’s been the shot of the tournament) and table-tennis-style retrievals by Schwartzman were out of this world. I’d just seen a crazy-long game – 15 minutes at least – in the second set, before giving back-to-back lessons for three hours, and the match was still going on after that. Predictably, Nadal was a bit too good for Schwartzman in the semi-final. The other semi was a fun match in the end, Tsitsipas coming back from two sets and match point down to force a fifth against Djoković. Tsitsipas seems mentally stronger now, and a real contender.

Teaching pronunciation when we’re both wearing masks isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and neither is teaching kids online. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Travel: Europe

Onboarding some more students

September 19, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

Soon I’ll have my ninth lesson in two days. That’s getting back to pre-apocalyptic levels. Not every day, or pair of days, is like this, but the direction of travel is positive and I really can’t overstate the difference a steady volume of work makes to me. It’s hugely uplifting. There’s a new bloke who lives in Brașov, and after a few lessons with the upper-beginner-level woman from the north of the country, I’ve now started with her younger sister who lives in Spain. She’s at a much higher level than her sister – a 7 or 8 on my 0-to-10 scale.

Earlier this week I had a large Zoom meeting with members of the body corporate, to discuss the sale of our apartment block. I’m still always amazed by how quickly seemingly normal people switch into meetingese and really weird cadences. There are reasons FOR that. Oh yes. Next you’ll be telling me that my bags must be placed IN the overhead locker OR under the seat in front of me. We were told how many people had signed the agreement to this point in time, and there was discussion of onboarding those who still haven’t signed. The airline parallels kept coming back. But it wasn’t a bad meeting – everybody present had signed, or onboarded themselves, so the tension was gone. In fact there are now only three non-signers, and only one definite “no”, so they’ve decided to push on with the sale. It’s now officially on the market.

I had a good chat with my parents this morning, in between lessons. Mum reiterated that she doesn’t expect us to meet before 2022. We talked about our family holidays. Dad sent me a picture of me and my brother in Belgium in 1987, at a campsite with two similar-aged girls we met. That was a good holiday. I remember getting up at 2am so we could take the ferry from Felixstowe to Zeebrugge, a six-hour trip. The company was Townsend Thoresen; one of their ferries had sunk earlier that year on the same route, after someone had forgotten to close the bow doors, and there were a lot of fatalities. We travelled around the French-speaking Ardennes region, staying first at a campsite in a place called De Haan, before moving to the place where the picture was taken, alongside the Meuse river. The river had recently flooded the campsite which was still wet in places, and I wore wellies in the photo. The other family had a caravan and drove a Peugeot 504; we just had our extremely heavy old tent, and Dad drove the Mazda 626 they’d bought less than a year earlier. We visited Waterloo, Ypres, and Passchendaele where hundreds of New Zealanders had died. I remember having a tooth out while I was in Belgium, and finding 15 francs under my pillow in the morning.

Coronavirus cases have taken a sudden upward swing, as they have in much of Europe. (See my graphs.) Things could still get extremely ugly here. It was sobering to talk to my new student based in Spain this morning. Overwhelmed hospitals. Palpable fear everywhere. Economic carnage in the big cities that will take many years to recover from. I don’t think they ever fully got over the economic crisis that started in 2008.

In the last few days I’ve been listening to Manchester Orchestra, an American band. This Youtube video (nearly nine minutes) is quite magical. Imagine creating something like that.

Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Politics

Missing NZ (and more US election talk)

September 9, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

The guy in Austria just cancelled his lesson 45 minutes before we were due to start. No sorry or anything. He’s a nice bloke and we have productive lessons, but when it comes to reliability he’s becoming a pain in the butt. The lessons with the woman in the north of Romania – we have two a week – are going well. My Romanian has improved to a point where I can handle beginner students, even online.

I spoke to Mum and Dad yesterday. They were about to head off to Moeraki for three days. I miss them a lot. I even miss the journey down there from Geraldine, through Oamaru and perhaps a stop at Kakanui, seeing penguins and seals, going to the pub there, and maybe getting fish and chips in Hampden or on the way back. It would be great to visit Central Otago again. I went there with my parents in 2014 – it’s quite a magical part of the country. Mum says we’re unlikely to meet before 2022, no matter what side of the world that happens to be.

Yesterday Dad said that America could enter a civil war if Trump is re-elected. Crunch time is approaching. Every poll of the country or a swing state is being met with delight or despair from the sorts of people who follow these things. And then there’s the geeky (but important) analysis. Is it a partisan poll? What is the margin of error? Does the pollster weight for education? (This was a big problem in 2016. Educated people are more likely to respond to polls. They are also more likely to vote Democratic. Four years ago, most pollsters didn’t take this into account, so their samples were skewed a couple of points to the left of the nation.) Yesterday a Florida poll showing Trump and Biden tied 48-48 got a lot of attention. Florida is a huge state. It has bucketloads of electoral votes (29) and tends to march to the beat of its own weird drum. The large Cuban population tend to lean Republican. It’ll be one of the first states to report on election night, so we’ll get a good idea of how the election will pan out (perhaps days or weeks later) by watching the Florida returns. Pennsylvania (20 votes) is also of massive importance.

It’s totally crazy that states allocate all their electoral votes to the winner, no matter how close the vote is. (See Florida – again – in 2000.) Or, at least, 48 states do. The two exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, where two votes are given to the statewide winner, and one to the winner of each congressional district, of which Maine has two and Nebraska three. This could be crucial in one of Nebraska’s congressional districts, centred on Omaha, the biggest city. It’s much more Democratic than the state as a whole, and there are non-crazy scenarios where that single electoral vote could put the Dems over the top, 270-268. (Although if it’s that close, prepare for court cases and frankly dangerous behaviour from Trump.) As for Omaha, there’s a lovely song by Counting Crows called Omaha. Released in the mid-nineties, it evokes a simpler time.

There’s plenty of Brexit news again. The government are just being extremely irresponsible now. There’s not much else to say, except for I didn’t vote for this.

We’re having beautiful, and quite hot, weather. There’s a string of temperatures in the low 30s stretching out as far as the forecast goes.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

What do you say?

September 1, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

This morning one of my students called me to say he won’t be coming to our lesson tomorrow because his 64-year-old father had died of a heart attack. His parents live in the country and his father was out doing heavy physical work in the blazing sun. Yeesh. What do you say when somebody’s father dies so suddenly at a too-young age? He says he’ll be back to see me on 22nd September, but seriously, just when you’re up to it again.

Just last night I happened to be reading about Romania’s low life expectancy relative to other EU countries, especially among men, and especially in the countryside where people are poorer and have less access to healthcare. For a man born in 1956 in rural Romania, 64 is probably about average. Heart disease is the number one killer.

I had a good lesson this morning. My student couldn’t get the sound on Zoom to work, so we made do with WhatsApp. She got the present simple. To be in all its forms, and the positive forms of all other verbs. She’s got that first brick in the often-flimsy verb wall in place. After that we played Taboo and she added half a dozen words to her vocabulary. I happily extended the lesson to make up for all the faff at the start. Our next session will be on Wednesday. (I’m grateful for the 7:30 starts which are forcing me to get up earlier and helping me structure my day.)

My parents keep me updated on the Kiwi coronavirus situation, and I keep telling them that Romania is getting about as many cases daily as New Zealand has had in total. Tomorrow Romanian restaurants and cafés are opening up again inside. You can count me out, thank you very much.

In the last six months, coronavirus has shone a 500-megawatt spotlight on Western society in 2020, and not in a good way. The misinformation, the politicisation, the tribalism, the selfishness, the entitlement, the steaming pile of shit that is social media – it’s hard not to feel extremely pessimistic. I was just reading an article about Marseille’s anti-mask, anti-science, anti-Paris warrior – he’s all over social media, potentially killing the city’s residents with his advice, but they don’t care because he’s on their team. No country is immune from this nihilism, not even New Zealand who are perhaps the nearest thing to it.

In New Zealand, they seem to have good scientists who people (by and large) respect. One of these is Siouxsie Wiles, infectious disease expert. Judging by her long curly pink hair, she’s probably ever so slightly mad, but she’s done no end of good during the pandemic. As I said about Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in another post, mad does not have to be evil; most of the time mad is good.

Yesterday, as I heard the strains of Por Una Cabeza and Vara la Țară from the buskers on a scorching late-summer day, I thought of how much time I’d spent alone this summer, even more than usual. The odd face-to-face lesson, the occasional drink with Bogdan, a few games of tennis, and that’s been just about it.

Last week I spoke to my brother – it was great to see him in such an upbeat mood. The UK Covid situation seemed to have dragged him down, even if he was managing fine from a practical perspective – but being back at work has given him a much-needed boost.

A pigeon has just laid an egg in a ledge outside my laundry.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

No going back

August 30, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

Right at the end of August, we’re hitting the mid-30s. Hot, soporific weather. At the same time, people in the UK are firing up their central heating.

This summer I’ve been eating a healthy diet. Tons of fruit and vege, mostly from the local produce market – the best market – and very little processed food. And I’ve been exercising more. Those 26 km round trips on my bike to Sânmihaiu Român – where I can read a book in the park and listen to the birds – are helping me shift some of my burtă (tummy). I’d like to get below 75 kilos. I’ve also ordered some second-hand clothes from Ebay – smarter stuff but stuff that’s still me.

It’s six months since the Covid freak-out started – did people even call it Covid then? – and two-thirds of the year is now in the rear-view mirror. It’s therefore just four months until the Brexit transition period expires. I really really hope all my pre-Brexit papers can be converted and I can stay here. Timișoara has been life-changing for me. Timișoara is my life now. Then if the Wellington sale goes through I can maybe look at buying a place here with a dedicated space for teaching, setting up an actual business, getting myself a car, and really building something. Perhaps – who knows? – even a relationship.

I had a busy first half of last week, and it’s amazing what that did to my mood. On Monday I started online lessons with a 41-year-old woman who lives in a place called Negrești Oaș near Baia Mare (which I visited in 2017). She’s at a fairly low level – no more than 3 on my 0-to-10 scale – and WhatsApp lessons with her were no easy task. Tomorrow we’ll be switching to Zoom. Without an easy way of sharing documents, we’re both pretty much hamstrung.

At the market on Wednesday I was still thinking about the world I used to live in. The ego-driven meetings, the desk moves, the restructures, the pretending to care, the slinking into the background to cope, the barrenness of each day, the futility of it all. How could I go back to that? For any sum of money? (And in 2011, I did go back after a much shorter time away, and the money was good, but I was like a fish out of water.) Now I get the sights and smells and sounds of the markets and the grandmothers and Simon Says and the Formula 1 game and the handmade cards and it’s all more real, more raw, more colourful, more mad. If I went back I doubt I’d even survive.

So much is going on in America, and very little of it is good. Fires in California, a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast, a man shot seven times in the back and the dreadful aftermath of all that. And of course Covid-19, which is still killing about 1000 a day. The official death toll will likely hit 200,000 in the middle of next month. With all of this, and Trump’s failure to even acknowledge most of that, the vile man still has a shot at re-election. I found an free-to-enter online prediction game, open to anyone with a Twitter account (I have one, even though I hate social media), where the organiser has stumped up prizes for the top three predictors. I picked a very narrow electoral college victory for Trump combined with roughly a three-point popular vote win for Biden. I very much hope I’m wrong.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Photos

Scary times

August 23, 2020

by plutoman 0 Comments

As case numbers have flattened, and perhaps started to trend downwards, I’ve been thinking back to March and how scary things were back then. During the second week of March, when both the Cheltenham Festival and Champions League football were allowed to take place in front of packed crowds, it was like watching a tsunami. By this stage it was already total mayhem in northern Italy, with hundreds dying every day. That weekend I went away to the mountains and I felt sheer panic, which was made worse by everybody around me carrying on regardless. As we drove there you could see queues forming outside supermarkets. Would there be food on the shelves when we got back? It was beautiful there but I could never relax. I disconnected from the news, but one of the others got a message that a state of emergency had been declared. What does that mean? On the way back I read about Italians singing traditional songs from balconies as a way of boosting morale amid the carnage, and I thought, in two weeks, or maybe three, that will be us. It was one heck of a relief to get back. Then the next morning I just about camped outside the supermarket before it opened.

We never reached anything like the level of transmission seen in northern Italy or New York. Our lockdown, which came in the nick of time, probably saved many thousands of lives. And luckily we don’t have the density of population or amount of travel that parts of the US or western Europe have. Things aren’t exactly great in Romania now, with more than 1000 new cases a day, and because we weren’t hit very hard initially, there isn’t much immunity in the population. About 98% are still susceptible. But at least we know much more now about how the virus spreads. In my last post I neglected to mention that a reason for Africa’s lower rate of severe Covid disease must be people’s exposure to other bugs and viruses.

I didn’t have a great start to yesterday. I had a no-show from my Skype student, who (in his messages) didn’t get that a no-show might be a slight problem for me. It’s clear that he thinks I’m a tap that he can turn on and off when he feels like it. I sent him a couple of what you might call passive-aggressive texts in reply, immediately regretting that, and wondering if I’d lose him completely, but he now says he wants to meet today, so that’s a relief. In a similar vein, I never saw the woman with whom I had the car-crash lesson last Boxing Day. Until last week, when she dropped by to pick up a book. She told me she’d changed her job, moving to a competitor coffee-machine-making company after being in the same place for 17 years.

I might buy a new bike later today, and I’ll post some pictures if I do. But until then, here are some pictures of Timișoara (where else, right now?):