Language teaching

Family - Language teaching - Other sports

Dad, darts and a damn good student

January 14, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Four lessons today. The last, with Ammar, a new student in his mid-twenties, was the most interesting. Ammar arrived from Syria in 2012. Since then, he’s found a Romanian girlfriend, picked up the local language to a standard I could only dream of, and studied medicine. His English is very good too (on my 0-to-10 scale, I’d put him at an 8) and he now wants to sit the IELTS so he can practise in the UK. He’s altogether a smart guy. His parents live in Malmö in Sweden. We’ll be meeting again on Saturday.

I spoke to Dad last night. He was much better. Maybe his headaches were really one big toothache, though that seems far-fetched. Their visitors were my US-based cousin whom I met on my trip there, and his wife. Dad said he was begging for them to leave. They’d been over for my aunt and uncle’s golden wedding celebration.

The BDO darts final was a good spectacle in a lively atmosphere. Both players were ripping into the treble 20 at the start, Jim Williams went two sets up, and I thought he might power to victory with a three-figure average. The critical moment of the match, looking back, came in the deciding leg of the third set. Wayne Warren needed six. Sounds simple, but it’s awkward. Two, double two? Straight down for double three? He chose the latter option, hit the single, but checked out on single one and double one. Miss that and he would probably have been 3-0 down in sets. Instead it was 2-1 and he could breathe. In the end, Warren’s performance in legs he started was decisive – his throw was never broken after the long intermission at three sets all. That included the 11th and final set where he zoned out at times, and was outscored, but he put all his energy into the legs in which he threw first. The match finished at quarter past midnight my time, so I was happy it didn’t stretch any further. Warren, the winner, is 57. Peter Wright, the winner of the more prestigious PDC title, is a couple of months shy of 50. Suddenly I don’t feel so old.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Lost in the fog

January 13, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a very foggy weekend. The fog lifted for a time yesterday, but otherwise we’ve been blanketed in the stuff. Today is one of those negative days we get relatively often here, where the temperature stays below freezing all day.

This was the beer factory around noon today.

I had a half-hour chat with Mum on FaceTime this morning. I spoke almost exclusively with her because Dad wasn’t in a good state at all. He had a tooth out on Thursday and will now also need a root canal. (What horrible images the mere mention of “root canal” conjures up.) The pain from his extraction kicked in as the anaesthetic wore off, but now he’s also suffering from the severe headaches he’s been plagued with for the last six months. Predictably, Mum’s sympathy level was zero. She told me that at some point today or yesterday they had visitors, Dad didn’t want them to come over, but when they did he seemed to cope reasonably well, so he’s probably fine and it’s all in the mind. The same old selfish bullshit. Dad did show his face for a matter of seconds, then went back to bed. If this continues, they might have to reconsider their plans to come to Europe this summer, in which case I’ll be booking a trip to New Zealand.

The first full week of 2020 was a light one on the work front: only 19½ hours of lessons. While some of my students are probably gone for good, others were on holiday mode and will be back this week. I also started with two new students and have a third beginning tomorrow, so things are looking up. The guy who started yesterday seemed obsessive about IELTS and all things related to CEFR levels. I’ll try to expose him to as much real-life English as I can; just doing IELTS practice tests will only get him so far.

We’ve got the men’s BDO darts final this evening. The whole set-up has been chaotic and unprofessional at times, and the BDO as an organisation look like they’re dying on their feet. Plus the move from the Lakeside, which gave the tournament a pleasant eighties feel, hasn’t helped. But the ramshackle train is about to clatter to its destination, and two Welshmen have made it to the final. Wayne Warren (aged 57, so there’s hope for us all) beat Scott Mitchell 6-3 (a 49-year-old farmer) in the first semi-final. Mitchell led 2-0 but Warren turned it around in a pretty even encounter which could have gone either way; Warren just hit the double more often in those crucial fifth legs. It was a very watchable game. The other semi was closer on the scoreboard – Jim Williams (35) beat his older Belgian opponent Mario Vandenbogaerde (awkward spelling) 6-4 – but it didn’t captivate me in the same way. The play was slower, there were fewer big finishes, and it was getting late for me. They also showed the women’s final where the popular Mikuru Suzuki retained her title. Women’s darts has had a big boost – Fallon Sherrock hit the headlines when she beat two men in a row in last month’s PDC world championships – but the BDO insist on still having a women-only tournament, with insulting “woman-sized” match lengths (first to just two sets, except the final which is first to three).

I’ve just started My Brilliant Friend, the first in a series of four novels by Elena Ferrante. It’s based in a poor part of Naples during the fifties, and is so far a very good read. Dad spent some time in Naples as a boy in the early sixties, and I’ll give the book to him the next time I see him, whenever and wherever that is. I’d like to visit southern Italy one day – I could perhaps take the train to Bar in Montenegro like I did last summer, and from there I could take a boat across to Bari in Italy.

Books - Language teaching - Other sports

Rabbiting on

January 6, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

With the new year has come some proper winter weather; on Friday we topped out at minus two. Lessons are starting up again in dribs and drabs, and after each drib or before each drab I’m spending some time on my English book. Who knows if it’ll come to fruition, but I’ve painstakingly been through both physical and online dictionaries to find words, phrases and expressions that Romanians misuse or overuse or don’t use at all, or simply don’t know. I recently got my hands on a better-quality bilingual dictionary, published by Oxford. It’s much better than anything else I’ve seen, but it’s still got one or two oddities. For instance, the R section kicked off with an entry for Rabbit. That’s with a capital R. Rabbit was a phone service that was rolled out in the UK in 1992. You could only use your phone in special hotspots, mostly located in cities. In other words it was hardly better than a payphone. Rabbit survived about as long as a real one does, but apparently you can still see Rabbit hotspot signs in British cities today. That’s pretty cool. But how this ever made it into an Oxford dictionary, let alone one published in 2009, is beyond me.

I’ve just finished Me Talk Pretty One Day, a book by David Sedaris. It was well-written and funny, but I found it somehow lacking it substance. Comedy is great, but there needs to me something behind the humour. Reading that book, which I still enjoyed in parts, made me think I could have a go at this book-writing lark one day. Maybe I could use my language-based book as stepping stone. The best line in Sedaris’s book, before I forget to mention it, referred to his voracious appetite for cassette-based audio books while living in Paris. “Someone who reads a lot of books is a bookworm. Well I was a tapeworm.”

I’ve gone off sport these days, but I decided to watch the PDC world darts final on New Year’s Day. The wacky-looking Peter Wright pulled off a bit of an upset in his 7-3 win over the much younger Michael van Gerwen. It was closer and more dramatic than that score might suggest; their averages were almost identical, but Wright played at a more consistent level throughout, and won the majority of those crucial fifth legs. That victory, which came after a perilous path to the final, netted him a cool £500,000. After that I’ve watched some of the games from the BDO, which has moved away from its previous home, the Lakeside. The quality isn’t quite there, and neither is the prize money, but the drama most certainly is. Sudden shifts in fortune and final-set tie-breaks galore. The tennis-on-steroids scoring system is what makes darts (for me) surprisingly watchable.

Last year I managed 1287 hours of teaching, up from 1129 the previous year. I don’t expect I’ll hit those heights in 2020 because I plan to take more time off.

And there’s one thing I didn’t do in 2019 for the first time since 2002. Travel by plane.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

It’s 2020 but not everybody can see clearly

January 2, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents called me to say they’d spent the first day of the twenties shrouded in smoke from Australia, with only outlines of the mountains visible on a sunny day. Geraldine is just over 2000 km, or 1300 miles, from the West Island. That’s a long way. By comparison, from here to London is 1050 miles. The fires have long since reached apocalyptic levels. Six million hectares of land have been burnt since the start of the season – an area a quarter of the size of Romania. Hundreds of millions of animals have succumbed, either directly or indirectly. People are fleeing to beaches to escape the flames. Life is happening under a permanent solar eclipse, and it’s happening all over the country, not just in a localised area. Their prime minister has his head either up his arse or in the sand. There’s no rain in sight. This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Last night I ate dinner at my normal time and then took the bus to Matei’s place. When I got there at around nine I was greeted with mountains of food that I hadn’t expected at all. At around eleven, people filed out into the garden where they’d lit a fire. Midnight came around quite quickly. As the clock ticked around to the new year, they had Abba’s Happy New Year playing, and that was a good choice: “It’s the end of a decade / In another ten years’ time / Who can say what we’ll find / What lies waiting down the line / In the end of eighty-nine”. Quite prophetic really; the western world changed beyond belief in the eighties. There’s even a line in there about every neighbour being a friend, but we went backwards on that score. By 12:30 I’d had enough, but I couldn’t get away from all the meat and rum and whisky and having to talk and listen. Where do you all get your stamina from? We then had our second short-lived power cut of the night. They’d also had a water outage earlier in the day – they said it gave them flashbacks to the Ceaușescu era. I hoped the power would stay off, but no such luck. One-thirty. They were still going. Eating, drinking, making jokes. Am I really that weird? At this point I’d have much rather been at home than there – It wasn’t remotely close – but I couldn’t easily escape. At around two I finally got away. I mentioned something about taxis, and Matei’s mother called me an Uber. I’d got through the whole of the 2010s without ever Ubering (or Airbnb-ing for that matter), but two hours into the new decade I found myself in the back of an Uber car. When I arrived, I opened my wallet to pay the driver, but apparently Matei’s mum had already paid via her app. As I said, I’d never taken an Uber before. Next time I’ll know. How Uber works, and how Romanian New Year’s Eve parties work, so I can pace myself better. I don’t want to miss out on these experiences. I just want to manage them, and who knows, maybe one day even enjoy them.

We’re at last back in a decade that actually has a name. The twenties. I wonder what, if anything, will be the decade’s defining features. Will there be twenties music and twenties hairstyles and twenties parties? I guess not. Society is so much more divided now. In the UK for instance, comedy, music, TV (four channels!) and culture in general used to unite everybody, even people who didn’t like it. Now the UK, perhaps since it hosted the Olympics in 2012, seems to be culturally dead. Brexit hasn’t helped.

How do we say years in English? This subject comes up a lot in lessons. Until now I’ve told my students that years in English split into four groups. (1) You say years before 2000 as two pairs of digits, so 1994 is nineteen ninety-four; (2) From 2000 to 2009, you say the year like a normal number: 2004 is two thousand and four; (3) From 2010 to 2019, you have a choice: 2014 can either be two thousand and fourteen or twenty fourteen; (4) From 2020, everybody will revert to the pre-2000 system, so 2024 will be twenty twenty-four. I think that’s accurate. But in the future there’s a chance that the system will retrospectively change itself. A kid born today might be so used to hearing things like “twenty twenty-eight” and “twenty thirty-two” and he’ll say 2009 as twenty oh nine or even twenty zero nine.

Language teaching - Life :)

Saying yes to everything

December 28, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Christmas Day was cool. I spent it at my ex-student’s parents’ flat on Take Ionescu. She’s 70, he’s nudging 80, and they’ve lived there ever since the block was built in the early seventies. Besides the țuică and sparkling wine, there was so much rich food – all kinds of sausages and ribs and venison rolls and sarmale and salată de boeuf (which doesnt actually contain beef) and two bowls of soup and other tasty bits and bobs that I can’t even remember. And then biscuits and chocolate cake. Would you like some of that? Yes, please. In between I spoke, and listened to, lots of Romanian. The listening bit in particular was tiring – it’s tiring enough in any language. Her mother talked a lot. Her father rather less, although the first thing he asked me was what I thought about Brexit. What’s “total shit-show” in Romanian? By the evening he needed a lie down, and I soon made tracks. I tried to speak to my family on Christmas evening, but my parents were in the wops, my brother was probably busy with his in-laws, and my aunt only ever picks up the phone in a narrow early-morning window.

Boxing Day didn’t start well. I had a lesson in the morning, and it was one I’d rather forget. Perhaps it had been coming. My student is an ice-cold single woman in her early forties. She’s a manager who reminds me of a boss I had way back in the dark days. (Also, I have lessons with a younger, much warmer woman who works at the same company, and she’s not a huge fan of my older student’s managerial style.) At the start of the lesson she told me about her non-Christmas. She’d received multiple Christmas dinner invitations but had declined them all. And there was me thinking I was antisocial. Anyway we chatted for a bit and then I brought out Bananagrams. Being the festive season, I thought she might like to try a game. I opened the yellow bag, the letter tiles fell onto the table, and unlike most people, she didn’t help me turn them face down so we could start. No big deal. But it was clear she really resented even the idea of playing. I tried to encourage her, but before long I gave up. I then said I was disappointed that she refused to participate. This, looking back, was a mistake, but I the level of pushback I got from her was greater than anything I’m used to from people over the age of ten, and I didn’t know how to react. (Mostly my students politely complete the activity or exercise or game I give them, I then ask them what they thought of it, and we repeat it in a later session, or not, depending on whether they liked it.) We descended into an argument where she accused me of being “strange” as well as inflexible – a bit of a joke considering our lessons are always scheduled to suit her, not me, and I’m constantly doing things that she wants – and then I told her I was glad she wasn’t my boss. Yes, I could have handled things differently, and honestly I felt sick afterwards.

After that debacle, it was off to some friends of Matei’s parents in Dumbrăvița for more food and drink. It was just what I needed to get my mind off what had happened in the morning. More shots of țuică, or maybe palincă – I can’t tell the difference – and then it was time for some WTF: weird-tasting food. I had piftie, jellied meat known in English as aspic, which in this case was made from pig’s trotters. When I spoke to Mum this morning, she said that aspic was quite a common dish in New Zealand in the fifties. After that I tried icre, or roe, from some fish or another. From there I was back into my comfort zone with salată de boeuf and cuts of meat. I mostly spoke English, with bits of Romanian and even (on one occasion) French thrown in. The hosts have a 20-year-old daughter who goes to Imperial College, London, and was back home for Christmas. I had quite a good chat with her. University life in 2019 sounded much the same as in 1999, just with a whole load more dosh involved. She pays £190 a week in rent. I know this is London, but holy moley. In my final year in Birmingham (2001-02) my weekly rent was forty quid.

So I’ve experienced some real Romania in the last couple of days. Bloody awesome. And I’ll be seeing Matei’s parents again on New Year’s Eve.

Language teaching - Politics

An uplifting day, and election resignation

December 12, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a lesson this morning with the English teacher who has plans to do the Cambridge exam in April. Those reading comprehension questions. Dammit, they’re hard. Even I was pretty much clueless half the time. You need to be primed for this stuff, and I’m just not. She said she hasn’t given up on me and will come back on Monday.

Yesterday I had a jam-packed day, with nine hours of lessons. I’ve been ticking along OK in recent weeks and months, but how I’ve missed days like that. Biking here, there and everywhere, and back home. Having to think on my feet. Hopefully helping people. And a wad of notes featuring the likes of Ion Luca Caragiale and Nicolae Grigorescu by the end of it. All in all, it’s a pretty bloody awesome feeling. I’m thankful that the snow has so far stayed away – this time last year we were blanketed in the stuff, and I had a hard time staying on my feet, let alone thinking on them.

On Monday morning I listened to the 7am news on the radio. I hadn’t quite woken up properly and they speak pretty damn fast, so all the Romanian politics at the start of the bulletin went over my head. Then I heard Noua Zeelandă and my ears pricked up. There had been a volcanic eruption on White Island less than four hours earlier, and it was obviously serious or else it wouldn’t have made the news in Romania. Apparently, and it makes sense, eruptions of steam (like this) happen without warning, and dozens of tourists were in the firing line. The death toll is currently eight, and sadly more are likely to die of their horrific burns.

The news this week has been crappy all round, with more devastating bushfires in Australia, and a Chilean Hercules crash with 38 people on board. And, though the results aren’t yet in, the UK election.

During the campaign all I’ve seen is Boris. Boris dressed as a milkman. A builder. A baker. A butcher. Probably some other alliterative occupations that for now escape me. Just big, friendly, cuddly Boris, no Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg. I’ll tune in at midnight to see or hear the exit poll results, but I’m almost resigned to five years of Boris, only fifty more days of Britain in the EU, and as for me, my days in Romania possibly starting to tick down. The polls (on average) point to a 30-seat Tory majority, and FPTP can be sensitive to small changes if they happen in the right or wrong places, so a hung parliament can’t be entirely ruled out. But neither can a big stonking Tory win. I can almost hear it now. Seventy-two seats. Eighty-eight. A hundred and four. If they break the wall of traditional Labour-voting working-class areas that voted Leave in the referendum, the sky’s the limit. But even a narrow majority would (as I see it) turn the UK into a backward, inward-looking Dismaland.

Update: The exit poll has just come through, predicting an 86-seat Conservative majority. A thumping victory (see above). Romania is looking increasingly attractive.

Language teaching - Life :)

Muriel

December 9, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I had coffee with one of my ex-students, who now lives in Vienna but is in Timișoara for three weeks. (She never really needed me. She was almost entirely fluent.) She told me, insistently, that given my potential I shouldn’t still be giving lessons to people in ones and twos. I need to be doing more. But do I? We discussed my book idea, and she said she could help me with the Romanian translations, so it could have legs. Last week I had half a dozen cancellations – a frustrating number – but I’ve got a busy schedule for the start of the coming week.

This morning I had a Skype chat with a friend who lives in Auckland. I promised him a zoomed-in version of a new mural (or Muriel, as he called it) I posted a couple of weeks ago. So here she is in full:

Timișoara is a pretty good place to see Muriels, and weddings too, for that matter.

Today it was foggy all day. I went to the mall to see the film about Maria, who was Romania’s queen, but it had sold out. The mall keeps expanding. They don’t even call it a mall anymore: Iulius Mall has morphed into Iulius Town, which contains a park – built at great expense, and for now in immaculate condition, with endless piped music – that reminds me of Singapore. One of my students told me that the centre of gravity of this city is changing. Even when I arrived, the central area where I live was the centre, but it will soon be at just one corner of a Bermuda triangle, with the mall, sorry, town, and a big multi-storey housing development forming the other two vertices.

An ad for bottled water on a mega video billboard at Iulius Town. More plastic bottles. Just what we need.
It’s two words. And you can keep it.
A trio near Piața Libertății. On the left is a well, for refilling those plastic bottles.
Ice skating and dodgems in Piața Libertății
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Not cutting it

December 1, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

The final month of the decade, which I still haven’t got to grips with at all, is almost upon us. In New Zealand it already is. I feel firmly entrenched in 2005, or perhaps a few years earlier. I feel grateful that Romania, in some ways, has let me step back in time.

It hasn’t been a bad week of lessons. Before my usual 90-minute session with the teenage boys, I had a half-hour “taster” with their mum, who told me she could understand English but couldn’t speak it. Then I asked her to at least have a go at speaking it, and of course she could. “I have forty-four years,” she said. Well OK, that’s not perfect, but it gets the point across, and for any of you reading this blog now, just you try to say your age in Romanian. Bet you wouldn’t have a clue. Yesterday I had the session with the two younger boys, and their mum is now happily hands-off; she knows I don’t need a translator.

I made an appointment for 2pm on Thursday to get my hair cut. The place I went to the last two times has closed down, so I thought I’d try this new place. But when I got there, they weren’t having any of my shoulder-length hair. They told me that either it’s a number 4 or whatever, or it’s no can do. My hair is part of who I am now, so I walked away. I’ll try another place next week.

I had a long chat with my dad on Thursday night. We talked at length about my aunt, whose tale is a rather sad one. In her (much) younger days she had the fortune (or misfortune, perhaps) to be handed everything. The looks, the brains, the lot. She was on all the sports teams, received a string of top grades in her O-levels, and so on. Then she met an RAF officer while still in her late teens, and she was married before her 22nd birthday. She trained as a physiotherapist, but never practised. In fact she’s never had a job at all. Her husband earned enough to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, and being married to the RAF was her job. Mindless lunches and parties and balls. She had two children, who were conveniently shipped off to boarding school at the age of eight, and neither of them now have any time for her. They see her at Christmas, but it’s a chore. Her adult life has been dogged by a complete lack of purpose. Everything she’s done has been play. And probably as a result, she’s suffered from ongoing depression. Unfortunately she’s never listened to anyone – as Dad says, she transmits but doesn’t receive – and has lacked the presence of mind to think, oh shit, if I carry on down this path things are going to turn to something pretty custardy pretty damn fast, so I’d better do something to arrest the slide.

Sometime in the nineties my aunt developed a drink problem, to go with her smoking habit, and that hasn’t exactly helped. She used to shop till she dropped, to give her a high about as temporary as the alcohol did. Her husband, an intelligent, kind man who at least provided some semblance of stability, died of lung cancer in 2002. When I saw her in 2008 on a trip out from New Zealand, she seemed positively evil and more than a little mad, and thankfully she isn’t like that anymore, but her world has gradually shrunk. She’s now almost completely isolated. Both my brother and I get on perfectly fine with her (unlike her children, she doesn’t perceive us as a threat) and I’d have been happy to spend Christmas with her, or heck, bring her out to Romania, but anything along those lines is a total no-go.

The UK election isn’t far away now. Right now I’d say there are three broad scenarios: (1) a sizeable overall Tory majority of 50 or more; (2) a smaller Tory majority, perhaps even just a working majority; and (3) a hung parliament. And I’d attach roughly equal probabilities to all three scenarios. (A Labour majority would require a massive shift from where things currently stand, and is highly unlikely.) I’m pinning my hopes on scenario 3.

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

Take the money and run

November 24, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

After a no-show this afternoon (there’s nothing more annoying than that), I finished my week with 29 hours of teaching. It felt more than that – there was a lot of biking to lessons this week, and maybe that tired me out. I didn’t put an end to my lessons with that slightly weird woman after all. She told me yesterday that she’d kept pages of notes in pencil about me (what?!) and in particular she wanted to know what was going with my face. She asked me if I was a drug addict. What a question. (I’ve had flaking skin on my face for the last three weeks or so. How being a drug addict would cause that I don’t know.) After yesterday’s session I figured she was strange but ultimately (hopefully) harmless.

On Thursday I had my second lesson with the English teacher. She was marginally better this time, but now says she’d like to do two sets of exams, IELTS and Cambridge, both in the spring. She asked me how long it would take to get her up to her desired C1 level. I was honest – I said nine months at a push. This week I had – yet again – somebody who said her dream destination was Dubai. Women seem to really home in on that furnace of flagrant fakeness. I just don’t get it. For me, it would be way down at the bottom of any list that didn’t include war zones.

A popular discussion topic with my older and younger students is something I’ve called What If?, where they have to imagine what they’d do in certain situations. One of these hypothetical scenarios is where they find a package containing a large sum of cash. A majority tell me, unashamedly, that they’d take it. One of them even said, “well, I’d buy a car,” never considering an alternative to taking the money. There’s been a story in recent days of mystery bundles of £2000 turning up at random in a small town in north-eastern England, which was discussed on local radio today. The host was amazed that people were really handing the money in to the police.

Duolingo. I’m beginning to see its limitations now. A lot of intricate grammatical concepts are introduced too early, without any real explanation. In contrast, many very important words and phrases come into play too late, if at all. The Romanian course has fewer resources put into it than more popular languages do, and I don’t think the English sentences have ever been sense-checked. Some of them are worse than bizarre, they’re just meaningless non-English. At the higher levels the sentences often comprise ten or more words, and can be translated in many ways, but only some of the possible answers are marked as correct, so you’re forced to play a frustrating guessing game. The Italian course is better than the Romanian one. I’ll continue with both languages for now; the Romanian exercises have already been useful for drilling pronouns that I struggle so much with.

One of the best resources for learning Romanian I have at my disposal right now is the local radio station, Radio Timișoara. My favourite programme, when I get the chance to listen to it, is between six and seven on weekday evenings, where they play lots of older pop and rock music. This morning I listened to the sport show, even though I hardly follow sport these days. There were slightly amusing regular updates from Timișoara Saracens’ rugby match in Constanța, which the Saracens won 111-0. I heard the surname of their kicker (who must have got lots of practice in today’s match) is Samoa. The Saracens are perhaps the best team in the country, and they often make the European competition, but they’re no match for British and French teams.

Tomorrow is election day in Romania: the second of two rounds which will determine the president for the next five years. Klaus Iohannis is the incumbent, and he is facing off against Viorica Dăncilă, who was prime minister until the government fell last month. My students have quite strong opinions about Dăncilă. They aren’t flattering. They think she’s stupid and she’d be a disaster for Romania if she became president. From what I’ve seen of her, I can hardly disagree. But she came second in the first round, mopping up votes in rural parts of the country where people have lower levels of education on average.

Dad’s stunning sales in Geraldine have given him a shot in the arm. It’s great to see him (and Mum) so positive. Thinking he’s found the winning formula, he’ll be churning out rhododendron paintings like nobody’s business.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - New Zealand

It’s only just begun

November 20, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I picked up some ink cartridges that I’d had to order, and the man who served me said, “Sărbători fericite” meaning “Happy holidays”. A few minutes later I was in Carrefour, where Slade’s famous Christmas song was blaring out. This evening I was sitting at my desk next to the window when two people, just about close enough to touch, were up a crane fixing the festive lights to the lamp-posts. There had been little sign of Christmas until it all hit me today. Ten days from now, the market sheds will be going up, and with the waft of chimney cakes and mulled wine soon after, it’ll really feel like the festive season, particularly if daytime temperatures do eventually fall from the balmy mid-teens.

I had a new student yesterday. She actually teaches English to groups of beginner adults, but if I’m being brutally honest, her knowledge isn’t quite what it needs to be. I’d put her no higher than a 6 on my 0-to-10 scale. She told me, “I have teached English for three years.” Oh yes. She then got confused between “taught” and “thought”. She didn’t know the word “narrow”. As it turned out, we had a very productive lesson, covering acres of notepaper in our 90 minutes, on all kinds of matters to do with vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, and I hope I can get her up to speed. I’ll be seeing her again on Thursday. The crazy thing though is that she wants to improve her English to help her get out of her English teaching job! She also plans to take the IELTS exam in March, which is pretty soon. Tomorrow I’ll have my last lesson with the woman who sent me that strange text.

Dad has had a successful local exhibition, selling a number of high-value paintings. Spring and the run-up to Christmas make it an opportune time to hold a show. There are quite a few people in the area who have sold family farms for colossal amounts of money, and I think that money was burning a hole in their pockets. My latest conversation with Dad was all very upbeat until we discussed my predicament in Wellington. My body corporate’s self-imposed deadline for me to sign the sale agreement is Friday. That ain’t gonna happen.

A new mural on an abandoned factory by the Bega