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Shopping in the Covid era

May 19, 2020 by 0 Comments

This morning I got my temperature checked on the way in to the supermarket. Two young guys were refused entry because they were maskless. In the fruit and vege area I battled those damn plastic bags with gloves and no saliva. At the checkout I got a nasty surprise as my bank card didn’t work. I tapped the PIN in twice but wasn’t going to risk it a third time (three strikes and you’re out, of course). The lady let me leave my trolley-basket there while I visited a cash machine and raided my New Zealand account. Everything then had to be re-scanned. What a pain. Then I faced what has become the usual routine: packing everything into my two backpacks to the intermittent sounds made by the nearby grab-a-furry-toy game called Happy Zoo, while trying not let the yoghurts or bags of rice split. Then I had to lug it all home. I’ll pop to the bank tomorrow morning. When I got back home, I had my now-weekly chat with my aunt. She was bored, and assumed I would be too. I don’t think I’ve felt ever bored during this pandemic, barring perhaps the first few days.

This afternoon I had that awkward FaceTime lesson with the ten-year-old. I was happy for him to spend the final 20 minutes describing Brawl Stars to me (in very good English, it must be said). Apart from the fact that it’s a game that uses cartoon-like characters and they fight each other (hence the name), I’m none the wiser. “I’ve won 9700 trophies.” Wow, that’s a lot. Where do you keep them all? This morning I had my first face-to-face lesson since March. We met in the park and sat at opposite ends of the bench. I was on the verge of a heated argument with her when she expressed her views that the virus was semi-fake (“but people die all the time”); I reined myself in, thankfully. It was good to see her again for the first time in February. I feel sorry for her because she has to bring up her six-year-old son on her own, and he’s very underweight and understrength for his age.

Yesterday I had a lesson that included an article on the 1988 FA Cup final. Other highlights have been the UK-based guy’s comments that nursing homes “sound like a bit of fun” and my 25-year-old student’s fascinating description of preparing, singeing, cutting and smoking a pig for Christmas. It’s pleasing to me that young Romanians are still interested in those traditions.

Tomorrow I’ve got no lessons at all, and once I’ve sorted out my bank card, I absolutely must crack on with the English book.

The eruption of Mount St Helens, 40 years ago today
Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Britain: what’s gone wrong?

May 14, 2020 by 0 Comments

When I moved to New Zealand in 2003, I was proud to be British. All the wonderful music and comedy that appeared on my TV screen made me homesick. I still remember how I felt when I went back to the UK in 2006 – this is a cool country. New Zealand is picturesque and everything, but it’s culturally dead. This place, on the other hand, is humming.

But now I switch on the TV and it’s the UK that seems culturally dead. It’s felt that way for years, long before this pandemic hit. Is Brexit to blame? Is it the internet? Something is missing. It seems the London Olympics in 2012 were Britain’s last hurrah, and since then the UK has become an increasingly inward-looking nation. Perhaps it’s just me looking in from the outside, and if I lived in the UK everything would feel as alive as ever (once you ignore the effects of coronavirus, of course).

I watched bits of Boris in parliament this afternoon. I’ve heard some people say that he’s mad (and the same of Trump). Maybe, but that’s not the right criticism. There’s nothing wrong with being a bit mad. The most interesting, most creative people tend to head in that direction. (The attraction of Romania to me as opposed to, say, Hungary or Poland, was that it would be a bit madder. Things would be faded, rusty, coming apart at the seams. Things might smell a bit. Colours wouldn’t match. My kind of place.) No, the problem with Boris is that he’s massively overprivileged. He hasn’t got to his position by being any good; he’s got there on this connections, on being able to make it up as he goes along, on having far too much self-confidence pumped into him at Eton. In a pandemic crisis like this, you need attention to detail, clarity of message, and bucketloads of sincerity. In other words, Boris is exactly who you don’t want at the helm. He’s potentially dangerous. (He’s still better than Trump, though. With Trump, there’s no potentially about it. That guy is evil. In all 17-plus stone of him, there is not an ounce of empathy.)

I had a sad lesson this afternoon with the woman I once played tennis with. She’s clearly been unhappy in her marriage for some time, and is now having Skype meetings with a psychologist. After the session we had a good chat in Romanian, and I felt I did reasonably well.

The nightmare with my apartment in Wellington means I’ve gone eight years without caring about money, except at a basic level. I’d pretty much given up on achieving any sort of long-term financial strength, because that ship seemed to have sailed. And really I’d checked out about four years before I got that awful letter from the council – I still had my career in insurance, but I was going through the motions. Now though, having hit 40, it’s about time I did something. I’ve managed to kill off most of my mortgage, and my immediate goal is to eradicate it completely. With KiwiSaver and the little pots of money I have in the UK and Romania, my financial situation isn’t all that dire when you consider the enormous loss I’ve incurred in Wellington. My almost total avoidance of expenditure on anything I can’t eat has helped.

Radio Timișoara plays all sorts of weird and wonderful music, most of it surprisingly good. I sometimes Shazam the songs when I hear them. Usually (but not always), Shazam tracks down the artist and the song title, and tells me how many people have Shazammed the song to date. These numbers are often in six or seven figures, but with lesser-known Romanian songs they might only be in the dozens or hundreds. On Monday I got a bit of a surprise when I heard a new song by Ștefan Bănică (Junior – his father died some time ago). This song had interesting lyrics, including Ceaușescu and Simona Halep. I was the first person to Shazam the song:

Then a few minutes later I heard a song I liked by a band from Timișoara called All In Green. This time I was a bit tardy and had to settle for bronze:

Contrast that with Master Blaster (Jammin’) on this evening’s Stevie Wonder-themed show. Fantastic song; nearly 1.6 million searches. (The song was made in 1979 and came out in ’80, just like me.)

Coronavirus - Language learning - Language teaching - Music

Hotting up

May 11, 2020 by 0 Comments

I was going to say it’s been a warm day, but no, it’s been positively hot. Nudging 30 degrees, and people were taking advantage of it. A far cry from six weeks ago when people were clearly scared to leave the house.

This afternoon’s lesson went well. My student showed his appreciation at the end. I spent some time yesterday and today translating The Magic Finger from English to Romanian, so I won’t sound quite so clueless when I we go through the last twenty-odd pages tomorrow. With intermediate students this isn’t a problem, because with them I only ever need to translate individual words or explain the gist of a sentence in English; I never have to translate whole texts into Romanian. It’s good practice though.

Little Richard has died. I didn’t know that much about him, but what an entertainer he was. (Isn’t Youtube great?) In his day he must have been a sensation. Right now, in a different dimension, I’m watching a traditional Romanian music show on TV. Dili-dili-dili-dili-dum, with violins going at a hundred miles an hour. The last song was all about the pride of being from Botoșani, which I always think of as șobolani (meaning “rats”).

I watched Boris Johnson’s speech. Lots of talk about the R (reproductive) rate, which they now say is between 0.5 and 0.9 (why such a range?), but no talk of masks. Madness.

My brother is fine. He went back to work last week. For some reason we ended up talking about the stock market before running out of things to say.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :)

May Day blues

May 3, 2020 by 0 Comments

Yesterday was a crappy Friday. My sinus pain or migraine (I’m not sure which) started the night before, and I didn’t sleep a lot. I took plenty of paracetamol which helped, but I still felt washed out and sapped of energy. Four trips up and down the stairs were all I could manage. I had two lessons, and I had to apologise for yawning in my session with my UK-based student which started at 9pm. In the middle of the lesson we had a storm here. Today I’ve still felt lethargic and have done little other than read and talk to my parents (where they taunted me on FaceTime with lumps of Whittaker’s chocolate). I did my full eight laps of the stairs but was slower than usual. It’s bucketing down right now. We were in need of a good deluge.

It’s our penultimate weekend under full lockdown. I hope by the end of this month I’ll be able to read a book on a park bench while eating a punnet of strawberries. I have no desire to eat out or go shopping. I was surprised to see Piața 700 – an open air market I’ve mentioned several times on this blog – in full swing when I passed by on Tuesday. I kept well away from the produce and people. Another market, Piața Iosefin, has shut down after one of the stallholders tested positive.

Mum keeps me updated on cases and deaths from Covid-19 in New Zealand. Those who die in NZ are invariably old, often from care homes. In Romania that is not the case. The list is updated two or three times a day, and it’s full of not-that-old people. So far, 57% of deaths have been under-70s, including 27% under 60 and 10% under 50. Why? My first guess was that, even though I see old people all the time, Romania has a smaller proportion of elderly than a prosperous country like New Zealand. But no, Romania’s proportion of over-70s is in fast slightly larger than NZ’s (1 in 8 against 1 in 9, roughly). That’s not because Romanians live longer than Kiwis – they don’t! – but because so many young people have left the country, and women have just about stopped having babies, so the elderly make up a sizeable chunk of the population. In other words I’m puzzled by all the premature deaths here.

Here’s the first ten questions from Tuesday’s game of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with the twelve-year-old. I made these up pretty much on the fly. After the Boris Johnson question, I was tempted to ask how many kids Boris had, and make all the possible answers correct.

Language teaching - Travel: Europe

Serbian commentary 4 — Signs from last summer’s trip II

April 29, 2020 by 0 Comments

The pictures in this post are from Bar in Montenegro. I call the language Serbo-Croat for simplicity, even though we’re not in Serbia or Croatia.

I dalje si felje, with lj ligatures, written on the pavement. What does it mean? Google Translate says “You’re still a fella.” Dalje means “still”, and seems to be related to daleko, meaning “far”.

A bookshop. You can see here that all foreign names are transliterated into Serbo-Croat phonetics. Jamie has morphed into Džejmi. The same happens to foreign words. This would be like me writing that I’d eaten a crwasson or that I like paintings by Clawed Monay. Jamie Oliver’s book is called Meals in 15 Minutes in English, but the translated title just means All in 15 Minutes. The title of the book about mushrooms simply means What is this Mushroom? The word koja really means “what” instead of “which”, but “which” is used more generally than in English. It’s the same in Romanian: Care este numele tău? literally means “Which is your name?” It’s more complicated in Serbo-Croat though, because “which” has to agree with the noun. Here it’s koja because gljiva is feminine, but if it would be koji for a masculine noun and koje for a neuter noun. Gljiva is one of two words they use for mushroom; the other is pečurka, a cognate of Romanian ciupercă (meaning the same thing), but it’s a mystery how the consonants got swapped between the two languages.

The large brown book on the right is entitled Sto događaja iz istorije Crne Gore: One Hundred Events from the History of Montenegro. The local name for Montenegro is Crna Gora – Black Mountain. The English name (which obviously also means Black Mountain) comes from Venetian, and I wonder why we don’t now call it Black Mountain. Some grammar: because we’re saying “history of”, Crna Gora needs to go in the genitive, which means the final a‘s become e‘s. As for “event”, that’s događaj, but when you’re talking about 100 of them, you need that final a. If it were just “events”, without a number, you’d have a final i instead.

You don’t see much Cyrillic in Montenegro but you can see it on some books here. Поуке старца Тадеја (Pouke starca Tadeja) means “Lessons of the Old Man Tadej”. Star means old, starac means old man, and “of the old man” requires the genitive (add an a to the end but remove the a before the c). The old man is Tadej Štrbulović, a Serbian Orthodox elder who died in 2003. His name Tadej is equivalent to Thaddeus in English. I did once meet a Thaddeus in New Zealand, back in 1997 – he was a friend of a friend of my grandfather’s, and was known as Thady (rhyming with “lady”).

In the top right we have a book with a Cyrillic title in quite a traditional font, similar to one commonly used in Romania (but to write the Latin script). When reading something in an unfamiliar script, unusual fonts only complicate matters. The title is Тешко побеђенима, or (in Latin) Teško Pobeđenima, which either means “Hard to Beat” or “Badly Beaten” (two very different things, but I can’t tell which it is). Pobeđenima is some sort of passive version of the verb pobediti: to win or to conquer.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Photos

Shockingly normal ⁠— what’s going on in the UK?

April 19, 2020 by 0 Comments

Nearly 900 deaths were added to the UK figures today, just like yesterday and the day before. Nine hundred. Nine Hillsborough disasters. A dozen Grenfell Towers. Every day. Granted, some of the deaths, perhaps 100 a day, are people who die with Covid-19 rather than from it, but there are also vast numbers dying in care homes who aren’t being counted. The daily tally of people dying from Covid-19 is surely well over 1000.

Those numbers are terrifyingly high. But what really shocks me is how normal this seems to have become over there. What has happened to the country I was born and bred in? How has life in the UK become so cheap, all of a sudden? How has being unable to breathe and drowning in your fluids, while your family can’t even say goodbye to you, become so acceptable so quickly?

Here in Romania we’ll be in lockdown, with armed police, until mid-May at the earliest. I’m glad of that. I agree with whoever said that lifting the lockdown now would be like flushing half your antibiotics down the loo because you’re feeling a bit better, and anyway we’re yet to even properly reach the “feeling better” stage. A huge hole was blown in my teaching hours in mid-March, but my volume is starting to pick up. Yesterday I had that lesson with Cosmin’s friend – it was probably as good for my Romanian as it was for her English. Now she wants a lesson every day including weekends (after all, what is a weekend now?). She should improve quickly.

It’s my 40th birthday on Monday. Yikes! All this social distancing means I won’t be having the massive rip-roaring party I would have had otherwise.

Timișoara really is beautiful in spring, and here are some more photos of the bits of Timișoara that I’m still allowed to set foot in.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :)

Stop watching the news. You’ll feel better

April 14, 2020 by 0 Comments

After only sleeping four hours last night and then falling foul of supermarket regulations, it hasn’t been a bad day at all. I was in the aisle with the canned and jarred fruit, when a security guard introduced himself formally with his surname first, and told me I was breaking the rules by having a backpack over my shoulders. That’s after the security woman last week explicitly told me it was OK. This man (55-ish, short and stocky) seemed new there, and I think he just wanted something to do. Everything was fine in the end, but after that incident I really just wanted to leave, and of course I couldn’t – I had to stock up for the week. I only just had enough cash to pay for my groceries. I’ve got so used to having bundles of the stuff that I didn’t even think. Good job I’ve managed to put a bit away in my Romanian account for a rainy day, because this is a deluge.

Lack of sleep seems to be a problem for a lot of people right now. One of my students called me to postpone our lesson scheduled for this evening because he said he’d hardly slept and felt like a zombie. I was happy to reschedule for tomorrow. So just one lesson today. That was the one on FaceTime with the ten-year-old boy, and it went great. We played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? for the first time. That’s been a hit almost universally.

I did two hours of Serbian today and only half-followed the news.

The number of confirmed cases in Romania rose to 6633 today. That’s also the name of the ultra-marathon that Tibi Ușeriu won and wrote a book about – I got the book as a Christmas present. The number 6633 comes from the fact that the event takes place around the Arctic circle, at a latitude of 66 degrees and 33 minutes north.

Here’s the latest graph with a newly-extended x-axis. I’m just glad it wasn’t the y-axis that I had to extend first.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Photos

Spring under lockdown

April 12, 2020 by 0 Comments

I called my aunt this morning. She told me that her dog had been put down yesterday. She couldn’t even be there while it was put to sleep. All very sad. She’s been on her own since my uncle died in 2002, and her dogs have always been a lifeline.

This morning, after hearing that Anak Krakatoa had erupted, I read about the Year Without a Summer. That was 1816, the year after Tambora erupted, the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history. This year looks like being summerless for completely different reasons.

Last night my UK-based Skype student predicted increasing casualty rates in Britain and even more draconian measures, just as people might want them to be relaxed. He said too many people were ignoring the rules. For some unknown reason we ended up talking about crumpets, as in the food item. He told me he picked up a packet of these mysterious floppy cakey things after arriving in the UK, but he wasn’t a fan. Apparently he ate them untoasted, unbuttered, un-anything, so no wonder they didn’t quite do it for him. To be fair, how would you know? (It’s always amused me that spectrum has crumpets as its anagram.)

The official death toll in Romania is approaching 300. Here is the latest graph, followed by some pictures of Timișoara in spring under lockdown:

Romania coronavirus 11-4-20
A helpline for over-65s without support
The shoes have walked
The half-attached sign warns people over 65 not to leave their home
This is a lovely notice on a nearby perfume shop. “Take care of each other, stay healthy, and we’ll meet again when this craziness is over.”
Coronavirus - Language teaching

A full work day at last

April 9, 2020 by 0 Comments

A proper work day today, my first for ages. That feels pretty good. I also had my best first lesson with a student for a while. Let’s hope he sticks around after that. (Sometimes I’ve had what feels like a great initial lesson with someone, then they don’t come back. Other times my first lesson has felt like a shocker, and we’re still going six months or a year later. There’s basically no correlation.) Tomorrow I can look forward to more Serbian.

After my last lesson I gave my brother a call. My sister-in-law is still doing emergency foot procedures and now finds herself in the firing line. Fortunately where they live, the rate of cases is one of the lowest in the country. In the latest UK figures, more than 900 deaths were reported in one day. We’re seeing shocking numbers there now, and the death toll could easily surpass Italy and Spain.

Here’s the latest graph:

Romania coronavirus 8-4-20
Coronavirus - Language learning - Language teaching

A long, hard slog

April 8, 2020 by 0 Comments

Tonight I had a quick, see-if-you-like-it session with Gabi, who surprised me by popping up on the screen as a bloke. We’d only exchanged messages, no phone call, and I totally forgot that Gabi was one of those short-version either-or names. We’ll have our first proper lesson tomorrow. Four lessons scheduled for tomorrow – yippee! Last week Dad told me about a game show that appeared on their black-and-white Grundig when he was a boy. It’s very simple – the host asks questions, and the contestant is eliminated from the game as soon as he says ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Trying this game on my younger students has been a lot of fun.

I’m back to learning Serbian, now that I have a good book to study from. Every time I pick it up again, I’ve (at best) half-forgotten everything I’ve done previously. I’m getting more comfortable with the lower-frequency letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, and today I started on hand-written Cyrillic, in which some letters look very different from their printed counterparts.

I’m lucky to live in a city centre and still have so much green space – and a river – around me. We’ve had glorious weather these last few days, and at least I can get out for a quick walk or a bike ride in the sunshine without bumping into people.

Every Sunday and Monday, we see less awful figures from the US, UK and elsewhere, and suddenly everyone says we’re peaking or plateauing (that’s such an awkward word), we’ve turned the corner, we’re flattening the curve. And then Tuesday happens. It’s clear that the numbers from Sunday and Monday reflect cases and deaths reported at weekends, and this reporting is an admin task that sometimes only gets done on weekdays. Still, there is evidence that parts of the US, especially New York, might be nearing their peak.

Wisconsin is holding an in-person election today. That’s so fucked up it beggars belief. I mean, just how? They have far fewer polling stations than usual, so people will have to queue for even longer than they would normally. From the president down, the US is full of very powerful people who are happy for citizens to die as long as they get what they want. It makes me extremely angry.

Romania has sadly just recorded its first death among medical personnel, an ambulance driver from the disaster zone that is Suceava. To give you some idea how awful the situation in Suceava is, I’ve posted the latest chart of Romanian cases by county. The figure of 191 in the west is Timiș, where I am. The 697 is Bucharest – it’s hardly surprising that the capital would have a large number of cases. But the 1322 in the north-east is Suceava, where the main population centre has barely 100,000 people.

As for Romania as a whole, two weeks ago I sketched optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for where we might be today. We’ve followed the optimistic path almost exactly, so let’s celebrate! Umm, no. First, around 200 Romanians have died so far, probably more if people who die at home are n’t being counted. That is already tragic, and the numbers will only go up. Second, testing isn’t keeping up with the spread of the virus, so the number of cases is greatly underestimated, probably by a larger multiple than a fortnight ago. Third, my pessimistic scenario was almost apocalyptically awful. And finally, life isn’t snapping back to normal any time soon. This will be a long, hard slog.

Here is the latest graph:

Romania coronavirus 7-4-20