Language teaching

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Happy with my lot

February 25, 2017 by 0 Comments

Dad emailed me last night to say that both he and Mum were very proud of me for having the guts to move to Romania and make a proper go of it here. That meant a lot to me. He said that I’ve already surpassed his (admittedly pretty low) expectations. Yes, coming here took some serious balls. I didn’t know anyone here and I’d never been here or anywhere in Eastern Europe in my life before. To say it was daunting would be a major understatement. But shit, how daunting was the alternative?! I’d been going through the motions for so bloody long that eventually I was going to crack. I simply had to break the cycle before it was too late.

And here I am. It still feels like a dream. The beautiful cathedral reminding me of its presence 96 times a day, the old trams (and new ones) rattling past, the parks lined with trees that will burst into leaf in a couple of short weeks. The melt-in-your-mouth bread from the bakery down below, the cheese, the salami, the peppers. I can now eat an orange in my workplace without the juice going all over the keyboard. I haven’t ironed anything in five months. I’ve been gradually stocking my wardrobe with clothes that I actually like wearing, such as the purple merino cardigan I bought for only 8 lei from one of the many second hand shops in the city; it seemed like new. I have no team meetings to remember (or forget, as the case often was for one particular weekly meeting at my last job, much to my embarrassment); I have no team.

I haven’t made a bad start with the teaching and my Skype student is a huge help, but I still need more business. I also need to meet more people even if I’m getting a healthy amount of human interaction from my lessons. But I don’t feel in any rush. Next week I hope to get a website up and running to help promote Skype lessons, and some business cards printed. Yes, business cards that won’t just sit in a drawer like all my previous ones have. One time I used them to make a card game I’d dreamt up.

The last couple of weeks have been frustrating with all my tech issues, and after contacting my cousin’s IT guru friend in Masterton, I bit the bullet and bought myself a new laptop. He said I would need a new hard drive and a clean reinstall of Windows 10, and the amount of time and effort and money involved wouldn’t be worth it. I’d already spent many hours painstakingly transferring data onto flash drives. At close to NZ$1200, this new Lenovo machine wasn’t cheap. It has a solid state drive and I hope it stays in a solid state as I drive it. It’s also a 2-in-1 meaning that it folds right back to become a tablet. So far (day three) it’s been pretty damn fantastic. Both the TV and washing machine are now working too, so I’m cooking with gas, so to speak.

The magnesium I took (and have now finished) was in the form of vials, not tablets.

Suffice to say I’m pretty happy with my lot right now.

 

Language teaching - Politics - Romania

The fight must go on

February 6, 2017 by 0 Comments

I gave a Skype lesson on Friday night and then played my cousin at Words with Friends for the 27th time. It had just gone eleven, and I had two blanks on my rack, when I could no longer concentrate on the game. What a remarkable sight and sound it was to see 30,000 people stream past my apartment block, armed with air horns and whistles, at that time of night. I gave my cousin a running commentary. Earlier I’d gone down to Piața Operei to see it relatively empty, and I wondered where everyone had gone, but they’d set off on their march through the city. Last night I spent some time in the square on a fifth consecutive night of protests, this time with the intent of joining them on the march, but the demonstration which had drawn a great crowd fizzled out at around ten. What’s happened? Have the people given in? Very bad news, I thought. But when I got home I read that the new prime minister had announced on TV that the government would repeal the new law, and in the last couple of hours they have done just that at an emergency meeting. It seems they have yielded to what has been very intense public pressure. But corruption is insidious in Romania and the people must continue to fight.

The protests were fascinating for me in many ways. I had an interesting time trying to decipher some of the banners and to understand what the hell they were chanting. I got some insight into Romanian culture. I was surprised how motivated younger people were to attend the protests when so few of them voted in December’s elections. I was also encouraged by how peaceful the demonstrations were and how many parents brought their children along. Seeing four-year-olds shout “de-mi-sia, de-mi-sia” (“resignation”) amused me. And visually, the protests were very impressive.

You could say that the low voter turnout was what caused this mess. As far as I can tell, the older generations voted PSD as they’ve always done, while the younger ones didn’t vote at all, and so the PSD got a thumping great share of the vote which allowed them to do pretty much what they liked, such as pass laws that decriminalise corruption. But then I don’t know how free and fair elections are in Romania.

I spoke to my parents this morning. My dad had just got back from a sailing trip in the Marlborough Sounds with two blokes both called Graeme. He seemed to enjoy the road trip there and back more than the rather claustrophobic few days on the boat. (The main road has been blocked since the November earthquake; now you have to go via Murchison, a town that has done quite nicely from the diversion, making for a seven-hour journey each way.) Mum had spent a few days in Moeraki with my aunt. I recently had a chat with Dad while Mum was at golf. He still finds his existence in that household plagued by unnecessary stress.

One of my previous students texted me earlier today to say that she won’t be wanting any more lessons from me because we couldn’t understand each other well enough. I’d already written her off. It was more than the language barrier, although that didn’t help. For whatever reason we just didn’t click. My Skype student now wants ten hours of lessons a week from me, starting tomorrow. Maybe she’s lonely.

I did find a word, LovELIER, with my rack. That low-scoring bingo helped me to a 401-344 win and an 18-9 lead overall. I was lucky with the blanks and S’s, although the high-scoring tiles I drew towards the end were more of a burden than anything as I had to quickly offload them. Having one blank on your rack is a huge asset; it effectively gives you 26 different racks and a much better chance of making a bingo or other high-scoring play. You have time in a game to go through the alphabet and consider each of the possible letters in turn. Having both blanks is even better, not least because you know your opponent won’t have one. But there are so many combinations with two blanks – 351 if I’m not mistaken – that you certainly can’t consider them all, and finding a bingo can be surprisingly difficult even if there are many available.

I’m thinking of getting into Scrabble reasonably seriously, despite all the things I don’t like about the game (all the silly words you have to commit to memory, mostly). I recently played a game of WWF where I had HIDEOUT on my rack, but nowhere I could see to play it. After giving up and playing a shorter word I realised I could have played the seven-letter bingo by attaching the O to the end of HOB. In Scrabble parlance, you’d say that HOB takes an O as a back hook. That kind of thing interests me. Learning all those stupid bloody words doesn’t, but maybe that won’t be a deal-breaker. We’ll see.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Romania is simmering

February 3, 2017 by 0 Comments

These are interesting times to be living in Romania. A law has been passed in secret that could effectively legalise corruption, freeing hundreds of politicians and senior officials from jail. There have been massive demonstrations all over Romania, including here in Timișoara, the biggest protests the country has seen since the end of communism in 1989. Romania has huge problems with corruption and they’re holding the country back in a big way. I’m very glad to see people taking to the streets. I was caught up in the crowd of (at a guess) 20,000 last night. Whistles, horns, megaphones, banners, Romanian flags, the national anthem, and many rhyming slogans; as far as I could see it was all very peaceful. News reports of hooligans, both here and overseas, give a false picture: the hooligans are a tiny minority. The first protest here was quite small, perhaps 1000 people, but they have since grown. Last night they marched past my apartment block at about 10:30, more than four hours after the start of the demonstration. I expect a big crowd again tonight, being a Friday. Who knows, maybe they will bring down the government. As I said, interesting times.

I’ve been having computer problems again. My laptop has developed a habit of freezing every few minutes. This morning I defragged my hard drive and that has, surprisingly, improved things somewhat. I think we all need to defrag every now and again. Without a fully functioning computer I’m pretty much stuffed.

I had two lessons scheduled for Wednesday but both my students pulled out for very different reasons. (At least there were reasons. There usually aren’t.) So that was a bugger. But it looks like I have acquired a new student, my third active one and my sixth overall. Yesterday, at his request, we met in Cărturești, a fairly upmarket bookshop near Piața Unirii, where we chatted for 90 minutes over tea. He paid me for that, and when he asked whether I’d agree to a buy nine, get one free arrangement for lessons I just about bit his hand off. He plans to actually have ten lessons with me. He’s very motivated, and that’s probably why he already has a very good command of English. I’d put him at an 8 out of 10. My Skype student pulled out of Wednesday’s lesson because she has exams, but she said she’ll soon want ten hours of lessons a week. I think my hourly rate is extremely cheap for her.

I’m so glad I’ve made the move. I wish I’d done it, or done something, earlier. I was stuck in a cycle of jobs that were meaningless or anxiety-provoking or repulsive or some combination of the three. Repulsive isn’t overstating it either. A lot of people find team meetings and performance reviews and corporate bullshit a bit of a drag, but for me it wasn’t a drag, it was a highly toxic mixture. If I stuck around much longer it might have killed me. Here there have been frustrations. I’ve found some people to be intimidating and untrustworthy. I’ve made suboptimal decisions, spending more time and money on things than I’ve needed, as I’ve tried to find my feet. I haven’t got to know a lot of people yet, although the lessons have helped. I haven’t picked up as much of the language as I’d have liked. But I’m comfortable, I’m making things happen, and I feel a general sense of hope, of optimism. I think I’d like to do this teaching thing for the next few years (I’ve never felt that about any previous job). I think Romania is awesome. I think I’ll be here a while.

Maybe I should use tonight’s protest to my advantage and risk putting up a few posters in the hope that the cops will be otherwise occupied.

I must admit, I never saw Roger Federer winning another grand slam, not for one minute. But he played sublime tennis for three sets out of five against Nadal in a very good final that wound the clock back a decade or so. The match wasn’t in the same league as, say, the 2008 Wimbledon final, because both players were rarely at their best at the same time, but it was still well worth watching and those last few games were gripping. Both men’s semis and the final were thoroughly good matches, all going five sets, and I’m trying to recall other grand slams where the last three men’s matches all went the distance. Wimbledon 2001 certainly (which had the added bonus of the women’s semis and finals all going to three sets) but I’m struggling to think of any others. A more recent Australian Open, perhaps.

My cousin just snapped a four-game losing streak against me in Words with Friends, winning our latest game 424 to 328 thanks to 115 points for CRAZE and some pretty ropy racks for me. I swapped tiles twice. The first time I needed to do so earlier but I was playing in the middle of the protest and was distracted. That was my lowest score since our seventh game. I’m now leading 17-9.

Language teaching

Feeling the strain

January 27, 2017 by 0 Comments

It was an enormous relief to get my internet access back.

My teaching continues to go well. I feel so much more emotionally invested in it than in my previous job, or maybe any of my previous jobs. This matters. I’d put my Skype student at a 4 on my 0-to-10 scale, so she knows the basics, but there’s still a lot we can work on. The highlight, if you can call it that, of Monday’s lesson was when she just about pissed herself laughing at my pronunciation of străin, the Romanian word for foreign (appropriately enough). “Say it again!” Er, no. The problems with străin are various. Mostly it’s the combination of ă and i that I struggle with. That they immediately follow a rolled r doesn’t help, and just to top it off, the word looks like a pretty common English word. Yes, it’s a străin. We’ll have our third lesson of the week tomorrow, and if our first few sessions are any indication, the two hours will whizz by. I still need a lot more lessons. I haven’t heard back from the student I gave two lessons to last week, and I don’t expect I ever will. My record at keeping students is quite poor at this early stage.

I haven’t watched that much of the Australian Open (it’s just not as important to me as it once was) but I did see this morning’s five-set semi-final between Federer and Wawrinka. I must be in a fairly small minority of people who wanted Wawrinka to win. Yes, Federer is one of the best players ever (arguably the best ever), and the way he’s managed to come back at the age of 35 and play such sublime tennis is quite remarkable, but the constant fawning over him gets to me. If Nadal beats Dimitrov tomorrow to make the final, I’ll be wanting him to win, and I expect I’ll be in the minority again. The prospect of a final between Nadal and Federer, to go with a Williams sisters final, has catapulted tennis to the front of the sports pages, and for that I’m grateful. A couple of stats that stood out for me: (1) three of the women’s semi-finalists were on the tour last century (Mirjana Lucic-Baroni made the semis of Wimbledon back in ’99) and (2) three of the men’s semi-finalists use a single-handed backhand.

I’ve been in Romania nearly four months and in my next post I’ll give my assessment of how I think it’s gone so far.

 

Language teaching - Romania - Tennis

Delayed delivery

January 24, 2017 by 0 Comments

I wrote this on Saturday morning but didn’t have any way of posting it. I’m now back in business internet-wise, and not before time: I’ve got a Skype lesson later this evening. Losing my internet access, and potentially my ability to work, put a damper on my weekend.

Good news: I’ve got some more students, including a woman currently living in Austria who wants six hours of Skype lessons per week. Bad news: I no longer have an internet connection in my apartment, so those Skype lessons will be a bit tricky to arrange.

I gave my first Skype lesson on Friday, scheduled for two hours. We covered grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, and she wasn’t at all shy when it came to asking questions. It was intense, it was fun. Or at least it was until my computer crashed ten minutes before our scheduled end.

One of my students is some sort of IT guru and he managed to get my wi-fi connected on Wednesday night. It took him about 15 minutes of fiddling around with the DOS screen and who knows what else – it was all far beyond me. I offered to give him the lesson for free but he declined. Having wi-fi meant I was able to FaceTime my parents and my brother. But I think some settings changed when my computer crashed on Friday, and although I still had a connection for a few hours afterwards, now I can’t even connect with the cable. I don’t think having Windows 10 is helping. I’m only guessing though. I spent hours yesterday searching on my phone for some kind of solution and playing around with settings, not knowing what any of them really meant. And of course I turned various devices on and off again many, many times. Why can’t these concepts be explained in a way that mere mortals like me can understand?

I think the root of the problem is this laptop which was a cast-off from my parents and is too weak and flimsy to handle intensive processes like Skype. It takes several minutes just to start it up. If I’m serious about teaching, I can’t be making do with second-rate technology. My phone works fine and has been immensely helpful, but its screen is too small and its runs on a version of iOS that’s too old for many apps. The next time I’m back in the UK, I might spend some of the money I have over there. It’s not much use anywhere else.

Thankfully I can run Words with Friends on my phone, albeit the old version that doesn’t tell you handy stuff like how many of each tile is left in the bag. I’m now leading my cousin 12-7. In our latest game, she raced into a huge lead with FROZE which scored 115, the highest score in any of our games so far. She maintained a three-figure lead for most of the game as I drew badly, but at the end I found SiLLIEST, a 101-point bingo (it’s not often a word like that will play at such a late stage) to put a dent in her winning margin. In the end I lost 453-420, scoring 400 in a losing cause for the second time. In a recent game on a frustratingly closed board I held a large lead, but my cousin could have bingoed out for over 100 with OXIDISE, if only there was somewhere to play it.

I have the equivalent of Sky on my TV, and it’s remarkably cheap. Years ago I would have been glued to the Australian Open. I’ve watched a bit of it certainly, but tennis, or any sport really, isn’t as important to me as it once was. The tournament has certainly had its moments, mainly on the men’s side with Djokovic’s shock defeat to Denis Istomin, Kyrgios’s meltdown, and that extremely long fifth set involving Karlovic. (Advantage final sets are dying, with both the Olympics and Davis Cup now using tie-breaks in the final set. How much longer before scores of 8-6, 9-7 and beyond are sadly killed off for good?) The best part about watching the tennis for me is the Romanian commentary.

I think my time in Romania will be a marathon, not a sprint, and I don’t feel I’ve even crossed the start line yet.

Language teaching - Romania

Getting set up

January 6, 2017 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been speaking to someone at a call centre – I still haven’t got my wi-fi connected. (I’m writing this from the café close by.) Dealing with call centres can be hard enough in my own language, but in Romanian … forget it. The woman on the other end rattled off some long number that was neither my phone number nor the number on my contract because it ended in a three. Shit, what am I supposed to say now? Um, er, yes? She then kept repeating something that sounded like the French word saisissez but with the Z in a different place. Normally I absolutely hate it when people offer to speak English, but when she did so it came as some sort of relief. At a guess she was 25 and started learning English 22 years ago. Speaking (or more to the point, listening to) Romanian on the phone is still a real problem for me, even though I’ve handled dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls since I arrived in the country. When you can’t see their eyes or their lips or make gestures, you’re almost flying blind. When people ring up about lessons it isn’t quite so bad because at least I know what sort of questions they’re likely to ask and vaguely how to reply. People are still calling me, even though I’m (sadly) no longer putting posters up apart from in the university campus.

If it wasn’t for those posters I wouldn’t have found this apartment. And it’s awesome. I love it. In fact I’m more excited about this place than the one I bought in Wellington because that didn’t represent anything. This represents a dream. And the location, the view, is a dream. I’ve got the beautiful cathedral that graces thousands of postcards and fridge magnets staring me in the face, with the hustle and bustle of the southern end of the square in the foreground, and Parcul Central and a tram line in the background. This is most definitely Timișoara. (Consciously or otherwise, I have a habit of ending up in places where it’s pretty obvious where I am. I think I like that. Suburbia, where you could often be just about anywhere, doesn’t do it for me.)

My apartment is 50 square metres; both the lounge and the bedroom are a good size. I neither feel hemmed in nor am I rattling around. And it’s peaceful up here; I feel a long way from the busyness down below. My second night here was New Year’s Eve – tens of thousands packed into the square for the fireworks display, many of whom cracked open bottles of bubbly as the clock struck midnight. All the festivities and illuminations have made this spot even cooler than it would otherwise be. The night before last the priest called in to anoint me and wish me a happy New Year. And to collect money. I gave him 6 lei. Should I have given 60? Probably not 600, but really I had no idea.

My only real worry here is what would happen if we had a fire. Alarms? Sprinklers? Extinguishers? Escapes? Romania, I know you’re beautiful and everything, and I like the way you haven’t gone overboard with the whole safety culture thing, but jeez, basic fire protection in high-occupancy buildings like this is common sense. You lost 64 people in a nightclub fire not that long ago. It’s time you got your shit together. Plus some of the wiring around here is as dodgy as anything, so we’re more likely to have a fire in the first place.

Last night I gave my first lesson at home – that was a milestone of sorts. I haven’t got a table set up yet, so we just sat on the sofa. He wanted to go over a song so I played him Our House by Madness and we went through some of the lyrics. He said he liked the song because the lyrics actually have a point to them unlike so much of today’s stuff. Continuing the early eighties theme, we went over an article about the Brixton riots in London.

I’m still playing Words with Friends with my cousin. As the name suggests, it’s a good way to catch up. I’m currently leading 4-3, though I was hammered 455-299 in our last game. There are eleven “power” tiles in WWF (five S’s, two blanks, the J, Q, X and Z). I only drew two of them, the X and an S, and that’s really why I lost so heavily. There were a couple of interesting moments that might have changed the game, however. On just my second turn I had a load of vowels that didn’t want to go anywhere, so I decided to exchange five tiles. My cousin said I shouldn’t exchange in almost any circumstances, and I actually disagree quite strongly with that. Then, in the middle of the game when I was down but by no means out I played RAVED, and my cousin followed that up with HIVES vertically in a very dangerous spot, with the H directly below a triple word score. Wow, both the C’s are still out. She must have one and be gambling that I don’t (and she’d be right; the only way I’d have a C is if I drew one last turn, because otherwise I’d have played CRAVED). So I played the only move I could see that blocked CHIVES and a potential monster score. She didn’t have the C after all, but still went and played RAJ on the opposite side of the board for nearly 60 to give her a three-figure lead, and that was just about game over for me.

Both BRR and BRRR are allowed in Scrabble. I’m not so sure about Words with Friends. But tomorrow we’re in for a top temperature of minus 8. That’s getting into proper brass monkeys, BRRR-with-three-R’s territory.

That was almost a thousand words. Sorry about that.

Language teaching - Life :)

I’m still learning

December 17, 2016 by 0 Comments

I’ve given just seven English lessons in Romania so far, but I’ve learnt a lot, and who knows, maybe my students have learnt something too. I’ve learnt that Romanians can’t pronounce “squirrel”. Or “vowel”. Or “valve”. I’m going to make up a lesson (or part of one) on V and W sounds for both my current students. Yeah, both. I need more, don’t I? My latest student is a 28-year-old in only her second week as a junior real estate agent (or consultant, as it says in her job title). She lives in Giroc, a village just outside Timișoara, with her boyfriend, four cats and two dogs. She picks me up from the hotel: that’s a win-win because, well, I haven’t got a car and I’d be struggling to get there, and she gets to speak English in the car, in effect a longer lesson. The first lesson ended up being about numbers, which are a pretty big topic in any language (I might do a post on Romanian numbers). I hear so many people with otherwise good English fail to make the distinction between “thirteen” and “thirty”. Her main confusion was between “hundred” and “thousand”, numbers she’ll be using a lot in her job. At the start of our second lesson she told me of her ingenious method for remembering those numbers: she called her biggest cat Thousand and her smallest (and she is tiny) Hundred. In our second lesson we practised introductions with customers. After my own experience with real estate agents here, I could give her plenty of examples of what not to do.

My other student presents me with all kinds of curveballs. He might ask something like, “Why do we use the present perfect continuous here?” Why is it “I have been waiting” and not “I have waited”? Sometimes I’m really struggling to come up with an answer. This week he asked me how to pronounce Nike and Adobe, and whether those words actually mean anything. I said that, yes you do pronounce the E’s (I always want to pronounce Nike to rhyme with Mike even though I know it’s wrong) and mentioned the goddess of victory and something about bricks. I then gave “recipe” as an example of a common word where you pronounce the final E. Then came the real doozy. He asked me whether there was a difference in meaning between “theatre” and “theater”. He said something about the building and the performance. I said no, one is British and the other American, whether you’re talking about the building, the performance, or even an operating theatre/theater. I said it was just like centre/center. I then did a quick Google search just in case, and lo and behold, he was right (maybe I was reading the exact same source he had read). Apparently some Americans attempt to distinguish between theatre (the performance) and theater (the building). You learn something every day (not “everyday”, which is one of my pet peeves).

Drumming up more teaching business has taken a back seat to the very stressful process of finding an apartment which isn’t over yet. I was supposed to view two flats today but both owners declined to see me because of my foreignness. I’ve got two new agents. I’ve already chucked hundreds of lei at one of them, to no avail yet. My other agent is somebody my female student knows. Today I emailed her in Romanian, explaining that I get a good income from my apartment in Wellington and paying my rent every month won’t be a problem.

I’m beginning to wish I’d voted differently in the EU referendum.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

It’s a mirage

December 10, 2016 by 0 Comments

This is Romania. The land of the bogus. The land of the fictitious. The land of the phantom.

Last night I rushed to view an apartment in the south-west quadrant of the city, not too far from the centre. The flat was on the ground floor of a forbidding seventies block, and far bigger than anything I need. But the real turn-off wasn’t the flat (“too big” isn’t the worst problem a flat can have after all), it was the agent. He was thirty or so, and his BMW couldn’t have been more than four years old. In Romania, that means he’s making far too much money. He was suave, he was smooth, he was someone I trusted even less than I normally trust real estate agents. From there I had to find my way, somehow, to my student’s apartment in the north of the city. I didn’t have much time, it was dark, and buses still remain something of a mystery. At Piața Regina Maria I got on the 14 bus, which seemed right, and tried to follow the route on the far-too-small screen of my phone. Traffic was heavy. I got off at Peter and Paul Street, or Strada Petru și Pavel, parallel to my student’s street. Excellent. But actually finding the right tower block was another matter. These blocks aren’t numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 or 2, 4, 6, 8 or anything predictable. They often have a letter and a number, and within every block there are typically several staircases each denoted by a letter. I needed block A35, staircase (or scara) C. By the time I found it I was five minutes late. The door was locked and I had to press a button so that my student could let me in. But which one? I knew he lived on the fourth floor but didn’t know which apartment. I phoned him. No answer. Great. A few minutes later a woman arrived. I asked her if she knew Silviu, she said yes and pointed me to the correct flat. I trudged up to the fourth floor, rang his doorbell, and got no reply. Wonderful. I then took the bus back to Piața 700, where I got two pleșkavițe (which aren’t all they’re cracked up to be), and walked home. The temperature was zero and dropping fast.

Finding a suitable apartment isn’t easy or fun. On Wednesday I got ripped off by an agency who charged me 100 lei (what I charge for two lessons) for some useless search tool. Well, it isn’t useless, but it doesn’t do anything I can’t do online, and it swamps me with spam. For my money I also got to chat with a young woman who said that inhabitants of Romanian villages are merely animals. Nice.

My dad showed me this article from the New York Times. (Dad finds these articles using a news aggregator called News360.) Wow, 148 diaries found in a skip (or dumpster). Alexander Masters’ Stuart was a great read and I’d recommend it to anybody. I spent a lot of time wandering around central Cambridge in the late nineties so I found it particularly illuminating.

This sense that I can’t trust anybody is frustrating, but it hasn’t put me off wanting to live here. Finding somewhere to live is my top priority. Once I’ve done that and got all my paperwork sorted (I hope), I can concentrate on finding genuine students. I’m getting plenty of responses to my ads so I remain positive on that score. Christmas and New Year will be a non-event and I don’t really mind.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Saint Nick (no it ain’t Christmas)

December 7, 2016 by 1 Comment

Today is St Nicholas Day, known as Moș Nicolae in Romanian. Last night children would have left their shoes outside, and this morning they would have woken up to find them (traditionally at least) filled with either gifts if they’d been good, or a stick if they’d been bad. In practice most of them would have received both. I was amazed to read that the average Romanian spends 318 lei on this religious festival. For that money you could buy six 90-minute English lessons from me, the haircut I had yesterday, plus a small coffee from the vending machine I often use. It’s a quarter of the minimum monthly wage. In other words it’s a lot of money. It’s a busy time of year for festivals and celebrations. St Andrew’s Day was on 30th November, the first of two public holidays in a row. The next day, 1st December, was Romania’s national holiday, commemorating the 98th anniversary of the unification of Transylvania (including the Banat region where I am now) with the rest of the country. I watched the parade of tanks and fire engines as my feet froze despite being double-socked. Later I had some food and mulled wine from the market in the middle of town, saw the mayor switch on the Christmas tree lights, and at 10pm watched the fireworks display to the strains of this revolutionary song. I even bought a Romanian flag.

I’ve got a new student who wants two lessons a week from me, starting this Thursday. He’s at a beginner level, so it promises to be interesting. I did well to hold that conversation together in Romanian. Again I’m a little worried about the first lesson from a safety point of view. I had several calls yesterday. Speaking Romanian (or rather understanding it) in the middle of a busy town is well beyond me at this stage. Somebody else rang me this morning wanting lessons in a café between 8am and noon, which would be very convenient for me, but we haven’t sorted out dates yet. Just from our English phone conversation I’d put him at a 7 (at least) on my 0-to-10 scale. The enthusiastic younger guy who I taught two weeks ago seems unfortunately to have dropped out of the picture, for now at least.

I have to find an apartment with some urgency if I want to stay in Timișoara (and I really really want to stay here!). But there are so many pitfalls. I’m at risk of being ripped off or in a noisy hellhole or robbed or some combination of the three. Noise control exists in the Romanian language: controlul zgomotului (see, another z-plus-consonant word) but that’s the only place it exists here. My tennis partner has a contact in real estate; I spoke with her this evening on the phone. Hopefully she can find me something.

I won’t be leaving Timișoara for Christmas.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Frustrations, and the latest from Geraldine

November 29, 2016 by 0 Comments

How long could I stay in that positive frame of mind? The answer: not very long.

Dad passed out again. He was out for about a minute; Mum could see the whites of his eyes and she thought she’d lost him. She called the ambulance which took half an hour to arrive. (This is Geraldine.) They did some tests: his heart was working as it should and his blood pressure was normal. He didn’t even have a temperature. It was all a mystery until yesterday when he received the results of a blood test. He’d picked up a bacterial infection that sent his warfarin levels sky high. He’s now been given antibiotics which should do the trick, and has been told not to take warfarin for two days. (He’s had to take warfarin ever since the aortic valve replacement he had done in 2005, which I touched on in my last post.) Dad regularly gets severe headaches, so when he gets sick like this he often suffers a double whammy. It doesn’t help that he also has a wife who only really starts caring when she thinks he might die.

The euphoria, or close to that, which I felt after my last English lessons, is well and truly over. Mihai, who is one of the nicest people I’ve met in Romania so far, has had to go to Bucharest so I won’t be teaching him tonight. I don’t know if and when I’ll see the first guy again. December 1st is Romania’s national day. The celebrations of all things Romania will be interesting to see, but people tend to use them as an excuse for an extended holiday, making things a bit awkward from a teaching perspective. I’ve heard nothing more about the “conversation club” due to begin on 9th December, so at this stage I’ll assume it won’t happen. The old guy who said he spoke no English pulled out of his lesson – twice – and only when I called him right before we were due to start to ask him exactly which apartment he lived in. Somebody called me yesterday to ask whether, when I said in my ad that I could “give you a hand”, I meant the left or the right hand. I hung up on him. Somebody else rang me at 4:20 on Sunday morning; I didn’t answer. Still more people have showed genuine interest, but were put off the moment I said I’d need to visit them rather than the other way round. This hotel room is in no way suitable.

I need to move out of this place soon. I’m using “need” accurately here. To get a registration certificate enabling me to live in Romania legally beyond early January, I need a fixed address. I was planning on sorting out all my paperwork at the immigration office this morning, but yesterday I spoke to the people at the hotel who said in an unnecessarily forceful way that they won’t let me name this place as my fixed address unless I commit to living here for six months or more. As I can’t teach here, that’s out of the question. Whether I rent a place through the usual channels, which have all kinds of pitfalls, or get something through Airbnb which would be safer but more costly, I haven’t decided yet.

Despite my recent frustrations, one thing is clear: teaching English is something I really want to do, and I really want to do it here in Romania. Making it all happen won’t be easy – there are barriers everywhere I look – but it’s all a lot more doable when I know the what and the where. For more than a decade I didn’t have a clue.