Language teaching

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Teaching in Timișoara is terrific, but no sympathy in New Zealand

November 26, 2016 by 0 Comments

I FaceTimed my parents last night. Dad has been ill for about a week. He’s been running a temperature and at one stage he was passing out. An obvious advantage of FaceTime or Skype is that you can see who you’re talking to, but it wasn’t much of an advantage last night. Dad looked frightful. For the first few minutes of my conversation with him, Mum was outside. He said he’d had absolutely no sympathy from her – quite the opposite in fact. In all the years I can remember, Mum has never given any love or attention to Dad when he’s been sick. I can’t forgive her for that. Mum’s sister, and sister-in-law, would be gobsmacked if they knew how she treated him sometimes. In fact her family was gobsmacked in 2005 when Dad went back to the UK for major heart surgery (that almost killed him) and she stayed in New Zealand. When Mum got to the phone last night I could see the burning anger in her face. When Dad came back on the line at the end of our call, Mum made faces and hand signals behind his back.

The night before last I gave only my second English lesson in Romania. I loved every minute of it and so did Mihai, or at least I think he did. He’s a 27-year-old medical student, so not that young, and he recently did a two-month work placement in Wolverhampton. To live and work in the UK long-term he needs a good score in the IELTS exam. Before the lesson I spent some time boning up on how IELTS works. The exam is in four parts – reading, writing, speaking and listening. He wanted help on the writing and speaking parts. He’ll probably be sitting the exam as soon as January, and is prepared to go as far as Slovenia to avoid having to take it on the Sabbath. I was impressed with his enthusiasm and that rubbed off on me. Every time I used a word or expression he was unfamiliar with, e.g. “salient”, “out there”, “think on your feet”, he jotted it down. We talked about how wonderful it is to travel (he’s done a fair bit of hitchhiking, something I’ve never had the balls to do) and the benefits to Romanians of being in the EU. We’ve got another lesson pencilled in for next Tuesday. As I walked down the stairs from his fourth-floor apartment (there was no lift or anything fancy like that) I was just about bouncing with happiness. I felt that good.

The woman at the photocopy shop yesterday asked me if I taught English; she said she wanted to take the IELTS exam so she could live and work in Denmark, where I guess English is a requirement. She was amused by my Donald Trump ad, which showed him pulling quite a ridiculous face, saying “I know words. I have the best words.” Above the picture of the president-elect, I wrote “Want to speak better English than this guy?”. My Simpsons ad will show the familiar blackboard scene that features at the beginning of most episodes, but in my version Bart will be trying to write out a difficult-to-spell phrase like “I will accommodate English in my schedule” and getting it repeatedly wrong until he gives up. Anyway, the photocopy lady seemed to like my Trump ad, and we swapped numbers. Maybe she’ll be another client of mine. It’ll help that I’m bound to use her photocopy services many more times.

I was going to write about Donald Trump and the state of the world, but things have happened, so that will have to wait.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

This is fun

November 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

I gave my first English lesson last night. The guy picked me from the hotel and we had the lesson in some kind of hall. His wife told me on the phone that he needs to know the rules. Rules? Wow, where do I start? Because I’m a native speaker, I don’t even know half the rules, and every rule seems to have just as many exceptions. I found a really good web page that gave a comprehensive guide to the different present tenses in English (I watch, I am watching, I have been watching, and so on) and figured that would be a good start. But it wasn’t. When I went through various examples of the present continuous tense in use, he was presently continuously bored. At the half-way point of the lesson I wisely ditched grammar rules and spent the next 45 minutes having a chat. He had a good handle on grammar, but as he said, he lacked the confidence (and experience) to apply the rules in conversation. That’s a pretty familiar feeling to me. His English wasn’t bad – I’d put him at a 5 on a 0-to-10 scale – but he made classic mistakes that a lot of second-language speakers make, such as overusing “many” in place of “a lot of”, or mispronouncing certain words. He also came out with a fair bit of Romanglish such as “there exists a company…”. The “highlight” was when he talked about a “dessert” in Serbia. I asked him what it was made out of. Chocolate? Cream? Strawberries? I might have to try it if and when I venture over the border. “Sand,” he said. “Many sand.” Overall the lesson, or at least the second half of it, was encouraging. Next time he wants me to go over hard-to-pronounce words like “thieves” and “south”.

Later today I’m helping a younger guy prepare for an IELTS exam, assuming he agrees to the price. Just from our phone conversation I’d put him at an 8 (at least) on my scale, so this is a bit daunting for me. What can I actually do to help him? In a year’s time, sure, but I’m totally green right now. He said that five years ago he scored 108 in a TOEFL exam (he pronounced it “one-oh-eight”, a good indication in itself that he can do the English thing). I said, wow, that’s impressive, without having the foggiest clue what the score meant. It’s out of 120, and you need 110 to get into Oxford, so 108 is actually pretty good after all. Since the exam he’s lived and worked in the US, so it’s a fair bet that he’s improved since then. Again, I wonder just what I can help him with.

Last night somebody else texted in reply to one of my ads. His or her English was better than perfect. It was quite possibly the first time in fifteen years that I received a text with a semicolon in it, and what’s more, he or she used it correctly. This person says he or she doesn’t require any further training in English, but would like to meet me and show me around the city. Cool.

I’m loving this! It is a bit frightening at times, but completely overhauling my life, which is pretty much what I’m doing here, is bound to be scary. It’s totally mad that I’m doing this, but totally awesome, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. When I walk around Timișoara I now feel much more comfortable, as if I’m part of the city, as if I’m just another of the thousands of small business owners here trying to scratch out a living. And like them, I now have my own homemade signs. As well as the Big Ben ads, I’ve made (but haven’t yet put up) ones with the word Timișoara spelt out in colour with landmarks and symbols from the UK and America: the McDonalds logo for the M, the London Eye for the O, Big Ben (again) and the Empire State Building for the two I’s, and so on. I’ve also got Donald Trump ads and Simpsons ones (where I’ll ensure that even the tear-off bits are in Simpsons-style writing) in the pipeline. That’s all appropriate now that as a species we might as well be living in an episode of the Simpsons after everything that’s happened in 2016 (more about that in my next post). But even the effort of putting up ads around the city, and trying to find the end of the sellotape in the dark, has been kind of fun, because there’s a purpose to it all.

I just hope I don’t have to leave. That would be terrible.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania - Tennis

A great opportunity

November 21, 2016 by 0 Comments

In Romania, anything UK or English language-related is incomplete without a picture of Big Ben. My Romanian–English dictionary has one. My packet of Earl Grey tea has one. Any self-respecting English teaching advert clearly needs to incorporate one. So I found a picture of Big Ben, showing one o’clock as it happens, and added the slogan “Now’s the Time” at the top. Then I wrote some blurb in English that sort of implied that I’ve been teaching for ages. I said I was after intermediate and advanced students (not that I have anything against beginner students; it’s just that they’d probably be better off with a Romanian teacher until I can get my Romanian up to speed). I found a cheap photocopy shop, printed off forty copies with those tear-off strips of paper at the bottom, and started sellotaping them to bits of Timișoara. This morning I was in the middle of putting up an ad (the 25th? 30th?) when my phone rang. It was an older bloke. I asked him what his current level of English was. He said he didn’t speak any English at all. And he wants a lesson tomorrow at 11am. Oh shit! I really will have to wing it tomorrow, won’t I? Actually I’m not thinking ‘oh shit’ at all. I’m thinking this is a wonderful opportunity. A dream come true almost. But yes, teaching somebody English from scratch will be a challenge. It’ll help me improve my Romanian if nothing else. (I know, technically Big Ben is the large bell, not the tower or any of the four clocks.) One concern I do have is about security. Putting ads up everywhere screaming that I’m from the UK does make me a bit of a target. I’m not in Wellington. I’m not in St Ives. I’ll have to be careful.

When I got off the phone this morning I thought, how cool is this? This is fun, this is exciting, and if I could get a few more takers… Man, this is what I dream about. Being my own boss, helping people, roaming around town, getting my lunch from market stalls, and at weekends taking a train to Belgrade or Budapest or Békéscsaba or wherever takes my fancy. Freedom, dammit! Freedom from having to play a role, which is always so exhausting for me. I’m a long way from achieving that freedom, but I might yet manage it. There aren’t many native English speakers in Timișoara, and for the most part they aren’t as crazy as me: they had jobs to go to when they came here. So I might not have a whole lot of competition. One thing’s for sure: I love this city and have no intention of leaving any time soon. I still have some things to sort out with immigration to ensure I don’t have to.

I see that New Zealand has its own version of Donald Trump. He goes by the name of Brian Tamaki. Two years ago he was the subject of an argument I had with my flatmate, who said he was an upstanding citizen who does a lot of good in the community, or something to that effect. I said he should be in jail.

I’ve had one eye on the final of the tennis from London. Andy Murray has just beaten Novak Djokovic in two sets, a well-deserved victory in what was a shoot-out for the year-end number one spot. Yesterday Murray played a remarkable match against Milos Raonic, winning 11-9 in the third-set tie-break. He’s had a fantastic second half of the season, winning Wimbledon and Olympic gold. Murray always impresses me in his interviews with his appreciation for the game and his recall of matches. In a way that shouldn’t impress me – tennis is, like, his job – but some players are pretty hazy when it comes to the finer points. I was supposed to be playing tennis today, not just watching it, but that might have to wait.

A train crash in India has killed 120 people. I read that almost 15,000 people die in Indian train accidents each year.

International travel - Language teaching

Promising

October 12, 2016 by 0 Comments

I can’t say I enjoyed my first day in Timișoara all that much. My hotel, which is almost right next to a large abattoir, seemed a long way from town. I meandered into the city centre, enjoying the incredible buildings, but I felt disoriented. The lady at the tourist office had me wondering what the big “i” stood for. Inconvenience? That’s certainly what I felt like. I found Union Square, and touched Casa Brück and the Banca de Scont like I promised to nearly a year ago, but I wasn’t feeling it. I walked round Piața 700, one of the produce markets, and went to a nearby supermarket. There I caused a mega shit-storm by going in through the out door. Apparently that’s very much frowned upon. (I didn’t even know it was the out door. There were no signs.) They decided that the kind of person who enters through the out door is also the sort of person who nicks stuff, and I was manhandled as I tried to leave. I didn’t know what was going on at first. Eventually I was able to leave, but not until I’d had the mick taken out of me for saying “I understand now” in Romanian. After getting a pleșcavița for lunch I wandered aimlessly, taking pictures of graffiti and bumping into another bloke who was doing the same thing. He lived in Budapest. Unlike me, his body was also graffitied. We walked for about three hours, getting a bit lost in the process, and had dinner together. I got back to the hotel thinking I’d seen enough of Timișoara already.

Day two was a different story. It was a few degrees warmer and it was Sunday. Church day. Family day. People were milling about in their thousands in the beautiful squares. The place felt happy and lively. Peaceful too. I walked along the Bega canal and to my surprise the free boat trips were still running. I hopped on. The boat took us to a lock and back, and lasted about 45 minutes. I walked through the many parks and found one that was full of hammocks. I lay in one for a while. I then found an alley full of eateries not far from my hotel, and had a shaworma (or something) and a beer for just 14 lei, or about three quid. As I walked back to the hotel people were playing table tennis in a park. Some of them I could have probably beaten; others looked like regional champions.

Since then I’ve been to the museum which was all about the revolution, taken a few mystery tram rides, and got my mobile phone sorted. The events of 1989 feel close to home; you can still see the bullet holes in what is now McDonald’s. Outside the museum there is a piece of the Berlin Wall which came down just before the Romanian Revolution. Today I had fun (or not) trying to get a bus ticket to Deva, which is my next port of call. I went to the station (taking the correct tram, which was nice) but got nowhere. I made a phone call on a busy street; the lady at the other end read me out a phone number in English but she was hard to understand. Was that “four four” or “four four four”? I then made another call from the comfort of my hotel room and was able to book my bus ride in Romanian.

Speaking a foreign language, when you’re at the fairly basic level I’m at, requires a certain amount of balls. I’m naturally a shy person, so at times I’ve really had to steel myself. However, the people at the hotel have complemented me on my Romanian, in particular my accent. Tonight, one of the hotel staff asked me if I was a linguist. Not exactly, I said. She then talked about opportunities at language schools in Timișoara, saying there should be plenty for a native speaker who is good with languages, and gave me her business card. I’ve already stored her details on this computer in case I lose the card. It all sounds very promising but I mustn’t get my hopes up too much.

Deva is about 150 km from here but the bus is scheduled to take 3¼ hours, stopping at every little town imaginable. After that I’ll be heading to the beautiful city of Sibiu.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

High of 14? Yeah, right

September 8, 2016 by 0 Comments

I was about to write a list of things I’ll miss about Wellington. Top of my list was going to be the weather. Yeah, I know, the weather. In Wellington. When I listen to the 7am weather bulletin, the Wellington forecast is usually bright sunshine with a high of 14. Or torrential horizontal rain and a high of 14. Or nor-westers gusting to 130 k’s and a high of 14. The Cook Strait and rugged landscape otherwise plays havoc with Wellington’s weather patterns, but blissfully, the temperature needle hardly twitches for weeks on end. I was going to say how much I’ll miss that in Romania where the high will deviate a long way from 14 in both directions. But then today happened, the rain, the hail, the snow (yep), the wind that you could hardly stand up in, and as for the high, what high? (That’s what I said in 2009 when I was (mis)diagnosed as being bipolar.)

I gave my last English lesson on Monday. He and his wife have invited me over for dinner next week, which will be the last time I see him, in lieu of a lesson. They’re very pleasant people. He had a good last lesson as we went through three readers. He seemed to be more attentive and I was particularly impressed with his pronunciation of “shelves”.

There are billboards up all over the city as the mayoral election approaches. There are several prominent ones for Jo Coughlan that are made to look like road signs, and have slogans like “Four lanes to the planes” and “Toot for a second tunnel”. My carpool mate and I were wondering how on earth Ms Coughlan pronounces her surname. There are no fewer than seven common pronunciations of -ough in English, as in tough, though, trough, through, thought, thorough and drought. (Just look how close the first six of those words are to one another.) So what is it? Coo-lun? Cow-lun? Coff-lun? Turns out it’s Cog-lun. Different from all seven of the above. Fan-bloody-tastic. I’m not voting for you Ms Coughlan unless you change the pronunciation of your name. You’ve got plenty of options. (Ms Coughlan is Bill English’s sister-in-law. Her father, Tom, played one game for the All Blacks in the fifties. Tom’s brother, who died a few years ago, was at the same home in Timaru that my grandmother spent her final years; I remember he had enormous hands.) I won’t be voting for Jo anyway because I doubt I’ll get the chance before I go away, and even if I do, prioritising the car ahead of public transport is not where I see Wellington’s future.

Language teaching - Life :) - My big plan

It’s not normal!

August 30, 2016 by 0 Comments

A couple of weekends ago my friend from the tennis club came over for dinner. I don’t often host people who aren’t related to me. He brought some weed but I declined since it was only my second day on Citalopram and it didn’t seem wise to muddy the picture at such an early stage. A pity really; I’d only ever tried marijuana a handful of times, all of them in France back in 2001, and the experience was positive. We talked for a long time and I must have been unusually engaged in the conversation because I didn’t look at my watch. At one point he said, “We’re not conventional people.” Last year I was taken aback when someone suggested that I don’t conform to society’s norms and until I stop playing the fitting-in game I’ll continue to be unhappy. Those words hit me hard: people don’t like to be told they’re not normal. But he was dead right. The fitting-in game wears me out and makes me unhappy, even though I only play it at a basic level by, for instance, attending work functions only if there’d be a particular loss of face if I didn’t show up. And I’ve been playing it for decades, at school, at university, and at work, by attempting to be invisible. By trying to fit in I’m in danger of becoming nothing if I don’t act fast.

Not being normal, in any of the forms that can take, isn’t easy. It means you probably didn’t have many friends at school. It means you almost certainly didn’t make the first rugby team at your high school, with the immediate confidence boost that comes with that and all the connections and job opportunities that are likely to accrue even 20, 30, 40 years later. Jobs of any description will be harder to come by and to maintain. Ditto relationships. It means you’re less likely than average to drive a car, to own your own home, to get married, to procreate. The kids you do have are quite likely to have the same problems you do. The house you do have is likely to be poorly insulated and get little sun. (D is probably not the only vitamin you aren’t getting enough of.) It means you’re less likely to vote than the general population (who cares about me anyway?) and if you do vote, the party you vote for probably won’t win. It means you’re likely to suffer from mental health problems, to have trouble with the law, to commit suicide, and to die at a young age. It means that even in 2016, life is generally a bitch and a short bitch at that.

Luckily I was born with a certain facility for maths and for language. I come from a loving family for whom education and employment matter. I learnt (I hope) to be warm and polite, and how not to offend or annoy people. I went to university (though it was far from easy for me socially), I got a good degree, I embarked on a career, I did all the normal stuff. And so I’ve been insulated from many of the bad things in the second paragraph. But I had no foundation to underpin any of that normal stuff – no sense of home, of purpose, of belonging, of attachment to anything. It was no surprise that it all came crashing down. From the moment I moved in, my apartment, spacious and conveniently located though it is, has felt like a monument to a past life that itself was pretty meaningless. In the last few years the insulation has worn thin, the veneer has cracked. Pretending to be normal, to please my parents or society at large, is no longer working. It’s about time I decided to be me instead. (That’s pretty much what I said when I started this blog last October, but it’s as if I forget.)

I’m glad I went back on Citalopram. I have absolutely no problem with taking antidepressants if they’re going to be of benefit to me.

Last night I gave one of my last English lessons. He still struggles with short words but does better with longer ones. Went and want posed problems but different and important were no bother. When I asked him if he knew find, he said “I’m find, thank you.” (I went through a list of words with two final consonant sounds, to try to get him to actually pronounce the ends of words, but had little success there.) He still recognises whole words only; he correctly identified hand and stand, but couldn’t then correctly pronounce land. The short-words-hard, long-words-easier pattern reminded me of my attempt to learn basic Chinese; lots of similar short words became a murky mess in my mind.

I still haven’t got anybody to rent my apartment. A group of three people were keen but only if I would guarantee their tenancy until February 2018 which I wasn’t prepared to do. That’s my biggest hurdle right now.

Language teaching - My big plan

I won’t be put off…

August 2, 2016 by 1 Comment

At the weekend I saw two Romanian movies, Bacalaureat and Sieranevada, as part of the film festival. They hardly showcased Romania’s natural beauty. In fact they could both put anyone off living over there. Sieranevada, which lasted nearly three hours, certainly put me off living in a seventies apartment block in Bucharest, not that I was ever planning to do that anyway. But they both provided a fascinating window on Romanian society: family, religion, politics, corruption, the clash between the modern and the traditional. Here’s a review of Sieranevada in the Guardian.  And here’s a very positive review of Bacalaureat from the same paper.

For a change last night I gave my student a crossword to solve. It was one I’d made myself, with pictures replacing the usual clues. Making even a small 9×9 crossword for a beginner-level student isn’t that easy, simply because your inventory of words is so heavily reduced. It’s very easy to end up in a situation where “abyss”, say, is the only word that fits, and that of course is hopeless. He’d clearly never attempted a crossword before (they wouldn’t work in his native language which doesn’t use an alphabet but rather an abugida) and at times trying to help him solve it was a painstaking exercise.

I’m flying to Timaru on Thursday morning to see my parents. We’ll go straight from the airport to their new(ish) house in Moeraki. When I spoke to them two nights ago they were still feeling the effects of jet lag.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

What’s the frequency?

July 27, 2016 by 0 Comments

It wasn’t a bad day at work. That’s because almost nothing happened. Last week’s desk move is still having an effect on me. Until last Wednesday hardly anybody walked past my desk, because you sort of couldn’t, but now people walk either in front of or behind me at a rate of 55 an hour. Yes, I did a traffic count today from 10 to 10:30 and from 2 to 2:30. This isn’t the first time I’ve counted things at work. I once had a boss who dropped 59 F-bombs in a single day and a colleague who had a DAFA (daily audible fart average) of just over three. I even used to count loo rolls or beer bottles when I overlooked a Pak ‘n’ Save loading bay. All this counting, and the fact that people walking past me at work bothers me enough to measure their frequency, might be a sign that I’m ever so slightly autistic.

On that note, I saw Life, Animated last night at the Paramount. It told the story of Owen, a now 25-year-old autistic man who as a child could only communicate by channelling Disney films, every one of which he’d memorised line-by-line, and who as an adult is going out into the big bad non-Disney world. It was a fantastic film that at times moved me to tears. He hero-worshipped his older brother who at one point tried to talk about sex to him. How do I do that, his big brother wondered. Through Disney porn?! This comment was met with much laughter in the cinema. Although the story was heartwarming I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of other Owens out there who don’t have a Pulitzer Prize-winning father, who might not even come from a loving family, and who certainly won’t get a fraction of the help he did. We were privileged to have the director, Roger Ross Williams, present for a Q&A session.

On Monday I gave another English lesson. My lesson plans rapidly went out the window, not that I minded. Quite the opposite in fact, as I helped my student and his wife buy a car seat for their small daughter on TradeMe. I did get him to talk about the start of his Monday (he said he woke up at 9:30 − lucky him) and because so many verbs with irregular past tenses cropped up I talked a bit about those as well as the regular -ed verbs.

Today is my brother’s 35th birthday. Only 15 months separate us. He and his girlfriend recently bought a house in Poole on the south coast of England. I got to see bits of the inside of their house on FaceTime. They’ve got a cat called Major Tom. (Great name. They’d better not mess with him.) I saw all the “new home” cards on their bench. It would have been nice to have had such cards when I moved into this place. It would be nice to have a cat too, but the body corp rules prohibit them. For that matter it could be nice to have a girlfriend.

I filled in for a social tennis team tonight and got obliterated in both doubles matches, even though my three service games were free of double faults.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Moving day

July 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

I was half-way up the stairs to our office on Wednesday morning when I remembered it was desk move day. The move was a two-hour operation involving physically moving desks. It was effectively a team-building event, and as always happens, the teamy people took over. I ended up in a fairly prominent position with far more foot traffic than before and far less privacy. Luckily I won’t be in that position very long. I have a cousin in Auckland whose workplace enforces daily desk moves. You’re not allowed to sit at the same workstation two days running. That sounds bloody terrifying.

In last Monday’s English lesson we focused on the letter F, or rather the f sound. I explained, with accompanying words and pictures, that the f sound can be written as f, ff, ph or gh. I think I said that ph is always pronounced f, hoping that he wouldn’t be wandering haphazardly through Clapham any time soon, or getting anything upholstered. That would be quite an upheaval. As for the gh combo, I tried to emphasise that f is far from the only pronunciation, without actually mentioning the numerous (and infamous) other possibilities. I think I failed badly. He first attempted to pronounce laugh something like “large”. When I then said the word correctly, he responded with “laffjjj”, and likewise “coffjjj” for cough. I think I got there in the end. Tomorrow I’ll concentrate on final consonant blends; he has a habit of omitting final sounds in speech. As I was driving home from the lesson, the guy who runs the marimba workshop happened to be giving a radio interview. I had two lessons with him. He was talking about an African instrument called an mbira. I thought it was interesting that we have to say an mbira rather than a mbira.

I haven’t mentioned Brexit for a while. Theresa May will be OK, I hope. She looks a safe pair of hands at least. The other contenders all seemed dangerous in their own ways. Still, May’s appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary is questionable to put it mildly. My biggest concern is a lack of effective opposition to the government. Labour are deeply divided. There is now a gaping hole in British politics which a new positive progressive party (like Podemos in Spain) should be able to fill, but alas the electoral system makes the emergence of a new party extremely difficult. Perhaps the best news for me is that Article 50 is now unlikely to be triggered before Christmas, but I wouldn’t assume anything in the current environment. I was reading an article about the Erasmus scheme, the EU student exchange programme that I took advantage of in 2000-01 when I studied in Lyon. Brexit puts UK access to the scheme in doubt beyond 2017. Yet another opportunity potentially lost.

I don’t want to write about Donald Trump because it’s too depressing and too scary. So much fear and hatred. Fivethirtyeight.com gives Trump a 42% chance of becoming president, and those guys know what they’re talking about. That 42% includes a 6% possibility that Trump wins the presidency despite losing the popular vote. We could be looking at a horrifyingly supercharged version of 2000.

I’ve now booked four of my five trains from the UK to Romania. They will hopefully get me as far as Budapest (quite an adventure in itself), and when I’m there I should be able to get a remarkably inexpensive train to Timișoara.

Language teaching - Life :) - My big plan

Made my mind up

June 13, 2016 by 0 Comments

I always feel energised after my English lesson and tonight was no different. I started off with a “twenty questions” game where my student had to guess the five items in a shoebox I’d brought along. After randomly guessing that the first item was a book, he struggled a bit. He kept wanting to guess specific items rather than attributes: Is it red? Is it soft? Can you eat it? Is it made of wood? Do you use it in the bathroom? But we got there in the end. I then showed him some pictures of a typical Kiwi winter and we “commentated” on them. Lots of useful words there: scarf, hood, walking stick, steam, smoke, logs, chimney, stuck, mud, and so on. And that was the end of the lesson. Time flies when you’re having fun, and for me (and hopefully for him too, but I can’t really tell) it is fun. He also said he wanted to get a job working in a park or garden and would be happy to study first; I’ll ring up the council tomorrow and ask what they can do.

I’ve made up my mind now. I want to teach English, learn foreign languages, study linguistics (maybe one day becoming really knowledgeable in a specific field) and travel. Lots and lots of travel. And that’s pretty much it. I’ve given on making money beyond what I need to survive with a modest level of comfort. It feels good to know what I want, and don’t want, out of life. If I hadn’t gone on that fantastic trip to America last year I probably still wouldn’t know.

I still don’t know where to base myself in Romania. My parents had reservations about Timișoara, but they were around lack of shops the likes of which you find in cities with tourism, unrenovated buildings, and a slightly dated public transport system. None of those three things bother me. Timișoara almost certainly will modernise its trams, but I’d actually like to try the old ones first. And I’d much rather get there before Emporio Armani does than after. Sibiu is incredibly picturesque and is much more “done up” – I think it got a cash injection from becoming Capital of Culture in 2007, but it doesn’t have all the markets and old trams that I know I’ll like. Sibiu has other stunningly beautiful places nearby, well, within a few inches on my 12-miles-to-an-inch map, and that’s significant plus for sure, and it has the possibility of volunteer teaching in rural areas close by, which would help me get my foot in the door. Timișoara would be better if I wanted to get to other places in different countries such as Belgrade. And of course there are other places I could go like Oradea in the north-west which I really like the look of.

Talking of Belgrade, you can take a train from there to Bar on the coast of Montenegro, a 12½-hour trip taking in 245 tunnels and 435 bridges, all for 21 euros! I must do that, after first catching a train or bus, or both, from wherever I decide to base myself in Romania.

Shocking scenes from Marseille (another place I want to visit – stupidly long but totally awesome train ride, here we come) at the weekend. Lots of criticism levelled at the police for not segregating the English and Russian fans, but all that tribalism, all that visceral hatred that necessitates segregation in the first place, it’s just so far from me that I have a hard time understanding it. The behaviour of the Russians makes one fearful of what might happen at the 2018 World Cup. But the events in southern France pale in comparison to the mass shooting in Orlando. Just terrible. Sometimes I fear for the future of humanity.