Language teaching

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.