by Having this place to myself again is making a huge difference. I can relax! I’d almost forgotten the meaning of the word. It’s also brought my upcoming move into sharp focus. I’m really doing this.
Why am I doing it? Because I can. And because nothing good will come out of persevering with the alternative. I’m convinced of that. Why Romania specifically? Well I fell in love with the language almost the moment I clapped eyes on it, and gosh, the country is still so unspoilt, so wild, so raw, and that really appeals to me. Not that I’ve been there yet, unlike my parents, who are there now. They’re in Timișoara and tomorrow they’ll be taking a six-hour bus ride to Sibiu which, judging from the pictures I’ve seen online, is incredibly beautiful. They say the architecture in Timișoara is wonderful but many of the buildings are in fairly dire need of some TLC. Most people they’ve met can speak English but are some way from fluency, and that’s good for me if I intend to teach it. I keep seeing “danger maps” where Romania is coloured yellow or orange, a notch above Bulgaria and Hungary in the danger stakes and, for that matter, a notch above the US, where an average of 36 people were killed by guns per day last year, excluding suicides and accidents. My parents said they’ve yet to feel under the remotest of threats.
My English lesson on Monday went reasonably well. I spent some time on minimal pairs, words that differ from each other by only one sound. For the long a / long i pairs I gave him lake/like, bake/bike, race/rice, hay/high and tail/tile, with accompanying pictures. He was fine with these, with the exception of tail/tile where he struggled to hear the difference between the two words. Learning another language helps me empathise with him here, but doesn’t help me get across the difference. Next week I’ll revisit those two words and say them very slowly. We also talked about football, in particular the Champions League final. I was pleased that he referred to the football vocab sheet I’d made for him.
I put my EU referendum voting paper, which was something of an IQ test, in the mail today. (The fact that I thought it resembled an IQ test probably says a lot about my IQ.) It’s fairly obvious which way I went. Which way the referendum will go is far from obvious.