Month: August 2017

Life :) - Travel: Romania

Engagements

August 30, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Some news hot of the press: my brother has got engaged. I know that last weekend he took his girlfriend up for a ride in the plane he subsequently jumped out of, so perhaps he proposed then. I’m happy for him, well both of them, although I was happy for them even before this news. Now that I live much closer to the UK, I might even go to his wedding. Imagine having to fly half-way around the world just for that. I’m only joking – he’s the only sibling I have, so of course I’d have travelled from New Zealand for it – but it does amaze me just how many people travel vast distances for weddings of relatives and so-called friends that they’re hardly ever in touch with. Perhaps the obligation they feel is extremely strong, or who knows, maybe they’re just crazy and actually enjoy weddings. On that note, I half-expected my cousin (the one I stayed with in America two years ago this very day) to invite me to his wedding which took place in northern Italy last year, but I’m very glad he didn’t.

The interview wasn’t too bad. On odd occasions she asked me to speak English, probably because I wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. In fact she did about 80% of the talking. After the interview I had to do an online multiple-choice English test, and I got 60 out of 60 in a third of the allotted time. There were errors in two of the questions that rendered all four of the possible answers incorrect, but I figured out which of the incorrect answers they wanted. Onwards to the second interview I had this morning. The initial instructions as to what this would entail were far from clear, and it’s just as well I asked the interviewer to clarify, otherwise I’d have got the wrong end of the stick entirely. My task was to give a half-hour one-on-one lesson on Skype on the subject of job interviews (!), imagining that it was my first meeting with the student. The time constraint upped the level of difficulty for me; I had a real hard time fitting everything in. But I gave it my best shot and that’s all I could do. She gave me some honest (and helpful) feedback and I probably scored about a 7 out of 10. Whether that will be enough, it’s hard to say. Working in my favour is the fact that their Timișoara office currently has no native English speakers at all. They all flock to Bucharest.

Thanks to my latest bunch of flyers I’ve picked up two more private students, taking my total to nine, assuming they both show up. Let’s hope so. I’ve got lessons scheduled with both of them on Thursday.

Towards the end of my train journey to Alba Iulia I got talking to a woman in her late twenties who wondered what was wrong with me to have got to my stage in the game without a wife or kids. (I notice that the last sentence includes six consecutive words beginning with W. Could that be the basis for some English exercise?) She described me as rușinos, which at the time I thought meant “ashamed” (from the word rușine, meaning “shame”), but actually means timid or bashful. My lodgings (“hotel” isn’t the right word) were pretty basic. Alba Iulia was a tale of two cities: the seven-pointed star fortress and buildings within it which were kept in pristine condition, and the city centre which (apart from the churches) had been wrecked by ugly Communist-era buildings and was overflowing with litter. I’ve just been reading about star forts and why they were constructed like that. Pretty clever really, but the cost of building such defenses must have been colossal. I didn’t do an awful lot on my second day in Alba Iulia; the heat slowed me down. I got back home at about 12:30am.

I saw some economic figures on the news tonight. The average Romanian spends 28% of his or her income on food, compared to 11% for the EU as a whole. Only one in three Romanians buys new clothes as opposed to second-hand ones. (The second-hand clothes shops here are pretty good. I’d never dream of buying anything new here.) So private English lessons are certainly a luxury item.

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Interviu

August 24, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got a job interview just one hour from now. On Skype. In Romanian. What an experience, positive or negative, that will be. It’s for a position where I’d be providing English training to employees at large companies. My interviewer is in Bucharest, hence Skype, although my job (should I get and accept it) will be here in Timișoara. I don’t know whether the role would be full-time; I really don’t want to give up the work I’m doing now and my current totally un-corporate lifestyle. I’m bound to struggle a bit, even if the interview is scheduled to take only half an hour. I mean heck, interviews are hard enough in English. Perhaps the fact that I can speak even a basic level of Romanian will work in my favour. Perhaps not. My biggest minus, I’m guessing, will be my CV: a bunch of mostly unrelated jobs. How can I convince her of the truth, that English teaching and linguistics are my preferred long-term future?

When my ordeal is over, I’ll pack my bags ready to take the train to Alba Iulia, a town not too far from Sibiu with a famous star-shaped fortress. I’ll be staying two nights at (probably) a grotty hotel. But at least it’s cheap.

Life :) - Other sports - Romania - Tennis

Mehala

August 22, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

We hit 36 degrees on Saturday, but it’s felt just the slightest bit autumnal the last two days thanks to a welcome drop in temperature and a fresh breeze. Yesterday I went to a market in the west of the city called Mehala. That “meh” combination, which is also found in Mehedinți (the name of one of the counties I visited with my parents) has an Arabic feel to it. “Meh” is, of course, now a word in its own right, thanks (probably) to The Simpsons. It can be both an interjection and an adjective. Mehala has a large car market but also a section where bikes, tools, second-hand clothes and other odds and ends are sold. One of my students told me about the market, turning the word Mehala into an English verb meaning to swindle: “I got Mehala’d.” With that in mind, I didn’t buy anything, not even from the very aggressive teenager trying to sell me sunglasses. It started to spit with rain, so it was all hands on deck for the stallholders. That green three-wheeled truck was incredible – I’d never seen anything like it. The market is also a popular spot for blokes to have a beer or two, although most places in Romania fall into that category. There was mici sizzling away on huge barbecues, and I even had some mici, though to be frank I find it pretty meh. I learnt that the local bike gang isn’t called the Red Devils, but the even more demonic Red Evils. The picture of the Trabant is from Baia Mare.

By my count, I put 483 flyers in people’s letterboxes yesterday, and walked about 13 km. I got another thousand flyers printed off today and visited a new language school; the bloke there was impressed with my Romanian or was just being polite, I couldn’t quite tell. I doubt they’ll have any work for me.

Simona Halep was taken apart by Garbiñe Muguruza in the final in Cincinnati last night; this was yet another missed chance for Halep to become world number one. She has an unfortunate habit of playing within herself in big matches. While that was going on (and long after it had finished) I watched the Red Sox beat the Yankees on a live stream. For some reason I’ve got back into baseball again. There are so many nuances to the game I don’t yet understand, but watching the Red Sox might help there: they’re unusually patient with the bat by 2017 standards, happy to work the count (I hope my terminology is right) rather than relying on the big hit. Unfortunately Romania is in a terrible time zone for watching baseball.

I spoke to Mum on FaceTime this morning. It was good to see her looking brighter. She wanted to read something out to me that she’d unearthed on the internet, and for a few heart-stopping moments I thought it might have been this site. Instead it was from the “court” section of a local UK newspaper: my brother’s ex-fiancée had been convicted of assault and tagged for four months. Mum likes to semi-cyberstalk her instead of just consigning her to history.

This morning I called Bazza for his 62nd birthday. I knew he’d appreciate that. He seemed fine.

Romania - Travel: Romania

Baia Mare trip

August 19, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I left myself so little time to catch the train on Saturday that I practically had to run. When I got to the station they were carrying out renovations that made it hard to tell exactly what was what. I was pretty sure Timișoara station had one of those split-flap departure boards that are still ubiquitous in Romania, but I couldn’t see it. Three minutes. Instead there were two large sheets of paper attached to the platform wall. After a momentary mental block as to which Romanian word meant “departures”, I saw that my train was leaving from platform 5. At least at the bigger stations you know which platform is number 5, so dripping with perspiration, I boarded the train with moments to spare.  So much unnecessary self-inflicted stress. I wasn’t able to chat with the couple opposite me because they were busy either chatting with each other or glued to their phones. (The smartphone has made meeting people on trains that much harder.) I finished a book and made a good dent in another one (Mister Pip, which I’ve now finished); the trip was fairly comfortable and didn’t seem to drag. My phone rang a couple of times but I didn’t recognise the number. Thinking it might have been a new student, I didn’t answer. I still don’t feel comfortable speaking Romanian in a busy environment with potential business at stake, so I decided to call back the next day. After stopping in Oradea, Arad and Satu Mare, and a few other places besides, we pulled into Baia Mare just after 10:30. Like most Romanian stations (Arad being the only real exception I’ve come across), Baia Mare station was old and run-down.

I took a taxi to my hotel, and that’s where things got tricky. Those phone calls were from the hotel, and because I didn’t answer, they gave my room (the last room) to somebody else. This is Romania. The bloke at reception put me through to some manager on the phone; I told him I’d give his hotel zero out of ten on booking.com. In the end I got put up in a much nicer and slightly cheaper hotel for the first night, and had a hearty breakfast the next morning that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, before being transferred to the grottier (but manageable) place for the last two nights.

Baia Mare sounds like it should be by the sea. It isn’t. (The name means Big Bath. Mare means both “sea” and “big” in Romanian.) I spent most of Sunday trying to get a feel of the place. The historic centre of the town is quite pretty; it’s been recently tarted up. The city also features the ninth-tallest chimney in the world; it belongs to a disused copper smelter.

Like so many places in Romania, Baia Mare isn’t tourist-friendly. Yeah OK, I followed the “Museum 1.7 km” sign, but now what? Am I still on the right track? It would be nice to know. Street name signs would be a neat idea too. I visited the Muzeul de Etnografie which told me that Maramureș is in some ways a separate country. And a beautiful one, if only I could spend more time there. It’s steeped in tradition, with its own style of music and regional costumes. Everything seems to be built of wood with hardly a nail to be seen. I had a beer in a courtyard and watched four men play a card game that I couldn’t get the gist of. As for food, I was struggling. I had to settle for some noodles that I bought in a large, modern mall. That mall had eight or so food outlets. KFC attracted people like bees to a honeypot; the lure of McDonald’s and KFC seems to be universal.

The next day I felt like going to Sighet, and showed up at the bus station at 9am, hoping to catch one of the scheduled buses. Instead I met a pony-taled Australian in his early sixties who had been travelling for 169 days, and a local guy of 23 who painted, grew beards, played traditional music (he gave us a demonstration on his flute) and had a passion for languages.

He was second person I’d met up there who spoke decent English, after the receptionist at the good hotel. No buses to Sighet materialised until 11:30. The bohemian guy got off just before the end of our winding 1¾-hour journey up and down the mountain.

In Sighet we were right on the border with Ukraine, though you never would have known it. We ate a basic but perfectly good lunch at the bus station restaurant, if you could call it a restaurant. Menus? Bills? Who do you think we are? The Aussie guy and I parted company as he made his way to a hostel. I didn’t do much in Sighet but wander around; it was Monday so the museums and the old communist prison (supposedly a must-see) were closed. Back at the bus and train station I thought to myself how wonderfully peaceful and quiet it was on that sunny evening.

There didn’t seem to be much point in staying long in Baia Mare on Tuesday, because it was a public holiday, and there were no trains that didn’t leave at stupid o’clock, so I made the seven-hour bus journey back to Timișoara. I hope to be back in Maramureș before long – one of my students comes from there and said I could come with her when she next goes there. I mentioned this to Mum; she immediately asked about her name, her age, her bra size, her blood group… Mum has been sick the last few days. Seeing her in such a bad way on FaceTime was quite a shock, but I think she’s just had a severe cold.

Books - Films - Romania - Travel: Romania

Baia Mare, here we come

August 12, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today Dad emailed me with a page outlining the potential horror show of complications that I could be faced with during and after sinus surgery, should I choose to have it some time in the autumn. Then, right on cue, I got an attack of severe pain lasting about an hour, this time in my right sinuses.

The ENT specialist told me that extreme weather doesn’t exactly help, and we’ve had a ton of that lately. Caniculă – extreme heat – has often been the first item on news bulletins. Tomorrow things will cool down significantly, and maybe Europe’s most energy-sapping and soporific heatwave since 2003 (which was my last European summer prior to this one) will be over.

Unsurprisingly, being holiday season, I’ll have slim pickings on the work front for the rest of the month. I’ve got a three-hour lesson pencilled in for tomorrow morning, then nothing else until Wednesday, so I’m taking the opportunity to go somewhere, just like my students. But where? Brașov seemed the obvious choice – everybody visits Brașov when they come to Romania, but I’ve lived here ten months (shit! have I really?) and still haven’t been there. Unfortunately, because it’s August, every man and his dog will be in Brașov, and by Romanian standards it’s an expensive city. So I’ve decided instead to head north to Baia Mare, a seven-hour train trip away. I’m due to get up there around 11pm tomorrow. I haven’t done much research on the place, but it’s in Maramureș, an extremely rugged and remote corner of Romania, jam-packed with tradition. On travelling through Maramureș, a 2013 article in the Telegraph says this: “This is not the place to hire a car or to drive your own car. Roads are notoriously dangerous, directions are difficult, and maps are few.” Well, I’ll just be visiting a city in my first taste of the region, but it should be interesting, and who knows who I might meet on the train.

After watching Nosedive, the opener to Series 3 of Black Mirror, in which everything you do and say is star-rated out of five, I dared to watch the next two episodes. Playtest wound up as a full-on horror movie which I thought was spoilt by the ending. Shut Up and Dance though, oh boy. I was hoping for something good to cling to, somewhere, anywhere, but by the end of it I felt my well had been sucked dry. The final twist was unexpected (to me; maybe I’m just bad at reading these things) and not in a good way. I did however sympathise enormously with the main protagonist, even after the shocking revelation at the end. At the start you see him working in a kitchen, and his experiences with his colleagues were similar to mine in real life when I washed dishes in a pub. Shut Up and Dance was very well done, but I’d strongly advise against watching it if you’re feeling emotionally fragile in any way, or if you have anything important to do immediately afterwards.

I’m currently reading The Elements of Eloquence. It’s about rhetoric. Figures of speech. Like parataxis. Which I’m using now. But not very well. I’m just about to find out what the hell epizeuxis is.

Books - Films - Language teaching

Hellishly hot

August 6, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been hellishly hot the last few days. As I write this at 6pm, it’s nudging 40 degrees in Timișoara, and Europe as a whole is sweltering in its most severe heatwave since 2003 when thousands of mainly elderly people in France succumbed. I’ve been avoiding the outside world between about 10am and 9pm whenever possible, but sometimes I have no choice. Heading out to Dumbrăvița on Thursday in 38-degree heat wasn’t a lot of fun. But at the time I thought to myself that temporary discomfort was a pretty small price to pay if it meant I go to do something I enjoyed.

On Wednesday I worked for 7½ hours without leaving my flat. It wasn’t a perfect day – I ran into trouble when one of my students absorbed all my planned material with half an hour still to play and I had to frantically find something – but my last lesson went well and afterwards I felt a warm feeling of satisfaction wash over me, something akin to the time I bounced down the steps of my student’s apartment block last November, feeling about eight foot five. Over half my teaching for the week – 14½ hours – was crammed into that one day.

I’ve just finished Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised – he’s an incredible songwriter after all – but it’s an exceptionally well-written and well-produced book. I like that he recognises how lucky he’s been – far too many successful people don’t. It’s funny that whenever I read any published material in English now, I do so with a teacher’s eye. Several times in the book, “bused” is used to mean “transported by bus”. Why on earth would you spell that with a single S?! The answer is that in the US, the spelling “bused” alleviates confusion with the past tense of “buss”, an old-fashioned verb meaning “to kiss”. On a few occasions he uses “mike” to mean microphone. Yay! That’s so much more logical to me than “mic” which has grown in popularity, to my annoyance. He uses A LOT of all-caps – not something I would do – but it WORKS!

This afternoon I watched the first episode of Series 3 of Black Mirror. In this age of like counts and friend tallies and social graphs, a system where likes and dislikes are hard currency is all too disturbingly imaginable. Tellingly, the only person in the film I warmed to was a dishevelled elderly truck driver, and her score had plummeted to the point where she effectively lived off the grid, although at the end I did find the main character much more likeable.

On the subject of dystopia, I mentioned Bruce Springsteen’s Vietnam draft-dodging before. I didn’t know this before, but in December 1969 they held a nationally televised draft lottery, where birthdays were drawn from a jar to determine the order in which young men would be drafted. You can find footage of the lottery on YouTube. The whole process is so messed up, and just to make you wonder if it’s even real, they play a “Merry Christmas” ad for a shaver in the middle of it all. To cap it all off, the lottery wasn’t even random: if you were born late in the year, you had a better chance of drawing one of the unlucky low numbers because the capsules had been placed in the jar in month order and hadn’t been mixed properly – most of the November and December dates remained at the top of the jar. Because it’s a classic randomisation failure, I’m surprised I didn’t know about the lottery before, given my interest in statistics.