Month: December 2017

Life :)

Haz-nots

December 30, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

In my last post I said my cold was getting better but it was a false dawn. I’ve had a rough time the last eight days, with all the symptoms of bronchitis: wheezing and hacking up thick dayglo yellowish-green slime; lack of energy; a mild fever. I haven’t been in the mood to do much apart from read and play the occasional game of Scrabble online. I was very glad that I could let Christmas be a non-event. Today, after a welcome 8½ hours’ sleep last night, I might actually be on the mend.

My parents didn’t have the best of Christmases either. Dad had a bad headache on Christmas Day which they celebrated at their place in Moeraki. Not that celebrate is the right word. It was largely wrecked by my 45-year-old cousin, the elder sister of the cousin I stayed with in upstate New York in 2015. She doesn’t have kids but she’s done well both in her career and in the property market. And she’s a self-obsessed arsehole who blames her mother – a very intelligent, practical and down-to-earth woman who I have a lot of time for – for just about everything. Which she did at my parents’ place. My aunt was in tears, and I think my uncle (76, and the only one of Mum’s three older brothers who is still alive) was speechless.

From my Romanian book I learnt a new word (or rather I relearnt it after forgetting it): haz, meaning fun, joy, merriment. I said to Dad that none of us had an awful lot of haz over Christmas. Dad said, so we were the haz-nots. Very good.

Life :) - Scrabble

Sorted for Christmas

December 24, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

A quickish update from me, on a beautiful cloudless Christmas Eve in Timișoara. It’s good to see the sun again after four or five cold, grey and foggy days. I heard that it reached an utterly ridiculous 29 degrees in Wellington on Friday.

I’ve been very lucky not to lose out on lessons due to illness all year, but right now I’ve got a nasty cold. I’m hacking up green and yellow gunk. Living on my own has numerous advantages for me, but when I get sick I kind of think, yeah, I wouldn’t mind having just a little human contact. So I pressed ahead with my lessons on Friday and yesterday – just one each day, thankfully, and I didn’t have to leave the house on either occasion. Had I been in any of my old office jobs, I wouldn’t have thought twice about taking a sick day. I am slowly improving: on Friday I felt so weak that I struggled to put one foot in front of the other.

It’s been great to see all the Romanian Christmas traditions from the vantage point of my apartment and the square (I moved in a few days too late to see last year’s festivities), and it would be rather nice to actually involve myself in them one time, but it’s hard to make that happen without a family connection. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a girlfriend in 2018. I can but dream.

Yesterday’s students, who will be moving to Austria next month but still hope to keep up their English lessons via Skype, bought me some beautifully presented chocolatey bits and pieces, along with a book: 27 de Pași (27 Feet), the autobiography of a Romanian ultra-marathon runner who had a rather colourful life before that. So with a Romanian book, some Scrabble, and all the sugary food I now have, I should be sorted for Christmas. I also have plenty of alcohol, but with the way I am right now, I’ll leave that alone.

After a bit of a break I played seven games of Scrabble yesterday, losing five, even though I outscored my opponents by 50 points overall and slapped down twelve bingos to their seven. My only wins came against players rated significantly lower than me, so my rating took a bit of a hit. In golf parlance, my long game is fine but my short game could do with some work.

I called my brother on Friday night, even though (or maybe because) I felt like crap. He wanted to talk about the wedding. He still resents his aunt and uncle, who have had zero contact with him in the last twenty years, inviting themselves, and I don’t blame him one bit for feeling that way. He’ll be spending Christmas with his fiancée’s family.

Uncategorized

Appreciation

December 16, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Shortly after writing my last post, my young student couple decided to cancel all their lessons for the week, plus the following Monday’s ones, ten lessons in all. This was supposedly because of some last-minute tests or assignments at university. Then they gave me another phone call to say they wanted to come over for five minutes for some unknown reason. Right, so they’ll be telling me they want to jack their English lessons in entirely. At 10am on Wednesday the bell went. What are they going to say? They didn’t say an awful lot. Instead they gave me a Christmas hamper containing two bottles of wine, a panettone, and lots of chocolatey and biscuity and nutty things. That will certainly keep me going over Christmas. It is also shows that I’m appreciated for the work I do, and that makes it all feel worthwhile. It’s almost a new feeling for me and a very pleasant one.
In spite of the loss of business from that couple, I’ve had a reasonably productive week. The lessons with the ten-year-old boy are always fun. My friend from St Ives sent me Tim and Tobias, the first in a series of beautifully illustrated short children’s books that were written in the seventies and that I read at school in 1986 or ’87. A magic key formed a major part of the plot, but my student kept pronouncing ‘key’ as ‘kay’. I kept correcting him. Eventually he started shouting ‘KEEEEE!’ every time the word came up. We also played Space Race (my board game, that could still do with the odd tweak) and a bingo game that involves common objects (including keeeees) instead of numbers.

Black flags, as well as Romanian ones, are flying from the cathedral and the lamp-posts outside my flat, because the country is officially in mourning after the death of King Michael (and possibly because it’s also the anniversary of the bloody revolution in 1989). The king was flown to Bucharest from Switzerland on Wednesday. The funeral is tomorrow and Prince Charles will be in attendance.

My Scrabble record on ISC now reads twelve wins, three losses, although your win–loss record by itself is meaningless. It’s all about how good your opponents are. That’s why the rating system works so well. Wins against higher-rated opponents boost your rating a lot more than wins against weaker players, and the margin of your wins and losses affects your rating too. Today I figured out why ISC has a no-play feature. Put some people in front of a computer screen, with the ability to type messages to someone else, and they can’t help but be a complete arsehole. I reckon this guy, who became the first player on my no-play list, was probably an arsehole in his offline life too. I did learn two useful lessons from the game. One, don’t let people like that put you off. Two, not knowing words (or to be more accurate, not knowing the most useful words) is a huge handicap. With the game virtually neck-and-neck, I played TIE, not knowing that I’d provided my opponent with the chance to hook an S in front of it and play a winning bingo (VERITES, which I didn’t know either). I think I’ve just about got the 124 two-letter words down pat, and am now, systematically I hope, trawling through the threes.

Life :) - Romania - Scrabble

Condemned

December 11, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Towards the end of last week, our body corporate sent out the latest estimate for strengthening our apartment building. The figures were eye-watering: $10 million to strengthen to 100% of new building standard; $8 million for 67%. And that’s just the bit that I live in. The other section, which abuts our building but is separate for seismic purposes, has recently been reassessed as even less earthquake-safe than ours, close to red-sticker territory. So strengthening is no longer a serious option. At the weekend the body corp had a brainstorming session to figure out what to do next, and I’ll expect we’ll probably sit it out now until 2028, when the complex is due to be demolished if it isn’t up to scratch by then. The amazing thing to me is how accepting everybody has been of their fate. (During the eighties, when the English-speaking countries changed from societies into dog-eat-dog economies, everyone became more submissive; there has been some backlash in recent years but it’s been weak and misdirected.) To avoid a repeat of the CTV building collapse, which this policy will fail to do anyway, they’re financially crippling thousands of people. If you’re reading this blog, you might think it’s perfectly fair for apartment owners to foot the bill – however much – to make their homes safe, and if they haven’t got the money, tough. They made a bad investment, right, just like the person who bought shares in a company that goes belly-up, or the guy who went to Las Vegas and put his life savings on red. But that’s eighties thinking again: your home is no longer primarily a place to live but is instead a financial instrument to be bought and sold like any other. As affected Wellington apartment owners, we should be getting together as a group and lobbying the government to end this insanity. This is the capital city after all, and there’s a new (more compassionate?) government in charge now.

It’s hard not to feel somewhat bitter about all of this. My cousin, for instance, makes bucketloads of money by helping make parasitic American drug companies truckloads of money. She works exceptionally hard, is driven beyond what I or most people will ever be, and is extremely well qualified. All of that deserves to be rewarded, and I get on very well with her, but the fact remains that her work is of questionable benefit to actual human beings. And her million-dollar house isn’t affected by the earthquake policy at all, because it’s a house, not an apartment. Just imagine the furore if people’s $2 million mansions in Eastbourne (many of which would be matchsticks in the event of a magnitude-8 quake) suddenly came under the scope of the policy and were effectively condemned overnight!

The apartment business might have had a silver lining though. Perhaps it gave me the impetus to say “sod this”, where I might have otherwise muddled along in a string of jobs, inevitably in disorienting (for me) team environments where the only good outcome would have been to avoid bad ones. If I’d carried on in that vein, then in the words of Bob Marley, one day the bottom would have dropped out, probably with disastrous consequences. Instead I’ve completely changed my life and to write that still feels bloody amazing.

I had 21½ hours of teaching last week. I was chuffed with that after all the cancellations I had in the early part of the week. Unfortunately this week it’s déjà vu: two cancellations already and it’s still Monday morning.

Last week King Michael, Romania’s last monarch, died at the grand age of 96. He became king before his sixth birthday, but was forced to abdicate in 1947 with the advent of communism. Today Romania is a very divided country – we had anti-government protests here last night – but the death of the king seems to have united the country temporarily and might help the current government to survive.

I’ve started getting frustrated with Words With Friends. I live in an awkward time zone for all the Americans who populate the app, so many of my games progress very slowly or sometimes fizzle out completely. Also I recently had to download Words With Friends 2, a more gimmicky version of the app that veers into Candy Crush territory, and I hate it. I’ll still play my cousin from time to time because I like to keep in touch with her, but apart from that it’s a waste of time. So instead I’ve started playing real Scrabble, with a clock, on the Internet Scrabble Club (isc.ro), a site that was set up by a Romanian in the nineties and visually has never been updated since then. But the server is actually very robust, and it attracts some of the best players in the world. It’s altogether a more high-octane experience than Words With Friends. I’ve so far played seven games, winning five. My very first move of my very first game was BUM, which turned out to be possibly my best move of the whole game, a 70-point loss for me. My other loss (by just 18 points, 396 to 414) was a fantastic high-scoring game. I had quite a dramatic game yesterday where I struggled with the tight 14-minute clock, and incurred a ten-point penalty for running over time, but was able to play out for a 36-point win before forfeiting the game altogether (which is what happens if you go over time by a minute).

The cancellations mean my only lessons today are this evening, from 6 till 7:30 and from 8 till 9:30. Unless they get cancelled too.

Language teaching - Life :)

Space Race

December 7, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m having a slightly frustrating week thanks to all the cancellations I’m getting, but if I’m lucky I’ll still hit the 20-hour mark. These days I seem to have temporary frustrations, and isn’t that great? At the sprightly hour of 7:30 this morning I had a lesson with a beginner who intends to move to Edmonton in Canada next year. It’s a pleasure to work with him, but it’s always interesting getting him to read. What comes out of his mouth is at times independent of what’s on the page. It reminds me of Mum trying to teach my brother to read, or this bit from the Royal Variety Performance a couple of years ago (fast forward to 4:24, or alternatively watch it all – it’s pretty funny).

Last week Octavian, my ten-year-old student, told me that as much as he loved Crazy Rabbits (the board game I made), he’d quite like to play something else next time. That meant I had to make another, probably more complex, game (or buy one, but that would be more expensive and less fun). I had to make something that would stand the test of time. I thought of making a space-themed game, and found a fun-looking spacey board online which was supposed to have 100 spaces but only had 94. It was also watermarked, meaning I’d need to pay a subscription (no thanks) to download the unadulterated version. I painstakingly removed the watermark as best I could using a slightly better (and free) version of Paint, and squeezed in an extra six spaces in such a way that you wouldn’t notice. I numbered the spaces in fives – each space represented five light years – and then I had to figure out the mechanics of the game. The goal, I decided, was to be the first to drive all three of your spaceships the 500 light years from start to finish. The skill, such that it exists, is in choosing which ship to move on which turn – you have to decide before you roll the dice. Some spaces give you extra turns or get you to draw cards that make good or bad things happen to either you or your opponent. I tested the game on Tuesday with Matei – it was my 51st lesson with him, so the risk that he wouldn’t want to see me again if he hated the game didn’t seem too great. He liked it but found some of the rules a bit counterintuitive (move 25 light years – five spaces – if you roll a four, for instance) and wished we used two dice instead of one. So I added a second die and simplified the rules quite a bit, and played it with Octavian yesterday. Space Race. He seemed to be a fan.

Something has been puzzling me. I followed one of the Cambridge textbooks with my Skype student (ex-student, thankfully), and one section was on travel. It gave a list of the “fifty places you must visit before you die”, of which my parents live in number four, and asked the student to pick his or her must-see places from the list. To my surprise, my ex-student put Dubai at number one. Last week I reached the same section of the book with another student, and once again Dubai was top of her list. Seriously, what is the fuck is going on here? The probability that they’d both choose Dubai at random is 0.04%. All-out nuclear war in the coming year is far more likely than that. I can understand why you might want to work in Dubai for a limited time (to make loads of dirhams), but not everyone goes to Dubai for work, or to visit friends and family who are working there, or even as a stopover to break up the journey between two places that actually have human rights. No, significant numbers of people go to Dubai to go to Dubai, to lurch from one soulless air-conditioned shopping mall to another, and then come home. How bizarre. I mean, I know bits of Timișoara are a bit shit, but at least they’re real shit.

The Christmas market is in full swing, and the pungent but pleasant whiff of mulled wine fills the air. Last night some young women in traditional Romanian dress were singing what I imagine were traditional Romanian Christmas carols.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

La mulți ani, România!

December 1, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been absolutely bloody hopeless with this blog thing, and for that I apologise. Last week was another busy one for me: 29 hours of teaching, and that was without any at the lollipop-stick-making company. This week I’m looking at 24 or so.

Right now we’re in a middle of a four-day long weekend. Yesterday was St Andrew’s Day; today is Romania’s national day, the 99th anniversary of Romania in its current format. Before the downfall of communism, the national day was celebrated in August instead, for some reason unknown to me because my knowledge of Romanian history is shamefully crap. The parade of military vehicles will start at eleven so I’ll pop down for that. Last year my feet were like ice blocks after standing around in zero degrees, so I might put on an extra pair of socks. Tonight there will be a firework display in the square. I asked one of my students what might be in store for next year’s centenary, and he said possibly an extra tank, and maybe they’ll add a screamer or two to their pyrotechnic arsenal. He said the parades of aging vehicles, which should be in museums, demonstrate what a joke Romania’s military is. I said, yeah, sounds a bit like New Zealand. Some people will be going to Alba Iulia for the day. I visited that city in August. In the middle of the citadel is where the declaration of unity (or whatever they call it) was signed in 1918, so it’s effectively Romania’s Waitangi. Today there will also be protests, timed for maximum visibility.

The Christmas market has just started in the main square, and will run until about 10th January. There will also be two smaller markets in the other squares that weren’t a feature last time around. It’s slightly weird that I’m now talking about last year. Everything is coming around for a second time – how did that happen?

The weekend before last, one of my students took me to the winery in Recaș, and we filled bottles of wine straight from the tap. She filled five-litre bottles. I can’t possibly drink those sorts of volumes by myself (although when I lived in France I did just that), so I just filled three two-litre bottles – two reds and a white – at between 13 and 15 lei a bottle, which is extremely cheap. When I showed the bottles to my brother last weekend on FaceTime, he thought they were hilarious. “Are you sure that one isn’t piss?” But I’ve almost finished the dry red which has been the best wine I’ve had since I arrived here.

I still play Scrabble, or more accurately Words With Friends, on my phone. I’m now leading my cousin by 52 games to 24, with one draw. Against a complete stranger I just played EQUALiZE across two double word squares for 143, my highest-ever score on one turn. I do find Scrabble fascinating from a tactical perspective, and I’m thinking I should take the plunge and actually attempt to play it seriously, which of course means learning those god-awful words.