Month: January 2018

Language teaching - Tennis - Travel: Romania

Happy memories

January 27, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Next week I could have over 30 hours of lessons, and that’s without that young couple with whom I had 12 hours a week until just before Christmas. They said that they’d be back shortly after 2nd February, when their exam session finishes. In other words, I face the imminent prospect of being totally knackered.

My travel companions from four months ago have sent me (as a present) a quite wonderful scrapbook of our trip, full of photos and diary entries. It must have taken several hours to put together. So many wonderful little things happened; I’m so glad that someone had the presence of mind to record them. I can’t believe how much I’d forgotten, like the time the car-hire man told me to maintain a good distance from the vehicle in front because the brakes might not be up to it, or the rubbery omelettes we had for breakfast, or the huge wedding party, out of the blue, at 8pm in a primitive village. And of course, just the wonderful scenery, pretty much wherever we went.

Twelve hours from now, another big opportunity to snatch her maiden grand slam will come Simona Halep’s way. I only saw her semi-final with Angelique Kerber from 2-2 in the final set because I had a lesson, but I was grateful to see what I did. For me it was literally edge-of-the-seat (and off-the-seat) stuff. Halep played noticeably more aggressively than I’m used to seeing her, and that bodes well for the final. Perhaps the fact that her very participation in the tournament has so often been hanging by a thread will relax her for the final. Wozniacki, her opponent in the final, has had a very precarious path too. In fact the two players have faced a whopping seven match points between them, including five for Simona in two separate matches. I’ll miss most of the final, or perhaps even all of it if it’s a quick one, because I’ll be working.

Language teaching - Scrabble - Tennis

Workload update

January 22, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I decided to actually count how many students I have. It’s 24. That number includes four couples (well three actual couples, plus a brother and sister), and two students (Matei and Timea) whose first names are anagrams of each other. I also have an initial Skype meeting with a potential 25th student tomorrow night. In other words, things are likely to get pretty crazy. I had a difficult session yesterday with a ten-year-old boy who described just about everything as nașpa, which is a slang word meaning “crap”. School was nașpa; learning English at school was total nașpa. I’m sure my lesson was nașpa as well.
My cousin said I should think about bringing somebody else into my “team”, but that would take things to a whole new level, and who would that person be exactly? (My point of difference is that I’m a native speaker. Where would I get another one from?) It’s something I could maybe consider in a couple of years, but right now I think it would be stress on a stick, which is precisely what I wanted to avoid when I came here.

I’ve only caught snatches of the Australian Open – I’ve been too busy to give a whole match my full attention – but much of what I’ve seen has been compelling. I didn’t see any of Simona Halep’s 3¾-hour match with Lauren Davis in the searing heat, but it must have been something. Women’s matches that go deep into an extended final set are a rarity, because of the relative lack of service dominance in the women’s game, so they’re invariably a treat when they do get that far.

I played two games of Scrabble this evening, winning them both. The first I won 462-331. I got rubbish in the early stages and swapped tiles twice, but I found three bingos in the second half of the game to run out a comfortable winner. In the second game (14 minutes, so some time pressure) I benefited from high-scoring tiles at the beginning, so when my opponent played a bingo I still held a slender lead. I was slightly fortunate that he provided a spot for a bingo of my own late in the game, and I won with something to spare, 375 to 299. My rating has reached 1101 (a new high) but if I do climb the rankings it’ll take a while – I don’t get to play all that often.

Language teaching - Scrabble

Monopoly (and a bit of Scrabble)

January 13, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I put up some more ads about ten days ago (online and at the university) and I’ve now got half a dozen new students, more or less, depending on how you count them. As for how many students I’ve got in total, I haven’t a clue. As far as I know, I have a monopoly – I’m the only native English speaker in Timișoara giving private lessons. It’s a mad situation to find myself in. As I recently mentioned, I did put my prices up, but perhaps I was a bit conservative.

Today I had only new students. I had my first appointment at 9am with a couple in Moșnița Nouă, one of several towns or villages that are officially outside Timișoara but, thanks to recent development, have now joined up with the main city.  I went to see them; getting there was a bit of a mission. There’s no bus or tram that gets particularly close. At about 7:55 I took the number 4 tram from Piața Libertății to the end of the line, which was even further from my destination than I thought. I traipsed along a main road, in the mud, past urban chicken coops, urban sheep pens, the milestone (or kilometre-plastic to be more accurate) telling me that I was 5 kilometres from Timișoara and 54 from Lugoj, then the one that said 6 and 53, and I wondered whether I’d ever find this place, even with the map on my phone. Maybe I should just walk to Lugoj. Streets were unnamed, houses un-numbered. Relieved, I arrived at 9:01. Not only were the couple present but their children (21 and 17) as well, all four of them in an upstairs study. We really just chatted. Next week I’ll have two lessons with them: one with the parents and one with the children, who are at a higher level than their mum and dad. Their dad drove me home, and said he’d pick me up in future. He told me that I might be able to get a new watch strap at the Bega shopping centre. I went there before my next lesson, and they did indeed have a leather strap that fitted my Swatch. It was pretty damn expensive: 80 lei. But I guess that’s to be expected when, as far as I know, they’re the only place in Timișoara that does Swatch straps.

At 2pm I had a lesson with an older man who said he was a quantum chemist. He came with a fairly long text about Hans Hellmann, a German quantum chemist who was executed in the Great Purge. My student wanted to practise reading a complicated text, and it was certainly that. I also think the piece had been slightly awkwardly translated from German. Then at four I had my first session with a 25-year-old Italian guy called Luca who works at the main hospital in town. When he phoned me earlier this week, he said, “My name is Luca.” I wanted to ask him if he lived on the second floor, but thought better of it.

I’m trying to learn the three-letter Scrabble words. There are 1300 of them, and because they’re only three letters long, they’re hard to distinguish from one another. It isn’t that easy to remember that KAM is a word but FAM and VAM aren’t, or that RET is acceptable and DET isn’t. But as much as I hate learning short strings of letters that someone has arbitrarily decided are playable, unfortunately they come up all the time so they’re vital to your success or otherwise.

Language teaching - Romania

A brief (but welcome) change of scenery

January 10, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Sunday morning I still didn’t feel wonderful. After the lesson I joined my students for a drink at Porto Arte, a bar by the Bega, five minutes’ walk from here. After sitting there for nearly two hours, I was prepared to go home. But then they asked me if I wanted to go to Herneacova, a place I’d heard of but knew nothing about and wouldn’t have been able to locate on a map. I said yes but my head was in a spin: I hadn’t mentally paced myself for spending who knows how many extra hours with people. Just how far away is this place? I was also dehydrated. If I hadn’t managed to get a bottle of water at Recaș, I’d have been really struggling. Herneacova is a fairly poor but typically picturesque Romanian village, while two kilometres outside the village is an arena which holds international equestrian events, and a domain (in New Zealand terminology) which is popular with families. The highlight, apart from the few horses, was probably watching somebody’s radio-controlled car being chased by a small dog. It was a beautiful day—it felt like spring—and when I did get home I was very glad that I’d accepted their invitation and got out of the city.

I guessed there were a million Johns or variations thereof who were celebrating their saint’s day on Sunday, but the number was actually two million, or one in ten Romanians. That day really marked the end of the festive season; yesterday, after being a fixture in the square for 5½ weeks, the Christmas market sheds were dismantled.

I now realise that teaching kids can be both rewarding and frustrating in equal measure. My first lessons with those two new kids yesterday were definitely both in the latter category. I ran out of material both times, for completely different reasons, and because I wasn’t at home I didn’t have any emergency supplies. The 13-year-old girl (90 minutes with her) was even better than I’d anticipated, so we she got through everything (a lesson on London, where she’d like to go) in double-quick time without her really being challenged. The 10-year-old boy was mostly unenthusiastic and didn’t really want to speak English, but I actually think he’ll be easier to teach in the long run, because I already have material I can use with him. With her, I’ve got to come up with stuff that’s at an upper-intermediate level and is age-appropriate and doesn’t bore her: although she seems motivated to learn, that’s no easy task.

My students, or their parents, are often in a different financial league from your average Ion or Ioana. It’s extremely noticeable in my lessons with the kids in Dumbrăvița, just as it was in Auckland all those years ago when I did a spot of maths tuition, often in suburbs like Remuera. Last night my student wouldn’t shut up about both her and her husband’s German cars. I had a much more interesting discussion of cars with a student last week: the Yugo, the Trabant (with its two-stroke engine), and the various incarnations of the Dacia, such as this hopelessly unreliable one (the Lăstun, which means “housemartin”) with a 500 cc engine, which was built in a factory right here in Timișoara. It’s sporting a Ceaușescu-era Timiș County number plate.

My Romanian is still in need of some massive improvement. More on that next time.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Inevitable

January 6, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It was going to happen eventually, wasn’t it? The last few days I’ve been feeling a bit down. Not depressed as such, but just this general bleeugh feeling. I’m sure I’d be fine now if I’d managed to get away for a day or two and spend several hours reading a book on a train, but my illness put paid to that. Last year Timișoara was all new and fun and mad and exciting; it hasn’t stopped being all kinds of awesome, but it’s still a biggish city that I need to get away from every once in a while to break up the routine. I was thinking that if I’d gone to the UK and endured what would surely have been an absolutely awful Christmas and New Year, I’d probably be fine now too. This morning there was a tell-tale sign that things weren’t right: I had no recollection of having made myself a cup of tea two minutes earlier. That’s how life used to be week in, week out, doing things like grocery shopping and, um, trying to hold down a job, with a similar memory span to a fairly retentive goldfish. The good news is that I’ll soon have a lot more lessons again, and so far there has been a very strong positive correlation between how much work I have and how I feel.

The couple who bought me that hamper won’t be having any lessons until 2nd February. That’s a bugger. But I do now have some new students. A brother and sister (he’s 10, she’s 13) will have their first lessons with me on Monday. They live in Dumbrăvița, five doors down from the ten-year-old boy I started with in October. I’ve also got a new bloke starting on Thursday. Yesterday I had a call from a woman who I really struggled to understand. She talked so quickly and at such a high pitch that she reminded me of when I was a kid and I’d mess around with Dad’s record player, putting one of his 33s or 45s on 78. She seemed to think I knew what she was saying, but I could hardly understand a bloody thing. Cât costă? How much is it? Phew, a question I understand. On that note, I’ve had no choice but to put my prices up. In my first few months here it felt like an inflation-free zone, but in the last six to nine months everything has gone up. The leu has weakened somewhat against the euro, and oil prices have shot up. Just around the corner is a kiosk where they sell shawormas (I’ve seen about five different spellings for shaworma, which is a bit like a kebab). For the last few months I’ve been waiting for them to increase their price of a large shaworma from 11 lei, and finally on Wednesday I saw they’d put them up to 12.

Today is Epiphany, or as they call it here, Boboteaza, which to me is a funny word. Right now there’s a snaking queue of at least 100 people around the cathedral, waiting to get their hands on water that is supposedly even holier than bog-standard holy water. Tomorrow is St John the Baptist’s day, which probably a million Romanians called Ion or Ioan or Ionuț or Ioana will celebrate. People here often celebrate both their birthday and their saint’s day, if they have one. Slightly confusingly, the expression “La Mulți Ani” is used on someone’s birthday, their saint’s day, and for New Year. Just like last year, although this time I was in the middle of a lesson, the local priest and his accomplice dropped in and blessed me and this flat. I gave him 8 lei, up from 6 last year.

My watch strap is broken, and because it’s a Swatch I can’t replace it anywhere in Timișoara. Believe me, I’ve tried. Even the shop that sells Swatches couldn’t do it. When I leave the house without a watch I feel just about naked. I know my phone shows the time in quite large digits, but it doesn’t compare. Yesterday I tried to find a cheap watch to use as a stand-in until I get the Swatch strap replaced, with no luck.

The weather is incredible for this time of year. Our expected high today is 13. And I feel a bit better now.

Life :) - Scrabble

Happy New Year!

January 2, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night’s New Year celebrations seemed even more chaotic than last year’s. Probably 50,000 to 100,000 people (but how do you count them?) crowded the city centre, many of them cracking open bottles of bubbly as the clock struck twelve. Some people set off fireworks randomly, both before and after the main ones. Mum asked me if I was going to stay up for it. Well, if you live where I do, going to bed before 1am isn’t a serious option. You certainly won’t sleep.

When I was younger I disliked New Year’s Eve because of all the clubbing and partying you were expected to do; more recently I’ve disliked it because it’s a reminder of the passing of time. Shit, it’s twenty-what now, and what have I done with my life?! Nothing! At least this time around I actually had done something in the previous twelve months, but I still felt a bit sad not to be seeing in the new year with somebody.

Earlier today I called my brother to wish him a happy new year. In under five months, touch wood, he’ll be married. His fiancée turns 35 (I think) in April, so I doubt they’ll hang around with the whole family thing. It’s very likely that Mum will become a grandmother a few months either side of her 70th birthday.

As for me, I had a good end to 2017 work-wise. I checked my records, and my half-way point in terms of hours was the middle of September (I got as much work after mid-September as I did prior to that date). I hope the early part of 2018 brings me as much joy. There’s also a whole bunch of stuff outside work I’d like to work on, but I don’t yet know where or how to start.

After feeling like utter crap for a week and a half, I’ve now just got a normal cold. As much as I like Timișoara, I had planned to get away for a day or two, but my illness put the kibosh on that. I shouldn’t complain too much; I was lucky that it happened during my downtime.

I’m still Scrabbling. Yesterday I played four games, recovering from a pair of losses to win my last two. In the final game I smashed my record, winning 540-326 thanks to three bingos: WAsHIER, LAUNCHES and COTERIEs. Yes, I drew both blanks along with most of the other good stuff. The aggregate score of 866 in that game is just two points off the highest of any game I’ve played in; that came in a 389-479 loss in which my opponent slapped down three bingos. I’ve played just one game today, an 83-point win that took my rating into four figures once more, at 1001. I’ve now installed Quackle, an extremely useful tool that, among other things, lets you review previous games.