Month: July 2018

Language learning

Serbian commentary 1 — The alphabets

July 30, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m trying to learn Serbian, which is a completely different animal from anything I’ve attempted before. It’s not at all like Romance languages such as Romanian and French. At least it is an animal, however. When I explained to my friend in the UK just how dissimilar Hungarian is to almost anything else, he said, so it’s like a fungus then. No, Serbian isn’t quite as off-the-wall as Hungarian.

I’m currently following a course of YouTube lessons. I like them because they explain the whats and hows and whys of Serbian, instead of just giving lists of vocabulary, which would be easily obtainable from a Google search.

First things first, the alphabets. Plural. Both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are in common use in Serbian. That sets it apart from the otherwise almost identical Croatian and Bosnian, where Cyrillic has largely been abandoned. It seems that the choice of alphabet in Serbia is sometimes politically motivated and emotionally charged. In that region, that’s hardly surprising I guess.

There are 30 letters in the Serbian alphabet. Using the Latin version, these are (in order):
A B V G D Đ E Ž Z I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S T Ć U F H C Č Dž Š
Crikey. Should I even bother buying a Serbian–English dictionary? I use physical paper dictionaries all the time, and I can look up a word in an average of around ten seconds, but alphabetical order (as I know it) is so hard-wired in my brain. There are, unsurprisingly, a few accented letters among that lot, but I’m used to seeing accented vowels. All the letters with accent marks in Serbian are consonants.

So how do you pronounce all those letters? Thankfully, Serbian is phonetic, unlike English which seems even more of a mess than it did before, now that I teach it. The Serbian letter C is pronounced “ts”, while Ć and Č are both similar to the English “ch” of chair, with Č being stronger. Ć and Č have their voiced counterparts Đ and Dž, which are both pronounced rather like “j” in “jump”, with Dž being stronger. Đ is sometimes written Dj, as in Djoković (or Đoković), which contains both the weak “j” and “ch” sounds. Then we have Š, which is like the “sh” sound in English, and Ž, which is like the “z” in “seizure”. Lj and Nj are pronounced similarly to the sounds in the middle of “million” and “onion” respectively. J on its own is pronounced just like the “y” in “yes”. Finally, there’s R, which is a really strong rolled sound. It is common for syllables in Serbian, and therefore whole words, to be completely devoid of vowels. An example is brz, which means fast, or srpski, meaning “Serbian”, which starts with five consonants in a row. But as far as I know, these vowel-free syllables all contain a syllabic rolled R.

An important thing to realise is that the digraphs Dž, Lj and Nj (and also Dj, if you write it like that) are each single letters. I noticed this in Serbia, when visiting a money changer, or menjačnica, like the one below. Notice that when the word menjačnica is written top to bottom, the NJ is written on one line, squashed together, like a simpler version of what happens with Chinese characters. You can also see a squashed NJ above the window, but that appears to be a stylistic choice. I’m guessing this is a fairly old photo and they just haven’t bothered with the decimal points; otherwise those exchange rates make no sense.

It isn’t that unusual for languages to have digraphs that are single letters; Hungarian even has a rare trigraph letter: Dzs. English could do something similar with, say, ch, sh, th and ng if it wanted. At least Serbian, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t like Welsh, where (for example) ng can be either one or two letters depending on the situation. That makes alphabetising a real pain.

For my own reference I’ll write out the Cyrillic version of the alphabet:
А Б В Г Д Ђ Е Ж З И Ј К Л Љ М Н Њ О П Р С Т Ћ У Ф Х Ц Ч Џ Ш

Finally, here’s a picture I took from a market in Belgrade, where you can buy fruit and vegetables, cups of coffee, pasta, household bits and pieces, and, um, coc. However those C’s in COC are actually the 21st letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, which corresponds to Latin S. The word seems to mean “sauce”. You can tell it’s Cyrillic because the next word is MAPКET. Note that the text above the kiosk windows is Cyrillic written in italics. A lot of the Cyrillic letter forms completely change when italics are used, or in handwriting. For instance, I think the letter that looks a bit like a w with a bar above it is actually a T. Madness!

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Saddle sore

July 30, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just got back from my bike trip to Sânmihaiu Român. I’m glad to be back: my arse was starting to really feel it, and I’d slightly underestimated the amount of water I needed on a 30-degree day. Just like me, my bike isn’t quite up to the job. People regularly eased past me in a blaze of lycra. (There wasn’t nearly as much lycra as you’d see in New Zealand though. This is Europe. You’re allowed to ride bikes even if you’re not training for a sodding triathlon. In fact a lot of the blokes who whizzed past me were bare-chested.) At the other end I grabbed an insanely cheap beer, spoke to my parents on FaceTime while at the bar, and read a book in a small park next to the town hall. For some reason my book piqued the interest of two kids.

goat_on_car
There’s something very Romanian about a goat standing on an abandoned car.

This morning I had another attempt at fishing. Still no luck. I’m competing with people who use four rods each, the maximum allowed, and one particular dynamic young fisherman who casts his line, reels it in 30 seconds later, and rides his bike to a different spot nearby to repeat the process. My latest batch of maggots had died in the fridge almost instantly, but I imagine fish will eat dead maggots just like live ones.

I’ve got a new student. She’s coming tomorrow evening. We spoke Romanian on the phone; she described her level as intermediate. People tend to underestimate their level, or are just modest, so I expect her to be quite good. On Tuesday I’ll have my first lesson for a while with Matei. He was telling me on the phone about his new dog, a pug.

My Skype lesson on Friday was interesting. My student was happy with my idea of studying a song. I chose Hotel California for him, and sent him a link to a YouTube video which showed the lyrics. I expected him to casually peruse the lyrics, but no, he memorised them all. Had them down pat. I was blown away. That song has a lot of words, some of which are pretty opaque. “Tiffany twisted”? I used that song with another of my students in one of our fortnightly “song and articles” lessons. That time I removed about 15 words from the lyrics, made a list of the missing words, and asked him to fill in the gaps. On Wednesday I had my usual double bill of lessons with brother and sister. The girl went first, and our 90-minute session passed without a hitch. As usual, however, the hour with her little brother was much more of a struggle. Anything that looks vaguely educational is strictly off the menu, as far as he is concerned. He’s getting bored of Last Card now. I’ll bring in the Formula 1 game next time; it’s certainly been a hit with one of the other boys I teach. In fact I’ll try it out on Matei too.

Scrabble. So yesterday I ended up with four losses, including two Jean Van de Velde-style ones, and finally two wins. To hopefully sort out my time troubles I’ll attempt a bunch of quick-fire, five-minute games on ISC. I’m bound to lose a lot and my rating is likely to plummet, but they should benefit me in the long run. My favourite word yesterday I thought was FILLIP. Six-letter words are relatively uncommon, but this one got rid of some very unpromising tiles and scored well, 32 if I remember rightly.

It’s now raining, and I can hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. It’s just as well I got out on my bike when I did.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Travel plans

July 28, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother this morning. He now has a beard. Yesterday was his 37th birthday. He and his wife have just put their house on the market: they might soon be expanding. The UK has been experiencing a heatwave the likes of which they haven’t seen since 1976.

I’ll have four work-free days in a row soon, so at the end of next week I’ll take the opportunity to do some travelling within Romania. I plan to visit the medieval town of Sighișoara, which is pronounced roughly “siggy-shwara”, just like the place I now call home is “timmy-shwara”. The -șoara suffix is some kind of feminine diminutive, and it comes up in a lot of place names, as well as in words like Domnișoara, which is the equivalent of the English Miss. (Mrs is Doamna.) Because of its prevalence in place names, I got really confused when I saw scorțișoară pancakes for sale. Where’s that, I wondered. The word in fact means cinnamon.
The only trains from Timișoara to Sighișoara take a circuitous route, and they all leave at an ungodly hour. Unfortunately I’ll miss the annual festival, which is taking place right now, so I might end up going somewhere else. But it’s been on my list for some time.

Six games of Scrabble since I last wrote. Three big wins against lower-rated opponents, two of whom resigned before the end, but the others were all close. In one game I found an early low-scoring bingo but my opponent drew both blanks, bingoed with each of them, and kept scoring heavily enough to snuff out my comeback chances. I lost that game by 27. My next game showed that bingos aren’t everything. Both times I bingoed, my opponent had the tiles and the presence of mind to make big scores immediately afterwards. I clung on to win by 22. I was particularly pleased to find BLOOPED in that game. B and P don’t go well together, and it’s easy to give up with a rack like that. I won my final game by just 11 points after going over time by a few seconds and getting stuck with a W. My score of 323 was my second-lowest in a winning effort since joining ISC.

Update: I’ve since had a nightmare game which I had in the bag with both blanks on my rack, only to lose by seven. But for the ten-point time penalty, and possibly the sinus headache I was grappling with, I would have won. Time management is a massive problem for me. Well, it’s not time management as such, it’s just that I can’t see the best plays fast enough, especially towards the end of the game when the board gets blocked. My opponent played all his words in just six minutes. Straight after that horror show I had a lesson with an Italian guy. He didn’t want to do our customary IELTS writing exercise so I half-jokingly suggested we play Scrabble. He agreed. He went first, played SPENT, and on my turn I found SPINDLES through the P. I then had to explain what a spindle was.

Update 2: It’s getting worse. Three more losses on ISC, by 51, 16 and 8.

Update 3: Now two wins! By 27 and 16. Could easily have lost both of them. In the first game I was 133 points down (that’s a lot!) before I remembered from somewhere in the recesses of my mind that CANG was a word. That allowed me to play GLUMmER and gave me just a glimmer. In the second game I led by 109 but was swamped with consonants and swapped tiles three times, and only because my opponent was overrun by consonants at the end was I able to sneak a win.

Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Time for a trip?

July 24, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum and Dad have been back in New Zealand a week, but when I spoke to Mum on FaceTime she looked pretty much zombified. My Wellington-based cousin and her family had been staying there (a base for their skiing) so my parents weren’t really able to recover from their jet lag.

The last two weeks I’ve only just crept over the 20-hour mark and that’s likely to drop further as people take holidays. I’m tempted to go to Belgrade (again), and from there go on a very spectacular train journey to the seaside town of Bar in Montenegro. It would be an unforgettable experience I’m sure, and one that doesn’t come with a high price tag.

With my reduced workload I make the effort to study Romanian for an hour a day, usually first thing in the morning. It’s helping. There’s a site called Context Reverso, which gives words and phrases in context, with their translations, and I’m finding that invaluable. I’ve also started to learn Serbian, which is a totally different animal from anything I’ve attempted before, and I intend to write about that next time.

The weather here has been iffy of late. I wanted to have a good go at fishing at the weekend, but my attempt was severely curtailed. Fishing and lightning really don’t go well together. If I ever do catch a fish, I’ll be sure to post a photo here.

I watched the absorbing final round of the Open golf yesterday. Absorbing because the course, the wind and the final-day pressure made for a tough combination, even for the world’s top golfers. I was probably in the minority who didn’t want Tiger Woods to win, although I enjoyed seeing him out there. I was rooting for Tommy Fleetwood, ‘cos he’s cool, but when he dropped out of contention I was happy to see the uber-consistent Francesco Molinari claim victory in a ridiculously crowded field. The tournament was played at Carnoustie, famous for Jean van de Velde’s meltdown on the 72nd hole in 1999. The scenes, accompanied by Peter Alliss’s commentary, were quite extraordinary. The Frenchman won, but then he didn’t.

I’ve got back to playing online Scrabble again. Five games since Saturday; three losses. In game one I lost by just four points on a ridiculously blocked board, which I struggle with. I still think I made a tactical blunder towards the end. In the second game I learnt my lesson and sacrificed points to open the board up. This felt like a well-played game for me, and I won by 78. Game three: I got both blanks simultaneously, but plenty of crap to go with them. My solitary bingo wasn’t enough and I lost by 43. Game four: my opponent drew both blanks and very quickly made two bingos (they all play so damn fast, probably because the play much more than me, so a lot of the time they’re on auto-pilot). I made a bingo myself and started to close, but my opponent scored well on his final moves to beat me by 73. Game five: I was lucky to draw both blanks, eventually cruising to a 114-point win thanks to two bingos.

Tennis

Should Wimbledon introduce tie-breaks in the final set?

July 21, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

That question got a whole heap of airtime after – and during – last Friday’s marathon Wimbledon semi-final between Kevin Anderson and John Isner, which Anderson eventually won, 26-24 in the fifth set. The match took six hours and 36 minutes, and wreaked havoc on the schedule. The second semi between Djokovic and Nadal was billed as the main event, and it was a marvellous encounter when it finally got underway. Unfortunately that wasn’t until after 8pm, and thanks to the council-imposed curfew, the match couldn’t be completed in one go. It too went to a long fifth set, and the women’s final, which has started at 2pm on Saturday for as long as I can remember, was pushed back two hours.

People weren’t complaining only because the timetable was thrown out of whack. Some commenters were fed up with watching hours of so-called servebotting. Others thought it was inhuman that Anderson and Isner were kept out there so long, with no endpoint in sight, and whoever came through that match would be a wreck for the final. (For the first two sets against Djokovic, Anderson pretty much was.) Then there were debates about whether Djokovic and Nadal should have played part deux of their match under the roof on a sunny day in what is supposed to be an outdoor tournament. Even though neither of the men’s semi-finals will be forgotten by any self-respecting tennis fan in a long time, the lack of a tie-break in the fifth set did cause some major headaches.

What do I think? Well, honestly I’d be fine if the rules didn’t change. Anderson–Isner-style matchups in a grand slam semi are pretty rare. Near-seven-foot goliaths don’t get that far very often, and on this occasion both players saved match points on the way there. And for me, there’s something conceptually cool about a set that can feature theoretically unlimited games. I’ve always been a bit of a numbers geek, even as a kid, and I always got excited when I saw big yellow eights and nines and double-digit numbers on the right-hand side of the scoreboard. However, the current rules (tie-breaks at 6-6 in all sets except the last) were implemented at Wimbledon in 1979, since when tennis has become much more physical. A marathon five-setter takes a far greater toll on one’s body than it did back then. And perhaps the clincher for me is the fact that the game state at 24-24 in the Anderson–Isner match was exactly the same as at 4-4, two and a quarter hours earlier! Rightly or wrongly (and I would suggest wrongly), we no longer live in a world where that is OK.

The Wimbledon committee are probably a bunch of old blokes and the not-so-old Tim Henman, so there’s not much use predicting what they might do. But I have a sneaky suspicion they’ll change the rules in time for next year’s tournament, and in a typically British compromise, bring in tie-breaks at 12-12 in the fifth set. They might even exempt the final from the tie-break rule. I also expect the Australian and French Opens to do the same, or even go the whole hog and have tie-breaks at 6-6, à la Flushing Meadows. Third-set tie-breaks for the women will almost certainly come in too, for the sake of consistency, even though marathon women’s matches are a non-issue.

It’s interesting that Anderson–Isner appears to be a line in the sand. Here are some other matches I can remember that went very long in the fifth (reaching at least 12-12), but for whatever reason didn’t leave everyone clamouring for a tie-break:

1992 Wimbledon doubles final: John McEnroe and Michael Stich beat Jim Grabb and Richey Reneberg 19-17 in the fifth.
This was back in the day when top singles players – even former champions – played doubles. At 33, McEnroe didn’t inhabit the very top echelons anymore, but he had quite the tournament, reaching the semis of the singles and winning the doubles with Stich, the previous year’s singles champion. This match was played on the old No 1 court, and was finished on the Monday, having been suspended at 13-13 the night before due to bad light. I don’t remember any complaints about the suspension or the length of the match, but McEnroe always drew the crowds, and at any rate, ’92 was a much calmer time when nobody could tweet to the @Wimbledon account that it was fucking bullshit.

1997 Wimbledon third round: Tim Henman beat Paul Haarhuis 14-12 in the fifth.
The first week of Wimbledon had been ravaged by rain, so they needed to play serious catch-up. This match, therefore, was played on the Middle Sunday, in a football-style atmosphere. I felt sorry for Haarhuis, who served for the match in the fifth set but double-faulted on match point. No complaints from the crowd, who once Henman had finally got over the line, probably thought it was “coming home”.

1998 Wimbledon semi-final: Goran Ivanisevic beat Richard Krajicek 15-13 in the fifth.
This is the closest precedent to last Friday’s marathon semi. Goran missed match points on his own serve in the fourth set, and in the fifth a holding pattern, quite literally, developed. In truth it wasn’t much fun, and just like last Friday, the crowd were eagerly anticipating the second semi-final, in this case between Henman and Pete Sampras. Had the match gone on much longer, and had it taken place in Twitterworld, there would surely have been calls for tie-breaks. For the record, Tiger Tim played a great match against Sampras, but in the end the great champion just had an extra gear.

2000 Wimbledon third round: Mark Philippoussis beat Sjeng Schalken 20-18 in the fifth.
I watched this in Penang with my grandmother. It was played on an outside court and took five hours in total. “Scud”, or “the Poo”, recovered from this ordeal to beat Henman in round four, again in five sets.

2003 Australian Open quarter-final: Andy Roddick beat Younes El Aynaoui 21-19 in the fifth.
The crowd really warmed to El Aynaoui; they hadn’t expected him to push Roddick so hard. Unusually, Roddick broke in the extended final set, but in a twist, was broken straight back. This added drama, plus the fact that it was a night session with no matches to follow, helped this match attain classic status. I don’t remember any tie-break talk.

2009 Wimbledon final: Roger Federer beat Andy Roddick 16-14 in the fifth.
I didn’t see this match. There was a lot on the line here, not least Federer’s legacy. Could he break Sampras’s record of 14 grand slams? With that in mind, and it being the final, nobody was particularly bothered that it took a while.

2010 Wimbledon first round: John Isner beat Nicolas Mahut 70-68 in the fifth.
70-68. Eleven hours. Jaw-dropping stuff. So why were there fewer calls for tie-breaks as a result of this match? A few reasons. One, the match reached such unprecedented proportions that people were in awe of it. Two, not many people actually watched all those aces and service winners. They were going about their everyday business while this animal, this colossal thing, was prowling in the background. Three, neither player was a real contender for the later stages. It didn’t have much bearing on the rest of the tournament. Four, we hadn’t quite entered the age of intense polarisation, where something as unimportant as a tennis match can cause people to lose their shit on social media.

It was perhaps because of Isner’s match with Mahut that his encounter with Anderson provoked such negative reactions. Oh no, it’s Isner again! Please make it stop! And unlike eight years ago, millions of prime-time eyeballs were directed at it.

Other sports - Tennis

It’s all over!

July 16, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

No, I’m not leaving Romania or anything that ridiculous. But the month-long sport-fest finally came to an end today. It’s been a nice distraction, I must admit.

France won today’s highly entertaining final of a marvellous World Cup. One of the goalscorers, Mbappé, has such a fun name to say and even type. It reminds me of a certain Hanson hit from the nineties. Four members of Pussy Riot invaded the pitch early in the second half. I wonder where they are now. Even the presentation at the end provided drama: it was absolutely teeming with rain. Putin was duly provided with an umbrella, while Macron and Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic (the Croatian president, who was decked out in national football attire) were left to soak. Croatia played very positively throughout the tournament and will have won plenty of fans. So France have now won two World Cups in my lifetime, as have Germany. And Brazil. And Italy. Argentina and Spain have won one each. Hang on, so that means I’ve lived through ten World Cups, so I must be nearly f… Oh shit.

To be honest though, over the last few days, my sporting mind has been in London. The later stages of Wimbledon were staggeringly good. I didn’t see it all, because I have to work occasionally, but I did pretty well. Much better, certainly, than I ever managed when I lived in New Zealand and it all happened at night. Anderson’s crazy 6½-hour semi with Isner was much better, and less serve-dominated, than some people made out. I was just the bit after 11-all in the fifth (admittedly quite a long bit!) that started to become monotonous as both players were holding with ease and not doing a whole lot else. Anderson was clearly the fresher of the two players as the fifth-set game tallies hit the twenties, and his improvised left-handed forehand while down on the ground was the killer blow in the end. Wimbledon will quite possibly change the rules in time for next year to prevent a 50-game final set from ever happening again. I’ll write another post on that topic specifically. Then came the other semi, itself an epic at 5¼ hours, which was played under the roof and spread over two days. It was probably the best match at Wimbledon since that final ten years ago. At 8-all in the final set, my parents phoned me from their hotel room in Singapore. They were stopping over on their way to New Zealand (they’ll now be on the plane). Mum is quite a big Djokovic fan and she was following the live scores on her phone, in the absence of tennis on their TV. I commentated the best I could (which isn’t very well) for what turned out to be the dénouement.

Predictably, Anderson was buggered today, after playing a stupid amount of tennis to get past Federer and then Isner. Although he found a second (third? tenth?) wind as the match progressed: he suddenly started to produce on his first serve and forehand, and Djokovic did extremely well to prevent a fourth set. Anderson came across as a thoroughly nice bloke, and is now firmly on the tennis map, even for fairly casual fans. Yesterday’s women’s final was a little disappointing, with Serena spraying errors everywhere, but she was so gracious in defeat and Kerber equally so in victory. Kerber was unbelievably consistent – only five unforced errors in the match, according to Wimbledon’s (possibly generous) stat-keepers. I even saw the men’s doubles final last night: extra drama was provided when they closed the roof between the fourth and fifth sets. The Kiwi Michael Venus came oh so close to grabbing a Wimbledon title.

So that’s it. Back to reality, and it’s just as well that’s not too bad these days.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

It ain’t coming home

July 13, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s staying right where it is. Football, I mean. I had a lesson last night from 8 till 9:30. The semi-final started at 9, and as both my students are big football fans (and play regularly), we decided to watch the start of the match. They predicted 2-0 and 2-1 England wins, while I picked a simple 1-0 England victory. After five minutes that was on the cards; England dominated the first half-hour or so and could easily have led by more than one goal. But in the end, after 120 minutes and an inexplicably long final period of stoppage time, they were beaten by a better side. Oh well. Making the semis, even with a kind draw, is no mean achievement, and hopefully it’ll be seen as such when everyone has calmed down a bit. England still have to play the third-place play-off (which, in Romania, they call the “little final”). Before last night’s match I would have picked France to be champions no matter who they faced in the final, but now I’m not so sure. I don’t expect Croatia to be hindered that much by having to endure all those extra time periods, effectively a whole game more than France have played.

If one or two of Colombia’s penalties had been placed an inch higher or to the right, England’s campaign would undoubtedly have been seen as a failure. Knockout football often hinges on such tiny margins. Grand slam tennis, on the other hand, can sometimes be a bit more clear cut. The scoring system tends to magnify small differences between two players, especially in the men’s game where they play best of five sets. Roger Federer cruised through his opening four matches, for the loss of 8, 9, 10 and 9 games. Yesterday, in his quarter-final with Kevin Anderson, he won the first set 6-2 and negotiated a tricky tie-break to win the second set. Anderson’s chances of coming back were incredibly slim. But he did. Even after facing a match point. I was glad to see a “Fedexit”, mainly because I really can’t stand his Wimbledon fan base, who are often disrepectful to whoever happens to be across the net from their hero. I also enjoyed Nadal’s match with Del Potro, where he just squeaked out a win in another marathon encounter. In three days Wimbledon will be all over, and my rekindled interest in sport will be snuffed out.

This morning I had a lesson with a guy who comes from Italy originally but has lived in Romania for 15 years. We talked about bike usage, or rather the baffling lack of it. Timișoara is almost dead flat, and almost perfect for bikes. But you don’t see very many of them. He said that in Romania, riding a bike is (increasingly) an admission that you’re a failure. Successful people drive cars. He told me about his friend in nearby Arad, who works in a fairly senior role in a large company, just 500 metres away from her home. Sensibly she cycled to work, on a smart and expensive retro-style Pegas (a revived Romanian brand, which in Communist times was all you could buy here). But she was told to drive instead, because her bike (any bike) didn’t project the right image. That attitude is what’s sending the planet to hell in a handcart.

Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Sport that matters

July 9, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Twenty years ago I’d have just about watched televised coverage of two flies crawling up a wall, but in recent years I’ve gone off most sports. The dominance of money, and changes to society, have made the whole experience of watching sport less interesting to me. Who wins hardly matters. But as Wimbledon is in full swing and England have made the semi-finals of a World Cup for the first time since I was ten, now is a bit of an exception.

Yesterday, while battling an intense headache caused by my right sinuses, I watched Simona Halep – French Open champion, let’s not forget – lose in freakish fashion to Su-Wei Hsieh of Taiwan. She led 5-2 in the third set, but after Hsieh had held authoritatively in the next game, the remaining four could all have gone either way. But they all went Hsieh’s way, including at 5-4 when Simona had a match point. Hsieh was one hell of a tricky customer, playing two-handed on both sides. She was a far cry from the kind of ball-basher Simona is more accustomed to. Incredibly, nine of the top ten women’s seeds are out of the tournament. Serena Williams is still there, and so are Kerber and Ostapenko.

From the tennis I switched over just in time to see England take the lead against Sweden, and they ran out comfortable winners. England’s campaign has already been quite something. Suddenly there’s a sense of real optimism: “It’s coming home!” In the bread shop today I met an American who has a Romanian wife. As soon as he realised I was English he mentioned the football. I talked to Mum yesterday about the heat wave they’re experiencing in England, as their team progress through the rounds in Russia. She said that should they win the World Cup, the summer will become the stuff of legends. “Do you remember the Summer of ’18?” Mum and Dad will be back in New Zealand by the time the final kicks off.)

Today has been a day of sport-free bliss: a rest day at both Wimbledon and the World Cup. I spent most of the day creating a new board game for my younger students (well it’s not new at all: Dad came up with the basis for it circa 1993), reading a book by the frog pond, and sheltering from a storm.

Five lessons scheduled for tomorrow.

Life :)

Getting by, somehow

July 7, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just sent off my New Zealand income tax return. I offset my various expenses against my rental income; my body corporate fees came to more than $8000 for the last financial year, including all the so-called “special levies” that will be the norm until, one way or another, the seismic shit resolves itself. Looking at that enormous figure made me wonder how I get by at all.

I need some more work again. Wednesday has been my only full day this week, and a productive day it was too: five lessons, including three with kids. (How did my mum cope with about thirty kids, all at once, day in, day out?) On the way to Dumbrăvița I grabbed a coffee from a machine in one of those charming little shops (like dairies in NZ) that you find everywhere. The woman behind the counter was lovely, and she reminded me to put the cup under the nozzle of the machine. Outside the shop were benches, and large empty paint cans and tins of olives that were being used as rubbish bins.

As I write this, they’ve just turned on the big screen across the road. The first of the quarter-finals, between France and Uruguay, is about to begin. That shoot-out to conclude England’s match with Colombia was hard to watch: such a fine line between success and failure, with the mood of a whole nation riding on events that are essentially random. It’s crazy when you think about it. I was happy for Gareth Southgate whose own penalty miss 22 years ago will sadly live with him for ever. Just imagine if England go on and win it now.

I had a cancellation this morning, so I popped over to Piața Badea Cârțan, my favourite market, in probably my favourite part of the city. At this time of year it’s just oozing with amazing fruit and vege. One of this evening’s lessons (with three people) has also been cancelled: I was cheesed off with that, not just because of the loss of work (and income), but also because one of my students could have given me some much-needed fishing advice.

My parents are staying at my brother’s place in Poole. On FaceTime it all looked very housey, in contrast to the humble apartment I live in.

Update: I didn’t watch the France–Uruguay match and I don’t think it had much to recommend it anyway, but what an absolute belter the Belgium–Brazil game was! A real cracker of a match. I was glad to see Belgium hang on, by the fingertips of their goalie, but really the final score could have been almost anything.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Vară în Timișoara

July 2, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s not a bad day to be in Timișoara. The temperature has dropped into the very pleasant low twenties. (That’s only a reprieve, surely.) Earlier this afternoon I was in Piața Libertății, reading the start of Tender Is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald, when a man in his sixties came up to me, impressed that I was reading a book in English. Then the mayor, and presumably his wife, walked past. They were eating an ice cream. Walking alongside the School of Music at the northern end of the square, on the other side of the tram tracks, I was treated, as always, to the sounds of vigorous practice in just about anything you can strum or tinkle or blow into.

I read that the boats (vaporașe) on the Bega, which they were trialling when I arrived here 21 months ago, will finally be put into action. There had been some bureaucracy emanating from Bucharest that threatened to put the kibosh on the whole thing.

This morning I had a lesson with my Italian student, taking my total for the week to 20 hours. After all those interruptions, I’ve lost some momentum, but I’m relatively confident I can build it again, even if August (the big getaway month) is only one month away. As my student and I completed an IELTS writing exercise, I saw the man with no legs ride his hand-cranked wheelchair to the cathedral, park it beside the steps, and painstakingly clamber up all twelve of them. For god’s sake (literally), can’t you build a bloody ramp?! Some things about Romania make me angry.

My student was disappointed that France beat Argentina yesterday, citing the number of black and Muslim players in the side. How bigoted. He also unashamedly cheats in his exams. But he has a lot of lessons with me, so I don’t complain too much. Friday was my best day of the week – four lessons, including one with three people. For that lesson I sat on what is probably called an ottoman, because I only have three chairs.

The World Cup continues to delight. Both of yesterday’s matches were crackers. Long may it continue, while the spectre of 2022 looms darkly in the form of Qatar Airways advertising hoardings surrounding the pitch. From a personal viewpoint, there is some well-founded optimism this time in the England camp. For once they have a non-Delboy-like manager with a good tactical brain, who hasn’t had to be imported from Sweden or Italy. On Tuesday they face Colombia, who (like four years ago) have been one of my favourite teams so far. I’d quite like to visit Colombia, if this 1997 video of the song Demons by Super Furry Animals is anything to go by. In the same original group as Colombia, I was disappointed to see Senegal go out by virtue of accumulating two more yellow cards than Japan, after both sides had amassed four points, scored four goals, conceded four, and shared four in their head-to-head encounter. Yellow cards are dished out too subjectively to be a good tie-breaker. If some sort of play-off game is unfeasible (and I don’t totally believe it is), flipping a coin might actually be better. As for the Mannschaft, which still sounds like part of the male anatomy, they just weren’t quite good enough. The victims of very un-German complacency, perhaps.

Fishing. One day I’ll know what I’m doing enough to spend a pleasant, relaxing morning by the water. One day I’ll even catch a fish. But today is not that day.