Month: April 2019

Life :) - Scrabble

Fair-weather friend

April 29, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is Orthodox Easter Sunday. It’s as big a family occasion here (if you have one) as Christmas.

On Thursday I had the CT scan done on my head. The procedure lasted ten minutes, if that. After the scan the nurse gave me a CD, but my laptop doesn’t have a CD drive. Anyway, I’ll need to wait a couple of weeks for the proper results. As I was waiting I had to fill in some forms, and then the nurse asked me, “Ce greutate aveți?” I thought she was asking what problem I had that necessitated the scan, because the word greutate (meaning “weight”) is often used to mean a burden or difficulty. But then she gestured; she was actually asking how much I weighed. I came out with a figure of 76 kilos, but it was a guess. I hadn’t weighed myself for ages.

Yesterday I went further along the track to Serbia, just past the 22 km sign, so it was a 36 km ride in all. I turned back when I could see the weather was rapidly closing in, and rode as fast as I could back to Sânmihaiu Român 5 km away (which wasn’t that fast; I was now facing a crosswind). I made it to the pokie machine-filled café in the village just in time: there was a huge downpour with thunder and lightning. Soon after I got my coffee, water cascaded through the entrance, flooding the floor, and they shut off the power. The storm passed quickly, though, and I was soon on my way back home. It was a nice feeling to be amongst nature as soon as I left the city. I saw a majestic kestrel flying overhead, a heron on the riverbank, and the odd pheasant. On the outskirts of the city, the Bega was teeming with frogs. At one point I stopped and there was a school of fish, with an old man trying to explain to me how and when they spawn. (They’re spawning now, and fishing practically anywhere in Romania is illegal until early June.) Apart from that man, there was hardly a soul for miles around. People must have, like, families and stuff.

Yesterday S texted me to say we could meet up today if the weather turned out to be sunny. A literal fair-weather friend. She’d obviously seen the forecast. It’s about time I found somebody else.

I haven’t played Scrabble online for two weeks, not since the time my opponent aborted the game accusing me of cheating. Instead I’ve been trying to learn words. I’ve devised mnemonics for the top 50 six- and seven-letter stems, and used a combination of random functions in Excel to select one of the 100 stems I’ve studied, plus a seventh or eighth letter, and re-order all the letters. For instance, it might select URINATE plus a P (ha!) and randomise that as APITUERN. From that I’ll have to unscramble that lot to get the valid PAINTURE. The next time it might give me NAAIESR, and I’ll have to think, hmm, SARNIE plus an A, what does that make? The answer is it makes nothing at all. Sometimes the combination might yield half a dozen or more words. There’s a program called Zyzzyva that does all of this for you, but it’ll never give you a barren selection like SARNIE + A, and I think it’s important to recognise when a bunch of letters don’t make a bingo.

My brother and his wife have been on honeymoon in Thailand. I think they got back today.

Language teaching - Life :)

Another year…

April 25, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I turned 39 last Saturday; the next day the Queen turned 93. My birthday was even less eventful than my average non-birthday.

Work has started to taper off a bit because of Easter (Romania’s public holidays take place over Orthodox Easter, which this year is a week later than its Western counterpart). Today was a fairly busy day, however, with seven hours of lessons involving two bike trips. I was off to Dumbrăvița first thing for an 8:30 start: two hours with an 11-year-old boy where I read him a couple of chapters of David Walliams’ Awful Auntie, we talked about Easter, he did some writing about owning a shop, I gave him a quick multiple-choice grammar quiz, and we played three homemade games including (for the first time) a version of the popular UK game show Blockbusters. Then I did some vocabulary and pronunciation with a 22-year-old in her final year of university, then it was back to Dumbrăvița for two hours with Matei, and finally home again for some grammar (present simple and continuous) and two crosswords with the woman who works at the coffee machine firm. In between I had to visit the clinic to reschedule my CT scan.

Yes, tomorrow I’ll be getting a map of my head done. That might shed some light on all my sinus pain, which varies from being almost unnoticeable to utterly excruciating. I really hope something useful comes of it.

Last week two of my students (a married couple) invited me to join them and some friends on holiday in Greece, in the delightfully-named region of Halkidiki. I’ve never been to Greece, and so much of the country looks beautiful, so I was happy to accept their offer, even if I’m always apprehensive about spending any length of time with anybody. They (we?) will be going for a week in early August. In other words, hot.

Talking of hot, we’re forecast to reach 26 tomorrow, and a balmy 29 on Friday.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :)

Footprints

April 16, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching dramatic footage of Notre Dame Cathedral ablaze. I visited it back in 2003 when I met my French flatmate there (we’d lived in student-level accommodation in the middle of Peterborough). It’s sad to see what is a beautiful work of art go up in flames.

On the 15th of every month I do my meter readings. There are four meters in (or just outside) this flat: electricity, gas and two for water. Yesterday was meter day, and I also happened to read an article about carbon emissions, so I went online to calculate the size of my CO2 footprint (click here). I was surprised at the answer. The centre of this city is increasingly clogged up with traffic, while I don’t even have a car. I don’t fly very often. I don’t think I consume much at all, as I sit here proudly sporting a threadbare seven-year-old T-shirt with a picture of a clapped-out VW camper van on the front (yeah I know, VW, emissions…). But it calculated my footprint as 4.9 tonnes per year, compared to a Romanian average of 3.5. (The UK average is around 7, and for the Western world as a whole the average is about 11.) I did err on the high side with my estimates, figuring that there’s always something I forget, so it’s possible my real total is slightly less. The real negative for me is living alone. In the summer I have the air conditioner going full blast because the heat would be unbearable otherwise. A big plus, however, which the site didn’t take into account, is that I have zero kids. My parents must have an enormous footprint, emitting 8 tonnes last year on their flights alone, and I’d dread to think what my Wellington-based cousin’s figure would be (I might send her the link). As for me, I’m trying to make 2019 my first flight-free year since 2002.

Yesterday was a pleasant day. On the way to my lessons in Strada Timiș, I intended to go to the offices of insurance company to arranging a CT scan for my sinuses, but realised the offices weren’t exactly on the way so I wouldn’t have time. That meant I arrived at Strada Timiș a little early, so I sat in the nearby Parcul Dacia, where old men were playing backgammon, rummy and a traditional card game. The lessons went reasonably well. I played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with my 17-year-old student, who did rather well in the end, despite starting out deliberating whether Sweden or Switzerland was part of the UK.

Language teaching - Photos - Scrabble

Headless chicken

April 15, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments
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I spent most of last week running around like a headless chicken, trying to organise lessons at the last minute, wading through the disorganised piles of crap on my table in the process. At the weekend I took advantage of the iffy weather to restore some kind of order, and feel much more relaxed now. This morning I had a short coffee meeting with a new student, who will be starting Skype lessons with me tomorrow. She lives in Timișoara but I guess she feels Skype is still a time-saver. Yesterday (yes, Sunday, which I prefer to keep free) I had my first lesson with another new student, who works for a coffee machine-making company. She asked me two questions I get a lot: “What the hell are you doing in Romania?” and “Obviously you do some English teaching, but what do you actually do for a living?”

A problem lately has been long preparation time. I hand-make a lot of my materials. I’d go as far as to say the slightly offbeat homemade-ness is part of who am I as a teacher, and my students seem to like it. “We don’t get this at school,” they tell me, or “My Romanian English teacher just used grammar books.” But all that thinking and writing and printing and cutting and sticking takes time.

There isn’t a whole lot of other news. I thought I’d mention another of my experiences on the ISC Scrabble site, which unfortunately seems to bring out the worst in people. On Saturday I played seven games, winning four, but they were mostly against people rated lower than me, so my rating actually dipped a little. Not to matter. I then fired up game number eight, against someone I’d never played before. It was me to go first, and I had this rack: AEIUTZ and a blank. Hmm, there’s probably a bingo here, and it’ll score a lot. This was void, which means it’s perfectly fine to try words without penalty. Is ‘azulite’ a word? It rang a bell (a blue stone, something like lapis lazuli, perhaps?) so I try it, but no go. Perhaps it’s ‘azurite’ I was thinking of. I changed the blank to an R, and hey presto, 100 points. I felt a bit guilty at my unprecedented stroke of good fortune, but didn’t expect what happened next. He accused me of using a word finder, promptly aborted the game (doing the online equivalent of tipping the board up and letting the tiles fly across the room), then put me on his no-play list. I contacted the site’s help desk, saying that this sort of behaviour detracts from what should be a friendly game, but was told in no uncertain (and sarcastic) terms that if I wanted a friendly environment I should go elsewhere. It’s sad that basic civility seems to be in such short supply.

The Easter market from my window
Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

I need to get out more

April 8, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I haven’t written for ages, because I haven’t had a whole lot to say. Work is absolutely fine (and that’s a big thing to be absolutely fine) but it would be nice to have a bit more of a social life. Spring has sprung and I can hear the pleasant ping of fluffy yellow objects hitting strings on the nearby courts, but I don’t have anybody to play with. (The concept of a club which you join and instantly have a playing partner or three doesn’t exist here. Not unless you’re willing to pay the earth, anyway.)

It’s safe to say that it’s all over with S. Lately she’s had to look after her grandmother who is nearly 90 and not in the best of health, but regardless of that, it’s obvious that she’s got better, more important things to do with her time than spend it with me. And soon she’ll be leaving the country to go on another of her grand tours.

As well as meeting people and getting out on the tennis court, I’d quite like to travel. There are extraordinarily beautiful regions of Romania that I haven’t yet been to (like the north-east of the country) or have been to but haven’t properly explored (such as Maramureș). So I plan to take at least a couple of weeks off in August, and perhaps a few days before then too. My friends from St Ives had planned to come over around now – we’d had the idea of going to the Danube Delta – but for various reasons they’ve had to knock that on the head.

A few of my students have said that I get quite animated in my lessons, in contrast to their experience at school or with a non-native tutor. They seem impressed at the various games and activities we do, even if continually coming up with new ones presents a challenge for me. I think I come alive in my lessons in a way I struggle to in “normal life”.

I’m finding Brexit compelling and exasperating in equal measure. Most British politicians are not arseholes, but the arseholes – the hardest of the Brexiteers – are certainly getting their moment in the sun. They are like bullies at school (and quite possibly were bullies at school), and make ridiculous comparisons between the Brexit crisis and the Second World War. The most likely outcome now would seem to be a long extension, but there’s a chance (15%?) Macron et al veto such a delay, the government refuse to revoke Article 50, and Britain are out of the EU on Friday night. In that case, Scotland will very likely exit the UK in short order.

I’ll post some photos of the very Eastery scene outside – the market started up over the weekend, and with temperatures soaring to 23 degrees, it was heaving out there.