September 2019 – plutoman.com

Freak-outs

September 29, 2019

by plutoman 0 Comments

My work volume has dropped off a little in the last week or two, so I’ve started advertising again. I put up an online ad, mostly in Romanian but with the last line in English: “I look forward to teaching you English.” Someone replied to my ad, questioning my command of my mother tongue. He didn’t think the -ing on the end of “teaching” should have been there. I swiftly corrected him; he was making a very common mistake.

Last night I bumped into Bogdan, the guy in his early forties who lives on the second floor of my block, in apartment 10. (I live at number 13, on the third of eight floors.) For months and months I saw him hanging around outside the apartment building, and until I got talking to him I never imagined he actually lived there. We decided to go for a beer in the square, just opposite our block, and he seemed reasonably switched on. He even knew a reasonable amount of English; he said he’d done eight years of it at school. He doesn’t work, and doesn’t currently have a functioning cell phone.

Among all the big news stories that flashed by in the first half of last week, I completely neglected to mention Thomas Cook, a big travel company that went to the wall. The number of people stranded overseas was in six figures. The modern company didn’t bear much resemblance to the outfit whose memorable slogan I remember as a kid: “Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it.” However, it was still headquartered in Peterborough and it will be a huge blow to the city.

When I spoke to my dad yesterday, he reminded me of the time (or one of the times) I completely freaked out when I was small. I would have been three or four, and we’d gone to the airport to pick up my grandmother who had flown all the way from New Zealand. I guess this must have been Terminal 3 of Heathrow. Even in the eighties it was vast and chaotic, and none of that helped, but I think it was the loudspeaker announcements that did it for me. I screamed and bawled, and broke out in a hot sweat. Dad said he wasn’t angry with me, but instead he felt powerless and sad. Another episode came in a shop called Habitat in the newly-opened Grafton Centre in Cambridge. On this occasion it was the thick ceiling pipes that I couldn’t handle. They totally spooked me. There were all manner of shops I just wouldn’t go into back then. Shops with freezers were a particular problem. I really didn’t like freezers. Except the dozens that must have been in John’s Freezer Centre in Godmanchester, where I often went with Mum; somehow those ones were OK. Tesco’s in Bar Hill was never an easy one for me. It was huge for a start, there were frequent tannoy announcements, and of course lots and lots of freezers. I was about seven when I got over all of this.

Dad and I also talked about the political situation in the UK, following the incendiary session in the Commons on Wednesday. We agreed that the risks associated with Brexit have now become secondary to the risks that Britain’s democracy will be irreparably damaged. Dad said that he voted to leave in 2016 because he wanted to “shake the tree” a bit. We had a good laugh at that. He now says he’d vote to remain in a future referendum.

I recently watched the five-part Chernobyl series. Very good. Chilling, but brilliant. I imagine the cover-ups and chicanery were even worse than depicted on screen. I certainly won’t be watching the Russian-made version.

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Politics

Turning it up to eleven

September 25, 2019

by plutoman 0 Comments

Yesterday I watched live coverage of the UK Supreme Court’s unanimous and damning verdict. By an 11-0 margin, they ruled that Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament for five weeks was unlawful. Yikes. I never expected that for one minute. I mean, silencing parliament for more than a month just so you get your own way should bloody well be unlawful, but the law so often makes little sense. Lady Hale wore a very striking (and symbolic?) spider brooch as she read out the decision, and she bore a slight resemblance to my grandmother at a similar age. This latest episode in the Brexit saga has brought to the fore a pair of eleven-letter words that I wouldn’t like to have to say once I’d had a few (which hardly ever happens these days): prorogation and justiciable. To be honest I’m not entirely sure how to pronounce the latter of these even though it’s 9am and I’m stone-cold sober. I think I’d go with /dʒʌˈstɪʃəbᵊl/ (jus-TI-shuh-buhl), but it’s a weird word.

Boris was in America yesterday. He met Donald Trump, and the two of them are looking more and more alike. Trump now has a pair of eleven-letter words of his own to contend with: impeachment proceedings. (OK, an impeachment inquiry.) I was hoping it would never come to this, mainly because the impeachment process, if that’s what we get, may well galvanise support for Trump. Then on Monday we had 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg giving a very powerful and emotional speech in front of the likes of Trump. So much has happened already this week and we’re less than half-way through.

On Sunday I spoke to my parents. They’ve booked their flights to Europe; they’ll be coming this way in May and will stay here for ten weeks. Can’t wait. (But it is a very long wait.) They’ll be flying direct, which I warned Dad never to do. “But we’ll have three hours in Dubai,” Mum said. Bloody great. We ended up talking, for some reason, about the Māori language. In the three years I’ve been away, it seems to have exploded. Ring up your bank now, and apparently you get a Māori (or should I say Te Reo) lesson while you’re on hold. As if the god-awful music wasn’t bad enough. My parents and aunt and uncle resent all of this, and I don’t blame them. A lady in my apartment block just forwarded me a letter she’d sent to some MPs about our situation, and at the beginning and end of the letter she’d written a sentence in Māori, complete with macrons (which represent long vowels), like the one I’ve put on the a in Māori. This woman is 0% Māori, but presumably she thinks slipping into that tongue for a few lines will help her cause when dealing with politicians. It’s a beautiful, powerful language (and the argument that it isn’t a real language because it wasn’t originally written down is absurd), but Māorification seems to be going too far, and who knows where it will stop.

It’s real Autumn here now, and I don’t mind that at all. Spring and autumn in Timișoara are lovely.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Moving too fast

September 15, 2019

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’ve been here a while now, and these “new” things keep coming back. As I write this, there is a large crowd outside the cathedral to celebrate the Feast of the Cross.

Today I played tennis, for only the second time this year, in Parcul Rozelor. I was better than I thought I’d be, so I’m keen to play again soon. My opponent (not that we played a game) was of a similar standard to me, but about 30 kilos heavier, so I have a fairly good idea of what my strategy will be if we ever do start counting games and sets. For his part, he generated plenty of pace, but also had a penchant for slice and drop shots. After the game, he invited me to go for a beer in a bar by the Bega. He asked me about Brexit, among other things. That’s a hard enough subject to talk about even in my native language.

No, I didn’t see the men’s US Open final. On Monday, my fifth and final student that day asked me, how come you didn’t watch it? Well it started at midnight my time and didn’t finish until five, and that was reason enough. When you’ve got a packed day (as I had on Monday) or even a loosely packed day, you just can’t. Not when you’ve got a job that actually matters. Shame, I know. It was a real barnburner of a match.

Last week it became clear that I need to change tack when it comes to the way I teach. I was going to say I’m pushing my students too hard, but that’s not the right word at all: I rarely exert any pressure on them. More accurately, I’m getting them to move onto the next level too soon, and need to focus more on consolidation. I’m still learning myself.

It’s still pretty warm for mid-September, but according to the forecast the last embers of summer will be extinguished in the next three or four days. The lovely fruit and vegetables from the markets will soon be gone too. A summer of eating Romanian tomatoes from markets makes me wonder how I ever eat the tasteless, polished, uniformly round crap you get in the supermarket.

A few old Dacias in Piața Unirii this morning

Life :) - Politics

Feels so normal

September 8, 2019

by plutoman 0 Comments

It all feels so normal now. Hopping on an elderly tram full of mostly elderly people, many of them engaging in serious arm action whenever we happen to pass a church. Gypsy women getting on in their customary brightly-coloured dresses. Today one of the women was so large she took up about as much space as Jacob Rees-Mogg did on the front benches of parliament last week. This morning I took the 7 tram to Flavia, the very popular (and large) second-hand market, although I didn’t buy anything. I then visited Shopping City, one of (so far) two malls, and picked up a whole load of practical stuff for teaching. I’m trying to expand and jazz up my already extensive collection of handmade cards and games that I think of as my trademark as a teacher. Make everything as manual as possible. My students seem to like that, but it involves many an hour spent printing, cutting and sticking.

I had a chat to my parents this morning, just before I got on the tram. These days we’re in touch at least twice a week. They said how lucky they are to have the two sons they have. It felt wonderful to hear that. On balance, I think I’d prefer to be in my brother’s shoes, despite my successful lifestyle change. His longer-term future is rather more secure than mine. He’s married, he’s got good, close friends, he’s got a work pension, and all that stuff. Whether I even have friends is debatable, and somewhat scarily, the people I know don’t know each other. One of them could die and I might never find out. And then there’s the bit about potentially getting kicked out of the country I live in. Right now, and in the short term, things are absolutely fine. Heck, if I step back a bit, I can hardly believe how well my Romania plan has worked out. But give it five years, or ten…

Back to the present. On Thursday I had my first Romanian-English session for several weeks. I got a bit frustrated at the number of basic mistakes I was making. Those pronouns. I never quite get them. My fellow teacher was surprised to learn that someone as apparently bohemian as me (in her words) spent ten years in the insurance industry. She’d been to Poland and gave me a can of Polish beer. I gave her a bottle of Rakija I picked up in Stari Bar. She said she’d been looking at enrolment forms for her course which begins later this month, and seeing 1999 and 2000 birth years. Two thousand. How did that happen? We even have, for the first time, a 2000-born grand slam finalist in Bianca Andreescu. I note that on Tuesday, I’ll have spent as much time in 20-something as in 19-something.

Brexit. The drama dial turned to max for three days solid. But good god, it should never have come to this, whatever “this” even is anymore. The debate was worth having, but a binary, in-or-out referendum on something as complex as Britain’s relationship with its European neighbours, without any plan for a Leave result, was a terrible idea. Invoking Article 50, firing the starting gun on the exit process, without any plan as to how you might actually leave, was a terrible idea. Boris Johnson. Prime minister. Terrible idea. Suspending parliament. Terrible idea. (It’s a national crisis. MPs should be sitting every hour god gives until this is sorted out. Spending less time than normal in parliament is crazy and reckless.) Leaving without any sort of agreement with the EU at all is a terrible idea, and the 21 responsible and courageous Tories who voted against it, as the country looked into the abyss, got booted out of the party instantly. (What sort of democracy is this supposed to be?)

I watched some of the speeches at Westminster last week. The best was by Ken Clarke who was Chancellor when I was in my teens. One of those responsible Tories I remember from the deep, distant past. Clarke said that the referendum was a bad idea, he didn’t like the result, but democracy must be respected and the verdict should be implemented. But given the narrowness of the result and that wrecking the country he’s served for almost half a century doesn’t exactly appeal to him, a soft Brexit is the only sensible outcome.

Robert Mugabe is, finally, no more. Good riddance. I mentioned the news to two of my students yesterday; neither of them had heard of him. That reminded me of a time I mentioned Paul McCartney, who was unknown to my 30-year-old student. It’s not that my students are stupid, just that their “window” of knowledge is different from mine. On the other side, I was embarrassed when my 18-year-old student talked about the gruesome murders of two teenage girls in Caracal in southern Romania, and I hadn’t been following the national news.

Autumn seemed to start abruptly (as seasons do here) on Tuesday, and right now it’s tipping it down.

Family - Travel: Europe

Balkans trip report — Part 4

September 1, 2019

by plutoman 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents this morning. It looks like they’ll be coming this way in mid-May. Eight and a half months away. Mum told me about her younger brother’s living hell. He’s been in and out of hospital, but mostly in, for the last four months. He recently had another operation and picked up an infection. His immune system is shot to pieces. It doesn’t seem long since he was at my brother’s wedding. It goes to show you never know what’s round the corner, which is perhaps just as well.

Now for the last lap of my Balkans trip. The journey from Mostar to Sarajevo took two hours by train (the scenery is supposedly spectacular, but unfortunately it was dark). The owner of the apartment met me at the station; that was an unexpected bonus. It wasn’t until the next morning that I thought I should really figure out where exactly I was. The apartment was located some way up a hill which rises from the city centre. I had blisters on my feet, and walking (even downhill) was slow going. I passed a graveyard where almost all the graves were from 1993 or 1994. A few minutes later I passed another, similar one. I wandered around the city, had some very cheap bureks (a kind of savoury strudels) for lunch, then bumped into somebody I’d met in Mostar. I joined him on another war tour, this time with a 34-year-old woman as the guide. She was a small child during the four-year siege, and at times during the tour she became quite emotional. We visited the market, still popular today, where a shell killed 68 people in 1995. We walked down the infamous Sniper Alley, surrounded by hills. Our final stop was a slightly bizarre monument: a large tin can, just like the cans of disgusting mystery meat that were supplied by the UN. Underneath the can was a semi-sarcastic thank you message. She explained to us the complexities of former Yugoslavia: an area the size of New Zealand is made up of nine or ten political entities or sub-entities, like Republika Srpska, the horseshoe-shaped Serbian part of Bosnia that takes in part of Sarajevo. I had dinner in a pleasant outdoor restaurant where the service was painfully slow. (By this stage I was getting fed up with the whole eating out thing.) I painstakingly made my way back up the hill.

I still had two more days in Sarajevo. The film festival was in full swing, and had attracted a lot of tourists to the city. I saw two films, that were both rather sad. The first – Ti Imaš Noć (You Have the Night) – was based in a coastal town in Montenegro, where a shipyard had closed down, leaving many people out of work. The second was called Transnistria, based in the thin strip of land (yet another political entity) in eastern Moldova that gives the film its title. This movie was shot on Super 16 film, which looks a bit like the Super 8 (cine) film my grandfather used to use.

The spot in the market where 68 people lost their lives.

On my second evening in Bosnia’s capital I visited Džirlo, a very charming tea house at the foot of the hill. My host had recommended it to me. The man who runs the place is quite a character. The next morning I had all kinds of hassle booking a bus to Belgrade for the following day. By this stage the credit had run out on my phone, so contacting my host was no longer so easy. I needed to contact him because the only time I could get a bus, without venturing into the part of the city in Republika Srpska, was at six in the morning. Would that be OK? Eventually things sorted themselves out, and I booked by ticket for the 6am service. That evening I had a Bosnian “combination” meal, which included ćevapčići, similar to the mici we get in Romania.

The following morning – Friday – I was up at 4:30. I didn’t want to take any chances. With no phone credit I couldn’t order a taxi, and had to go down the hill to hail one. I grabbed a coffee at the station before boarding the bus which left on the dot of six, and took us past the striking Twist Tower and the Olympic Park where Torvill and Dean won their gold medal in 1984. We then drove along a winding road through the forest. It was pretty the whole way, in particular when we entered Republika Srpska, which was obvious from all the Cyrillic signs. After another border crossing, we reached Belgrade in the scheduled 7½ hours. I checked into the guest house, and had a few hours to wander around the city again. I bought an Oxford-published Serbian–English dictionary.

On Saturday morning I visited the nearby market, and then it was time to go home. The minibus took an age – 4½ hours – including my fifth and final border crossing. On board was a Kiwi who had been travelling for months. He didn’t have too many good words to say about his homeland. I felt he was being quite harsh, except when he talked about New Zealand’s suicide rate which continues to be shockingly high.

Before I knew it, I was back, and that felt pretty good.

Language teaching - Travel: Europe

Balkans trip report — Part 3

September 1, 2019

by plutoman 0 Comments

No shortage of work on my return to Timișoara, and it feels good to have some money in my pocket again. My worst lesson was my first of two with the six-year-old boy. I couldn’t connect to their wi-fi, and I was hopelessly unprepared for that scenario. The second time I was armed with colouring-in sheets (colour the roof red, the chimney orange, the door green…) which he really enjoyed. We practised numbers a bit; he knows 1 to 12, and 20, so I’m trying to get him up to speed on the teens. Other than that, I had eight hours with the Cîrciumaru family, nearly a third of my total for the week (26).

I’ll now give a run-down of the second half of my trip, starting in Mostar. At 5:10 on Sunday morning (the 18th) I was woken by a call to prayer at one of the nearby mosques. A bit later I got up and negotiated the rabbit warren of side streets to end up in the middle of town, where I had breakfast. I met a woman of about 30 from the Basque part of Spain; she told me that a tip-based tour of the city would be starting from where we happened to be, in a few minutes. I’m very glad I did join the tour, because it taught me so much about the war and its aftermath. Before our guide went on to the serious stuff, we first saw somebody jump 22 metres from the Old Bridge into the river. The beautiful bridge isn’t old anymore, sadly: it stood for more than four centuries before being destroyed in the war. Reconstruction was completed in 2004.

We then watched some coppersmithing (a dying art), and then things did get fairly heavy. Our guide was 43; he and his family survived the war, which is still so recent and so raw. (Saying that, most of the people on the tour were under 30 and had no recollection of the war, or of a country called Yugoslavia.) He described the gruesome events of the early 1990s in vivid detail, and explained that although the fighting stopped a quarter-century ago, the hatred most definitely hasn’t. This I found hard to get my head around. I’m just me. I could be in Romania or New Zealand or anywhere. The idea of despising a whole group, race, nationality, ethnicity, call it what you will, is totally alien to me. But as far as I can see, unlike in Tito’s time, the three main groups in Bosnia – Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims) – hardly mix at all these days. There are three prime ministers (who must all agree in order to pass legislation, but never can), three school systems with their three separate truths about their recent history, separate hospitals, and so on. I soon found out why a city as small as Mostar had two bus stations: one was for the Bosniaks, the other for the Croats.

After our three-hour tour, I had an enjoyable lunch (a big platter of traditional Bosnian fare and some Bosnian beer) with three of the others. Paying for our meal was interesting. In Mostar, although the Bosnian convertible mark (abbreviated KM) is the official currency, they also accept euros (which I had) and Croatian kuna. We paid using a mixture of all three. Next stop was a Bosnian coffee demonstration, and after that we went our separate ways.

In the afternoon I didn’t do a whole lot. It was 37 degrees, although if I’d been there the week before it would have been even hotter. In the evening I had another big mish-mash of Bosnian food, and later I met the Spanish woman again, with a friend she was staying with at a hostel, and we tried some craft beer. Her friend was an English teacher from somewhere near Swindon. She’s a nomad: she travels from place to place, giving Skype lessons. I think I’d tire of that – not having my own bed – pretty quickly. Meeting her gave me a rare opportunity to talk about linguistics and teaching methods. She said speaking the student’s first language, which I sometimes do here in Romania, is a no-no. (For children and beginners I’m not convinced. For kids in particular, being able to speak their language a bit seems to help gain their trust. She doesn’t teach kids.)

The next morning I bought my ticket at the train station. I wouldn’t be leaving until around 8pm, not 5 as I’d thought. I visited two museums, including one showing a young New Zealander’s quite moving photographs of the war. There I also chatted to some English people, partly about Brexit, which never goes away. After bumping into the Basque woman once more (she was catching a bus), I arrived at the stark-looking train station very early, and somewhat eerily, nobody else was there. Then people suddenly showed up, seemingly out of nowhere. I spoke to a young Bosnian chap who was travelling to play football, then I had a really strange conversation with a woman from Hong Kong. After some confusion (is this the right train?) I was on a surprisingly smart Spanish Talgo train, on my way to Sarajevo. Mostar is a very picturesque city, and I enjoyed my time there, despite the spectre of war that looms large.