Month: December 2019

Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Romania

Is Christmas even worth it? And happy new decade

December 31, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve now properly caught up with my family to find out how their Christmases went. My brother’s was draining. Endless eating and drinking and small talk with the in-laws and trying to appear somewhat entertaining. He said he couldn’t relax for one minute. When he spoke to me his wife wasn’t there, and as he gave me the gory details I built up a picture of Christmas from hell. I really enjoyed our unusually long chat though – I’d say it was one of the highlights of my Christmas.

My parents’ Christmas wasn’t much better. A couple of days before, Dad learnt that his main gallery in Geraldine had jacked up their commission to 50% from an already slightly piss-taking 40%. What’s more, the increase came unannounced and was even backdated, how far I don’t know. The woman who “runs” the gallery does so chaotically (to put it politely), and Dad has written her a letter to say, basically, stuff you. So that drew a black cloud over their Christmas. Like always, these things affected Mum more than Dad. My father is able to be philosophical: they will continue to live very comfortable lives even if he never sells another painting again (and hell, a few months ago, we were wondering if he’d even see out the year). But for Mum, it’s a case of “must be successful, must be seen to be successful”. Dad also had his ongoing battle with headaches to contend with, and it’s always a battle he has to fight alone. The weather down in Moeraki wasn’t up to that much either, so all in all it was a pretty crappy Christmas.

I got off pretty lightly, then, with my almost totally pressure-free, family-free Christmas. Tonight I’ll be seeing in the new year (and new decade) at Matei’s place. I’ll take along the unopened bottle of Rakija I picked up in Belgrade the summer before last. Matei’s dad called me to say they’ll be starting at nine, not seven as they’d originally planned, and that’s fine by me.

The 2010s have been a weird, disorienting decade for me. Twenty ten itself, when I still lived in Auckland, wasn’t too bad. I’d made some friends up there, I’d left the toxic world of life insurance behind, I had my tennis, my online poker, my trip to the UK to see my grandmother for the last time, bits of pieces of meaningful but low-pressure work, I was managing. Then came the move to Wellington in early 2011 and my insane step backwards into the corporate inferno. Not one part of me wanted to be there (my job I mean, not Wellington which I think is a great city). Then the beginning of 2012 was just horrendous – my grandmother died, the house of cards (a.k.a. my job) came crashing down, I made the disastrous decision to buy my flat, and so it went on. Whenever I hear one of the hits of 2013 playing on the radio, I want to gag – I picture myself in that office with the music piped through the speakers. The best decision I made was to take a four-week trip around America in 2015. The vastness of the place made me realise that there’s a whole world out there to be explored, and here I am. I still have my ups and downs, but I no longer feel that barrenness, as if I’m driving through a desert and there’s not even a tree to be seen.

Twenty twenty. It feels like a mini-millennium. The Romanian ex-prime minister became the butt of jokes when she called the upcoming year “douăzeci douăzeci” (which literally means “twenty twenty”) instead of the correct “două mii douăzeci” (two thousand and twenty). Even though things have improved for me, I’m happy to see the back of the old decade. The constant news cycle, the partisan politics, the toxicity of social media, the illusion of being connected when we’re in fact more disconnected than ever, the technological advancements that help us buy increasing amounts of crap at increasing speed and not a lot else. And the natural and unnatural disasters that have dominated the very end of the decade.

Before I go, I’ve just watched a brand new three-hour documentary about Romania’s rocky 30-year path since the downfall of communism. It taught me a lot, and best of all I was able to watch it with Romanian subtitles.

As for the highlight of 2019, that’s very clear. All clear, in fact. I got out of bed on 25th June, a nondescript Tuesday morning, to find an email from Dad to say that he’d been cleared of bowel cancer. It was like a miracle.

Language teaching - Life :)

Saying yes to everything

December 28, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Christmas Day was cool. I spent it at my ex-student’s parents’ flat on Take Ionescu. She’s 70, he’s nudging 80, and they’ve lived there ever since the block was built in the early seventies. Besides the țuică and sparkling wine, there was so much rich food – all kinds of sausages and ribs and venison rolls and sarmale and salată de boeuf (which doesnt actually contain beef) and two bowls of soup and other tasty bits and bobs that I can’t even remember. And then biscuits and chocolate cake. Would you like some of that? Yes, please. In between I spoke, and listened to, lots of Romanian. The listening bit in particular was tiring – it’s tiring enough in any language. Her mother talked a lot. Her father rather less, although the first thing he asked me was what I thought about Brexit. What’s “total shit-show” in Romanian? By the evening he needed a lie down, and I soon made tracks. I tried to speak to my family on Christmas evening, but my parents were in the wops, my brother was probably busy with his in-laws, and my aunt only ever picks up the phone in a narrow early-morning window.

Boxing Day didn’t start well. I had a lesson in the morning, and it was one I’d rather forget. Perhaps it had been coming. My student is an ice-cold single woman in her early forties. She’s a manager who reminds me of a boss I had way back in the dark days. (Also, I have lessons with a younger, much warmer woman who works at the same company, and she’s not a huge fan of my older student’s managerial style.) At the start of the lesson she told me about her non-Christmas. She’d received multiple Christmas dinner invitations but had declined them all. And there was me thinking I was antisocial. Anyway we chatted for a bit and then I brought out Bananagrams. Being the festive season, I thought she might like to try a game. I opened the yellow bag, the letter tiles fell onto the table, and unlike most people, she didn’t help me turn them face down so we could start. No big deal. But it was clear she really resented even the idea of playing. I tried to encourage her, but before long I gave up. I then said I was disappointed that she refused to participate. This, looking back, was a mistake, but I the level of pushback I got from her was greater than anything I’m used to from people over the age of ten, and I didn’t know how to react. (Mostly my students politely complete the activity or exercise or game I give them, I then ask them what they thought of it, and we repeat it in a later session, or not, depending on whether they liked it.) We descended into an argument where she accused me of being “strange” as well as inflexible – a bit of a joke considering our lessons are always scheduled to suit her, not me, and I’m constantly doing things that she wants – and then I told her I was glad she wasn’t my boss. Yes, I could have handled things differently, and honestly I felt sick afterwards.

After that debacle, it was off to some friends of Matei’s parents in Dumbrăvița for more food and drink. It was just what I needed to get my mind off what had happened in the morning. More shots of țuică, or maybe palincă – I can’t tell the difference – and then it was time for some WTF: weird-tasting food. I had piftie, jellied meat known in English as aspic, which in this case was made from pig’s trotters. When I spoke to Mum this morning, she said that aspic was quite a common dish in New Zealand in the fifties. After that I tried icre, or roe, from some fish or another. From there I was back into my comfort zone with salată de boeuf and cuts of meat. I mostly spoke English, with bits of Romanian and even (on one occasion) French thrown in. The hosts have a 20-year-old daughter who goes to Imperial College, London, and was back home for Christmas. I had quite a good chat with her. University life in 2019 sounded much the same as in 1999, just with a whole load more dosh involved. She pays £190 a week in rent. I know this is London, but holy moley. In my final year in Birmingham (2001-02) my weekly rent was forty quid.

So I’ve experienced some real Romania in the last couple of days. Bloody awesome. And I’ll be seeing Matei’s parents again on New Year’s Eve.

Life :)

Have a great Christmas, everybody

December 25, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I had a Skype chat with a friend in Auckland, then I got a phone call from my parents. It was quarter to ten at night there, and they’d parked their car somewhere in Hampden where they could get a signal. On the way they’d been to Pleasant Point for Christmas Eve mass.

The next port of call was the penultimate tram stop on Line 4 to pay my rent, but I was engrossed enough in a book that I missed my stop and got off at the end of the line. It was only a five-minute walk back. My landlady was in tears when she told me that her husband, who suffers from severe depression, will be spending Christmas Day in hospital. On the trip back there was a bloke singing Christmas carols – he got a few lei here and there.

Egg vending machines. These are dotted around the city, and I finally plucked up the courage to try one (for Christmas, the time of year famous for all things egg-related). I inserted 6 lei into the slot, tapped in a number, and at that point I half-expected my carton of ten eggs to go ga-doonk. But no, the arm gradually lowered the box to the armhole at the bottom of the machine. They’re locally produced (you can tell that from the TM code) and are cage-free (the digit 2 tells you that), so the egg machine might become a regular thing.

Yesterday as I saw two pigeons picking at a corn cob that somebody must have bought from the Christmas market, I reminded myself that “corn” and “pigeon” have the same root in Romanian: they’re porumb and porumbel, respectively.

On Sunday my student asked me if I had a pension plan and how I’ll manage “when I’m eighty”. I try not to think too much about that.

In my next post I’ll tell you how my first real Romanian Christmas turned out.

Life :)

I won’t be lonely this Christmas after all

December 24, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Exciting news. I’m going to be experiencing, for the first time, a Romanian Christmas. Sarmale. Cozonac. I really don’t know what to expect, but it should be fun no matter what. One of my ex-students invited me to have dinner with her family, once I’d told her that I’d otherwise by spending the day on my own. And best of all, I should get to speak plenty of Romanian.

In the last week Timișoara and Romania have been marking thirty years of freedom from communism. Millions of older Romanians would prefer to be unfree. When I first came here, I thought these people (who were in far greater numbers than I’d imagined) must be mad. Totally barking. But little by little, it’s begun to make sense. The biggest difference to most people’s lives since 1989 has been the ability to consume more pointless shit more easily, while becoming less and less connected to one another. Life under communism wasn’t exactly a ball for most people, but it was probably less shallow than it is now. Earlier this evening I had a lesson with a bloke just three days older than me. He talked about how special his pre-revolution Christmases seemed compared to the hyper-commercialised ones we know today – of course I don’t know how much of that is down to lack of commercialism and how much is because he was at most nine years old.

I took the tram to the mall (eughh!) this morning. It was a grey, drizzly, English morning, but extremely mild for the time of year. (I’ve just looked back at my posts from 2016. It was brass monkeys back then.) Every time I take the tram I notice a new shop or some other edifice designed with the purpose of facilitating the consumption of unnecessary crap. Today it was a corner shop on Strada Victor Hugo. I’m sure I had a coffee from there one time in the summer of 2017 when I was traipsing up and down streets putting flyers in people’s letterboxes, but then it didn’t have a big shiny sign in English: “Be smart, buy quality”. I’ve learnt not to trust anything that describes itself as smart. At the mall I bought hardly anything Christmassy and instead grabbed a load of files and other stationery. At the cheese counter I simply gave up, and I later got my block of sheep’s cheese from the old lady at the market.

My steady stream of lessons has predictably slowed to a trickle, and I’m fine with that. I’ve been using the extra time to beef up my Romanian language skills. A useful resource to improve my listening are podcasts, and I’ve recently found a regular podcast called Pe Bune, where famous and semi-famous Romanians from the film, theatre, music or art world are given interviews lasting nearly an hour. The best thing is that the transcript is available.

Outside I can hear drums banging, whistles peeping and trumpets tooting. It must be Christmas time in Romania.

Life :)

What does this mean for me?

December 17, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother last night. He’d been skiing in France (Les Deux Alpes) with his army mates. I ended up speaking more with my sister-in-law than with him. She’s a lovely person; it still amazes me how he managed to find someone as nice as her. After that I had a long chat with my parents. It was good to talk to my mum for a decent length of time. Dad’s headaches are still unremitting. He survives cancer, and now this? Every day?

Yesterday one of my students called me to say she was at the Christmas market with her husband and eight-year-old son. Would I like to join them? That was kind of them, and I was only free because another student had cancelled. They’re from Bucharest, came to Timișoara for work, and are now itching to go back. I had some mulled wine and sarmale, and tried some șorici, or strips of pork rind. I couldn’t stomach it. There was a march commemorating the 30th anniversary of the revolution. My student and her husband thought it was all a waste of time. “It’s been thirty years!” As if that’s somehow a long time. It was clear that they’re part of the modern generation of Romanians, happy to forget their past.

On Friday I bumped into the elderly couple who live on the sixth floor. A different generation, a different world almost from the people I met yesterday. They lamented the benign December we were having, and longed for the Decembers of fifty years ago with snow up to their knees. According to them, Timișoara was going to hell in a hardcart, judging by the way people dress (flip-flops!) and their lack of respect for one another. I felt sorry for them as they told me about their aches and pains, and even more sorry when they said they had a son who had lost contact with them. However, I enjoyed the chat, and I came away feeling a certain pride that I was able to communicate in Romanian with people from a very different background without too many problems.

The election result. I saw it coming. An 80-seat overall majority for the Conservatives. I don’t think Brexit affected the outcome so much as Jeremy Corbyn, who was deeply unpopular. He’d been vilified. One of my students sent me a link to a Daily Mail article written in August about Corbyn’s choice of summer holiday destination. Corbyn had visited, guess where, Romania. An ex-communist country! And we know he’s a communist. But regardless of that, going to Romania proves that he’s weird. Not like you normal people reading this column who wouldn’t even be able to locate Romania on a map. And what’s more, he flew Wizz Air! How can you be a prime minister if you use a budget airline?

Labour picked up the wrong message from the 2017 election. Yes, they overperformed expectations and importantly prevented a Tory majority, but Corbyn was not the man to build on what was still, after all, a defeat. It reminded me somewhat of the 2005 general election in New Zealand, where National under Don Brash (in his mid-sixties) bounced back from a devastating loss in 2002 to only lose narrowly, but National realised they needed to hand over the reins to somebody younger and fresher. Labour (in the UK) are now in a pretty bad place. Corbyn’s acolytes are front and centre in the party. Unless that changes, we’re looking a whole decade of Boris and his mates.

So what does this all mean for me? Honestly I’ve got no idea. In a few months, my registration certificate with an expiry date of September 2022 might not be worth the paper it’s written on. I plan to visit the immigration office tomorrow, but I bet the bloke at the desk won’t have a clue.

Three cancellations so far today. Oh, and guess what, I bumped into S on Thursday, not long before my worst election fears became reality. I thought that if I hadn’t seen her in all this time, I perhaps never would, but I was cycling back from a lesson and there she was. She told me her grandmother, who must have been nearly 90, had died. Perhaps we’ll meet up again after Christmas.

Language teaching - Politics

An uplifting day, and election resignation

December 12, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a lesson this morning with the English teacher who has plans to do the Cambridge exam in April. Those reading comprehension questions. Dammit, they’re hard. Even I was pretty much clueless half the time. You need to be primed for this stuff, and I’m just not. She said she hasn’t given up on me and will come back on Monday.

Yesterday I had a jam-packed day, with nine hours of lessons. I’ve been ticking along OK in recent weeks and months, but how I’ve missed days like that. Biking here, there and everywhere, and back home. Having to think on my feet. Hopefully helping people. And a wad of notes featuring the likes of Ion Luca Caragiale and Nicolae Grigorescu by the end of it. All in all, it’s a pretty bloody awesome feeling. I’m thankful that the snow has so far stayed away – this time last year we were blanketed in the stuff, and I had a hard time staying on my feet, let alone thinking on them.

On Monday morning I listened to the 7am news on the radio. I hadn’t quite woken up properly and they speak pretty damn fast, so all the Romanian politics at the start of the bulletin went over my head. Then I heard Noua Zeelandă and my ears pricked up. There had been a volcanic eruption on White Island less than four hours earlier, and it was obviously serious or else it wouldn’t have made the news in Romania. Apparently, and it makes sense, eruptions of steam (like this) happen without warning, and dozens of tourists were in the firing line. The death toll is currently eight, and sadly more are likely to die of their horrific burns.

The news this week has been crappy all round, with more devastating bushfires in Australia, and a Chilean Hercules crash with 38 people on board. And, though the results aren’t yet in, the UK election.

During the campaign all I’ve seen is Boris. Boris dressed as a milkman. A builder. A baker. A butcher. Probably some other alliterative occupations that for now escape me. Just big, friendly, cuddly Boris, no Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg. I’ll tune in at midnight to see or hear the exit poll results, but I’m almost resigned to five years of Boris, only fifty more days of Britain in the EU, and as for me, my days in Romania possibly starting to tick down. The polls (on average) point to a 30-seat Tory majority, and FPTP can be sensitive to small changes if they happen in the right or wrong places, so a hung parliament can’t be entirely ruled out. But neither can a big stonking Tory win. I can almost hear it now. Seventy-two seats. Eighty-eight. A hundred and four. If they break the wall of traditional Labour-voting working-class areas that voted Leave in the referendum, the sky’s the limit. But even a narrow majority would (as I see it) turn the UK into a backward, inward-looking Dismaland.

Update: The exit poll has just come through, predicting an 86-seat Conservative majority. A thumping victory (see above). Romania is looking increasingly attractive.

Language teaching - Life :)

Muriel

December 9, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I had coffee with one of my ex-students, who now lives in Vienna but is in Timișoara for three weeks. (She never really needed me. She was almost entirely fluent.) She told me, insistently, that given my potential I shouldn’t still be giving lessons to people in ones and twos. I need to be doing more. But do I? We discussed my book idea, and she said she could help me with the Romanian translations, so it could have legs. Last week I had half a dozen cancellations – a frustrating number – but I’ve got a busy schedule for the start of the coming week.

This morning I had a Skype chat with a friend who lives in Auckland. I promised him a zoomed-in version of a new mural (or Muriel, as he called it) I posted a couple of weeks ago. So here she is in full:

Timișoara is a pretty good place to see Muriels, and weddings too, for that matter.

Today it was foggy all day. I went to the mall to see the film about Maria, who was Romania’s queen, but it had sold out. The mall keeps expanding. They don’t even call it a mall anymore: Iulius Mall has morphed into Iulius Town, which contains a park – built at great expense, and for now in immaculate condition, with endless piped music – that reminds me of Singapore. One of my students told me that the centre of gravity of this city is changing. Even when I arrived, the central area where I live was the centre, but it will soon be at just one corner of a Bermuda triangle, with the mall, sorry, town, and a big multi-storey housing development forming the other two vertices.

An ad for bottled water on a mega video billboard at Iulius Town. More plastic bottles. Just what we need.
It’s two words. And you can keep it.
A trio near Piața Libertății. On the left is a well, for refilling those plastic bottles.
Ice skating and dodgems in Piața Libertății
Photos - Politics - Romania

Pics from Romania Day

December 6, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Three years ago today I was living in a loft on the other side of the river, trying to find somewhere more permanent. I remember it being a good deal colder than today. Things had become quite urgent, and I was struggling to make headway through a forest of dodgy agents. Christmas was just around the corner and that only made things harder. I was forced to make phone calls in a language I could hardly speak at all, and some of the apartments I looked at weren’t even finished. Had I been ten years younger I might have just taken the first thing I saw. I particularly remember the main website I used, where apartments were advertised as having 2 or 3 or 4 camere, meaning rooms, or specifically rooms for living and sleeping in, not bathrooms or kitchens. Some places said they had “O cameră”, which I honestly thought meant “zero rooms”, i.e. some sort of storage space. It took me days for the penny to drop: “O” was the Romanian feminine indefinite article, meaning one, not zero. That seems really silly now, but anything seemed possible then, even flats with no livable rooms.

On the other hand, I had a new city to explore, I’d found somebody to play tennis with, and I was even starting to get the odd lesson here or there. It was through one of my very early students (who responded to one of my ads featuring President-elect Donald Trump) that I found the place I’m writing this from. I was extremely fortunate. The chances that I ended up right here must have been pretty slim.

After my last blog post, where I put the chances of a hung parliament in next week’s UK election at roughly one in three, I’ll now revise that downwards to 20-25%. A few more days have passed, the polls haven’t really changed, and the passing of time leads to greater certainty.

I didn’t mention the Romanian presidential election in which Klaus Iohannis was re-elected by a hefty margin of about two to one. My students were happy with this, and I took that as a good sign. Plus he appears to me to be cool, calm and collected, and he’s somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. I found the map of Romania showing the results by county to be particularly illuminating. In Timiș, Iohannis topped 75%. In Cluj he was in the eighties. But in the south where people are poorer and less educated, Viorica Dăncilă was either roughly equal or in some cases ahead.

On Tuesday I finally got my hair cut, and a good conversation in Romanian. (My hairdresser could speak some English – he’d spent some time in the UK – but no thanks.)

Sunday was Romania’s national day and the square was packed. I tried some mulled wine and it put me to sleep. The fireworks were set off from the park that reopened in August, so I got a ringside seat from my window. Here are some photos.

Moș Nicolae (St Nicholas) stick sellers
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Not cutting it

December 1, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

The final month of the decade, which I still haven’t got to grips with at all, is almost upon us. In New Zealand it already is. I feel firmly entrenched in 2005, or perhaps a few years earlier. I feel grateful that Romania, in some ways, has let me step back in time.

It hasn’t been a bad week of lessons. Before my usual 90-minute session with the teenage boys, I had a half-hour “taster” with their mum, who told me she could understand English but couldn’t speak it. Then I asked her to at least have a go at speaking it, and of course she could. “I have forty-four years,” she said. Well OK, that’s not perfect, but it gets the point across, and for any of you reading this blog now, just you try to say your age in Romanian. Bet you wouldn’t have a clue. Yesterday I had the session with the two younger boys, and their mum is now happily hands-off; she knows I don’t need a translator.

I made an appointment for 2pm on Thursday to get my hair cut. The place I went to the last two times has closed down, so I thought I’d try this new place. But when I got there, they weren’t having any of my shoulder-length hair. They told me that either it’s a number 4 or whatever, or it’s no can do. My hair is part of who I am now, so I walked away. I’ll try another place next week.

I had a long chat with my dad on Thursday night. We talked at length about my aunt, whose tale is a rather sad one. In her (much) younger days she had the fortune (or misfortune, perhaps) to be handed everything. The looks, the brains, the lot. She was on all the sports teams, received a string of top grades in her O-levels, and so on. Then she met an RAF officer while still in her late teens, and she was married before her 22nd birthday. She trained as a physiotherapist, but never practised. In fact she’s never had a job at all. Her husband earned enough to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, and being married to the RAF was her job. Mindless lunches and parties and balls. She had two children, who were conveniently shipped off to boarding school at the age of eight, and neither of them now have any time for her. They see her at Christmas, but it’s a chore. Her adult life has been dogged by a complete lack of purpose. Everything she’s done has been play. And probably as a result, she’s suffered from ongoing depression. Unfortunately she’s never listened to anyone – as Dad says, she transmits but doesn’t receive – and has lacked the presence of mind to think, oh shit, if I carry on down this path things are going to turn to something pretty custardy pretty damn fast, so I’d better do something to arrest the slide.

Sometime in the nineties my aunt developed a drink problem, to go with her smoking habit, and that hasn’t exactly helped. She used to shop till she dropped, to give her a high about as temporary as the alcohol did. Her husband, an intelligent, kind man who at least provided some semblance of stability, died of lung cancer in 2002. When I saw her in 2008 on a trip out from New Zealand, she seemed positively evil and more than a little mad, and thankfully she isn’t like that anymore, but her world has gradually shrunk. She’s now almost completely isolated. Both my brother and I get on perfectly fine with her (unlike her children, she doesn’t perceive us as a threat) and I’d have been happy to spend Christmas with her, or heck, bring her out to Romania, but anything along those lines is a total no-go.

The UK election isn’t far away now. Right now I’d say there are three broad scenarios: (1) a sizeable overall Tory majority of 50 or more; (2) a smaller Tory majority, perhaps even just a working majority; and (3) a hung parliament. And I’d attach roughly equal probabilities to all three scenarios. (A Labour majority would require a massive shift from where things currently stand, and is highly unlikely.) I’m pinning my hopes on scenario 3.