Month: August 2020

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

No going back

August 30, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Right at the end of August, we’re hitting the mid-30s. Hot, soporific weather. At the same time, people in the UK are firing up their central heating.

This summer I’ve been eating a healthy diet. Tons of fruit and vege, mostly from the local produce market – the best market – and very little processed food. And I’ve been exercising more. Those 26 km round trips on my bike to Sânmihaiu Român – where I can read a book in the park and listen to the birds – are helping me shift some of my burtă (tummy). I’d like to get below 75 kilos. I’ve also ordered some second-hand clothes from Ebay – smarter stuff but stuff that’s still me.

It’s six months since the Covid freak-out started – did people even call it Covid then? – and two-thirds of the year is now in the rear-view mirror. It’s therefore just four months until the Brexit transition period expires. I really really hope all my pre-Brexit papers can be converted and I can stay here. Timișoara has been life-changing for me. Timișoara is my life now. Then if the Wellington sale goes through I can maybe look at buying a place here with a dedicated space for teaching, setting up an actual business, getting myself a car, and really building something. Perhaps – who knows? – even a relationship.

I had a busy first half of last week, and it’s amazing what that did to my mood. On Monday I started online lessons with a 41-year-old woman who lives in a place called Negrești Oaș near Baia Mare (which I visited in 2017). She’s at a fairly low level – no more than 3 on my 0-to-10 scale – and WhatsApp lessons with her were no easy task. Tomorrow we’ll be switching to Zoom. Without an easy way of sharing documents, we’re both pretty much hamstrung.

At the market on Wednesday I was still thinking about the world I used to live in. The ego-driven meetings, the desk moves, the restructures, the pretending to care, the slinking into the background to cope, the barrenness of each day, the futility of it all. How could I go back to that? For any sum of money? (And in 2011, I did go back after a much shorter time away, and the money was good, but I was like a fish out of water.) Now I get the sights and smells and sounds of the markets and the grandmothers and Simon Says and the Formula 1 game and the handmade cards and it’s all more real, more raw, more colourful, more mad. If I went back I doubt I’d even survive.

So much is going on in America, and very little of it is good. Fires in California, a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast, a man shot seven times in the back and the dreadful aftermath of all that. And of course Covid-19, which is still killing about 1000 a day. The official death toll will likely hit 200,000 in the middle of next month. With all of this, and Trump’s failure to even acknowledge most of that, the vile man still has a shot at re-election. I found an free-to-enter online prediction game, open to anyone with a Twitter account (I have one, even though I hate social media), where the organiser has stumped up prizes for the top three predictors. I picked a very narrow electoral college victory for Trump combined with roughly a three-point popular vote win for Biden. I very much hope I’m wrong.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Photos

Scary times

August 23, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

As case numbers have flattened, and perhaps started to trend downwards, I’ve been thinking back to March and how scary things were back then. During the second week of March, when both the Cheltenham Festival and Champions League football were allowed to take place in front of packed crowds, it was like watching a tsunami. By this stage it was already total mayhem in northern Italy, with hundreds dying every day. That weekend I went away to the mountains and I felt sheer panic, which was made worse by everybody around me carrying on regardless. As we drove there you could see queues forming outside supermarkets. Would there be food on the shelves when we got back? It was beautiful there but I could never relax. I disconnected from the news, but one of the others got a message that a state of emergency had been declared. What does that mean? On the way back I read about Italians singing traditional songs from balconies as a way of boosting morale amid the carnage, and I thought, in two weeks, or maybe three, that will be us. It was one heck of a relief to get back. Then the next morning I just about camped outside the supermarket before it opened.

We never reached anything like the level of transmission seen in northern Italy or New York. Our lockdown, which came in the nick of time, probably saved many thousands of lives. And luckily we don’t have the density of population or amount of travel that parts of the US or western Europe have. Things aren’t exactly great in Romania now, with more than 1000 new cases a day, and because we weren’t hit very hard initially, there isn’t much immunity in the population. About 98% are still susceptible. But at least we know much more now about how the virus spreads. In my last post I neglected to mention that a reason for Africa’s lower rate of severe Covid disease must be people’s exposure to other bugs and viruses.

I didn’t have a great start to yesterday. I had a no-show from my Skype student, who (in his messages) didn’t get that a no-show might be a slight problem for me. It’s clear that he thinks I’m a tap that he can turn on and off when he feels like it. I sent him a couple of what you might call passive-aggressive texts in reply, immediately regretting that, and wondering if I’d lose him completely, but he now says he wants to meet today, so that’s a relief. In a similar vein, I never saw the woman with whom I had the car-crash lesson last Boxing Day. Until last week, when she dropped by to pick up a book. She told me she’d changed her job, moving to a competitor coffee-machine-making company after being in the same place for 17 years.

I might buy a new bike later today, and I’ll post some pictures if I do. But until then, here are some pictures of Timișoara (where else, right now?):

The trees are dripping with plums. I picked about six kilos a couple of weeks ago.
These one-seater, three-wheeled vans are quite a common sight.
They didn’t see it coming
This is in Piața Traian. The sign in Serbian means “House of the Golden Deer”
Space tomatoes
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Music

Is it worth the risk?

August 16, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

A few words on Covid-19 in Romania. To go a bit Antipodean, it’s not that flash here. The first wave was barely a trickle compared to what we’re experiencing now, and we aren’t doing a whole lot to make things better. Masks, yes. We’ve been hot on masks since April, and I’m sure lives have been saved as a result. Bars and restaurants are still only open outside. And, well, that’s about it. Physical distancing has just about gone by the board if the bakery today is anything to go by. Traffic is back to normal for the time of year. Way too many people think this is over, for some bizarre reason. Way too many people don’t believe Covid was ever real in the first place. This is a nation of ostriches. I’ve got a new student starting on Tuesday who I don’t know from Adam. I gave him the option of having online lessons, implying that I’d really really prefer it if he didn’t come here, but he didn’t take the hint. Are 90-minute face-to-face lessons even worth the risk at this point? Obviously I want the work, but if I catch Covid I might not be able to work again for bloody ages.

John Campbell came out with an intriguing video yesterday about the surprisingly low rates of severe Covid-19 disease in sub-Saharan Africa, even accounting for the much younger demographic than in European countries or the United States. We’re talking an order of magnitude lower. South Africa, however, was pretty much in line with Europe (worse if anything – so much corruption leading to limited access to health care). It’s good news for those countries, but a bit of a mystery, especially when you consider the prevalence of HIV which massively compromises your immune system. Is it lower obesity? More time in the sun, leading to higher vitamin D levels? (But South Africa is also sunny.) My theory is lack of travel and lack of work in unventilated, air-conditioned offices means that people aren’t picking up those potentially lethal viral loads, while low obesity rates and higher vitamin D probably help too.

The first song on yesterday’s Musicorama (Radio Timișoara’s daily music programme) was Time to Say Goodbye by Sarah Brightman (she turned 60 yesterday) and Andrea Bocelli. That gave me goosepimples. They played it at my grandfather’s funeral in 1999; I wasn’t there for my grandmother’s funeral but I’m pretty sure it would have been played there too. It must be extremely popular at funerals. The next song they played was the pretty cool I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper by 18-year-old Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip, which I’d never heard before. Musicorama has introduced (or reintroduced) me to a vast array of artists. Recently they showcased Sparks, whose songs range from amazing to downright weird. In the first category are This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us and Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth, both from the seventies, and the fantastic new song All That. Another band I’ve been getting into lately are the modern Belgian group Absynthe Minded.

This afternoon I made 48 cards with opposite adjectives (such as rich and poor), complete with pictures, for the ten-year-old girl I teach. They’ll be useful for other kids too. I made cards with opposites (adjectives, verbs and nouns) soon after I started teaching here, but even the easiest ones contain pairs like deep/shallow and wide/narrow, which aren’t that easy. Yesterday I made a 9×9 crossword containing words that are common to both languages but mean completely different things, such as drum (road in Romanian) and sting (Romanian for “put out”, e.g. a fire). Ignoring the accents, there are some interesting ones, like străin (foreign), strânge (to gather, collect, raise money), and seamăn (something or somebody alike). There are two sets of clues, one for each language. Such a crossword isn’t easy to make because your stock of words is extremely limited.

There has been a fiasco in the UK with A-level results. No exams this year for obvious reasons, and 18-year-olds’ futures have been left to the whim of an arcane, nonsensical algorithm. Pupils have sometimes dropped multiple grades from their mock exams in January or what they were predicted to receive, and those from deprived backgrounds have often fared the worst. I’ve read heartbreaking stories of people about to be the first from their family ever to go to university, only for their dreams to be shattered. On a lighter note, there have been jokes about ABBA turning into AC/DC. By the way, I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory when it came to my A-levels. Doing completely the wrong subjects (with the exception of maths) didn’t help.

Coronavirus - Politics

Can’t see a way out for the UK

August 13, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

They said it was a case of when, not if, and New Zealand now has community transmission of Covid for the first time in over 100 days. Auckland is back under a fairly strict lockdown. If the last five months are any indication, they’ll stamp out this latest outbreak pretty sharpish. Heaven forbid Auckland ends up like Melbourne, or Romania for that matter. Heck, if we took the same attitude to Covid that NZ has, we’d be bolted down right now. Hermetically sealed. On Tuesday night one of my students decided to turn up sick to his lesson. We shook hands when he arrived, then he immediately said he wasn’t feeling well and could we cancel? My first feeling was one of sympathy for him being ill – he’s a nice guy – but then, shit, what if he’s got the virus? Why didn’t he just stay at home?

Joe Biden has picked his running mate, Kamala Harris. The sensible pick, I’d say. I’m not sure how I should pronounce her first name. I’ve heard Americans say it’s comma + la, but I don’t pronounce comma anything like how Americans do. My best option I think is to say the beginning of the name like how I say calm, so I end up with /ˈkɑːmələ/. It’s an interesting name, with those three consecutive consonants alphabetically (albeit out of order) alternating with three identical vowels. It reminds me a bit of the common Hungarian surname Kelemen – four consonants in alphabetical order, with the same vowel three times in between. Relatedly, someone once created the word kelemenopy from KLMNOP, the six letters in the middle of the alphabet, defining it as a period in the middle of something when not a lot happens. There’s also the New Zealand band Elemeno P.

Fivethirtyeight came out with their election forecast yesterday. They made Biden a 71% favourite. Only 71%, after the practically flawless way Biden has campaigned so far and Trump’s utter eff-up on coronavirus and just about everything else. They’re saying that Trump’s chances are the same as the probability that a random date on the calendar is in the weekend, or the chance that a random point on the earth’s surface is on land. Or that Biden is marginally less likely to win than my dad was to see out the next year after his cancer diagnosis. In other words, because we live in such uncertain times and there still nearly three months until election day, this thing is far from over. And the odds don’t even take possible cheating into account.

But, in the US you can see a path. A long and treacherous one, but a path nonetheless. There’s the sense that the Democrats are building something that people can get behind. It’s possible that they take the senate, that Harris or some other Democrat wins in 2024, that the country enters a long period of positive leadership, of inclusion, of reduced partisanship. It’s possible. Even if Trump wins, which would be a huge setback, the path wouldn’t necessarily disappear. This is different to the UK, where I can’t see the path at all. It might be there, but it isn’t on any map. I see hatred, bile, polarisation caused mainly by the botched Brexit process, and people getting angry at all the wrong things. Reading an article in the Express yesterday and the comments that went with it, I thought, holy hell, even if 20% of British people think like you, the country is in an omnifuck of staggering proportions.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Writing a book

Steady progress with the book

August 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my aunt this morning. We both had an almost total lack of news. It was hot in Earith where she lives, just like here, so at least this time she couldn’t contradict me on the weather front.

My work volumes are relatively low so I’ve been working on the book. I’m now up to letter I of the dictionary part. My Romanian teacher is now tackling the first (most important) part which contains all the big-ticket items, in other words the mistakes that even good speakers make over and over. She’s made a good start at correcting my Romanian, which as I’ve said before, isn’t up to this kind of task.

I only had one lesson today, with the eleven-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother. I beat him in the Formula One game for the fourth time running. He’s a mild-mannered kid but I think he was ever so slightly pissed off today. In the first couple of games he didn’t exactly apply optimal strategy, but now it’s pretty much dumb luck. Today he drew a card that sent him into the pit stop on the last lap, and I was able to overtake him.

Last week we had that awful explosion in Beirut. At first I thought it was a terrorist attack, but it was a terrible accident. The warehouse was on the waterfront, right next to a grain silo, so the blast took out much of the city’s food supply. As well as the hundreds who have died, about 300,000 people have been displaced. Lebanon was in a deep enough crisis already, exacerbated by Covid-19, so this is an utter tragedy. It was impressive to see Emmanuel Macron make a hasty visit to Beirut, appearing in a packed crowd and risking getting Covid-19; I could hardly imagine Boris Johnson doing something similar. I’ve just read that the Lebanese government have quit.

Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump shows signs of narrowing. His average lead looks to be seven points, or perhaps half a point more. There are under three months to go, and early voting starts soon in some states. I see this election as a giant IQ test, but even if the country passes it (i.e. significantly more people vote for Biden than for Trump), will their sham of an electoral system hold up enough to be rid of the bastard?

Coronavirus. Romania is in what looks like a plateau, but it has spread to just about all parts of the country. My panic level has dropped just a tad, but I don’t know how justified that is.

Mum and Dad got their birthday cards from me yesterday. Their birthdays were six and eight weeks ago.

Family - Language teaching

Awful old news

August 4, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had my weekly-ish chat to my aunt today. At the start, I mentioned the weather as a way of making small talk. When I told her it was hot here, she corrected me by saying that no, it wasn’t hot where she was, as if her weather was the correct weather, as if her poxy village was the only place on the planet that even had weather. But by now I’m used to her disregard for the world outside her ever-shrinking bubble. We then moved on to a fairly normal conversation, including the awful news of her and Dad’s cousin’s brain tumour.

Dad called me at ten to midnight on Saturday. Mum was at church, and Dad has never been that hot on numbers or times. I was in bed but not yet asleep. His previous day had been one to forget. He’d been struggling all day but he went to a theatre production in Geraldine with Mum and some others – it was one of those fake obligations that Mum imposes. He felt faint during the show and was in the middle of a row with no easy way out. He made it to the intermission, when he sensibly decided to leave. He’s had to change his blood pressure pills because the old ones had been phased out, and that has caused havoc. Then when he got home, he learnt that his cousin had been diagnosed with a (probably inoperable) brain tumour. That sounds impossibly awful.

His cousin is 69 and lives in mid-Wales. He’s been a successful potter. We used to see him once or twice a year when we made our trips over there. He must be at least six foot five, and he’s never exactly been fond of kids, so my brother and I found him intimidating as small children. A few years ago he split up with his wife (a lovely person, I’d always thought) and married a Korean woman about 30 years younger than him. The last time I saw him was at my uncle’s funeral in 2002. (On that occasion his daughter, who was grossly overweight, went straight through a wooden chair.)

Not much news other than that. I had my weekly masked lesson with the eleven-year-old boy today. Any time I try a new game, whether with a kid or an adult, I’m taking a bit of a gamble. Today I tried the rummy-style card game I made up with the pictures that begin with different letters of the alphabet, and it was a bit of a flop, unfortunately. That’s the way it goes, sometimes. After the session I felt sorry for his grandmother who told me she had “a thousand and one” health problems. The masks began to make even more sense.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Tennis

Don’t you get it? Stay the **** at home this summer!

August 2, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

We’ve had some pretty warm weather this week, though we were spared the intolerably high temperatures seen near the banks of the Danube, and of course I now have few face-to-face lessons. This morning I had another lesson with the chap in Austria, who said that Romania’s coronavirus figures are probably deliberately overstated. Don’t know about you, but if was going to fabricate the numbers I’d make them go down, not up, and anyway I’m finding all these conspiracy theories tiresome, not to mention dangerous. Apart from that, our lesson went well as always. A highlight of the teaching week was another game of Maths Millionaire with Octavian. When we ran out of time, he’d got to £32,000 but had run out of lifelines.

I’ve been in contact with the Romanian teacher about the book. She hasn’t had much time of late. I did a 900-word translation from her from Romanian to English as a form of payment, but she has a much tougher task on her hands in translating what I’ve done. I’d have liked to have written the book in Romanian myself, but I’m just not up to it. When it comes to anything half-way technical, I’m clueless. I shouldn’t be too downhearted though – my Romanian is getting better in general. My speech is more fluent, my listening is better, and I’m at least aware of some of the traps even if I still fall into them now and again. The tennis is helping.

Five of us were at tennis tonight, including Domnul Sfîra, the 85-year-old bloke. I played the whole time with the only woman. She always serves the first game of every set, and that only serves to put her team at an even bigger disadvantage. In the first set Domnul Sfîra was on the other side of the net, and we eked out a 7-5 win. One long set was enough for him, and he left the stage for my partner’s husband, and we lost the remaining action 6-3, 6-4, 3-1, not that any of that mattered. In fact playing with either the woman or Domnul Sfîra is good for me because I get more exercise that way. I was thinking tonight, while taking in all the trees in the vicinity of the court, that if you enjoy simple pleasures, this Romania thing isn’t bad at all.

That goddamn virus. Four-figure daily case numbers are the norm in Romania now, and deaths are increasing. Timiș is verging on hotspot territory. People (or should I say people with money) are still travelling overseas, as if it’s an entitlement. The Romanian teacher is about to head off to Greece, and when I questioned that idea, she thought I was some kind of corona-Nazi. Right now, we all need to stop travelling. No Greece, and no Black Sea either. Just for this one year. We’re in this mess in the first place because of rampant, selfish, unnecessary travel. I still think there should be much more freaking out in Romania full stop, although it was pleasing to see about 80% of people wearing masks at the market this morning, even though it was outdoors. I bought some goat’s cheese, tomatoes, peppers, onions, aubergines, sweetcorn, cucumbers, nectarines and some watermelon. The fruit and vegetables are quite wonderful at this time of year. I’ll probably pick some more plums in Mehala tomorrow morning. It’s a shame we don’t have figs, which were heavenly when I visited Montenegro and Bosnia.

My signed sale agreement on the flat in Wellington, which I sent in early June, never reached its destination. I can’t be arsed with getting it all notarised again and sent via an exorbitant courier, with no guarantee it will ever get there. Nothing is getting to NZ from Romania, or vice-versa, as far as I can see. If my lawyer insists on having the original documents, I won’t bother.