Month: October 2021

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Music

Don’t freak out!

October 28, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a beautiful Thursday morning here. I’ve already had two lessons. The Rapid Bucharest football team bus has just pulled up outside the cathedral. They’re playing Poli Timișoara in a cup game this evening.

During a lesson on Tuesday afternoon I started to feel less than 100%. A stuffy nose, a few sniffles, fatigue. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of that – they’re typical symptoms of a cold – but when I’m living in a country where daily Covid death tolls are in the 500s, that’s panic-stations territory. As it happens, I was paying the doctor my monthly visit that evening, and naturally I asked him if I should be alarmed. He took my temperature and measured my oxygen saturation level, and said I was probably fine. I slept badly that night and had all sorts of weird dreams, and the morning after I felt (and looked) pretty groggy. I called my parents and asked them not to freak out. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Covid but I got a rapid test from the pharmacy anyway. It isn’t easy to do the test – how to I swab my tonsils without wanting to gag, or twizzle the swab around several times in my nostril without sneezing? As expected, the test (which has a high false-negative rate) was negative. Yesterday I improved throughout the day, and last night I slept well. Mum called me back last night, and was glad I looked better. South Islanders are understandably mad that two cases of the virus are now in Christchurch. Why there are no restrictions on flights between north and south beats me.

I’ve got a new student – a 21-year-old guy – and I had my first lesson with him this morning. Yesterday he introduced himself on the phone as Răzvan, but he popped up on Skype as the rather non-Romanian-sounding Memet. Today he told me he was a musician – a saxophone player in a travelling band – and he’s still enrolled in high school after having to repeat whole years, although he never actually attends any lessons. He said he wanted a change of lifestyle. A job? A career? A salary? Oh no, he said, my only boss is God. He didn’t seem particularly well educated (failing whole years isn’t a good sign); when I used the English word “precarious”, and then gave him the translation precar which isn’t an uncommon word in Romanian, he didn’t know what I meant. But he’s already paid me for today’s session and now plans to have two lessons a week, so he should be OK.

Last night my student gave me the happy news that she’d passed her driving test at her first attempt, having only started learning about three months ago. She told me she still feels uncomfortable driving at more than 40 km/h. Getting a licence at that stage of the game would have been unthinkable for me. It took me ages to get mine (at my third attempt, not counting the test that was postponed because of snow). British tests were bloody hard. Atypical of young men, I was low on confidence and unmotivated to get my licence until I really needed to. Running and insuring a car in the UK was ridiculously expensive, even back then. I then moved to New Zealand where I would have been utterly screwed if I’d been unable to drive.

In one of my weird dreams, a song started playing. Heck, what is that song? Ah yes, it’s one of those songs that I voted for to be the UK’s Eurovision entry, a very long time ago, by calling an 0898 number. It might have been ’93 or ’94. It’s amazing what your mind can dredge up in a dream. Yesterday I found it on YouTube – it’s Lover Come In, a beautiful non-Eurovision-y song written and performed by Brendan Faye, a Liverpool folk singer. It just missed out on being Britain’s 1991 entry (even earlier than I thought), coming second to some forgettable poppy crap that came in the middle of the pack on Eurovision night. Had Faye’s song been nominated, it could well have won the whole shebang, and I’d be hearing it now on Romanian radio 30 years later. (Eurovision is big here, for some reason.) I wonder what happened to him.

The MicroMillions series has started on Poker Stars. It’s a series of small buy-in tournaments with big fields in a wide variety of games. I plan to play two of these tournaments tonight.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Making the news for all the wrong reasons

October 25, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Romania’s Covid woes – excavators being brought to cemeteries to cope with the sheer weight of mortality – have made the news in New Zealand, which is saying something because Romania hardly ever makes the news anywhere. Covid is now killing one Romanian every three and a half minutes. Romanians are now getting vaccinated in much larger numbers, because of the increasingly severe restrictions that they face if they don’t. Far too late for this wave, but it will help in 2022. My parents are worried about me. They fear that all lines of communication could be cut in the event that I get whisked off to some Covid ward. Or corridor. Or car park.

I played tennis this afternoon. First I played singles with the guy of 60-ish, whom I’ve had close battles with until now, but this time I was up 6-0 5-0 when we were joined by a third player; we then played what they call American doubles. The singles match was bizarre because the score was more down to him than me. I really didn’t play that well in the first set. My forehand wasn’t doing what it was supposed to, though in the second set that started to click. I sometimes wonder about etiquette in such situations. Is it poor form not to let someone win at least one game? (To my mind, absolutely not, but I know others see things differently.) After the first set he was marvelling at the colours of the leaves on the big maple tree that overhangs the court, so I’m guessing he had no problem with me.

House hunting has taken a back seat. It involves meeting unknown people which isn’t particularly safe right now. That agent has stopped contacting me. Today I had a look at a place in Mehala, but only from the outside.

Living on the edge of a time zone has its oddities. We’re still on summer time until next Sunday morning, so right now it’s dark in the mornings until eight. There has been serious talk of EU countries ending their twice-yearly clock changes, though that has stalled, probably because of the Covid crisis. If Romania were to observe permanent summer time, it wouldn’t get light until 9:15 am in December in Timișoara. I like the long summer evenings here, so clock switching gives us the best of both worlds. I imagine it’s a minority position, but I’d choose to keep the time shifts.

Last night I had a marathon poker session, and a deep run in Omaha hi-lo, but only made a tiny profit from the four tournaments I played. My bankroll is in four figures for the first time, at $1001.

The two pictures above are from Parcul Regina Maria.

The last three pictures are from Mehala. The sign on the power pole is telling dog owners to clean up after their “quadrupeds”, or four-legged friends.

Coronavirus - Photos - Poker

Rise and fall (with some photos)

October 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

What a lovely autumn day it’s been today. I managed to cycle along by the river in between my lessons. It’s the last day of balmy weather we’re getting.

Vaccination numbers are stepping up in Romania, but it’s all way too late for this wave of the pandemic. (I read that at the current rate, Romania will hit 70% vaccinated in May 2024. First or second dose wasn’t clear.) In this morning’s lesson, my student said that the case numbers had been kept artificially low until all the political shenanigans (that I don’t even understand) had been completed on Monday, then a big dump of cases were reported on Tuesday. Seriously mate, you’re an intelligent bloke, and the first thing you do is reach for the conspiracy option. Why? There was a spike in cases on Tuesday because it was a Tuesday. Sunday and Monday’s numbers are always low, thanks to the limited reporting and testing over the weekend, then there’s a catch-up on Tuesday. Happens every week, like clockwork.

Talking of case numbers, New Zealand has recorded a three-figure daily tally for the first time. I’m surprised it took so long. South Islanders are dreading the inevitable appearance of the virus on the mainland.

I spoke to my brother and his wife last night. She’s been going through a tough time and has taken time off work due to stress. She’s one of many recent victims of burnout in the NHS. I just hope she’ll be OK.

In the last few days I’ve listened to Tubular Bells several times. It’s that good. Mike Oldfield wrote the album when he was still a teenager.

In poker, I had a third-place finish in a small buy-in pot-limit badugi tournament yesterday, but didn’t get a single bounty. My bankroll is $998.

Autumn is always beautiful here as the leaves change colour. This weekend we’ll have the ritual of sweeping the courts of leaves before we can play. Here are some pictures that I’ve taken in the last week. A Romanian-style bike, the Bega bathed in autumn sunshine, the park under the full moon, and ultra-modern and not-so-modern architecture.

Coronavirus

The 13th hour

October 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been to the park to get my 12 litres of water. It’s a full moon tonight. The air was pungent with crow poo, as it often is at this time of year.

While I was teaching this evening, President Klaus Iohannis gave an eight-minute speech about the Covid crisis in his usual deliberate way. He said that the figures we see every day are people’s lives, dreams and futures, not mere numbers. Then he went on to talk about the fake news that anti-vaxers are lapping up, and bringing in unpopular measures (a lockdown?) to curb the spread. “We’re at the 12th hour,” he said. It’s actually the 13th. For thousands of Romanians it’s too late. He then said the current crisis is beyond even the most pessimistic of predictions. Sorry, you’re wrong there too. I’m a bear of average-sized brain, and I predicted this. On 6th June, I wrote in this blog, “…most people won’t touch the vaccines. Unless that turns around pretty sharpish (and why will it?), Romania is probably screwed.”

This morning I was almost talked out, following a good hour on Skype with my aunt and uncle, who are doing remarkably well, and another chat with my parents.

Coronavirus - Life :) - The UK

A dark place

October 19, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Friday I got a call from the police. What happened to my your bike? I told him, and he said I had to come in to give a statement so he could close the case. I went in first thing this morning. When I arrived, the receptionist was smoking. He asked me who I’d spoken to. No idea, I said. Eventually the officer met me and showed me to an upstairs corridor with several rooms on both sides. He led me into room 8 where we sat down. There were mugshots pinned to the wall as well as two stopped clocks, one advertising Camel cigarettes. I tried not to get too close to the officer; he wasn’t wearing a mask. Just imagine getting Covid because of a $90 bike. That would be so typically Romanian. He typed up a statement and I had to write some bits and bobs on the end. He told me my written Romanian was better than some Romanians’. Then I was free to go.

Yesterday I met the guy who teaches at British School. We had a drink in Piața Unirii. It was sunny, 17 degrees, and pretty lively when you consider that it came at the end of Romania’s deadliest week since the Second World War. (This week will surely be deadlier still.) Nobody checked our green passes or anything of that sort. We talked about teaching and Margaret Thatcher, then I gave him a short impromptu Romanian lesson.

My near-neighbour, whose husband plays tennis, recently gave me five pancakes. In return I baked them a quince crumble. I’ve had no feedback whatsoever on that, despite meeting him twice at tennis since then, so I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly a hit. At the weekend a new guy in (I guess) his late fifties showed up. Shortly after my arrival in the country, I learnt that one in three adult Romanians no longer have any of their original teeth. This guy had about four teeth in total. The spoof travel guide Molvanîa, written by Australians and a minor hit in New Zealand at about the time I moved there, is surely based on Romania and its neighbour Moldova.

Molvania400px.jpg

Another British politician has been murdered. Conservative MP David Amess was stabbed to death on Friday at his constituency office in Essex. I didn’t know much about him, except that Mum once joked about his surname (“a mess”), and he once spoke out in parliament against a drug, Cake, which was entirely fictitious. British politics, and Britain in general, is in a dark place right now.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Poker

Walls and doors are good

October 17, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a look at another flat on Thursday. It was only three years old. At €100,000 (NZ$165,000), it was cheaper than the previous one I looked at, but the layout, with the kitchen and living room all together as one room, made it a non-starter. “Look! You can have your lessons here,” the agent said to me. Just no. I need my office to be accessible without entering the kitchen area at all, and certainly not inside the kitchen. The shelves in one of the bedrooms were loaded with fishing trophies. Dozens of them. I then met the current owner who wore a kind of fishing tracksuit. He showed me to the garage, which was predictably full of fishing gear. For some reason I asked him if he also had guns, and he answered no, unequivocally. I wasn’t a big fan of the area either, but as there’s a nice park nearby, I didn’t dismiss it entirely. But the unremitting newness of everything would have got to me. “See, they’re building a big supermarket, and a kind of mall. Right there,” the agent said, pointing out a large steel skeleton. Great. Timișoara is not exactly lacking in that department already.

Viewing that flat was useful, as now the agent knows what is and isn’t suitable for me. She told me that almost all new builds have that open space, with a combined kitchen and living area. That just means I need something less new. The trend is for fewer walls and doors, but walls and doors can be good a lot of the time. I recently watched breakfast TV, where they did a piece on people in various countries returning to the office as the Covid situation improved, and when I saw an open-plan office I just about broke out in a cold sweat. I worked many years in that environment, but how long would I survive now? I could do six months, if I knew it was only going to be six months. They also showed an office full of cubicles, which looks more austere, but it’s actually less awful to work in. Even mini-walls help. (As for hot-desking, don’t even get me started.)

After a week of mostly crappy weather, it’s a bright, sunny mid-October morning. I had some decent lessons last week, but I still wouldn’t mind one or two new students. The low point was on Thursday when my student (a guy in his mid-thirties) got a phone call from his father to say that his 83-year-old great uncle (whom he was very close to) had died from Covid, after his doctor had told him not to get the vaccine. (Just wow.) I suggested that we stop the lesson, and after pressing on with a translation exercise for a little longer, he agreed. He was understandably struggling to concentrate. Yesterday my student, a woman of 26 (I think) told me that her 74-year-old grandfather had survived a three-week battle in hospital with Covid. Petrică (mid-fifties) from the tennis club had a kidney condition, then was hospitalised with Covid last winter, before the vaccines came. He’s now on dialysis three times a week. He told me he hadn’t had a pee since March.

For my parents and anybody else living in New Zealand, especially the South Island, the virus must still feel abstract, a bit like it did for me in the early days. But it not, it’s killing people and doing long-term damage to those who survive it, and it’s coming your way. I was delighted to read that 2.5% of NZ’s population got the jab on a single day, in a high-profile Super Saturday “vaxathon” campaign. They were late to get started on vaccinations in NZ, but they’re certainly making up for lost time now.

I spoke to my parents yesterday. They’d just been down to Moeraki. Mum has sent me some pictures of the boulders, some broken and filled with water. I was happy when they told me they didn’t do much there apart from read. With all the house stuff, they really needed the break. We talked about our globetrotting experiences from 30-plus years ago, a subject that comes up quite often. Modern long-haul flying involves mega-hubs where you’re basically cocooned in airportworld. It didn’t used to be like that; the process was slower and more arduous. Dad remembered a time we landed in Jakarta (either ’86 or ’89) and just breathing in the air told you that you were in some faraway land. Airports were fascinating places then (the smells!), before they got all Guccified. Planes themselves were different too; if you didn’t want to be stuck in your seat you could slink off to the area around the galley – my brother did this all the time. You saw more out of the window too – the crew didn’t enforce artificial night-time. My younger students are amazed when I tell them that you could smoke in the back half-dozen rows of the plane. That would be unthinkable now.

Poker. I haven’t been able to make much headway of late, but I’m only down a few dollars for the month so far. My bankroll is $987. Staying up late to play seems to give me headaches, so I’ll try and avoid that.

I’m meeting the British teacher this afternoon. (Should I be worried about this, even though we’re both vaxed and he’s had it? He sees kids all day. These are the sorts of things I have to concern myself with.) Then I’ll be playing tennis.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Dying of ignorance

October 14, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I remember the powerful British AIDS campaign from when I was little: billboards with Don’t Die of Ignorance in big, unmissable capital letters. Now, thousands of Romanians are doing just that. It’s upsetting to be living in a country that has completely given up on something so fundamental – keeping its citizens alive. Romania was fortunate at the start of the pandemic – being outside Europe’s main traffic routes afforded the country more time, and they used it to good effect. Masks were mandated in shops in late April here in Timișoara, some time before they became law in the UK, schools were closed, and we came out of the first wave in good shape. In autumn 2020 as cases rose again, masks were made mandatory even on the street. In spring 2021, we had another lockdown which kept a lid on things. So far, so good, or at least not absolutely awful.

But since then it’s been a complete disaster zone. The vaccination campaign has been feeble, and the victors have been a lethal cocktail of religion, fake Facebook “news”, and Antena 3 (Romania’s version of Fox News, whose viewership is made up almost entirely of old people who are most at risk of Covid). Right now, two-thirds of Romanians are fully exposed to the Delta variant, and most of them are going about their business as normal. You can hardly blame them for not giving a toss when the government doesn’t either. In last December’s elections, a right-wing anti-vax, anti-everything party gained significant representation. Eighteen months ago we had the police checking every vehicle that drove by, and even an army presence, but now there’s nothing. Restaurants and bars are still open. We have a curfew – you’re not allowed out after 8pm if you’re unvaxed – but is that even enforced anywhere? About 400 people are dying from Covid every day, 90% of whom are unvaxed, and that only counts hospital deaths as far as I’m aware. (A lot of Romanians avoid hospital at all costs, and that’s understandable. I mean, you might burn to death there.)

Of course some people will say that killing a few hundred people every day is worth it if you save the economy. That stopping the spread of the virus (at least within reason) doesn’t actually help the economy in the long run has been the biggest lie of the pandemic, and Romania doesn’t do long-term thinking. The big obsession right now seems to be “Horeca”, which is an acronym of hoteluri, restaurante, cafenele. Gotta keep Horeca moving, no matter what.

The beeping Happy Zoo grab-a-toy machine, which is in the area outside the supermarket where I pack my bags while trying to keep away from everyone, still creeps me out. It’s like something out of a Stephen King novel.

Another creepy thing is this song that my neighbour has been playing, almost on a loop, day and night, for weeks. Thankfully it’s been at low volume, but what is it? DUM-dum-DUM-dum-DUM-dum-dum. Today I managed to get close enough to the wall to Shazam it – I was the eighth person ever to do so. I imagined it was an old song, but it’s a brand new Romanian song called Nu Mai Spune Nimănui, by Pragu’ de Sus. It’s quite a nice song outside the saturation-level rotation that I’m experiencing. (One of my favourite Romanian songs, by Kumm, has an almost identical title, Să Nu Spui Nimănui.)

Tomorrow I’m looking at another flat, but it’s in an ultra-modern area which just isn’t my thing.

Coronavirus - Films - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker - Tennis

Keeping my distance and some old Romanian

October 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

This afternoon’s lesson with the young couple was a no-go after their son got sick, then tennis got washed out, so I finally got round to watching the 2011 film Contagion on Netflix. It wasn’t in the same league as Station Eleven, the brilliant pandemic-based book that I read 18 months before Covid, but it would have been instructive had I seen it in the early days of our real-life pandemic. Some things were strikingly similar. In the film, Forsythia was touted as a miracle cure on social media, just like ivermectin is right now, at the expense of vaccines that really do save lives. There were bats and what looked like wet markets. There was much talk of R-rates. There was someone complaining that spring and summer had been stolen from her, just like people have done in real life. (I found spring 2020 to be blissful.) An interesting idea in the film was a Vietnam War-style vaccine lottery where people get the jab earlier or later depending on what day of the year they’re born. Actually, it would be an utterly crazy idea when you think about it for five seconds, but it does make the assumption that the population would be desperate to get their hands on the stuff.

Daily Covid deaths in Romania are hovering around 300. This morning on the news I heard the L-word (in English, while everything else was in Romanian) for the first time during this dreadful third or fourth wave, however you prefer to count these things. I’d be all for a lockdown. The mess we’re in is due to the unvaccinated people, but the rest of us (the minority!) are massively impacted by this too. When hospitals are stretched to this extent, it’s not just Covid that could kill us.

Even though I’m fully jabbed, I’m still keeping the hell away from people. Luckily I can in a way most people can’t. Last night one of my students said he’d been to the gym. It seems utter madness that gyms should be open right now, even if you’ve got your green thingy. This morning I went to an open-air market; mask wearing was universal among shoppers although not among stallholders. I was in and out in 15 minutes. That’s the limit to how exposed I choose to be right now. But most people seem to have a higher bar, even if they’re unjabbed. It’s a far cry from the panic you saw in the early days, when people were elbowing revolving doors and disinfecting surfaces, even though we faced a less contagious variant back then. Of course, 18 months ago we thought that surfaces (or fomites, as they explained in the film) were a major mode of transmission.

In the absence of tennis I thought I’d talk about Domnul Sfâra, the 86-year-old who plays. He’s tiny – he can’t be more than five foot three. In a game I hit the ball directly to him, preferably to his forehand, and plop my serve over. He used to be a teacher, at a university I think, and spent some years in Moscow. He has a number of catchphrases. After sufficient warming up, he says M-am încâlziiit, meaning “I’m warmed up”. (Încâlzit only has one i. I spelt it with three to show that he draws out that final vowel.) If somebody misses an easy shot, he says siguranță prea mare, which seems to mean that they played it too safe, although in reality it’s usually the opposite. At a score of 15-15, he usually says “fifty-fifty”, in English, presumably thinking that’s actually how we say that score. The -teen and -ty numbers cause Romanians no end of confusion (and me too; I often simply can’t tell whether someone’s saying 13 or 30, say, so I repeat it back to them in Romanian). He usually says 0 as nulă, which I’m guessing is an older term for zero, as is commonly used in Romania today. (Nula is the usual term for zero in Serbian, and it seems that Slavic terms have sometimes been replaced by more Latinate words in recent decades. Prispă, meaning porch, has largely been supplanted by the much more boring terasă, for instance.) He also says the number three as tri, as I sometimes hear from old men on the market, instead of the standard trei.) As for “out”, which Romanians have stolen from us, he pronounces that with two syllables, a short ah before launching into a prolonged ooot.

From next week I’ll be having two lessons a week with the twelve-year-old girl instead of just one. She and her mum think I’m doing a good job. It’s nice to get that kind of feedback. She has come on in leaps and bounds since we started 15 months ago.

I’ll probably play some poker tonight. It’s been a mixed bag of late, although I seem to be improving in Omaha hi-lo, which has been something of a nemesis for me. My bankroll is $997.

Life :) - Romania

Pipe Day

October 8, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s Pipe Day today, the one day every year that you start to hear the hot water gurgling through the pipes that run from top to bottom of this apartment block, marking the beginnings of winter. It will probably be my last Pipe Day. I’ll miss this place when I leave.

It’s also the fifth aniversary of my arrival in Romania.

Buying property - Coronavirus

(Not) always the sun

October 7, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Always the Sun is a mid-eighties hit from the Stranglers. Good song, but could really have done with an extra verse or two.

I had a look at another place on Monday. It was in a new, Mediterranean-looking block (finished in 2015) in the much older Mehala area. Between the annoying real-estate patter both before and after, and the initial intimidation of being one of five people in the place (there were two agents and the couple who currently live there), I got to see a damn good apartment. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a biggish living area, all fully furnished, and more mod cons than I could shake a stick at. Too good for me was my immediate thought. It was priced at €123,000 (NZ$205,000). There was one snag, however, which will stop me from considering it. The place got no sun. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon. When I got back home, the sun was beginning to stream through my west-facing living room window. I look back at the places I’ve been in over the years, and sun, or lack of it, has mattered a lot. In 2003 I flatted in Peterborough – a dive, honestly – but I certainly got the sun. So I’ll keep looking.

The virus in Romania has spun out of any semblance of control. That’s what happens when you give up even trying and people won’t take the sodding vaccine. (Please, New Zealand, approach your “containment” strategy with extreme caution.) Many thousands of old, and not so old, Romanians will die before the year is out. It wouldn’t shock me if we are soon averaging 500 deaths per day. During the daytime at least, people are behaving as if everything is normal. Heads are buried deep into the sand. (Right now – 10:15 pm – it’s pretty quiet. If you’re unvaxed, you face an 8pm curfew.)