Month: March 2023

Language teaching - Life :)

Conversation Club

March 26, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Our clocks have just gone forward and later today I’ll be playing tennis for the first time this year. Before that I’ll be meeting Mark in Dumbrăvița – I expect we’ll have a walk in the woods with his two dogs.

Last time I forgot to mention the English Conversation Club which took place last Saturday at the elderly English lady’s apartment. She and her Romanian friend (who speaks extremely good English) had decided to resurrect the club after about a decade. There were about ten of us including two teenagers who had been dragged along by their mothers and didn’t say much. People brought food; I made a cottage pie – I would have made a shepherd’s pie, but lamb is hard to come by in Romania. I felt at ease there, even when I made a hash of explaining something to the group in Romanian. I think it was the word “gossip”. Apart from us two native speakers, people spoke English at wildly different levels, so it was suggested that (if the group expands) we split into two. Next time we meet, which – frustratingly – won’t be until 13th May, I’ll give a presentation on New Zealand. It was great to see a social event succeed in the world of TikTok and ChatGPT, and nice to know that social events in which I’m not hopelessly intimidated actually exist. I got a new student out of the meet-up – we met for the first time yesterday. Her level is close to zero. She has four kids, aged 23 and younger, and she was born in August 1981. Yikes.

Life :)

A two-speed city

March 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Just before I got to this afternoon’s session with the four twins, a slightly wizened older guy asked me for the time. Două fără cinci, I said. Five to two. On most of my bike ride I’d been pondering ChatGPT, cryptocurrency, NFTs (whatever the hell they are; perhaps they stand for nothing fucking there), TikTok, people jetting off to ghastly Dubai (the 16-year-old girl I teach is about to do that), a World Cup in Qatar, and Saudi Arabia’s insane Line megacity proposal. They all seem part of the same sinister juggernaut. It was refreshing to see someone a million miles from all of that, someone without so much as a phone. In fact there are a lot of phoneless “what time is it?” people all over the city, a place that operates on two speed settings. You often see both speeds cheek-by-jowl, for instance at Piața 700 which is a bustling outdoor market flanked by kiosks selling various burgers and snacks and cups of coffee. Probably cigarettes, too. Beggars hang around there, then clamber on the tram, then hang around somewhere else that’s full of people. But just metres from the market and kiosks are five glass office buildings, all housing management consultancies and other multinationals. The difference is striking.

On Saturday morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. My maths lesson with Matei got cancelled, so I had a look at the car market at Mehala on my way (sort of) to my English lesson with Octavian. I didn’t get anywhere near actually buying anything, but at least I got an idea of what’s out there. I’m only prepared to spend €4000 (£3500; NZ$7000) – absolute tops – and it needs to be something easy to maintain. The big selling point appeared to be the number of airbags a car has.

A Ford Focus, complete with ten airbags

Next to the car market was the normal Mehala market where I got my bike from. There are loads of tools for sale; in fact before big hardware stores like Dedeman became commonplace, markets were just about your only option if you wanted to buy tools. These markets have a very Romanian feel about them; there’s always the unmistakable waft of mici.

I watched some of Boris Johnson’s lengthy hearing into all those socially undistanced gatherings that took place during the pandemic. As an English teacher I found myself seeing past his probable lies to focus on his upper-class pronunciation of certain words. Necessary, with only three syllables – nothing between the s and the r. Circumstances with a reduced third syllable. Transcript with a long first vowel. Room with the same vowel as foot. These are all features that I don’t have in my fairly nondescript standard British English, and they scream “I went to the right school”.

In this morning’s lesson, my student suggested that the pandemic was all a media beat-up. He was amazed to hear my view that more should have been done to stop the spread initially.

Uncategorized

Fractionally better

March 16, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to Mum again last night. She looked much better. I fear though that she’ll stagger from one bout of stress and misery to the next, at least until the house business is sorted. I also had a chat with my brother. We talk at least once a week. During my first few years in New Zealand, contact with my brother was extremely rare. I often didn’t know what continent he was on. Now he’s much more settled – he has a half-in, half-out relationship with the army – and with me being much closer geographically, we’re in touch far more often. Plus, he used to verge on being a dick. The dick days are well and truly over; he’s turned into a really nice guy. At the moment he’s pursuing a university course, and I’ve been amazed by his level of motivation. Where has that come from? Right now he’s in the middle of an assignment where he has to calculate financial ratios from real-life financial statements, and I’ve been helping him, though I lost interest in all that stuff ages ago.

I should be able to get a Romanian driver’s licence. I’ve made an appointment for 3rd April; there will be some medical hoops to jump through, one of which involves standing on one leg for a period of time. Sounds like fun. I’m a bit wary though of getting behind the wheel for the first time in 5½ years. I’d like a car to be able to travel around Romania – there’s so much to see that I’ve so far missed out on; I’ll still use my bike to get around the city.

Today I’ll give my weekly maths lesson in Romanian. I’m going to do a session on fractions. It’s apparent that both my maths students have no real concept of a fraction, even if they may (at times) know how to magically manipulate them. For them, halves and thirds and quarters are brimming with mystique, and the intrigue only deepens when algebraic fractions come into play. For me, simple fractions are an extremely natural concept – heck, I even used one in the previous paragraph – even if something like 8/13 is hard to get a handle on. When I was at school, I learnt fractions before I learnt decimals, and that made sense. A quarter – one of four equal slices of a pie – is a more natural concept than 0.25. But I see a generational difference here. When I was growing up, fractions were commonplace. Road signs showed fractions of a mile. (In the UK, I think they still do.) Dad ordered glass for his paintings with the dimensions in fractions of an inch. Now though, we’re bombarded by decimals and percentages, and anyone growing up in a purely metric country like Romania doesn’t see a fraction from one month to the next. On a similar theme, Matei sniggered a little last Saturday when he asked me for the time and I told him it was “ten to twelve” so we didn’t have long left. Why don’t you old guys tell the time properly?

In my online English lessons I’ve been making good use of a YouTube series called Streets of London, in which a youngish guy called Pablo Strong interviews pedestrians at random. He homes in on the interesting characters. Can I ask what you’re up to today? Do you mind if I ask what you do? What makes you happy? What would you say to your 16-year-old self? Fascinating stuff, and hours of off-the-cuff English for people to get their heads around.

Spring has begun to, well, spring. Such a shame I can’t look out the window and see all the greenery start to appear in the park. In ten days our clocks will go forward and people will be milling around in the central squares, taking advantage of the longer evenings. On my bike ride with Mark last Sunday, we saw several people gathering urzică, or stinging nettles. The local markets are full of them right now. People make tea from them, whip them up into smoothies, mix them with eggs, and all sorts. They’re a Romanian superfood.

This has been one of my better weeks of late. My working memory was shot to pieces; holding down a normal office job would have been a near-impossible task, just like it was at times in Wellington. Let’s hope I can stay like this.

Family - Life :)

When brave-face mode is deactivated…

March 14, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I Skyped my parents on Sunday night. Mum looked horrendous. She had that stony-grey look on her face that she always has after an argument, probably because she’d just had an argument. But she was also clearly sleep-starved, and she was suffering from the neck pain that has been bugging her for months if not years. Only two people on the planet, Dad and me, ever see her like this. With everyone else, including my brother who’s like married and stuff, she snaps into brave-face mode. They recently got a letter from Barclays saying they’d be closing their account just like they did to mine, so that didn’t help her mood, but so much of this is caused by their house. Hassles and challenges and regrets that will only ever end if they sell the place, and then what? During most of the pandemic, when they still lived in the large but practical house that they built in 2004, things seemed to be on a nice even keel. And now this. It’s all so upsetting.

On Sunday morning I met Mark – the English guy – and we went down the bike track to La Livada, just past Sânmihaiu Român. We had a beer – at 11:30 – and a bite to eat. I had a goulash, which was tasty and had more of a kick than usual; I just wish it could have been bigger. The hot bread was the most wonderful bread I’d tasted in years and I’m not kidding. We talked about the varied challenges of teaching. At his private school, where the fees are an arm and a leg, a major problem is horribly spoilt kids. We saw a cyclist whizz by with a camera attached to his helmet; Mark called him a spaceman. Mark reckoned he saw a jackal, which looks like a cross between a wolf and a fox, when he was walking the dogs recently – this was funny because he used not to believe in the existence of jackals. (There is also a British military vehicle called a Jackal, which my brother knows perhaps too well.) We had a coffee at Porto Arte, the place I’ve been to a dozen times or more, then we parted ways. He and his girlfriend plan to leave Romania in June 2004.

Yesterday was quite productive, much more so that my culmea day of a week earlier. I turned up to the Direcția Fiscală, the place where you pay all your local bills and fines, only to find that it had moved to the mall. Ugh, not again. It must have only just moved because other people were doing the same as me. Someone piped up that if you’re just a person and not a company, you can go to any post office instead of the damn mall, so I went to the one round the corner. I wanted to know what was happening with my rates. Why hadn’t I received a bill? I was armed with a cash-stuffed envelope, because I never know if anyone will accept cards. The lady at the desk found me immediately on her system, and said I owed 227 lei. That’s about £40 or NZ$80. “Is that for the whole year?!” I asked in disbelief. Yes. Forty quid. I’d brought all the cash I had, which was at least ten times that. Part of living in Romania, as an outsider, is not knowing how many digits you’ll have to pay for something. Take train tickets. Opt lei, vă rog. Sorry, eight? Really? To get all the way from here to here on the map? Then the next day I’ll have some medical procedure which will be nouă sute și ceva – nine hundred and something – and my reaction is wha-wha-wha-fa-fa-fa.

After paying that shockingly small bill, I met the English lady who’s been helping me with the dictionary, then went to Piața Unirii to pick up my translated electricity bill, then had my ciorbă – a beef and bean soup – at the market, where I also bought a block of cheese. The cheese woman wanted to know where I was from – I could tell that “no, I actually live here” didn’t fully compute with her. When your rates bill is only forty quid, it starts to compute a bit more. I had four lessons including a fairly productive one with the single pair of twins, then I set about getting all my Barclays bits together. That meant a load of tedious scanning and PDFing, and after having to start all over when the page timed out – how aggravating – I managed to send them all the documents online. What will happen next is anyone’s guess.

I’m in a much better place than even three days ago, and let’s hope I can stay that way. To see Mum like that is a real worry though.

Life :)

Culmea

March 13, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been another week of lurching, hour-by-hour, from just about coping to being someone people would cross the street to avoid. There’s a word in Romanian, culmea, which doesn’t easily translate into English but conveys the idea of a limit or crossing a line. For instance, the guy who took me into the mountains in his car last September had me momentarily worried when he pretended to drive off without me, after we’d stopped for a coffee. He said that it would be culmea if he left me on the side of the road.

On Monday I faced culmea at the immigration office. I was unusually free of lessons that morning after someone had cancelled, so (after sleeping terribly) I got to the squalid office at 8:20, ten minutes before it opened, to try to get the address changed on my residence card. Dozens of people were already in front of me, young Indians mostly, many of whom had camped there since midnight. Seriously. They had drawn up an informal ordered list so they wouldn’t all lose their places in the queue when they went out for a pee behind the building. I realised after some time that EU citizens were allowed to jump the queue, and I blagged my way to the front – after all, I’m able to live in Romania because I was an EU citizen when I arrived. The officer at the desk – the only person, when there needed to be at least six – gave me a form to fill in, but told me in no uncertain terms that I’d have to join the back of the queue, so I did, and spent the time on my phone, staring at maths problems that I could use in my lessons. At 12:30 I’d nearly reached the front of the queue when the office closed. I practically shouted at the officer. What time do I have to arrive, then? Four in the morning? Three, two, one? I said the masculine doi for two when it should have been the feminine două. I would turn up at any hour if I knew it would solve my problem – getting my money back from Barclays, which is what this is all about – but as it might not make the blindest bit of difference, I don’t think I’ll bother again. The angst isn’t worth it. (So much of this shite – account closures, being stuck all morning in a queue that goes nowhere – is down to sodding Brexit.)

On Wednesday I got my bike fixed – that wasn’t cheap but I didn’t mind too much because I rely heavily on my bike, then on Friday I felt particularly low. Should I leave Romania? Sell my flat? Is there really any point in doing anything at all? After my morning lesson I had my appointment with Enel, the energy company. Making an appointment, which takes time in itself, was the only way I could talk to them without being stuck in a queue for hours. I wanted them to give me a copy of my bill that was authorised or notarised or whatever the word is. The rather unhealthy-looking man who served me was pleasant, unlike the woman next to me who treated her customer appallingly. In the meantime a large bloke lumbered in and launched into a wild tirade over something to do with his bill; his booming voice cut through the entire cavernous room. I got handed a bill and went to Piața Unirii to find a qualified person to translate it into English. It should be ready tomorrow.

When I got home from seeing the translator I thought, shit, I’ve got to get a grip here. Part of the problem is I’m spending too much time in my flat. Unlike in my old place with the view of the park and the trams and all that life, when I’m inside now I’m really inside. The nearby market is a lovely place for watching the world go by, so starting from tomorrow I’ll go there for lunch whenever I can, grabbing a bowl of soup and some bread from one of the kiosks, or whatever else takes my fancy, instead of just making sandwiches at home. The small expense will be worth it. Then I thought, right, driving licence (or driver’s licence – I never know which to say). Get my own set of wheels, push off for a day or two, wouldn’t that be great? With a bit of luck (I mean that literally), I might be able to get a Romanian licence without having to take (another) test. Just imagine, after all these years of not driving, having to take a test in Romanian. Virați la stângă la capătul străzii. În următoarea intersecție, virați la dreaptă. That would be culmea for me.

One big problem for me is lack of sleep. This sinus or headache problem, call it what you will, is keeping me awake at night and it isn’t going away. I’ve made another appointment with the neurologist for 8th May.

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

The freight train is coming

March 5, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a long chat with my brother last night. I’m thinking of seeing the three of them over Orthodox Easter weekend. If his grandparents aren’t able to see the little one, at least his uncle can. Mum and Dad have mentioned the cost of the flights as a reason for not coming over. They have loads of legitimate reasons which I entirely understand, but the cost ain’t one, I’m afraid. They’ve just spent almost ten times that amount – money they won’t get back – on an EV. Edit: They will of course save money on fuel, and isn’t there some kind of rebate? But it’s still a fast-depreciating asset.

My work week (28 sessions totalling “just” 32½ teaching hours – unusually many short sessions) is over. Last night I had a weird 90-minute session with the bloke who lives near the Dartford Tunnel in London. As usual he read an article out loud a paragraph at a time, but this time he used ChatGPT to translate the text into his native Romanian, bit by bit. He could hardly contain himself, such was the quality of the translation in his view. “Sounds like you don’t need me anymore, then,” I said. Supposedly it can even translate jokes, and he showed me a letter he’d written to a phone company that was ChatGPT-generated. Although it’s free and intriguing, I haven’t tried ChatGPT, mainly because it forces you to create an account. Why should I have to do that? I know, I know, I have accounts with everything else. Like, for instance, one of the clinics here in Timișoara. Call reception and there’s no receptionist on the other end, just a message telling you to create an account – the 47th goddamn thing in your life that needs a password. You have no choice in the matter. More alarmingly, this artificial so-called intelligence is ripping jobs away from us like a freight train – it’s already gathering serious momentum and will soon be unstoppable. As a private teacher I’m probably safe for the next 10 to 15 years, but all bets are off after that.

This morning I had a one-hour online lesson with a Bucharest-based woman, then I cycled to Dumbrăvița for a pair of two-hour lessons with teenage boys. From 10 till 12 I had maths with Matei. He informed me that the boy I’d be seeing after lunch had just joined him at British School, and in only one week had already become slightly unpopular. “The rich kid,” Matei said. His father owns a computer hardware company. After a packed lunch – a cheese and salami sandwich, a boiled egg and some fruit – I had my English lesson with the rich kid, who can at times be conceited but wasn’t today.

I’ve just been reading something about the demise of cursive writing. I found the whole thing a bit puzzling, because it suggested that there were only two types of handwriting – the flowery swashy style and letter-by-letter printing, when surely there’s a very practical in-between. When I was at school, the word “cursive” was never mentioned – we just called it “joined-up writing” – and a version of that is what I use to this day. Romanian kids, interestingly enough, still learn what I would call proper cursive. The Romanian cursive has some distinctive features like a curvy x, like the one I use when writing maths, but with an added crossbar.

Here are some recent samples of my handwriting from my whiteboard. It’s slightly less joined-up than normal, because I’m sacrificing some speed for an increase in legibility. Note that in the third sample, my student has written “where” and “were” in the bottom-right corner with w‘s that look like pairs of crossed v‘s; that’s typical of Romanians – their native language is w-less, so they don’t develop a quicker way of writing the letter.

Family - Life :) - New Zealand

Our perilous existence

March 2, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents are staying in Moeraki for four days. Just up the coast is Hampden, the village with a great fish and chip shop and a wi-fi hotspot which they called me from last night, luckily after I’d finished work. The morning sky was a brilliant blue, as was their shiny, shapely new electric vehicle. Seeing that sky made me really look forward to getting over there. Five months away. Earlier Dad almost got wiped out in a Pak ‘n’ Save car park. He was pushing a trolley when an old lady went full throttle in reverse, ripping the trolley out of Dad’s hand, and slammed into two cars on the edge of the car park. Dad’s hand was hurt in the process, but a few inches or a split second this way or that and he’d have ended up under the car. Such is our perilous existence. The driver was unscathed (thankfully she was going backwards); it sounds like she wrote off three cars, but it could easily have been catastrophic. The incident was caught on camera; it took 30 seconds for staff to appear on the scene.

Dad has had several narrow escapes now. No such dramas here, though at times it feels like it. On Tuesday morning I went to the immigration office because my residence permit still shows my old address, and getting it updated (which I should have done months ago) might help me with my Barclays debacle. As soon as I got there, a middle-aged man said (in English), “Why are these places so fucking disgusting?” He was Mexican, and with his Romanian-born wife, whom he’d met in Germany, and their daughter. His wife and daughter were summoned to some office or other, and he and I had a chat. He wasn’t a fan of Romania at all. He compared the country to his native Mexico – a similar standard of living, he said, but services like immigration work much better over there. The immigration office is horrible, I agree, but I think I’d rather be living somewhere largely free of drug cartels in a city where I can walk around safely, day or night. Timișoara, touch wood, is a remarkably safe city. At one point, a border police van pulled up outside, and two Middle Eastern-looking handcuffed men got dragged in. The place was very busy, and after hanging around there for an hour, it was clear that I wouldn’t get anywhere. In the afternoon I tried again, and this time I met a Romanian guy of around sixty who told me to use the app instead of wasting hours in the office. He was extremely helpful (bizarrely, he actually seemed to enjoy this stuff) but when I got home and tried to use the app I had more questions than answers.

Yesterday morning I had a two-hour lesson scheduled for eight. I started with him last week, and I tried calling him the night before to confirm, but got no reply. (He’s twenty and a new student – exactly the sort of person liable to forget or just not be bothered.) If he didn’t come, I’d get the “opportunity” to go back to the immigration office. Should I go? Eight o’clock rolled around. He won’t turn up, will he? Then at 8:05 the intercom beep went off, to my relief. It was him. We had a productive session, I got paid, and the “opportunity” to deal with life admin was taken away from me. I wonder how I’d be managing right now if I still had the earthquake business in Wellington to contend with. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

I had three lessons this morning, and I still have three more this afternoon and evening. This is shaping up to be my busiest week for some time.