by We hit 36 degrees on Saturday, but it’s felt just the slightest bit autumnal the last two days thanks to a welcome drop in temperature and a fresh breeze. Yesterday I went to a market in the west of the city called Mehala. That “meh” combination, which is also found in Mehedinți (the name of one of the counties I visited with my parents) has an Arabic feel to it. “Meh” is, of course, now a word in its own right, thanks (probably) to The Simpsons. It can be both an interjection and an adjective. Mehala has a large car market but also a section where bikes, tools, second-hand clothes and other odds and ends are sold. One of my students told me about the market, turning the word Mehala into an English verb meaning to swindle: “I got Mehala’d.” With that in mind, I didn’t buy anything, not even from the very aggressive teenager trying to sell me sunglasses. It started to spit with rain, so it was all hands on deck for the stallholders. That green three-wheeled truck was incredible – I’d never seen anything like it. The market is also a popular spot for blokes to have a beer or two, although most places in Romania fall into that category. There was mici sizzling away on huge barbecues, and I even had some mici, though to be frank I find it pretty meh. I learnt that the local bike gang isn’t called the Red Devils, but the even more demonic Red Evils. The picture of the Trabant is from Baia Mare.
By my count, I put 483 flyers in people’s letterboxes yesterday, and walked about 13 km. I got another thousand flyers printed off today and visited a new language school; the bloke there was impressed with my Romanian or was just being polite, I couldn’t quite tell. I doubt they’ll have any work for me.
Simona Halep was taken apart by Garbiñe Muguruza in the final in Cincinnati last night; this was yet another missed chance for Halep to become world number one. She has an unfortunate habit of playing within herself in big matches. While that was going on (and long after it had finished) I watched the Red Sox beat the Yankees on a live stream. For some reason I’ve got back into baseball again. There are so many nuances to the game I don’t yet understand, but watching the Red Sox might help there: they’re unusually patient with the bat by 2017 standards, happy to work the count (I hope my terminology is right) rather than relying on the big hit. Unfortunately Romania is in a terrible time zone for watching baseball.
I spoke to Mum on FaceTime this morning. It was good to see her looking brighter. She wanted to read something out to me that she’d unearthed on the internet, and for a few heart-stopping moments I thought it might have been this site. Instead it was from the “court” section of a local UK newspaper: my brother’s ex-fiancée had been convicted of assault and tagged for four months. Mum likes to semi-cyberstalk her instead of just consigning her to history.
This morning I called Bazza for his 62nd birthday. I knew he’d appreciate that. He seemed fine.
