by My friends (or my parents’ friends really) arrived on Tuesday night. It’s been fun having them here in this wonderful city and meeting up with them in breaks between lessons. I feel perfectly comfortable with them. The highlight so far was perhaps eating out on Wednesday night. We ate at Timișoreana in the square. They both had fairly substantial meals while I was lumbered with a hunk of pork on a bone, with horseradish covering about a quarter of the plate. The pork was perfectly fine, but something with it would have been nice. We then went to a decidedly frill-free basementy “restaurant” alongside Piața 700 so I could properly fill up. The staff there were much older, male, and couldn’t speak English. There were no other customers. I had something advertised as sausage and bean soup, but “slop” might have been more accurate. We also had a beer each, and the whole lot came to 20 lei. Four quid. My friends couldn’t believe that. Yesterday, after visiting the Museum of the Revolution, we checked out a street food festival in Parcul Rozelor (the rose garden). Yes, oh-so-trendy “street food” has landed in Timișoara. The festival was sponsored by a bank or insurance company or something awful like that, and it was all basically overpriced mall food. You could hardly get a sandwich for four quid. We couldn’t get away quick enough.
This morning we’ll be going away, but where and how are still very much up in the air. I’m not looking forward to negotiating Timișoara traffic in a strange car on a strange side of the road. I’ll be meeting them at their hotel in just over an hour.
Last Saturday I met up with my student. We had a few drinks at a bar on the storm-stricken bank of the Bega. We spoke Romanian. I sometimes accidentally invented a word like “profesorile”, which she thought was funny.
Watching coverage of the New Zealand election last weekend and seeing people like John Campbell and Russel Norman, I got ever so slightly homesick for the first time since I left a year ago.
I might be starting my new job on Tuesday. More on that next time perhaps, but I’ve really got to go.
