by I’ve had a big week: 23 hours of teaching over six days. When I came to Romania I thought I might not manage 23 hours in total. There’s a fair bit of preparation time too of course, so I’m working close to a full week now. The competition, or total lack of it, is helping me greatly. In a city the size of Wellington with thousands of people wanting to improve their English for thousands of reasons, I seem to be the only native speaker giving private lessons. I feel like a pioneer. The first man on the moon. Or Pluto. And that’s a pretty exciting feeling. At the beginning I struggled to build momentum and would lose students as fast as I’d gain them, but in the last few weeks I seem to have passed a tipping point: people are starting to like what I do and are recommending me to friends. In the new year I’ll probably increase my prices for new students, but I won’t want to overdo that and price myself out of the non-manicured-lawns market.
In contrast to my private lessons which I enjoy immensely, my new job with the language school is, in some ways, a pain in the butt. The work itself is perfectly fine, but I miss out on other potential lessons due to the travel time, and all the admin that goes with it is a chore. (I mean, I don’t have a problem with admin. At times I even like admin. But only if it’s my own admin that uses my own systems. I really can’t be arsed with other people’s admin anymore.) On Tuesday only one person showed up to the lesson, and we got sidetracked trying to calculate just how many tonnes of lolly sticks are produced annually by the company. We arrived at a figure of 7500 tonnes. On Thursday two people turned up. The most difficult part of that lesson was reading from an on-screen PDF of which one page was printed upside down. I could have rotated the document but then all the other pages would have been upside down instead. I shouldn’t complain too much: the language school lessons are only 15% of my workload, and the rest of the time I’m free to do as I please.
There’s a cinema underneath my apartment block. I’ve wanted to go there since I moved in, but I’ve had nobody to go with. This weekend Timishort, a festival of short films, has been running, so yesterday I went there on my own. It cost me just 5 lei (a pound!) to see five 20-minute films. Incredible value. One of them was Eat Me, a thought-provoking Bulgarian-made musical about food. Where does it come from? What does it do to you? That would be my pick of the five, though I also liked The Committee, an amusing Scandinavian-made film about choosing a monument (or something) to replace the current stone at the Sweden–Norway–Finland tripoint. The cinema itself, which is only open four days a week, is a far cry from your modern multiplex. It reminds me a bit of the cinema in Geraldine. It has a single screen with a surprisingly large capacity. The seats are rather hard so some people brought cushions, and it got a bit chilly in there. Next time I’ll know.
We’ve had lovely weather of late; the autumn colours in Timișoara are really quite beautiful.
