by So I’m back. I got in this afternoon, just after four. My trip was a real mixed bag.
On Monday, the day before I left, I felt terrible and wished I hadn’t booked the damn thing. I made it to my lesson in Dumbrăvita, then met Dorothy for coffee at 11:30. We sat outside. Dorothy told me all about studying Latin and Greek at Cambridge in the seventies. It was the Greek that really grabbed her. I could have sat there all day, listening to her talk about ancient Greek (in ancient Greek would have been fine too) while watching the world go by. Alas I had to go home to pack – a process that felt like torture – and give a face-to-face lesson. My student, just like Dorothy had, told me I needed to see the doctor. I went to the after-hours place but my usual doctor wasn’t on shift and because I didn’t have an emergency (though it felt like one) it got too hard and I came home.
I tried to be off by 10:30 on Tuesday morning. I got away at 10:50 – not bad under the circumstances – and got my battery checked before heading properly on my way. I filled up with diesel – this cost 525 lei, only a little less than the 564 lei I paid for three nights’ accommodation. As I’ve mentioned before, fuel prices have been well and truly Hormuzed. I paid 10.14 lei per litre, equivalent to NZ$3.80. And this is after the recent tax break – when I went away earlier in the month I paid close to 11 lei.
It was just after I filled up that I felt thoroughly awful. Then Dad rang. Ugh. I can’t remember much about the drive apart from the two places I stopped in. I finally got to the guest house and parked around the back, near the pool. A swimming pool. Fantastic. Lugging my bags from the car to the building was a big effort. I felt so weak. My room was pretty cramped, with loose sockets and a loo seat that didn’t stay up and all that stuff I’ve come to expect from Romanian accommodation. It did the job I suppose. The great thing was the almost total lack of other guests. Oh, and the much cooler weather, which was practically the whole point of getting away.
That evening I was able to give an online lesson, thanks to that lack of other people. We read a BBC article about people who (annoyingly for everyone else) change their mannerisms and even their accents after coming back from an overseas holiday. In retrospect, this article was a notch or two above my student’s level. The article gave theories for the phenomenon, but I reckon it’s pretty simple. You’ve had a wonderful holiday where everything’s exciting and vibrant and different, then suddenly you’re back in your grotty fucking housing estate and your pointless fucking job and those parents’ fucking WhatsApp groups. Why wouldn’t you want to pretend you were still in Marrakesh or wherever? (I had something similar after visiting the US in 2015. For a few weeks afterwards I was tuning into Boston-based radio.)
I used the common room for another lesson on Wednesday morning. I felt really groggy – I needed a lie down after breakfast – but I got through it. It was just my second lesson with the 23-year-old guy who’s about to get married. He said they stand to make a 10,000-euro profit on their wedding. Er, what? Well, in Romania the guests all pay, and he reckons all the “donations” will greatly outweigh the cost. If you ask me I think it’s all a horrible practice that encourages people to vastly overspend on weddings: a lose-lose for everybody except singers, caterers, and people like that. At least they’ve stopped the practice of announcing, in turn, who gave how much. The Popescus gave 1000 lei but the Ionescus – shame on them – only gave 500.
After the lesson I looked around the town of Lupeni. An ex-mining town, it was pretty down-at-heel and there wasn’t much to see there. Besides, I had very little energy and, after visiting a fruit stall and a bakery, just sat in a park. I went back to the guest house and decided to make use of the pool. Lovely warm water. As I was lying on a sun lounger after my dip, four cars arrived, all with CT number plates. Constanța. They’d come a long way. Such a big party of people, nice people though they seemed, changed everything. It made me feel I shouldn’t have been there. Fortunately my lessons were done and dusted by then.
Sleep that night was difficult. There was a pool table in the common room close to my room which had an unshuttable door, and a family (including a boy of eleven or so) thought it would be a great idea to play pool at 11:30 at night. Jeez. The next day I was looking forward to getting back home. I drove down the road a bit and stopped at Uricani, a nicer town than Lupeni. The scenery was great but I was in no mood to appreciate it. I sought out some waterfalls further down the 66A road but a very nice man told me there was no water. Back to the guest house and the pool.
I was glad to leave this morning and let the big group get on with their big meaty breakfasts and dinners without me impeding their progress. On the way back I stopped at a place called Pui (which means Chicken) next to a river called Bărbat (which means Man). From there I called New Zealand. I told my parents that a lady over there had two large melons (she did, in her hands) and that the stonemason across the road provided its services dead cheap. I had lunch at Hațeg, just down the road from there. After that I only made brief stops to get fruit and syrup to give Elena who had been looking after Kitty. I could feel the temperature rising the closer I got to home. Then I was home. Kitty was happy to see me. She’d been well looked after. I dropped in on Elena almost immediately and we had a very nice chat, mostly about her travel experiences in the mid-eighties, when Romania was still under communism. She visited Russia then, both by plane and by train.
There was a lot of news while I was away. Dolly Parton, one of those increasingly rare people liked by almost everybody. An extremely sharp American cookie who did so much good in the world. (I was proud to get the Dolly Parton, aka Moderna, vaccine for Covid.) Then there was the glacial collapse in Nepal and Tibet which reminded me of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Thousands, many of them tourists, must have died. Yesterday Ratko Mladić died in prison. He masterminded the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims in 1995. His name means “young warrior” or something to that effect. Good riddance. And all the while there was the business with Mark Carney (a contender for leader of the free world right now) and Trump (leader of the utterly fucked-up world).
I’ve pulled out of this round of the Scrabble league, by the way. That’s not because of my shocker in the last round (two wins, twelve losses, despite playing decently according to the stats) but because of my general brain fog. It had all become a chore.
After seeing Elena and writing this, I’m starting to feel ever so slightly better. I’ve got two lessons tomorrow morning.
