by Today is the tenth anniversary of my arrival in Romania. It felt amazing, looking back. I’d taken five trains over two days, plunging ever deeper into Europe – from the UK to France, then on to Germany, Austria, Hungary, and eventually Romania. After taking the taxi from Timișoara’s main railway station to the guest house, I’d finally made it.
My first full day in the country didn’t give me the best impression. The first thing I saw in the morning was the old abattoir. Then I was followed around a supermarket by security guards who aggressively rifled through my bag before I was allowed to leave. I didn’t go back to that shop for another four months. I visited an outdoor market in which a man hanged himself (as I heard on the news) a few hours later. The following day was great though, as were most days. After a trip around some of Romania’s main cities I came back to Timișoara and looked for a place to live. And some work. Autumn turned to winter. The national day parade on 1st December kicked off the Christmas market which was magical. It was like being in a wonderland. It helped that everything was so cheap then. Between Christmas and New Year I moved into my flat, slap-bang in the middle of this beautiful city. I had to pinch myself. I was unfazed by the harshness of my first winter. That winter there were the anti-corruption protests, the likes of which I’d never seen before, with people marching past my flat in their tens of thousands, on several bitterly cold nights in a row.
Then there was the teaching. Everything about that was very exciting. A complete departure from all that corporate crap. It didn’t take me long to realise that yes, this was what I wanted to do. I put up a number of ads and got a lot of responses, mostly on the phone. This presented quite a challenge at the beginning because my Romanian was shaky at best. Slowly but surely, I got more work, and by early 2018 I was struggling to keep up with demand. I was literally the only person in the city giving private lessons as a native speaker. The excitement of being in Timișoara and the sounds and smells continued until the summer of 2018, but it wore off quickly after that. The Covid period brought some of that back, strangely enough, because the sights and sounds were different. After ten years, I still like Timișoara very much, even if things have become a bit samey. I don’t know how many more anniversaries I’ll have. Summers are messing me up and I’m already dreading the next one.
Swimming. Would you believe it, the pool is closing on the 30th of this month. I don’t know why. It’s something to do with the city council. The receptionist told me she’s looking for a new job. On Monday I signed a petition – I was the 92nd signature and by today there had been many more. A great shame – I’ve only really just started. Maybe the pool will reopen under different management, but who knows? This is Romania. This city has other pools of course, but they’ll be further away and probably have strings attached.
A stat I saw in an article last weekend: in 2024, 48% of Brits didn’t fly at all. This was presented as a high figure. Look, lots of people get by without flying. You probably could too. But what surprised me was that the percentage of non-flyers was so low. A small majority did fly. That would have been very far from the case 30 years ago. I saw a similar thing earlier this week about YouTube views. “Only 4%” of YouTube videos get at least 10,000 views. I was surprised it was anything like that high.
I don’t think the author of a book has ever died while I’ve been reading it. Until this week. I’m still getting through Jeffrey Archer’s book – it’s very well written but political ambition isn’t a subject that enthuses me – and on Monday he died at the age of 86. He lived in Grantchester, a village near Cambridge, so just down the road from where I grew up. He (and his wife) were always in the news – in 2001 he went to prison for lying in court.
Update: I’m back from my lessons. With a nine-year-old girl I did an exercise I’ve done with a few kids now: I wrote the names of several objects in the room on Post-It notes and asked her to stick them to the right things. One of them was the ceiling which I had to help her with. It always reminds me of when I did that myself in the kitchen at home. I couldn’t have been any more than four. We didn’t have Post-It notes (Wikipedia tells me they came out in the US in 1977; perhaps by 1984 they still hadn’t made their way to the UK) so I had to use paper, sellotape and scissors. That was how I learnt (from Mum) how to spell ceiling. She also corrected my spelling of droors for “drawers”. I thought it should logically be spelt like “doors”.
In Piața Operei on the way back there was a protest, only 30-strong, of people chanting “Călin Georgescu is president”. In Romanian, obviously. Georgescu was the guy who won the first round of presidential election in December 2024, before it was declared null and void. Romanian politics is typically dysfunctional at the moment. I can’t begin to understand it all.
In the changing room this morning I heard someone say that the outside temperature would be the same as in the pool. That was pretty accurate. We reached an unseasonable 27 degrees today. Tomorrow it’s forecast to be one degree warmer. Then it should drop to something approaching normal.
