by A quickish update from me, on a beautiful cloudless Christmas Eve in Timișoara. It’s good to see the sun again after four or five cold, grey and foggy days. I heard that it reached an utterly ridiculous 29 degrees in Wellington on Friday.
I’ve been very lucky not to lose out on lessons due to illness all year, but right now I’ve got a nasty cold. I’m hacking up green and yellow gunk. Living on my own has numerous advantages for me, but when I get sick I kind of think, yeah, I wouldn’t mind having just a little human contact. So I pressed ahead with my lessons on Friday and yesterday – just one each day, thankfully, and I didn’t have to leave the house on either occasion. Had I been in any of my old office jobs, I wouldn’t have thought twice about taking a sick day. I am slowly improving: on Friday I felt so weak that I struggled to put one foot in front of the other.
It’s been great to see all the Romanian Christmas traditions from the vantage point of my apartment and the square (I moved in a few days too late to see last year’s festivities), and it would be rather nice to actually involve myself in them one time, but it’s hard to make that happen without a family connection. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a girlfriend in 2018. I can but dream.
Yesterday’s students, who will be moving to Austria next month but still hope to keep up their English lessons via Skype, bought me some beautifully presented chocolatey bits and pieces, along with a book: 27 de Pași (27 Feet), the autobiography of a Romanian ultra-marathon runner who had a rather colourful life before that. So with a Romanian book, some Scrabble, and all the sugary food I now have, I should be sorted for Christmas. I also have plenty of alcohol, but with the way I am right now, I’ll leave that alone.
After a bit of a break I played seven games of Scrabble yesterday, losing five, even though I outscored my opponents by 50 points overall and slapped down twelve bingos to their seven. My only wins came against players rated significantly lower than me, so my rating took a bit of a hit. In golf parlance, my long game is fine but my short game could do with some work.
I called my brother on Friday night, even though (or maybe because) I felt like crap. He wanted to talk about the wedding. He still resents his aunt and uncle, who have had zero contact with him in the last twenty years, inviting themselves, and I don’t blame him one bit for feeling that way. He’ll be spending Christmas with his fiancée’s family.
