by Thirty-six hours of teaching last week. That’s almost a whole page of lessons in my notebook, and it’s getting to be a problem. A nice problem, but a problem nonetheless. I need a day off occasionally. Time for myself. Time to sit in the square and have a coffee. Time to be served by that complete lunatic in the funny bar next to the market. Time to not have to think about time all the time. I see people fishing on the Bega and it all looks wonderfully relaxing. I’d like to take up fishing, but right now I know next to nothing about it.
For some unknown reason Ryanair have decided to close their Timișoara base as from 25th March, cancelling both sets of flights I’d booked to and from the UK (in early April and for my brother’s wedding in late May) in the process. My aunt and uncle from New Zealand were also booked on the flight from Stansted to Timișoara on 28th May. We’ve since rebooked all our flights with Wizz Air, going to and from Luton rather than Stansted. What a pain.
“Welcome to Romania. Please turn your clocks back fifty years.” Not if the availability of Bitcoin is anything to go by. The currency of the future is readily available in machines dotted around the city. So is Ether, another cryptocurrency. I had a play with one of the machines which had 2.5 Bitcoins available. How many would you like? Hmmm, 2.5? That’ll be 80-odd thousand lei, please. Ah. I’ve probably missed the boat there.
For a minute there I thought I’d dodged winter pretty much entirely, but we’re now in the grip of an icy blast. It is cold! The next day with a non-negative expected high is Friday.
Three games of Scrabble today. My first was a loss on an extremely tight board that I’d prefer to forget (I had a tiny lead but went into overtime, costing me ten points, and forfeited the game a minute later after failing to find an elusive out play). I then had a close game, clinging on a bit in the end to win by 17. In my last game I managed to play my first nine-letter bingo on ISC: UNrESTING, a double-double through ES for 86 points. I won that game by 56.
