by Like any other app or site whose main purpose is to connect with people, Tinder is a bit scary for me. Scary enough that I started scheduling time each day to ensure I’d actually use it. Monday: an hour of Romanian practice, then my lesson at nine, then coffee, then shopping, then Serbian study for an hour, then lunch, then an hour of Tinder before I prepared for my evening’s lessons. Only I didn’t last the whole hour because I got my first ever match which means we both liked each other, and then some chat thingy popped up on my screen. Uh, what happens now? She sent me a message, I replied, and we eventually agreed to meet at a café in the square on Tuesday evening after I’d finished work for the day.
Tuesday ended up being a pretty good day. In the morning I met up for coffee with a young couple who used to have boatloads of lessons with me, but worked over the summer. They’re about to start their final year at university. I met them at the same place I’d be meeting my Tinder match later in the day; that was a deliberate choice on my part. We had a lovely chat, speaking Romanian the whole time. I’m not sure if they’ll find the time to have any more lessons with me. After lunch I was off to Dumbrăvița for a lesson with my eleven-year-old, and when I arrived there all my lesson plans went out the window (that’s OK though; I can use them next week). My young student had a friend over to play Risk, or Risc as it is here, and they wanted to involve me. His friend was only ten, and almost entirely fluent in three languages: Romanian, French and English. I didn’t do a whole lot of teaching, and somehow got paid to play a board game with a couple of kids for two hours. They had some utterly bizarre house rules that I had an interesting time navigating. I won the first of our two games by sheer luck.
When I got home I had another lesson where I did my fortnightly fill-in-the-gaps lyrics game, this time with REM’s Losing My Religion, and then read and discussed an article on the obesity epidemic in the Western world, which I talked about last month on my blog. At eight it was time to meet my match. By five past, I wasn’t overly optimistic. She works in Corporateville, and when I told her how I make my living, her initial reaction seemed to be, what have we got here? As for her, she didn’t look quite the same as in her various selfies taken in exotic locations including Easter Island. But then everything, somehow, changed. We talked, half in English (hers is immaculate), half in Romanian, and we seemed to feel at ease with each other. When I told her that I shun social media and use a manual diary to organise my lessons, she called the hairy man opposite a hippie. I didn’t mind that one bit. We chatted for nearly two hours. We’re meeting again for coffee tomorrow morning.
