by I’ve got a cold, and it’s bad enough that I’d have taken sick days in my previous life, but in my current incarnation I can sort of just muddle along unless I’m really sick. In fact, work helps matters. Yesterday I had four lessons, including one on the seventh floor of an apartment block on Strada Timiș in the Dacia area of the city, with the boy of nearly nine whose big sister I recently started with. To begin with I wasn’t optimistic – he was rolling around on the sofa in the living room, saying he didn’t want to do it, exhibiting (when I think about it) the sort of behaviour you sometimes see in autistic kids. But it turned out he was a fairly standard kid who liked basketball and pizza and Fortnite and Roblox, whatever the hell those last two are. He’s close to bilingual – Romanian and German – and sometimes he’d throw me by slipping in a few German words. The first lesson is always tough because you never know what they know, or whether they might decide they just hate you, but we only had an hour and I muddled along.
On Saturday I had my second lesson with his older sister, but it was more therapy than anything educational. She talked, at some length, about the difficult three months she recently spent in a school in Vienna. Her stories reminded me of the time I spent at that school in Temuka at a much younger age. All my reading and grammar exercises swiftly went out the window, and before I knew it our 90 minutes were up. From there I walked to Mehala market to look for a bike, and found an old green single-speed German one, probably dating from the late seventies or early eighties. It seemed in good nick. Pretty cool, I thought. I bought it for 250 lei and have already found it way more fun than my mountain bike. It’s also a good deal more practical – and faster – when I just want to get around an almost flat city. It only has a front brake and that will take a little getting used to.
On Friday I met my Tinder friend (from now on I’ll just call her X) and a café on one of the side streets off Piața Libertății. It wasn’t my kind of place – it had English signs everywhere and I usually avoid those kinds of places like the plague. I bought a flat white (only those kinds of places offer that) and when I was about to put sugar in it the barista stopped me in my tracks. You need to taste it first! I was given a piece of paper showing the origin of the beans: Cajamarca in Peru, which happens to be a place that featured in a lesson early this year and would be incredible to visit. Anyway we chatted, mostly in English this time, and she invited me to a board games session on Sunday evening at the apartment of her brother and his wife.
I was kind of looking forward to the board games night, because how scary can board games be? But the answer to that is actually quite scary when you’re playing with frequent gamers who even speak a different language to me. They did speak good English, but that was more of a hindrance than a help I think. We played Ticket to Ride, which I’d played years ago in Wellington, just twice if memory serves, and the mechanics of the game had long been forgotten. I took what to them must have seemed an eternity over my moves. “Oh, it’s my turn again. How did it come round so fast?” My strategy was far from optimal. After that we played two rounds of some head-messing Monty Python-themed game, one of which I won without even realising it. X’s brother and sister-in-law lived in a new apartment block in the south of the city, and their flat gave off a whiff of sophistication. Even modern-style board games are the domain of a certain type of person; by Romanian standards they’re expensive for a start. X’s sister-in-law had a habit of dropping English words into Romanian sentences, perhaps to sound sophisticated. I found that bloody annoying, I must say. Interestingly there were a lot of homemade alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, some of which I tried, as well as hand-knitted bits and pieces dotted around the place. Next time I go there, if there is a next time, I hope I’ll be a bit more relaxed. The experience did however make me a bit nervous about ever showing X my place.
After an incredible Indian summer, autumn is well and truly here now.
