by A bad week on the teaching front was capped off by my trip to Strada Timiș yesterday. The 17-year-old girl was there but her little brother was elsewhere, and their mother hadn’t bothered to tell me. I helped my one student with her homework on bird and animal idioms (such as “to watch somebody like a hawk” and “the straw that broke the camel’s back”) and phrasal verbs. She had several sheets to get through, which consisted almost entirely of matching exercises. At times I gave her clues as to what the answer might be, but I could tell she was thinking, Just give me the bloody answer, would you? The more sheets we got through in 90 minutes, the fewer she’d have to do by herself. We get on well and our sessions are productive, but once again we were interrupted by regular dings and beeps from her phone. I told her she was obviously very popular. She said that those messages came from five social networks. She also made it clear that Instagram, not Facebook, is king among people born around the turn of the century. Of course Facebook own Instagram. They also own WhatsApp. At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if either Facebook or Google buy out Coca-Cola or Boeing.
S. Yes. She’s 33, five years younger than me. She works for a large multinational and is currently in the middle of a two-week business trip in Prague. She doesn’t eat meat. Last weekend I asked her how on earth she survives in mici-fuelled Timișoara as a vegetarian, but she assured me it isn’t actually that hard. Her English is almost entirely flawless; she’s developed an Irish-like accent with an appealing lilt. (In some ways her fantastic English is a pain. I want to improve my Romanian.) She isn’t sporty in any way (either playing or watching) but is into all the cultural stuff. She’s been all over the place but was born and bred in Timișoara, which by now she’s understandably fairly blasé about. We’ve been in contact every day since she’s been away.
Only 16 hours of work last week. That won’t cut it, unfortunately. That kind of volume neither brings in enough income nor gives me that pleasant feeling I get from being productive. For the coming week I’m a bit more optimistic – I could have two new students.
