by One hundred years ago today, Timișoara (and the region of Banat, or most of it) became part of Romania. Before that, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I have a map of modern-day Romania on my wall; yesterday my student of about 25 explained to me what bits used to go where, and when. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well young Romanians know their history.
Yesterday a concert started up in the square to mark the centenary. Last night Phoenix (a well-known band from Timișoara who formed the same year as the Beatles (!) and whose music I like) played in the teeming rain. I didn’t even think about going to bed until they wrapped things up at midnight; it was pretty loud. It’s currently 10:30 in the morning and it’s been tipping it down the whole time.
In the last 36 hours I haven’t been feeling great (sore throat, stomachache and general lack of energy), and yesterday was a dead loss apart from the three lessons I had, two face-to-face at home and one on Skype. I didn’t have to go out, thankfully.
If my student couple hadn’t run into financial difficulties, I’d have been jetting off to Greece with them (and hordes of other Romanians) today. That wasn’t to be. Instead I’ll be pushing off on my own, a week on Monday. I’ll get the bus to Belgrade, stay two nights there, and then take the train to Bar, on the coast of Montenegro, where I’ll stay three nights. That train trip is a 12-hour journey through the mountains and literally hundreds of tunnels. It should be spectacular. To reserve a seat on the train, I had to contact a Mr Popović, who booked me a first-class ticket, for the same price (only €24) as a second-class one. He told me that it was a kind of promotion, to encourage people to use the service. After Bar I don’t know what I’ll do. Perhaps I’ll take the train to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, and from there go up through Bosnia and somehow back through Serbia to Timișoara. That will certainly involve buses, which are never as comfortable or as much fun as trains.
In my lessons I often ask people about their holidays and travel experiences. I always ask them to state their favourite means of travel. With the exception of a boy who said he found flying scary, they almost all show a preference for travelling by plane. It’s almost a case of, “Well, when I go on holiday, I like to travel more than a couple of hundred miles, and the only sensible way to do that is to fly. I mean, duh!” I find flying, short-haul flying in particular, to be quite stressful, and distinctly un-fun. Saying that, you couldn’t beat Wellington to Timaru on a sunny day.
On Tuesday I joined a Skype meeting of owners in our apartment block. People are full steam ahead when it comes to selling. All the talk, amongst the annoying meetingese (piss off with your “quantum” and “I’ll talk to that”) was about solicitors and conveyancing and whether we’d be happy to sell for x or y million, figures that I can only get a handle on when I calculate what I’d get for my apartment alone. (One owner, who wasn’t in the meeting, said he would sell for one dollar.) In the absolute best case scenario, I’d get back half what I bought it for, ignoring all the interest I’ve also paid. But this is almost beside the point. People have just accepted their fate, and I think they’re all mad. I can see it now. We sell. Great. We lose a ton of money but we can all get on with our lives. The developer has, in theory, six or seven years to do something with the mess they’ve inherited before it has to be razed to the ground, but as D-day approaches, they and various other developers across the city are granted an extension, then a second, then a third, and in the end they won’t have to do anything.
Oh, I’ve been trying to learn Serbian again, after dabbling with it a year ago. I might write my next post about that.
