by Three years ago today I was living in a loft on the other side of the river, trying to find somewhere more permanent. I remember it being a good deal colder than today. Things had become quite urgent, and I was struggling to make headway through a forest of dodgy agents. Christmas was just around the corner and that only made things harder. I was forced to make phone calls in a language I could hardly speak at all, and some of the apartments I looked at weren’t even finished. Had I been ten years younger I might have just taken the first thing I saw. I particularly remember the main website I used, where apartments were advertised as having 2 or 3 or 4 camere, meaning rooms, or specifically rooms for living and sleeping in, not bathrooms or kitchens. Some places said they had “O cameră”, which I honestly thought meant “zero rooms”, i.e. some sort of storage space. It took me days for the penny to drop: “O” was the Romanian feminine indefinite article, meaning one, not zero. That seems really silly now, but anything seemed possible then, even flats with no livable rooms.
On the other hand, I had a new city to explore, I’d found somebody to play tennis with, and I was even starting to get the odd lesson here or there. It was through one of my very early students (who responded to one of my ads featuring President-elect Donald Trump) that I found the place I’m writing this from. I was extremely fortunate. The chances that I ended up right here must have been pretty slim.
After my last blog post, where I put the chances of a hung parliament in next week’s UK election at roughly one in three, I’ll now revise that downwards to 20-25%. A few more days have passed, the polls haven’t really changed, and the passing of time leads to greater certainty.
I didn’t mention the Romanian presidential election in which Klaus Iohannis was re-elected by a hefty margin of about two to one. My students were happy with this, and I took that as a good sign. Plus he appears to me to be cool, calm and collected, and he’s somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. I found the map of Romania showing the results by county to be particularly illuminating. In Timiș, Iohannis topped 75%. In Cluj he was in the eighties. But in the south where people are poorer and less educated, Viorica Dăncilă was either roughly equal or in some cases ahead.
On Tuesday I finally got my hair cut, and a good conversation in Romanian. (My hairdresser could speak some English – he’d spent some time in the UK – but no thanks.)
Sunday was Romania’s national day and the square was packed. I tried some mulled wine and it put me to sleep. The fireworks were set off from the park that reopened in August, so I got a ringside seat from my window. Here are some photos.
