by Yesterday I had coffee with one of my ex-students, who now lives in Vienna but is in Timișoara for three weeks. (She never really needed me. She was almost entirely fluent.) She told me, insistently, that given my potential I shouldn’t still be giving lessons to people in ones and twos. I need to be doing more. But do I? We discussed my book idea, and she said she could help me with the Romanian translations, so it could have legs. Last week I had half a dozen cancellations – a frustrating number – but I’ve got a busy schedule for the start of the coming week.
This morning I had a Skype chat with a friend who lives in Auckland. I promised him a zoomed-in version of a new mural (or Muriel, as he called it) I posted a couple of weeks ago. So here she is in full:
Timișoara is a pretty good place to see Muriels, and weddings too, for that matter.
Today it was foggy all day. I went to the mall to see the film about Maria, who was Romania’s queen, but it had sold out. The mall keeps expanding. They don’t even call it a mall anymore: Iulius Mall has morphed into Iulius Town, which contains a park – built at great expense, and for now in immaculate condition, with endless piped music – that reminds me of Singapore. One of my students told me that the centre of gravity of this city is changing. Even when I arrived, the central area where I live was the centre, but it will soon be at just one corner of a Bermuda triangle, with the mall, sorry, town, and a big multi-storey housing development forming the other two vertices.
