by Exciting news. I’m going to be experiencing, for the first time, a Romanian Christmas. Sarmale. Cozonac. I really don’t know what to expect, but it should be fun no matter what. One of my ex-students invited me to have dinner with her family, once I’d told her that I’d otherwise by spending the day on my own. And best of all, I should get to speak plenty of Romanian.
In the last week Timișoara and Romania have been marking thirty years of freedom from communism. Millions of older Romanians would prefer to be unfree. When I first came here, I thought these people (who were in far greater numbers than I’d imagined) must be mad. Totally barking. But little by little, it’s begun to make sense. The biggest difference to most people’s lives since 1989 has been the ability to consume more pointless shit more easily, while becoming less and less connected to one another. Life under communism wasn’t exactly a ball for most people, but it was probably less shallow than it is now. Earlier this evening I had a lesson with a bloke just three days older than me. He talked about how special his pre-revolution Christmases seemed compared to the hyper-commercialised ones we know today – of course I don’t know how much of that is down to lack of commercialism and how much is because he was at most nine years old.
I took the tram to the mall (eughh!) this morning. It was a grey, drizzly, English morning, but extremely mild for the time of year. (I’ve just looked back at my posts from 2016. It was brass monkeys back then.) Every time I take the tram I notice a new shop or some other edifice designed with the purpose of facilitating the consumption of unnecessary crap. Today it was a corner shop on Strada Victor Hugo. I’m sure I had a coffee from there one time in the summer of 2017 when I was traipsing up and down streets putting flyers in people’s letterboxes, but then it didn’t have a big shiny sign in English: “Be smart, buy quality”. I’ve learnt not to trust anything that describes itself as smart. At the mall I bought hardly anything Christmassy and instead grabbed a load of files and other stationery. At the cheese counter I simply gave up, and I later got my block of sheep’s cheese from the old lady at the market.
My steady stream of lessons has predictably slowed to a trickle, and I’m fine with that. I’ve been using the extra time to beef up my Romanian language skills. A useful resource to improve my listening are podcasts, and I’ve recently found a regular podcast called Pe Bune, where famous and semi-famous Romanians from the film, theatre, music or art world are given interviews lasting nearly an hour. The best thing is that the transcript is available.
Outside I can hear drums banging, whistles peeping and trumpets tooting. It must be Christmas time in Romania.
