by In the last few days we’ve had a weird combination of icy gales of Wellington proportions, and beautiful cloudless spring-like weather. In a recent lesson we discussed the topic of travel while a plane carved a four-pronged vapour trail across the blue sky. I told my student it was probably an Emirates A380 like the one my parents hope to take when they visit Europe in May. I say hope because my father still hasn’t had the “answer” to the blood in his urine, and there’s also the small chance that the coronavirus will put the kibosh on international air travel entirely.
Yesterday I met my ex-student who lives in Austria but is back in Timișoara for two weeks. I also met her friends, an English couple of about my parents’ age who have lived in Romania since the late nineties and in Timișoara since 2001. This was my first-ever encounter with British residents of this city. My former student thinks it would be good to run English coffee evenings or something along those lines. A good idea, but wouldn’t it really fly in my apartment – there just isn’t enough space. So I’d need to hire a room somewhere and … everything would get complicated. Lack of complications is one of the best things about my job, and I’d like to keep it that way. The book idea of mine though, that’s something I still want to pursue. I had quite a long chat with the guy, and realising he could speak Romanian at an OK level but with a strong British accent – his vowels were waaay off – made me feel a bit better about my attempts at ă and î.
America. What a joke their so-called democracy is. They don’t even allow witnesses at the Trump impeachment trial (seriously?), and then at the Iowa caucuses (which are stupidly undemocratic anyway) they don’t seem to even care about counting the votes properly. Things are going backwards there – even human life expectancy is – and again nobody in authority really cares as long as their team is winning. Yesterday my dad described the potential Democratic nominees as a bunch of has-beens. Yep. Of the six candidates with a realistic chance, four are over 70 and three aren’t far off 80. Pete Buttigieg (37) is the big exception, but he might struggle to expand his base due to his lack of experience and, um, gayness (sadly; I know it’s 2020). Please, please, please, not Michael Bloomberg. If you’re going to vote for this megalithic media magnate you might as well vote for Trump.
