by I’m talking to my parents every day or two now. This morning Dad said he hoped I’d have a better time up the mountain than last time. I said that actually last time wasn’t bad, and then he reminded me of my hellish sinus pain, or migraine, whatever it was. It’s amazing how easily one can forget horrible experiences. I only have to read back over old blog entries.
So we’ll be setting off at seven tomorrow morning. If we don’t go this weekend, we probably won’t get another chance for a while. Part of me wishes I wasn’t going at all, but up a mountain honestly isn’t the worst place to be right now. And it will give me a break from the wall-to-wall grimness of news channels and websites.
In the last 60-odd hours, things have ramped up to the next level. Eerie is the best word I can use to describe the scenes here. All the trains and trams are still running to schedule, but the usual crowd at the nearby bus stop has depleted by about 80%. As for me, I have avoided public transport for the last three weeks. There are always old men playing games in Parcul Dacia. Always, whatever the weather. But there weren’t today. And neither were there in Central Park. And over large swathes of the world, life is gradually shutting down. This will be no ordinary spring and summer. If we’re lucky, only two grand slam tennis tournaments will bite the dust.
My lessons have taken a battering this week, but I managed four today: the brother and sister who live near Parcul Dacia (they were not enjoying their enforced break from school), then the lady who came here and immediately wiped down my desk, then the guy in the UK on Skype. As a listening exercise with the lady, I went through a 15-minute monologue that my dad had listened to on Radio New Zealand about a Romanian child who moved to NZ in around 2003 at the age of eleven. He talked poetically about the differences between NZ and his homeland, and quite movingly about his phone conversations with his very elderly grandmothers. Listening to that was the highlight of my day, and really an escape from everything else.
When I get back on Sunday afternoon or evening, we’ll have moved a further notch or two up the eeriness scale. My work is likely to be sparse. (I’m encouraging people to have Skype lessons if possible.) There are currently 86 confirmed cases in Romania (make that 88) of what most people seem to be calling simply “the virus”. I expect that figure to double in the next 48 hours. Meanwhile Italy has recorded 250 deaths in the last 24 hours alone. The projections I’ve seen for Romania – cases doubling every second day or so, with a 2% mortality rate – are sobering indeed.
