by I had absolutely no idea David Bowie was so ill, so I was shocked and saddened to hear that he had died of liver cancer at the age of 69. Most rock stars don’t really appeal to me as people: stardom is a long way from anything I’ve ever aspired to. But Bowie is an exception; I wouldn’t have minded at all being him. He was always reinventing himself, visually as much as in his music (who was your favourite David Bowie?), and he must have had a helluva lot of fun doing that, but he also seemed a thoroughly nice bloke. My dad told me that his first TV appearance in 1964 at the age of 17 caused quite a stir, mainly because his hair was a bit long. That would be laughable now. So Bowie was lucky I guess that he was around in a time when you could still make an impact.
On Tuesday I looked for articles about David Bowie on Romanian websites. I printed off three. The first two articles gave you the facts and figures: that he died after an 18-month battle with cancer, that his career spanned 50 years, and that his latest album, Blackstar, was released on his birthday two days before he died. I didn’t have too much problem understanding them. But the third article was on a different plane entirely; the author told us how, as a very emotional 20-year-old student, he was affected by Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, and similarly how he felt when Freddie Mercury died three years earlier. In comparing those experiences to hearing of Bowie’s death, he used a lot of flowery language and complex constructions that left me all at sea, even with the aid of Google Translate (which, admittedly, is some way short of perfect). I’ve got a long, long way to go in learning this language.
To improve my listening skills I’ve taken to watching the Romanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on YouTube. It’s great for a whole raft of reasons. The questions and possible answers appear on the screen, so you can try and figure out what the question means (and sometimes attempt to answer it), or you can pause the video and look a word up. The contestant often spends considerable time on a particular question; that’s to my advantage too. The same phrases come up all the time: “are you sure?”, “final answer”, “phone a friend” (which is “sună un prieten“; they annoyingly call the 50:50 lifeline “fifty-fifty”) and so on, so I try and pick them out. Amounts of money of course come up regularly, and I can now pick out stuff like “Marius is 36 years old and he’s a lawyer from Bucharest.” You learn quite a lot about Romanian culture from watching it too; questions on sport are far rarer than in the UK (and certainly the Aussie) version, while questions on art and the Bible are far more common. One particular question from the last programme I watched was about monkeys (maimuțe). Which of these monkeys doesn’t exist: vervet, owl, spider or rabbit? The contestant (who did well in the end) used two lifelines on that question, and I could tell that he and the host were making jokes about monkeys throughout the rest of the game, but I was nowhere near being able to understand the jokes.
Talking of monkeys, it will soon be Chinese New Year: the Year of the Monkey (anul maimuței – to say “of something”, instead of using the word for of you change the ending of the something). I’m a Monkey, born in 1980, and here’s hoping that this will be my lucky year. Pity my poor brother: he’s a Cock. (Outside Chinese culture most people aren’t going to know the full zodiac – I don’t think I do – so it would be fun to think up an animal at random and say that you’re the Year of the Alligator or something, and see if you get away with it.)
