by Forty. I’ve made it. I’ve had a fairly busy day of birthday phone calls with people in New Zealand and the UK, mixed in with a pair of lessons. I even got a knock on the door from the chap on the sixth floor – he handed me what looked like homegrown apples, some sarmale and more pască. Bizarrely, he also gave me a pair of trousers that he said were too big for him.
After last night and this long weekend in general, it’s pretty clear that Orthodox Easter is a really big deal for Romanians, and something that they find hard to let go of, lockdown or not. Older Romanians, even more so. I’ve had eighty Easters goddammit, and I’m gonna have my Easter even if kills me. Last night they told me that grocery shopping is a three-hour round trip from them. I’ll do it for you in a fraction of the time, I said. But they didn’t trust me to get “the right stuff”. I trotted off to the supermarket this morning, masked and gloved, but it was closed for Easter Monday.
I can make no complaints about the weather for my lockdown birthday, a day when US oil prices dropped below zero. They are paying you to take it away. Oh, and I just tried on those trousers, for a bit of a laugh. They’re enormous, and far too short.
