by Bogdan, the guy on the second floor, just phoned me to ask if I wanted to join him at a bar on the riverbank. He said there was live music. I would have joined him but I have a Skype lesson soon. Hopefully we can meet tomorrow.
The coronavirus case numbers aren’t looking great in Romania – more than 300 new cases on each of the last three days – but people I talk to seem to be living in a parallel universe. “Social distancing is nonsense,” the father of one of my younger students told me yesterday. We still have very few cases here in Timiș, but the return of all those ambulance sirens I heard in April feels inevitable, sadly. But this time with the lid off.
My parents have a friend of sorts who has just flown from Christchurch to Arizona, where he grew up. Imagine voluntarily going to Arizona at the moment – they’ve got terrifying Covid numbers. What’s more, he’s over 70, he’s overweight and he’s got type II diabetes. His wife has stayed home; she might never see him again.
In my list of Timișoara smells in my last post, I didn’t mention mici. In the summer, the smell of those pieces of pork sizzling on a barbecue (grătar) permeates the city, and probably the whole of Romania. From time to time (not where I live, thankfully, but on other arterial roads in the city), you also get the dreadful pong of what will become mici. Pig crates. Even when they’ve rattled by and are well in the distance, the stench from the pigs, or rather their ordure, still lingers.
Family has seemed more important than ever, now that we can’t see each other, and Dad has been sending me family pictures from when I was a kid. My favourite so far is from the time we lived in Temuka in 1989-90 and Dad’s parents came out to see us. All four of my grandparents are in the picture, along with Mum, my brother, me and our cousin (she’s between me and my brother in age). My brother had Grandad’s hat on – he liked to wear it. Other highlights are my brother sitting on a tractor on my uncle’s farm on the West Coast, and one from even further back (December 1986) when we stopped off in New Caledonia on the way from the UK to New Zealand – my brother and I looked unbelievably tired.
