by Four lessons today. Soon that might count as an easy day – my hours keep climbing. This morning I had a lesson with the guy in Brașov who lived for a time in Coventry. We talked positively about the UK government’s plans to ban new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030. I’m not exactly a huge fan of the current British government – they’ve mishandled the pandemic terribly and are still pissing about with Brexit as the country careens off a cliff – but credit when it’s due. After that I worked on the book. Last night the Romanian teacher got back in touch with me, and had nice things to say about the picture of Dad’s that I showed her, so that gave me a bit more impetus. I then went for a walk along by the river – today was sunny, and according to the forecast it’ll be the last day before winter sets in.
When I got back I made dinner, knowing I wouldn’t have time otherwise, then back to lessons. My hour with the 11-year-old girl went much better than it did last week. Then I had a two-hour session with a 13-year-old boy. In the last half-hour he wanted to watch a documentary, with English subtitles, on Netflix. We started off watching Behind the Curve which was about flat-earthers, but after two minutes he couldn’t handle the preposterousness of it any longer. I was happy with that – I’d already seen a documentary on the same subject – and I suggested we watched David Attenborough’s A life on Our Planet, which started off, poignantly, from the site of the Chernobyl disaster (itself the subject of a great documentary series). My student told me that the two greatest crises facing the planet are capitalism and pollution, in that order. They’re heavily interlinked, I said. When I was his age I didn’t know what capitalism even was.
Finally I had my 90-minute session with the 18-year-old Trump fan. First I told him that he needed to pay me for eight lessons, forgetting that he’d already paid me for the first two, which were face-to-face. I soon apologised, feeling like a right wally. With the Trump stuff and this, he probably hates me now, I thought. We went through an IELTS listening test. It became apparent that, like most of my students, he struggles with the English alphabet. I spelt out the word Adelaide and asked him to type it in the chat, but he was drowning in a sea of As, Es and Is. He even chucked in a Y for good measure.
The coronavirus picture in Romania is hardly great, but it’s less bleak than two weeks ago. We’re no longer experiencing exponential growth in cases. Timișoara might escape a full-on lockdown (and might not, too). A pared-down version of the Christmas market might still happen (and might not, too). Ditto the parades for Romania’s national day on 1st December.
On Tuesday’s edition of Musicorama (the local radio station’s brilliant music programme) they played The New OK, a new song by the American country rock band Drive-By Truckers. The video shows footage from the protests in Portland over the summer. I also like another new song of theirs, called 21st Century USA. As far as Americana goes, I’ve continued to watch Vlogs about small-town (mostly abandoned) America from the guy who calls himself Adam the Woo.
