by It’s been quite a tiring week, with late finishes and constant shifting of gears. On Thursday night I finished at 11:30 – my student needed to prepare for his rather important presentation the next day, and I was happy to help him with the English for three hours, even if my eyes were glazing over at all the unfathomable jargon. In another lesson my student attempted a translation of a football match report (one of the local teams had lost 5-0) from Romanian to English. That’s a harder task that you might imagine. The woman in Spain wanted me to read part of the lovely journal that my friend had written when she and her husband came here in 2017, particularly the bit about the level of customer service – approximately zero – that she’d got at the tourist information centre. A married couple and I discussed cheating in exams, which is (no surprise, perhaps) brazen and rampant here. It goes without saying, almost. Phones, headsets, the works. People are amazed to hear that I never cheated in exams. Seriously, I never did it. Way too risky, way too stressful, and anyway most of that fancy tech didn’t exist back then. The same guy who said that his mate transmitted answers to him via Bluetooth in a university exam (the mind boggles) also said that he received a watch as a birthday present one time, but had to get rid of it because he hated the giver so much. I can’t imagine detesting someone to that extent. (My brother’s ex-fiancée bought me a shirt for Christmas eight years ago. She was a nasty piece of work. But I still have the shirt now.) And then once again I’ve been bombarded by steaming hot grade-A bullshit about the virus and the vaccines. Take the damn vaccine, people.
I had three 90-minute lessons yesterday (Saturday), including one with a very smart 17-year-old who is taking his advanced Cambridge exam (CAE) next weekend. I can sense the neurons connecting in his brain faster than mine could ever do. Or ever did. He loves talking very excitedly about gaming, and I never know how to respond. There’s a game that he’s really into with an X in its name that has characters called Turians and Salarians. (“Now there are Turians with armour!” I’m supposed to get really excited at this news.) A Turian to me sounds like a ponging spiky fruit, while a Salarian makes me think of an overworked Japanese man in danger of karoshi. He says he finds the game educational because it teaches him about ancient civilisations, and I can believe that. I’m so out of the loop though. Computer games aren’t just something to pass the time on a wet afternoon. They’re serious business, worthy of serious expense on serious-looking keyboards and memory-foam chairs. (I’ve just checked. The game is called Mass Effect. There’s no X in the name after all.)
Things have hotted up. A week ago we barely got above freezing during the day, but yesterday we hit a spring-like 16. In between my three lessons I managed to squeeze in some tennis. After we finished the last set, the woman I partnered said I’d played “like a lion”. That’s the first time anyone has likened me to a lion, on or off the tennis court. It was a bit of recency bias, I think, because I played well at the end of our final set. We led 3-2 in that set (against two men), but lost the next two games, including on my serve, to fall behind. But then I played solidly and aggressively (is that lion-like?) in the final three games as we won 6-4. I struggled earlier in the session because the wind was howling – it was like being back in Wellington – and my game relies heavily on placement. It was a sunny afternoon, with a four-engined plane carving its path through the blue sky. After finishing our game I saw a large fat-bodied spider scuttling across the court, a species I hadn’t seen before. Last Sunday I played four sets of two-against-one (American doubles, I think they call it) with a man and a woman. In the first and last of those, I played as the one, and the stakes really do increase when you’re out there on your own. I did fine, winning both those sets, though the surface was slippery and my footwear wasn’t up to the job.
Parliamentary elections are taking place today in Romania. It already looks like there will be a low turnout, which will probably help the PSD, who are almost universally despised among the people I talk to. (After the PSD won the elections four years ago and pardoned dozens of corrupt politicians and other officials, people took to the streets. It was extraordinary to see. I wrote about it on this blog.)
I’ll have to decide what to do with this money that I thought I would never get. That almost certainly means buying property, but I don’t feel interested enough in the whole subject to make an informed decision.
