I won’t be put off…

At the weekend I saw two Romanian movies, Bacalaureat and Sieranevada, as part of the film festival. They hardly showcased Romania’s natural beauty. In fact they could both put anyone off living over there. Sieranevada, which lasted nearly three hours, certainly put me off living in a seventies apartment block in Bucharest, not that I was ever planning to do that anyway. But they both provided a fascinating window on Romanian society: family, religion, politics, corruption, the clash between the modern and the traditional. Here’s a review of Sieranevada in the Guardian.  And here’s a very positive review of Bacalaureat from the same paper.

For a change last night I gave my student a crossword to solve. It was one I’d made myself, with pictures replacing the usual clues. Making even a small 9×9 crossword for a beginner-level student isn’t that easy, simply because your inventory of words is so heavily reduced. It’s very easy to end up in a situation where “abyss”, say, is the only word that fits, and that of course is hopeless. He’d clearly never attempted a crossword before (they wouldn’t work in his native language which doesn’t use an alphabet but rather an abugida) and at times trying to help him solve it was a painstaking exercise.

I’m flying to Timaru on Thursday morning to see my parents. We’ll go straight from the airport to their new(ish) house in Moeraki. When I spoke to them two nights ago they were still feeling the effects of jet lag.