by Doing the Wordle has now become an early-morning ritual for me. Although the game is hosted on a .co.uk site, today’s one was an American spelling. I see American spellings pretty often without batting an eyelid, but I don’t immediately think of them, so it was a challenge today. I was happy to get the word on my fourth attempt after deliberating for ages. What could it possibly be? The best part about Wordle for me is that I can use it as a teaching tool. When you’re sometimes giving hundreds of lessons to the same person, you can never have too many tools. The Romanian version is also great for me because it gets me to think about words differently. For instance, last week COAJA was one of the answers. Coajă means the skin of a fruit, or the shell of a nut or an egg. I could lump that together with coadă (a tail, or a queue) and coamă (a ridge, or a mane), so that those three words no longer took up three separate spaces in my brain. (Edit: there’s also coasă, which is a scythe, and coală, a scrap of paper, to complete a quintet.) Yesterday’s answer, by the way was SOFER. The French word chauffeur was borrowed into Romanian as șofer, and like in French it just means driver, without the added swank that comes with it in English. It’s funny how a nine-letter French word became a five-letter Wordle-valid Romanian word.
Today is a fairly big day for me, because I’ll get to look at two, maybe three, perhaps even four flats. I don’t even know which they will be – not for the first time, I’ll meet the agent outside a pizza place and go from there. Most the ones I’ve seen so far have merged into one big amorphous blob. At Mum’s suggestion I’ll go around with a checklist for each flat: sunlight, noise, wiring, security, furniture (that’s usually included), too open-spacey?, does it have a balcony?, parking, and so on and so forth. I really want to make some progress here, but I feel I’ve got two big handicaps. The biggest is that I’m on my own. Nobody to bounce ideas off or to tell me that the flat I’m eyeing up is ideal or utterly ludicrous. The other is that when it comes to home interiors, I’m colourblind, shape-blind, everything-blind.
Actually one of the places I looked at last week seemed pretty decent. This one was being sold directly by the owners, without an agent. That isn’t uncommon here. I met the owners, a very pleasant couple in perhaps their late sixties, who showed me around. The man first asked me whether my hair was natural or if I dyed it that colour. You seem young, he said. I was wearing a beanie (with my grey hair flopping out of it) and carrying a backpack. After I removed all of that, he could see I wasn’t that young after all. Once I’d been through all the rooms, I told them that I was a private English teacher and needed a room for work. The lady then said, well that explains why you have an accent. An accent? That’s one of the greatest compliments on my Romanian that I’ve ever received. I liked the area, and the flat was fine, if maybe a little overpriced. I really don’t know though.
On Monday I bought a fruit I hadn’t seen before – a nectarcot, a cross between a nectarine and an apricot (but apricot-sized). It tasted pretty good.
In my next post I’ll say how I got on today.
