by Maybe, just maybe, we’re now nearing the end of the pandemic for real. People here thought it was all over in the summer of 2020, and incredibly they thought the same a year later when it was blindingly obvious (given the pitiful vaccination rate) that more Romanians were yet to die from Covid than had already done so. Țara struților, I remember saying. Nation of ostriches. But the Omicron variant is acting as a like-it-or-not vaccine, so we could be entering the final lap of the Covid marathon. This morning my parents told me that New Zealand’s daily figure for infections had whopped up into the 800s, which will soon seem a tiny number, like on my graphs. It’s now in South Canterbury – there are a smattering of cases in Timaru. Right now, they know zero people who have caught Covid; that will soon change. (The majority of people I know in Romania have had it, at pretty much every level you could imagine, and in some cases twice. I’m fortunate not to know anybody who has died from it.) Perhaps this week it will show up in Geraldine, then the week after on their street. Thankfully both my parents are triple-jabbed, and with the possible exception of Dad’s blood tests, they could get by for a month without leaving the house if they really had to. They might just about have half a cow in their freezer.
On Friday I had coffee with the woman in her early fifties whom I had lessons with in 2018 before she moved to Austria. She’s now come back to Timișoara. She had Covid in November, during the Delta wave, and said she wasn’t at all concerned despite (or perhaps because) she hadn’t been vaccinated. The survival rate is 99%, she said, as if somehow live and die are the only two outcomes. Some of the survivors have been to hell and back. She was fine. Lucky her. Anyway, she suggested I ramp up my teaching by joining British School in some capacity. Perhaps I could even teach maths there, she said. That all conjured up images of stress on a stick. WhatsApp groups filled with angry parents who’ve paid an arm and a leg for their kids’ education. I want to get a flat sorted before even thinking of anything on those lines.
So, on to today. Mark, the teacher, had the bright idea (no sarcasm) of going on a bike ride. He asked me if there were any good options, so at eleven we met outside the cathedral and set off on the track that I’ve now been on dozens of times. I suggested we stopped at La Livada, a friendly-seeming restaurant next to an orchard (which is what livadă means). Mark had a well-used mountain bike. I warned him that my bike wasn’t capable of high speeds, and neither was my body. We got there before twelve and grabbed coffees before getting something to eat. We both had a ciorbă (Romanian thick soup) and papanași, an extremely yummy fried pudding. We just sat around and chatted for a while. We both liked the place so I’m sure we’ll be back there. There wasn’t as much wildlife on our journey as I might have expected, though on the way back we saw a kestrel. On our return, Mark told me I went much faster than he’s used to. That surprised me, because I don’t think I’m a particularly fast cyclist. It was probably just a case of staying at by-myself speed, when I should have slowed down to with-someone-else speed. I’ve often been told I walk too fast.
My Sunday evening lesson with the guy in London isn’t far away.
