by On Wednesday I went back to the hotel I started off in. I didn’t know whether the manager, the boss, really wanted to see me again. I can’t quite make her out. The rooms here have names, not numbers. She said my room was called something like Dali or Dally and was on the first floor. I found an empty room called Darling (of all things) with the key in its lock, and even saw a map showing no other rooms beginning with D. It must have just been her accent (her mother tongue is Hungarian). I piled my junk into the Darling room and went back downstairs. I was told to be careful with the skylight. Skylight? It turned out there was a Dali room, not far from Darling, but the map only showed a few rooms. (Room numbers are a great idea, aren’t they? Big businesses, especially really unfriendly ones, love to name their rooms. One company I worked for had ghastly names like the Synergy Room. Even after years, people still couldn’t remember that the Synergy Room was the second room past the lift on the fourth floor. If they’d just called it 4B, which is a much nicer name anyway, life would have been easier for everybody.) So I had to swiftly move all my stuff, some of which I’d already unpacked, from Darling to Dali. I certainly couldn’t dally. The Dali room, where I’ll be staying until 2nd December, is bigger than I feared it might be, but doesn’t have the facilities I was promised (I need to ask about that). It does have a TV however.
On Tuesday I visited six language schools in the city. I received a very positive response from the first one. They currently have no native English speakers among their staff, and before they’d even looked at my CV, they wanted me to run conversation classes with their advanced students. I sat down with two of their senior staff for 45 minutes. They want me to promote myself, and to be honest that’s not something that comes easy to me. I also received advice about accommodation in Timișoara. It seems I’m better off using Airbnb instead of renting an apartment where I’d likely face a 25% price hike as soon as I open my mouth. All in all, things sounded promising.
Sometimes, when I’m buttering bread with my penknife or finding somewhere to put the soap so it won’t slide off, I wonder why the hell I’m doing all of this. But then I think I could be in some god-awful meeting in the Synergy Room.
