by My birthday – another one – was on Wednesday. It was just a normal day for me; I didn’t even see anybody face-to-face except when I looked at yet another apartment. (That decision isn’t getting any easier. I’m glad it’s now the long Orthodox Easter weekend, so agents are unlikely to hassle me for a few days.)
Yesterday I had my last lesson with a 16-year-old girl. Her mother had contacted me the day before to say that it would be the last one. We’d had some good and productive sessions in the last few months, so seeing the clock tick down on our final meeting was rather sad.
The weekend before last, I went to Lake Surduc with Mark (the teacher) and his dog (or really his girlfriend’s dog). It’s funny how I see him quite often but haven’t seen his girlfriend since around Christmas. She probably doesn’t like me. I can imagine their conversations. “I suppose you’ll be seeing your mate this weekend, then.” “I might do.” “God, he’s so boring!” “He isn’t really. And you don’t exactly like trudging through mud, do you?” Maybe she’s just very conscientious and spends her Sundays making lesson plans for the following week like my mother used to do. Anyway, Surduc is about an hour’s drive away. I’d been there once before, when my friends from St Ives came over in 2017, but we didn’t stop apart from to ask locals if there was any nearby accommodation. This time they’d clearly had a deluge of rain overnight – it was extremely muddy. There was no path around the lake, so you had to clamber through the adjoining wood. There were plenty of ups and downs. We passed shepherds on their small farms, and at one point we were met by six menacing dogs that had come from the farm below. On the shore of the lake we saw dozens of four-pointed (tetrahedral) seed pods that looked like medieval weapons. These came from water chestnut trees. We also saw some rather large shells. I had to cycle to his place in Dumbrăvița and back, and I later played two sets of tennis, so I managed to burn off some calories that day.
Today is Orthodox Good Friday, or as they call it here, Vinerea Mare (“Big Friday”). I’ve just had a lesson with a lady in Bucharest, and I’m about to try and make a Romanian-style marble cake, following a video on Youtube (in Romanian) that has had ten million views. Easter is a much bigger deal here than in most of the English-speaking world, and it seems relatively free of commercialisation. It’s a family occasion, with a lot of traditional food. It’s the only time of year that Romanians normally eat lamb – as well as roasting the meat, they use the innards to make drob, a kind of loaf that also has an egg inside. There’s the usual sarmale and salată de boeuf, then for dessert they have various cakes including pască, which is made with sweet cheese.
After a nice run of final tables (but no wins, dammit) I withdrew $1375 from my PokerStars account. Of course I didn’t quite get all of that because they hit you with a withdrawal fee and an exchange rate margin that adds up to nearly 5% (or at least it did in my case). I’ve now got $719 sitting in my account. Maybe I should have withdrawn the whole lot and ended this unproductive distraction for good, but the SCOOP tournament series is coming up soon, so I thought I’d at least try my hand at that.
This was the scene outside my window last night, following a screech of tyres and metal. I don’t think anyone was badly hurt.
