by This morning I got the keys. After eight months or so of looking at apartments that mostly have views of other apartments, this bit has all happened at breakneck speed. As long as you’ve got the money, nobody cares. It really is just like buying a car. Or a shaorma. My brother was amazed when I told him how fast the process is here (in the UK it really drags on) and it was actually at least twice as quick as I told him it would be.
After getting the keys I called my parents and gave them a Skype tour of the flat on my phone. They were remarkably impressed, and not at all bored by my showing them every room in minute detail. At 81 square metres it’s plenty big enough for one person, and it’s amazingly well kitted out, right down to lime green cutlery that matches the kitchen cupboards. Initially I’ll have to buy very little. The only thing that’s semi-urgent, living-wise, is a new mattress on at least one of the two beds. My teaching room will require some thought and a little expense.
I panicked a bit last Wednesday when I tried to pay the vendor online and was met with a bewildering array of fields that I didn’t know how to fill in. I got to the bank when it opened the next morning, and the lady was so helpful. She even laughed at the bank account code – ROBU, which probably stands for Romanian Banks United or something, but is also the name of the ex-mayor of Timișoara. She really put my mind at ease. Sometimes nothing beats a real human being. I say sometimes, because in Romania there’s no guarantee that you’ll get that level of service; it was my lucky day.
A couple of work highlights of a very warm second week of May come to mind. First, I did a longish translation from Romanian to English that included a 105-word behemoth of a sentence. So much translation out of Romanian involves gutting crazy-long sentences. Second, I contacted Macmillan to see if they still had the audio of a lovely podcast interview from 2007 of somebody called Boris who does consultancy work but whose dream job is to be a clown. (I used it once before in a test that I created.) Alas, it had disappeared into the ether, but I was impressed by the Macmillan guy’s prompt reply.
Two singles tennis matches this weekend, both against Florin, the 60-year-old guy who comes from the Nadia Comăneci era when sport really mattered. Yesterday I won 6-4 6-3 – it was a rather scrappy match lacking many rallies but chock-full of service breaks, 13 of them in fact. That evening I went to the “boat” bar (or restaurant) by the river, with him, his wife and a friend. As well as some beers I had sarmale and mămăligă, about as Romanian a meal as you can get. Florin’s wife likes to talk about all matters linguistic, so we had a good conversation. Beautiful Romanian words came up like ogoit and prispă. It was nice to be totally within my comfort zone. (I suppose that doesn’t happen very often.) In today’s match with Florin, I dropped only two points in the first five games. I then led 6-1 2-0. But he hung in there, I started to wobble especially on serve, and I surrendered meekly towards the end of the set, losing it 6-4. I didn’t love my chances in set three, but I remembered all those times in about 2005 or ’06 that I came through matches like this, and after I eked out the early games he started to spray errors and I won the third set 6-0. Tennis is weird. Then, after we got off the court, it happened. I bumped into S, whom I met on Tinder in 2018. There was always a lot of her anyway, but now she’s seven months pregnant. “I’m practically a planet,” she said. With her obvious news, it was nice to have some of my own. Maybe we’ll meet up again. I might invite her to a housewarming, in which case I’d better remember that she’s vegetarian. (Not many of them in these parts.) S was with a friend, whose name I could tell began with an A because she was wearing a big “A” necklace. (I could also be pretty sure than it ended with an A, because just about all female names in Romania do, the only exception I can think of being Carmen.) Bumping into S for the first time since December 2019 reminded me of a lovely novel I read: Three Dollars by Elliott Perlman. The book is set in Melbourne in the eighties. At intervals of several years, the protagonist bumps into a woman called Amanda, and each time he only has three dollars to his name.
I’m writing this from the old place. The place with the bells going off 96 times a day. I’ll miss the bells; they’ve ruled my life for the last 5½ years.
