This really is my new home

I’ve finally found a place to live. What a relief. It’s on the corner of Piața Victoriei, right next to the city hall and with a close-up view of the Orthodox Cathedral, probably Timișoara’s most recognisable landmark. It’s a dream location, perfect for teaching and, well, everything. The apartment is on the third floor of a massive eight-storey block; it measures 50 square metres. I’ve been given a six-month contract (which is perfect at this stage) starting on 1st January. Finding a student who happened to work for a real estate agency was an enormous stroke of luck for me, and she only contacted me for lessons because one of her friends had posted a picture of my Donald Trump ad on Facebook. Yesterday I visited the agency to sign the contract and pay one month’s rent as a deposit, plus a commission of 60% of the monthly rent plus 20% VAT. I had to hand over seemingly acres of lei – the equivalent of 516 euros or about NZ$800. The landlord was there, well not the landlord actually because he’s in Israel but his go-between, and she seemed very approachable. Every month I’ll need to physically give her the rent in euros. W-wha-huh? Poftim? You won’t accept Romanian currency? This is like being in the UK and insisting on rent payments in US dollars. Are there any cash machines in Timișoara that spit out euros? The agent said that there are indeed one or two, but I’ll probably need to change lei at a bank or any of the possibly dodgy kiosks you see on just about every street corner. And yes, I will lose money every time I do this. She talked as if it was the most natural thing ever, just like Americans talk about their electoral system, or Brits talk about carpeting their bathrooms. I think it’s bloody stupid.

This morning, having at last found an apartment after a frustrating two or three weeks, I went to the immigration office expecting no end of complications. The office was staffed by a man, probably in his late forties, who could hardly speak a word of English. (Isn’t that wonderful? When you order a kebab, you’re bombarded with bloody English, because getting the spicy sauce instead of the sweet sauce would be a calamity.) The young woman in front of me was from Turkey which is outside the EU; she could speak English but not Romanian, and she was struggling to communicate with the man in the window. An English speaker was eventually located. Both he and the bloke in the window were being rather dickish to this young lady, and I wondered what sort of person sets him or herself the daily goal of being as much of an arsehole as possible, because there seem to be a lot of that sort of person all over the world. Then it came to my turn. I was told to get copies of my various documents made, which I did. I went back to the office with the photocopies, the window man took my photo, he said gata (“ready”), and I should be able to collect my registration certificate at 9am tomorrow. Great! I got treated very differently from the Turkish lady simply because I’m an EU citizen. What a difference Brexit will make.

My New Zealand credit card statements now get sent to my parents. Mum phoned me last night to inform me of a surprise whopping $580 charge. It had escaped my notice. I usually don’t notice until I pay the bill, automatically in full at the end of each month, and anyway I’ve hardly used my card since I moved to Romania. The bill was for the renewed hosting of this website and another one I have. It renewed automatically at a vastly increased price from the original (the bastards). I should be able to recover most of that money by cancelling the service but I don’t want Plutoman to be exterminated in the process.

I played tennis (singles) on Sunday on the same hard indoor court that I played on two weeks earlier. I won easily, 6-2 6-0 6-1. I hit a purple patch in the middle of the match where I made very few unforced errors. But for winning a very long game (seven deuces?) at 1-1 in the first set, things might have turned out differently. The court doubles as a basketball court and the hoops are in the way of where you’d normally serve in singles. You had no choice but to take a wider stance.

On Saturday I went to a flea market which was off a main street, many of the signs for which used the old, pre-nineties spelling. It was lined with pre-nineties apartment blocks. The temperature was minus something at midday. I got a coffee from a bar, because it could see it had a toilet. Most people in the bar were drinking something stronger. For only NZ$20 I could have had my stomach pumped. The market was full of second-hand clothes, including ski jackets of every crazy colour combination imaginable that I really, really wanted as a kid because I thought they were so cool. The market and that whole area of town was a time warp.

I love it here in Timișoara. I’ll love it more when it warms up again. I love the rawness of it all. I love that it’s given me the opportunity to be myself and completely change my life. I love that not everybody loves it, or even knows about it. I love that I’ll be able to travel. I love that I can play tennis on clay (maybe I’ll master the slide one day). And I love that I’ll be here until the middle of next year at least.