by I Skyped my parents on Sunday night. Mum looked horrendous. She had that stony-grey look on her face that she always has after an argument, probably because she’d just had an argument. But she was also clearly sleep-starved, and she was suffering from the neck pain that has been bugging her for months if not years. Only two people on the planet, Dad and me, ever see her like this. With everyone else, including my brother who’s like married and stuff, she snaps into brave-face mode. They recently got a letter from Barclays saying they’d be closing their account just like they did to mine, so that didn’t help her mood, but so much of this is caused by their house. Hassles and challenges and regrets that will only ever end if they sell the place, and then what? During most of the pandemic, when they still lived in the large but practical house that they built in 2004, things seemed to be on a nice even keel. And now this. It’s all so upsetting.
On Sunday morning I met Mark – the English guy – and we went down the bike track to La Livada, just past Sânmihaiu Român. We had a beer – at 11:30 – and a bite to eat. I had a goulash, which was tasty and had more of a kick than usual; I just wish it could have been bigger. The hot bread was the most wonderful bread I’d tasted in years and I’m not kidding. We talked about the varied challenges of teaching. At his private school, where the fees are an arm and a leg, a major problem is horribly spoilt kids. We saw a cyclist whizz by with a camera attached to his helmet; Mark called him a spaceman. Mark reckoned he saw a jackal, which looks like a cross between a wolf and a fox, when he was walking the dogs recently – this was funny because he used not to believe in the existence of jackals. (There is also a British military vehicle called a Jackal, which my brother knows perhaps too well.) We had a coffee at Porto Arte, the place I’ve been to a dozen times or more, then we parted ways. He and his girlfriend plan to leave Romania in June 2004.
Yesterday was quite productive, much more so that my culmea day of a week earlier. I turned up to the Direcția Fiscală, the place where you pay all your local bills and fines, only to find that it had moved to the mall. Ugh, not again. It must have only just moved because other people were doing the same as me. Someone piped up that if you’re just a person and not a company, you can go to any post office instead of the damn mall, so I went to the one round the corner. I wanted to know what was happening with my rates. Why hadn’t I received a bill? I was armed with a cash-stuffed envelope, because I never know if anyone will accept cards. The lady at the desk found me immediately on her system, and said I owed 227 lei. That’s about £40 or NZ$80. “Is that for the whole year?!” I asked in disbelief. Yes. Forty quid. I’d brought all the cash I had, which was at least ten times that. Part of living in Romania, as an outsider, is not knowing how many digits you’ll have to pay for something. Take train tickets. Opt lei, vă rog. Sorry, eight? Really? To get all the way from here to here on the map? Then the next day I’ll have some medical procedure which will be nouă sute și ceva – nine hundred and something – and my reaction is wha-wha-wha-fa-fa-fa.
After paying that shockingly small bill, I met the English lady who’s been helping me with the dictionary, then went to Piața Unirii to pick up my translated electricity bill, then had my ciorbă – a beef and bean soup – at the market, where I also bought a block of cheese. The cheese woman wanted to know where I was from – I could tell that “no, I actually live here” didn’t fully compute with her. When your rates bill is only forty quid, it starts to compute a bit more. I had four lessons including a fairly productive one with the single pair of twins, then I set about getting all my Barclays bits together. That meant a load of tedious scanning and PDFing, and after having to start all over when the page timed out – how aggravating – I managed to send them all the documents online. What will happen next is anyone’s guess.
I’m in a much better place than even three days ago, and let’s hope I can stay that way. To see Mum like that is a real worry though.
