by I spoke to Mum again last night. She looked much better. I fear though that she’ll stagger from one bout of stress and misery to the next, at least until the house business is sorted. I also had a chat with my brother. We talk at least once a week. During my first few years in New Zealand, contact with my brother was extremely rare. I often didn’t know what continent he was on. Now he’s much more settled – he has a half-in, half-out relationship with the army – and with me being much closer geographically, we’re in touch far more often. Plus, he used to verge on being a dick. The dick days are well and truly over; he’s turned into a really nice guy. At the moment he’s pursuing a university course, and I’ve been amazed by his level of motivation. Where has that come from? Right now he’s in the middle of an assignment where he has to calculate financial ratios from real-life financial statements, and I’ve been helping him, though I lost interest in all that stuff ages ago.
I should be able to get a Romanian driver’s licence. I’ve made an appointment for 3rd April; there will be some medical hoops to jump through, one of which involves standing on one leg for a period of time. Sounds like fun. I’m a bit wary though of getting behind the wheel for the first time in 5½ years. I’d like a car to be able to travel around Romania – there’s so much to see that I’ve so far missed out on; I’ll still use my bike to get around the city.
Today I’ll give my weekly maths lesson in Romanian. I’m going to do a session on fractions. It’s apparent that both my maths students have no real concept of a fraction, even if they may (at times) know how to magically manipulate them. For them, halves and thirds and quarters are brimming with mystique, and the intrigue only deepens when algebraic fractions come into play. For me, simple fractions are an extremely natural concept – heck, I even used one in the previous paragraph – even if something like 8/13 is hard to get a handle on. When I was at school, I learnt fractions before I learnt decimals, and that made sense. A quarter – one of four equal slices of a pie – is a more natural concept than 0.25. But I see a generational difference here. When I was growing up, fractions were commonplace. Road signs showed fractions of a mile. (In the UK, I think they still do.) Dad ordered glass for his paintings with the dimensions in fractions of an inch. Now though, we’re bombarded by decimals and percentages, and anyone growing up in a purely metric country like Romania doesn’t see a fraction from one month to the next. On a similar theme, Matei sniggered a little last Saturday when he asked me for the time and I told him it was “ten to twelve” so we didn’t have long left. Why don’t you old guys tell the time properly?
In my online English lessons I’ve been making good use of a YouTube series called Streets of London, in which a youngish guy called Pablo Strong interviews pedestrians at random. He homes in on the interesting characters. Can I ask what you’re up to today? Do you mind if I ask what you do? What makes you happy? What would you say to your 16-year-old self? Fascinating stuff, and hours of off-the-cuff English for people to get their heads around.
Spring has begun to, well, spring. Such a shame I can’t look out the window and see all the greenery start to appear in the park. In ten days our clocks will go forward and people will be milling around in the central squares, taking advantage of the longer evenings. On my bike ride with Mark last Sunday, we saw several people gathering urzică, or stinging nettles. The local markets are full of them right now. People make tea from them, whip them up into smoothies, mix them with eggs, and all sorts. They’re a Romanian superfood.
This has been one of my better weeks of late. My working memory was shot to pieces; holding down a normal office job would have been a near-impossible task, just like it was at times in Wellington. Let’s hope I can stay like this.
