by Today has been a catch-up day after a tiring week. Yesterday I had a pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița followed by a 90-minute one at home, then I went to the second meeting of the English Conversation Club to give a presentation on New Zealand. I’d had to prepare the talk and also give a translation into Romanian because one of the women in the audience (of four!), whom I’ve started teaching, knows very little English at this point. I went on for 20-odd minutes and could have gone longer. I also prepared a Kiwi vocab list – chocka, crook, dairy, Eftpos, feijoa, heaps, jandals, munted, OE, pom, she’ll be right, stoked, tiki tour, togs, wops, and more. One of the women found this list fascinating, especially the bit about chips meaning both hot chips and cold chips. A young bloke knew about the All Blacks and the haka, but otherwise people knew very little. New Zealand is off the map to most Romanians. (It’s literally off the map to many people, it seems.) One woman was amazed to learn that there exists a side of the world with reversed seasons. Skiing in August? You having a laugh?
Plenty of work for the rest of the week too, and not nearly enough sleep. I felt pretty good though, for a number of reasons. We had good weather (that today has turned sour). My shipment of second-hand clothes arrived. I got my bike fixed (again, at a cost of nearly 300 lei, even more than I expected). I felt the eager anticipation of getting on the road and seeing more of this amazing country, the place I now call home. And the biggie – lately I’ve stopped feeling blasé about what I did by coming to Romania. It’s nothing to be blasé about, is it? Coming to a place where I don’t know a soul and can hardly communicate, to do a job I’ve barely dabbled in before and do it full-time. Utterly batshit mad, on the face of it. But I did it, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Before I came here, people were incredulous. Why Romania? Why not do what thousands of other native speakers do and teach in tried-and-trusted Japan? Or Korea? No no no. Precisely because of the thousands of other teachers. I’d have been part of a teaching farm. Competing against people better than me and feeling like a failure again. Sod that. Romania was blissfully off the map. After 6½ years it’s still just me doing this, in a city the size of Wellington. I’ve got this whole wonderful place to myself, which is utterly batshit mad. Should I put my prices way up? I do think about it. On Thursday one of my students – a teacher – was about to go to Greece for a teaching conference. She showed me the programme, chock-full of life-sucking buzzwords and acronyms. Look what I’ve escaped, I thought.
Tomorrow I’ve got my appointment to get my British driving licence converted to a Romanian one. If everything is deemed to be in order, they should give me a temporary licence to tide me over until I get the proper one in the post, and I’ll look at buying one of those Dacias.
