by I’ve got the plumber here for the third day running. He’s a really nice guy, and he’s doing a good job as far as I can tell. But with the exception of my students who are confined to one room, I’m used to having this place to myself. He has to constantly flit between all the rooms to replace the old heaters, and I can’t relax. Not his fault, obviously. Nor was it his fault that he locked me in on Wednesday night. When he left I was giving an online lesson. He locked the front door behind him with the spare key I’d given him, turning the key twice. When I tried to leave at 9pm, I couldn’t. I found out that if you turn the key twice, whoever is inside can’t open the door. Before Wednesday I had no idea about that. (I live by myself. There isn’t normally a ‘someone else’ to lock the door behind them.) Thankfully there was no fire that night – my only option would have been to jump – and when he came back the next morning I was a free man again. This place is now a complete pigsty, and of course there’s the noise too. I’m grateful for the thunderstorm we had in the middle of last night; it has (temporarily) taken the edge off the temperature, so I could comfortably escape for a bit earlier today. I think (hope!) he won’t come back again tomorrow, and will start getting everything piped up on the 24th when he comes back from his break. Wednesday was an expensive day – I forked out 11,645 lei (£2000, or NZ$4100) on all the materials. I’ll give the plumber 2000 lei today, and the remainder (a little over 2000 lei, I think) when he finishes the job.
This morning I spoke to my parents from the café next to the market. It was 10:15 and I was the only person not drinking beer or whisky. Their builders had had the day off; it was the newfangled Matariki public holiday. (I always get that word muddled with tamariki, which means ‘children’ in Maori.) Matariki doesn’t shine very brightly in their part of the country, though I’m sure people don’t mind the extra day off in the middle of winter.
I read a couple of articles this morning on the local news website. The first was about a musical instrument called a duduk which will be accompanying an organ at an upcoming festival. My first thought was, ah, it’s Indonesian or Malay. I thought that because on all those Garuda and Malaysia Airlines flights I took many years ago, I saw the native word duduk – which meant ‘seat’ or ‘sit’ – all the time. It’s a distinctive word. Your life vest is under your duduk. Please fasten your duduk belt. Maybe the duduk is similar to an organ, and has that name because you have to sit down to play it. But no, it’s actually an Armenian woodwind instrument.
The second article was about the International Maths Olympiad which had just taken place in Japan. Romania finished an impressive fourth of the 112 countries who took part, behind (in order) China, the US, and South Korea. (New Zealand came 64th.) Maths olympiads are a really big deal in Romania – they’re treated a bit like American spelling bees – and some teenagers spend many hours priming themselves for them. (The test/exam takes 4½ hours, by the way. Are you allowed to pop out for a pee?) So I’m not surprised that Romania did so well. Each national team consisted of six students, and (this is the bit that blew me away) 59 of the 60 participants from the top ten countries were male. You expect a skew towards boys – they have a thing for largely pointless competitiveness – but that stat is just nuts. An important takeaway is that just because Romania did well in this olympiad thingy, Romanians aren’t necessarily good at maths as a whole. It was nice when Andy Murray won his three grand slams, but it didn’t make Britain any better at tennis.
