by It was an enormous relief to get my internet access back.
My teaching continues to go well. I feel so much more emotionally invested in it than in my previous job, or maybe any of my previous jobs. This matters. I’d put my Skype student at a 4 on my 0-to-10 scale, so she knows the basics, but there’s still a lot we can work on. The highlight, if you can call it that, of Monday’s lesson was when she just about pissed herself laughing at my pronunciation of străin, the Romanian word for foreign (appropriately enough). “Say it again!” Er, no. The problems with străin are various. Mostly it’s the combination of ă and i that I struggle with. That they immediately follow a rolled r doesn’t help, and just to top it off, the word looks like a pretty common English word. Yes, it’s a străin. We’ll have our third lesson of the week tomorrow, and if our first few sessions are any indication, the two hours will whizz by. I still need a lot more lessons. I haven’t heard back from the student I gave two lessons to last week, and I don’t expect I ever will. My record at keeping students is quite poor at this early stage.
I haven’t watched that much of the Australian Open (it’s just not as important to me as it once was) but I did see this morning’s five-set semi-final between Federer and Wawrinka. I must be in a fairly small minority of people who wanted Wawrinka to win. Yes, Federer is one of the best players ever (arguably the best ever), and the way he’s managed to come back at the age of 35 and play such sublime tennis is quite remarkable, but the constant fawning over him gets to me. If Nadal beats Dimitrov tomorrow to make the final, I’ll be wanting him to win, and I expect I’ll be in the minority again. The prospect of a final between Nadal and Federer, to go with a Williams sisters final, has catapulted tennis to the front of the sports pages, and for that I’m grateful. A couple of stats that stood out for me: (1) three of the women’s semi-finalists were on the tour last century (Mirjana Lucic-Baroni made the semis of Wimbledon back in ’99) and (2) three of the men’s semi-finalists use a single-handed backhand.
I’ve been in Romania nearly four months and in my next post I’ll give my assessment of how I think it’s gone so far.
