by Firstly I’m taking the right pills at the right times again and I no longer feel disoriented. Last Saturday night and Sunday weren’t a lot of fun.
I had a haircut yesterday. I may at some stage just decide to let it grow – by coming to Romania I have in a way turned on, tuned in and dropped out so what the hell – but for the moment while I still need to get business, I need to look like I mean business. That doesn’t mean going totally overboard by ironing my shirts or anything crazy like that, but I do want to at least look tidy. I have a hard enough time describing what I want at the hairdresser’s in English, partly because I don’t really know what I want myself. Er, do you have a number 4? And short I guess on the top, but not too short. We didn’t really talk, and that felt like a missed opportunity to speak some Romanian. At the end she charged me treisprezece lei (the long version). Thirteen lei, or a fraction over NZ$4. I wonder how they make ends meet. At that price I almost felt like going back today just for an excuse to talk. (No I didn’t; I’m far too shy for that sort of thing.)
Making ends meet is a daily struggle for many people here. On a Saturday morning, if you walk to Piața Badea Cârțan (a big market), you’ll see people selling homegrown vegetables and plants on the kerbsides. I even saw somebody with a set of old bathroom scales charging people to weigh themselves. He really should have brought along a tape measure too and calculated people’s BMIs.
I’m learning to be slightly less aggravated by people (other than my students) who speak English to me, like the woman today at Digi Punct (the place you go to pay your TV and internet bill). I had better luck at the bank, where the teller didn’t switch to English even after I put a V in noiembrie. Better still, I should be able to get a bank card now or perhaps even two, one for or my account in lei and one for a new account in euros. My Skype student paid me recently from her account in Austria but because the payment was in euros while my account was in lei, I got hit with commission. The bastards. I want to avoid that in future. Getting a card will also mean I can avoid having to take money from my New Zealand account and paying a fee every time I do so. The whole business of arsing around with both euros and lei is a palaver I didn’t expect (I just thought Romania used lei, being its official currency and all that) and even one of my students thinks it’s crazy. I’ll write a post about that some time.
Apparently there are only around 3000 UK citizens in Romania, one for every 75 Romanian citizens currently in the UK. I’d hazard a guess and say that 2000 of them are in Bucharest. I imagine most of the remainder are in Transylvania and I can’t blame them because it’s beautiful and there’s tons to see and do. As for Timișoara, there might be 100 here, perhaps even fewer. A good few probably work for multinationals like Bosch and Accenture. I mention Accenture because my newest student works there. He’s Polish and he seems a really nice guy, even if he does work for a management consultancy which would be my idea of hell. One you eliminate the BigCo people, there are very few indeed who have come to Timișoara with a completely blank slate as I’ve done. Today I’ve been asking myself, why me?
The games of Words of Friends with my cousin are an ongoing saga: I lost three games in a row but have since won the last two to lead overall by 31½ to 14½.
