by This morning my brother called me to say that our aunt now had a chest infection. He forwarded me an email from her consultant (third-hand by this point) who said among other things that getting her home is “looking increasingly unrealistic”. (I recently bemoaned people’s poor writing skills. This consultant’s writing, on such a delicate matter, was exemplary.) Dad arrives at Stansted on Tuesday afternoon. She might not even make it that far.
Last night I had a cyst (a double cyst, as it turned out) removed from my back. It had been there for around six months without causing any pain. My usual doctor assured me that it was benign back in July. The private clinic was state of the art, with signs everywhere written in Trajan, the all-caps font that has been used in hundreds of big-budget movie posters. Some of these signs were in a sort of English: “German rigurosity with Latin spirit”. The font almost fooled me into thinking that “rigurosity” was a real word. There were forms to fill in, as always. I didn’t know if my health insurance would cover me; I guessed not. The surgeon led me into his room. He had colossal biceps, one of which was tattooed. He clearly had a good command of English but we conducted the whole thing in Romanian. I lay down on my tummy, he gave me an anaesthetic, and then 10 or 15 minutes later it was gata – done, bits of cyst lying on a tray. The admin stuff that followed took longer to resolve than the excision. In a twist on the millennium bug, their system calculated my age as minus 57 years old, and correcting that absurdity took considerable faff. Everybody in Romania has an ID card with a long number that incorporates their date of birth as six digits – mine is 20 04 80. (Can you see where this is going?) The first digit of your ID number is 1 for male and 2 for female, if you were born in 19-something. Those born in 20-something get a 3 (male) or 4 (female) instead. But foreigners like me are classed as a different species so we get something else at the beginning; my number starts with a 7. It seems their system included a simple code – “ID number starts with 3 or above means you were born in 20-something, otherwise it’s 19-something”. As for my insurance, it paid for the consultation, but not the surgery (the bulk of the cost) or the painkillers. It total I had to pay just over 900 lei (NZ$325 or £160). I’ll have to go back in two weeks to get the stitches removed. Before that I’ve got an allergy test for my long-term sinus problem.
This morning I had another look at that bike in the barn in Dumbrăvița. I liked it and it seemed to ride well, but after last night I felt strapped for cash. The asking price was 1250 lei, I offered 1000, the guy wouldn’t budge one leu, and I rode away on my rather more rickety machine. My brother suggested I should, you know, get a bike from an actual shop and not some dodgy barn, and he’s probably right.
I had a bizarre online lesson yesterday with a girl about to turn 16. It was only our second session; last week I met her face-to-face in their very smart place in the north of the city. Her father is a doctor, her mother a dentist; by Romanian standards her family is swimming in money. When I asked her in our first meeting if she’d travelled much, she reeled off seven European cities. Marseille was dirty, Berlin was a bit boring, Barcelona was great. I assumed she meant she’d been to these places over a period of years, but she then clarified that she visited them all just this summer. Crikey. Zanzibar was last summer, and of course she’d been to Dubai. I spent some time going over the grammar rules of talking about travel experiences. Yesterday’s meeting was just weird. She’d just been to tennis training. She didn’t need to tell me where; it’s where all Timișoara’s haves go. Are you a good tennis player? “Yes, I am.” Right. I decided to ask her some discussion questions from my “teenagers” topic. That didn’t work well, because she shut the door on me at every turn. Look, this is like a game of tennis. If you don’t hit the ball back to me, we won’t get far. I actually said that. Next she made a series of arrogant statements with little to back them up – it was hard not to take the piss – then she revealed that she spends 500 lei per week at the mall and is currently pining for an iPhone 15, priced at around 4000. It isn’t your fault that you’re this shallow, I thought. Switching the topic to “Have you ever…?” was a good move on my part, because it then became all about her.
I might be making a trip to the UK before too long.
