by I had a good night’s sleep last night. I had an easier than average work day yesterday. And I still feel absolutely shattered.
Last night I met up with Mark at Casa Bunicii in Dumbrăvița. We both had spätzle which Mark had had before but was totally new to me. Spätzle are a kind of German egg noodles; mine were topped with minced beef in tomato sauce, so the dish was very much like bog-standard spaghetti bolognese. Very good though. We both drove there so neither of us could drink anything. Hopefully next time we go there, if there is a next time, we’ll be on our bikes. I say if there is a next time because Mark won’t be in Romania much longer. He and his wife are heading back to the UK. They may stick it out until the summer, but his wife has just applied for a deputy head position at a school in Cardiff; she’d start in three months’ time. Saying goodbye to Mark isn’t going to be much fun.
When I got back from Dumbrăvița I called my parents. Good news. Dad just happened to be closest to the phone when it rang, and he unilaterally accepted the offer of £245,000. A straight accept, no halfway house or anything. I don’t blame him. The risk of having the sale fall through is simply too great. Lately Mum has been attending an exercise class on Thursdays. This meant Mum had to leave in the middle of our chat, so I got the chance to talk to Dad alone. He said that for the past two days he’d had to deal with a permanently angry Mum. Angry with him, mostly. During these spells, which are all too frequent, Mum becomes practically impossible to live with. As I’ve said to Dad before, 80% of blokes wouldn’t put up with it as he does.
Braytim, that slightly weird name for a suburb of Timișoara that I was keen to avoid that I mentioned in my last post, is in fact the name of the Romanian–French construction company that built the development in the nineties. So it isn’t quite as new as I thought. The Bray part of the name comes from Saint-Jean-de-Braye, which is a place in France, while tim obviously comes from Timișoara. There are names ending in (or beginning with) tim everywhere here. I once thought about setting up a teaching company called Verbatim.
I had an interesting maths lesson yesterday with a 12-year-old girl. For a while we went off-topic. At one point I mentioned car loans, saying that they’re generally a terrible idea. She wondered why. They give you ages to pay it off, right? If you take out a car loan for €10,000, I said, how much would you have to pay back? Well, €10,000, of course. No, it might be more like €15,000. Whatever the figure, it’s a lot more than the original price. This is the sort of thing they should be teaching you in maths classes at school. Well of course they’re not going to teach us that! That’s life stuff, and you don’t get taught life stuff at school. Gosh, sadly you’re absolutely positively right on that point, aren’t you?
