Life :) - My big plan - Politics

Nerve-wracking

June 23, 2016 by 0 Comments

Voting in the EU referendum has begun (well voting in person has; I sent in my postal vote three weeks ago). I don’t know which way it’ll go and I’m extremely nervous. It could affect me and millions of other people profoundly and it’s just so binary. What’s more, I have to attend a meeting between two and four tomorrow afternoon, when over the half the results will come out. If I’m lucky I might be able to follow the headline figures on my phone. It’s times like these I wish I was more normal and only had to worry about the ABs (and if they lost I’d have plenty of mates to commiserate with).

I wish we’d heard more of this kind of rhetoric from the Remain side. It’s a wonderful, rousing speech. More of that and we’d be looking at a crushing win for Remain, but instead…

I got my new passport yesterday, with the words “European Union” on the front.

I told my boss I’m leaving, in the middle of what has been a stressful week for him, not that I’ve never known him to have a non-stressful week. I think he was OK with it.

Life :) - Politics

Sad times

June 19, 2016 by 0 Comments

Jo Cox, the British Labour MP who was shot and stabbed on Thursday, sounded absolutely lovely and full of compassion. It’s so sad that two small children are now without a mother. Her suspected murderer has just appeared in court; he gave his name as “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain”. He sounds seriously messed up.

The compassion that Jo Cox showed in spades appears to be in increasing short supply in Britain. The picture of the UK that is beamed to me via various news websites (and therefore may not be entirely accurate) does not resemble the tolerant place I was brought up in, and that makes me sad. I’m seeing a lot of anger and resentment and hatred there now, and this EU referendum has given people an outlet for that. I don’t blame them in a way, but the EU is only a small part of the problem. The real problem is that successive governments over the last 35 years haven’t done enough to help poor people and poor communities. Britain’s economy is increasingly concentrated in London and the south-east. That includes St Ives in Cambridgeshire where my parents are staying now. Dad said he’s seen no evidence of the sort of anger I’m talking about, but then he wouldn’t in a town which is only a guided busway ride away from Cambridge, an outward-looking city which is likely to vote Remain by one of the largest percentage margins in the whole of England. If instead he went for a half-hour drive to the Welland Estate in Peterborough, parts of which some buses wouldn’t go through (and maybe still don’t) because it was too dangerous, I’m sure he’d see it. In 2003 I lived and worked in Peterborough, which is in the same county as Cambridge (sort of), but it’s really a world away and I expect it to vote Leave by a hefty margin.

How will Jo Cox’s murder affect the referendum? It sounds crass to even ask, but I think for such a huge decision we have to. Before the event I was picking a fairly comfortable win for Leave by nearly ten points. The more coverage the referendum and the campaigns got, the more it seemed to favour Leave as it became the mainstream option, and I could see that continuing right up until voting day. (This is the opposite of what some commentators were saying, i.e. that more attention would lead to a higher turnout, especially amongst Remain-friendly younger people.) The murder itself might garner some sympathy votes for Remain, but perhaps more importantly there hasn’t been any campaigning for two days and what campaigning is left will probably be more civil than before the shooting. I can see the pendulum swinging back towards Remain but will it be enough to get them over the line? I’m not so sure. And if it is enough but only just, people will say that the murder changed the result. What a terrible mess.

Life :)

Sick of playing these games

June 16, 2016 by 0 Comments

Ever since work moved out of town in late 2014 I’ve been carpooling with a 28-year-old guy who lives near the zoo in Newtown. Lately he’s been riding his bike to my place and I’ve driven him to work from there. He has a similar outlook on life to me but is far more extroverted and that outlook is far more obvious in the way he dresses and behaves. In fact we’re polar opposites when it comes to people. The absence of human interaction for significant periods is a necessity to me, and I rarely if ever get the urge to interact with lots of people all at once, but he just loves that. He loves it so much that whenever we have a team meeting at work, he feels the need to hijack the beginning of it by making everyone play a game. Today’s game involved people standing around in a circle and giving funny hand signals, a haka-like gesture, and some others that I’ve forgotten. I was out of my comfort zone, everyone knew it, and I knew that everyone knew it. I panicked and said I had “no fucking clue what was going on” which pretty much summed up the situation I found myself in. The only thing I really understood was one particular manoeuvre that would eliminate me from the game, so after one other person had been knocked out I made that gesture (oh, silly me!) and sat down. I then texted my carpool mate: “You just demonstrated why I’m going to Romania.” He’s the only one who knows I’m going there. At least I hope he is. It might seem a piffling thing, but I do find those games and team building activities, and frankly most of the team stuff that’s unavoidable at work, very uncomfortable and entirely demotivating. I really wish it wasn’t like this. It’s why I have to stick with my guns on my big adventure and do my English teaching, and not end up in some team environment where a guy just like my carpool mate – let’s call him Bogdan – decides to play some crazy game and I end up embarrassing myself and swearing in Romanian.

Last night I had my penultimate marimba session, and the last with our usual teacher before she goes to Germany. I’m completely within my comfort zone there. It feels great to do something that gets me animated after work where I’m really just going through the motions, and I’m not too bad at it because it relies on pattern recognition. I love seeing other people getting animated too when they’re just starting out. I see it when they play the bass marimba, which requires some serious arm action, for the first time.

Many people in the UK will be voting Leave as an act of desperation and I can’t say I blame them. I just don’t think leaving the EU will help them any more than a Donald Trump presidency will help desperate Americans, given the sort of characters who will be leading the country in the (now very likely) event of Brexit. At least a Trump presidency would be reversible four years later.

Language teaching - Life :) - My big plan

Made my mind up

June 13, 2016 by 0 Comments

I always feel energised after my English lesson and tonight was no different. I started off with a “twenty questions” game where my student had to guess the five items in a shoebox I’d brought along. After randomly guessing that the first item was a book, he struggled a bit. He kept wanting to guess specific items rather than attributes: Is it red? Is it soft? Can you eat it? Is it made of wood? Do you use it in the bathroom? But we got there in the end. I then showed him some pictures of a typical Kiwi winter and we “commentated” on them. Lots of useful words there: scarf, hood, walking stick, steam, smoke, logs, chimney, stuck, mud, and so on. And that was the end of the lesson. Time flies when you’re having fun, and for me (and hopefully for him too, but I can’t really tell) it is fun. He also said he wanted to get a job working in a park or garden and would be happy to study first; I’ll ring up the council tomorrow and ask what they can do.

I’ve made up my mind now. I want to teach English, learn foreign languages, study linguistics (maybe one day becoming really knowledgeable in a specific field) and travel. Lots and lots of travel. And that’s pretty much it. I’ve given on making money beyond what I need to survive with a modest level of comfort. It feels good to know what I want, and don’t want, out of life. If I hadn’t gone on that fantastic trip to America last year I probably still wouldn’t know.

I still don’t know where to base myself in Romania. My parents had reservations about Timișoara, but they were around lack of shops the likes of which you find in cities with tourism, unrenovated buildings, and a slightly dated public transport system. None of those three things bother me. Timișoara almost certainly will modernise its trams, but I’d actually like to try the old ones first. And I’d much rather get there before Emporio Armani does than after. Sibiu is incredibly picturesque and is much more “done up” – I think it got a cash injection from becoming Capital of Culture in 2007, but it doesn’t have all the markets and old trams that I know I’ll like. Sibiu has other stunningly beautiful places nearby, well, within a few inches on my 12-miles-to-an-inch map, and that’s significant plus for sure, and it has the possibility of volunteer teaching in rural areas close by, which would help me get my foot in the door. Timișoara would be better if I wanted to get to other places in different countries such as Belgrade. And of course there are other places I could go like Oradea in the north-west which I really like the look of.

Talking of Belgrade, you can take a train from there to Bar on the coast of Montenegro, a 12½-hour trip taking in 245 tunnels and 435 bridges, all for 21 euros! I must do that, after first catching a train or bus, or both, from wherever I decide to base myself in Romania.

Shocking scenes from Marseille (another place I want to visit – stupidly long but totally awesome train ride, here we come) at the weekend. Lots of criticism levelled at the police for not segregating the English and Russian fans, but all that tribalism, all that visceral hatred that necessitates segregation in the first place, it’s just so far from me that I have a hard time understanding it. The behaviour of the Russians makes one fearful of what might happen at the 2018 World Cup. But the events in southern France pale in comparison to the mass shooting in Orlando. Just terrible. Sometimes I fear for the future of humanity.

My big plan - Politics

The ins and outs of the EU referendum

June 11, 2016 by 0 Comments

At 1pm today, or 4am in Bucharest, I attempted to listen to the news on Romanian radio. My Romanian just allowed me to discern that one of the items was the hot-off-the-press Brexit poll, giving Leave a ten-point lead. That poll is by a company called ORB, and their methodology leads me to conclude that it’s complete garbage just like their previous polls, some of which gave Remain a whopping lead. (I’d love to see polling banned altogether in the last four weeks before an election or referendum.) But I think there has been a genuine move to the Leave side, and I’d now put Britain’s chances of leaving the EU at 50:50, perhaps even a shade higher. The betting markets still make Remain the favourites by about a 70:30 margin, but I don’t buy that. The high rollers are backing Remain; the mums and dads with a few quid to spare are backing Leave. Many people treat their bets as votes (and likewise their votes as bets) and a clear majority of bets are on Leave. I’d bet on Leave myself, because I think it represents great value, if it wasn’t for all the complications involved in setting up an online account in some non-sterling foreign currency (I say non-sterling because I expect the pound to plummet in the event of a Leave win).

The zeitgeist is very much with Leave, and that’s hard to combat. The scare tactics by the Remain side certainly aren’t cutting through. They needed to frame staying in the EU as something positive to vote for. In fact as I watch from the other side of the world, the level of debate from both sides has been appalling. What’s the plan if the UK stay in? What’s the plan if they/we decide to pull out? Maybe none of that matters. Maybe people aren’t interested in the facts anyway. All I hear about is even more dreadful immigrants if we stay and a third-world economy if we leave.

Dad registered with hours to spare before the original deadline, and he might well vote “out” (he happens to be in the UK so he’ll vote at the local polling station). I suspect my brother will vote “out”. I voted “in”, and I’m not ashamed to say that was largely out of self-interest. [Yikes. Another poll out with a ten-point lead for Leave. Phew, it’s the same one. Please tell me it’s the same one. See, they shouldn’t have polls at all this close to the vote.] This plan of mine isn’t just a plan, it’s a dream. It’s a long time since I had a dream with a realistic chance of becoming reality. If Britain wasn’t in the EU, my dream wouldn’t exist. I readily admit I’m too selfish to vote against my dream. I might still be able to live and work in the EU for some time because the “divorce” is unlikely to be immediate, but I don’t know. Nobody knows.

Another reason to vote “in”, for my mind, is that the “in” people seem nicer. I bet most of the English hooligans in Marseille are voting “out”. The CAPS LOCK “BREXIT!” brigade on online forums are mostly “outers”. The people who didn’t want voting extended after the website crashed (their stupid fault for leaving it till the last minute; sod ’em) were mostly “outers”, which is ironic considering how much they keep banging on about democracy. Most importantly the Conservatives who are likely to take over in the event of Brexit don’t seem particularly warm and fluffy, not even Boris Johnson.

Despite all that, I wonder how I’d vote if I still lived and worked in, say, Peterborough. It’s so long since I lived in the UK that I was only just eligible to vote. It’s six years since I even set foot in the country. If I’d seen the influx of Polish plumbers first-hand, I might well be voting out now.

Romania lost 2-1 to France this morning in the first match of Euro 2016. I was impressed with the number of Romanian fans there. I remember all the hype surrounding Euro ’96 which was played in the UK. It was huge, and all played with the catchy tune in the background that talked about thirty years of hurt (since England won the World Cup). It’s now fifty years. And talking of the nineties, two-hit wonders Ace of Base are playing on Romanian radio.

Language learning

Romanian commentary 9

June 6, 2016 by 0 Comments

I learnt a new word at the weekend: dușman, meaning “enemy”. It’s Turkish in origin and pronounced “douche man”. Duș means “shower”, just as the similar-sounding word does in French and German, and puns abound on Romanian websites. That guy who fixes your shower is hostile! In English you could say “don’t be a dușman, you’re my friend” or something. I’m not very good at this: douche(bag) isn’t in my normal lexicon. If you like puns and word games, learning a new language is great; it opens up a whole new world of words, of anagrams and permutations.

I’ve spent some time on words for “this” and “that”, “these” and “those”. In English we have just those four words. In Romanian there are sixteen. Here goes:

acest băiat or băiatul acesta – this boy
acel băiat or băiatul acela – that boy

această pictură or pictura aceasta – this painting
acea pictură or pictura aceea – that painting

acești tigri or tigrii aceștia – these tigers
acei tigri or tigrii aceia – those tigers

aceste cafele or cafelele acestea – these coffees
acele cafele or cafelele acelea – those coffees

So there are different words for masculine and feminine, and you mustn’t forget that neuter nouns are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. This takes us from four words to eight. But you can either put this/that/these/those before the noun, which is more emphatic, or after the noun. If you go for the latter option you need to articulate the noun, while the this/that/these/those word changes slightly, normally getting an extra “a”, and so the word count doubles again. And even that isn’t all (I lied when I said sixteen). Even words like “this” and “that” suffer case changes, so while “this boy” is acest băiat, “this boy’s life” requires the genitive case: viața acestui băiat. Yet another word, and there are plenty of these other words. Doamne, this is hard! I don’t expect to remember much of this.

A word about cafelele above. Coffee is cafea, which becomes cafele in the plural and the nice soothing cafelele when you want to say “the coffees”. But if that sounds soothing, how about lalea, meaning tulip. For tulips you say lalele, and for “the tulips”, yep, you guessed it, lalelele. It’s hard to stop saying (or typing) that word.

Lalelele sunt frumoase!
Lalelele sunt frumoase!
Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

I have to do this

June 6, 2016 by 0 Comments

On Friday I went to the theatre at Bats, a Wellington institution that, to my shame, I hadn’t been to before. I never normally have anyone to go to the theatre with, and unlike the cinema, I wouldn’t go by myself. I saw Love and Information with the bloke from the tennis club and his brother who had come over from Singapore. The play was weird. It flitted between dozens of seemingly unrelated scenes with no discernible plot. I think the play was about the sheer quantity of information, some of it deadly serious, some of it less so, that gets thrown at us almost constantly in the digital age we live in. We can’t possibly take it all in. Each piece of information, each tweet, each Facebook message (I guess, I don’t do Facebook) has an implied “you’re supposed to care about this” tacked on to the end. But we can’t care about it all. The trick in the digital age is deciding, out of every ten pieces of information chucked at you, which seven or eight to ignore. The star of the show for me was an old guy who in some scenes had dementia, and at one point hilariously described online sex as “virtual and great”. In one scene somebody rattled off umpteen words for “table” in various languages and I was disappointed not to hear the Romanian word masă.

Yesterday I went on a walk around Island Bay with a Meetup group. It was a beautiful afternoon and we had great views including of the South Island. Wow, what a difference. A few weeks ago a walk like that would have been a serious struggle. Even walking up the stairs was an effort. It’s great to have my physical energy back. I noticed the difference again today on the tennis court. My play was still very scratchy and I still had problems on serve, but at least I could move to the ball. One of the women who ran the English teaching course in February was there.

Someone recently put me in contact with a Romanian woman, and I got to speak with her yesterday. She seemed very nice but wasn’t really able to help me, mainly because she’s been out of Romania for such a long time. I think she thought I was nuts. She certainly managed to sow a few seeds of doubt in my mind. Should I even be doing this? She said it would be daunting for me because I don’t know anyone over there. But I think of the alternative – team meetings, strategic goals, service level agreements, performance reviews, desk moves, restructures, playing the pretending-to-care game where the avoidance of bad outcomes is the best possible outcome – and daunting doesn’t begin to cover it. And if I only ever went to places where I knew people I’d hardly go anywhere. (The possibility of long-term isolation is something that concerns me, I’ll admit that.)

Last Thursday we had our latest body corp meeting about seismic strengthening. We didn’t make all that much headway. There are so many decisions to make – what percentage of new building standard to strengthen to, when to have the work done, whether to employ a project manager or facilitator, and how to apportion the costs. The fact that these decisions depend on each other to an extent makes it especially hard. On the matter of dividing up the costs, I was amazed at the number of people who wished this to be done equally between the apartments. “We’re about fairness and equity here.” So am I, but an equal allocation is surely unfair, inequitable, and plain wrong. Some of the upper-level apartments have almost twice the unit entitlement of my apartment and the others on the lower floors, which means they’re almost twice the size and are worth nearly twice as much. Nobody would seriously suggest that someone who owned two apartments should pay the same as someone who owned one, would they? Would you like to pay the same income tax as your boss? This reminds me of the Poll Tax in the UK in 1990. It led to riots and the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.

I haven’t seen any of the French Open because I haven’t found a stream that works. Muguruza’s win over Serena last night didn’t surprise me that much. People forget that Serena is in her mid-thirties, and Muguruza has looked the goods for a while. I predicted the Spaniard to win the title in an email to a friend when they were playing the third round, but unfortunately I forgot to place my $20,000 bet. There’s a lot riding on the men’s final. Djokovic is surely the favourite to complete his career grand slam but I certainly wouldn’t write Murray off.

Language teaching - My big plan

Into focus

June 1, 2016 by 0 Comments

Having this place to myself again is making a huge difference. I can relax! I’d almost forgotten the meaning of the word. It’s also brought my upcoming move into sharp focus. I’m really doing this.

Why am I doing it? Because I can. And because nothing good will come out of persevering with the alternative. I’m convinced of that. Why Romania specifically? Well I fell in love with the language almost the moment I clapped eyes on it, and gosh, the country is still so unspoilt, so wild, so raw, and that really appeals to me. Not that I’ve been there yet, unlike my parents, who are there now. They’re in Timișoara and tomorrow they’ll be taking a six-hour bus ride to Sibiu which, judging from the pictures I’ve seen online, is incredibly beautiful. They say the architecture in Timișoara is wonderful but many of the buildings are in fairly dire need of some TLC. Most people they’ve met can speak English but are some way from fluency, and that’s good for me if I intend to teach it. I keep seeing “danger maps” where Romania is coloured yellow or orange, a notch above Bulgaria and Hungary in the danger stakes and, for that matter, a notch above the US, where an average of 36 people were killed by guns per day last year, excluding suicides and accidents. My parents said they’ve yet to feel under the remotest of threats.

My English lesson on Monday went reasonably well. I spent some time on minimal pairs, words that differ from each other by only one sound. For the long a / long i pairs I gave him lake/like, bake/bike, race/rice, hay/high and tail/tile, with accompanying pictures. He was fine with these, with the exception of tail/tile where he struggled to hear the difference between the two words. Learning another language helps me empathise with him here, but doesn’t help me get across the difference. Next week I’ll revisit those two words and say them very slowly. We also talked about football, in particular the Champions League final. I was pleased that he referred to the football vocab sheet I’d made for him.

I put my EU referendum voting paper, which was something of an IQ test, in the mail today. (The fact that I thought it resembled an IQ test probably says a lot about my IQ.) It’s fairly obvious which way I went. Which way the referendum will go is far from obvious.

Life :) - Tennis

I still don’t get it

May 27, 2016 by 0 Comments

My parents just FaceTimed me from Desenzano del Garda in Northern Italy, where they’re staying for my cousin’s wedding which takes place in a few hours. Last night there was a big pre-wedding do which Dad said I would have absolutely hated. He’s absolutely right. You travel half-way around the globe to stay in such a beautiful place, only to be stuck with all those people! What a waste! I’m so sociable, aren’t I? I made a list a few years ago of five things I really just don’t get, of which weddings was one.

Simona Halep’s third-round match at the French Open starts in 15 minutes, and I hope I can watch that with Romanian commentary. I’ll then see Andy Murray’s match with Ivo Karlovic if I hold out that long. Tomorrow (forecast to be a wet and horrible day) I’ve got a property manager coming over to assess my apartment.

The prospect of doing something I want to do feels, well, amazing.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

Humming

May 21, 2016 by 0 Comments

The last few days I’ve been humming. During the day everything has been beautiful, amazing, wonderful, and at night I’ve hardly slept. On Thursday, after my fifth night in a row of sleeping for a couple of hours max, I decided to take a sick day, only my second in over two years there. It was the perfect day for it, the sun was shining and my flatmate had moved out the day before. I walked around my local area for two hours or so, wide-eyed, taking photos of beautiful trees and houses that were now so much more colourful than I remembered. Other than that I gave the bathroom a good clean (it needed it – my flatmate was a rather aggressive user of the toilet) and studied some Romanian.

I’ve now got my Google set to Romanian: the “I’m feeling lucky” button is now “Mă simt norocos” and if I search for Sibiu I get aproximativ 32.100.000 (de) rezultate in just 0,57 secunde. The same goes for Google Maps, Google News and Google You Name It, everything is in Romanian including all the suggested search terms and my supposedly tailored results. As anti-Google as I can be at times (they are so pervasive), that’s pretty cool. There’s also a social network, Google Plus, which I’ve joined. It’s much smaller than Facebook or Twitter, with “only” a few million active members. I find the network part of Google Plus as confusing as hell (and of course all the terminology and help pages are in Romanian for me), but what I like about it is that it’s great for viewing and sharing photos, and I’ve spent hours staring at colourful photos of Sibiu and elsewhere. I might even post some photos of Wellington at some stage, and I’ll post the link here if that happens. I’ve even got an animated Romanian flag as my mascot or avatar or whatever you’re supposed to call it. I had to find one that wasn’t so fast as to drive everyone batty and to re-order the frames so that the first one looked nice (sometimes you only get to see a still photo and it defaults to the first frame). Yeah, working with animated images, or GIFs, is fun.

romania_done

 

I think what’s made me hum is the realisation that I’ve got so much freedom. I can be who I want and for years I didn’t even know it. Isn’t that something? Billions of people around the world don’t have that. In my own country we do pretty well in the freedom stakes, but so many of us are constrained by the situations we end up in. Take my boss. He plans to move house soon, but can’t move more than a mile or two because his three kids would have to move to a different school otherwise. He works extremely hard and his mind works extremely quickly but to me, as I watch him shove TV food down his throat while he rushes from one bullshit meeting to the next, none of it seems worth it. I used “TV food” there because of something I saw on a train in America. The guy in front of me in the food car dropped an armful of processed crap on the counter, and the bloke behind the desk tried to stop him from buying it: “You don’t want to be spending eighteen dollars on all that TV food.”

It would be criminal for me to waste this freedom I have. I haven’t got a two-mile radius dammit, I’ve got a great big map. My train itinerary which will cover some of that map is likely to be:

  1. London to Paris via the Eurostar, 2½ hours;
  2. Paris to Munich, humming along at 200mph on a double-decker train (Seat61.com tells me to get a top-deck seat for the best views), 5¾ hours;
  3. Munich to Budapest overnight, 9¾ hours, and I’ll have a few hours to look around Budapest when I arrive;
  4. Either Budapest to Timișoara, 5 hours, arriving in the evening of day two, or Budapest to Sibiu, 10 hours (why so much longer I have no idea), arriving in the early morning of day three.

Without Seat61.com I don’t know where I’d be.

A week ago yesterday I had my performance review, the last one that will matter in my current job (and I’d prefer not to ever have another job where they’ll matter). I got through it OK, and that felt pretty good. The same evening I went to a regional tennis awards presentation. Someone at the club nominated me for an award for those nine consecutive singles wins I had, but there wasn’t much chance I’d ever win it. Most of the prizes went to the elite players who already win heaps of awards anyway. The best moment of the evening was when a bloke of about eighty, who had done so much work organising competitions over decades, was recognised with the volunteer of the year award; it brought a tear to his eye.

Talking of freedom, having this apartment to myself again, and the freedom that gives me, feels incredible.