Language learning

Romanian commentary 1

October 29, 2015 by 0 Comments

I was about to write about my experiences with an employment consultant, but I’m trying to keep things positive on this blog.

Here’s some more Romanian. I’m getting just a little obsessed with this language (I need to be obsessed with something or else I’ll go mad). I often used to look at Wikipedia pages on obscure languages in dull moments at work, but this is the first time it’s gone further (and this is hardly what you’d call an obscure language).

There are several different words for Hello/Hi in Romanian, just like in English. The ones I’m seeing the most are:

Bună ziua (literally “good day”), bună dimineața (good morning), bună seara (good evening). Good night is noapte bună – I’ve no idea why that one is the other way round.
Bună – this seems to be a nice informal catch-all for the bunăs above. It’s used quite a lot I think.
Salut (as in French)
Servus (used mostly in Transylvania, as well as a bunch of other Eastern European countries)
Ceau (pronounced like the Italian “ciao”, and mostly used in the west of the country)

It’s quite nice that they use different greetings in different parts of the country. I’ll talk about a city in the west of Romania in another post.

Servus and ceau are also used for “bye”, as is pa or pa-pa. The “official” goodbye phrase is la revedere.

It’s important to know what words/phrases people actually say. I noticed as I was coming up and down Mt Kaukau on Monday (public holiday: lots of people) that “morning” was more common than “hi” or “hello” at that time of day. “Good morning” (which you’ll see near the start of any English phrase book) didn’t crop up at all, but it certainly does in more formal situations. It’s interesting that we keep the “morning” in informal situations whereas Romanians keep the “good”.

The next post on Romanian will deal with nouns.

Life :)

Oh no, not normal again

October 27, 2015 by 0 Comments

Things feel normal again. That normal where nothing matters, I can’t take anything in, and I’m unable to be in the moment. Bugger. Just what I didn’t want. I desperately need to get not-normal back.

Over the long weekend I attended my first marimba class, went to the Watercolour Society exhibition on Queens Wharf (Dad had three paintings in there), did some muesli tasting (a friend won several boxes of Vogel’s muesli in some Facebook competition), went up Mount Kaukau, played some tennis, got 697 photos of America printed (what a shame that I lost the Boston ones – I guess I’ll just have to go back there), and learnt some Romanian, a bit half-heartedly because at this stage I could be going anywhere, or nowhere.

I also tried to figure out what’s going on with my mortgage. In 2009 I started a blog called Fixed and Floating, a reference to people taking out ridiculous 100% mortgages to get on the property ladder in Auckland, where I was living at the time. (Ha! An overheated Auckland property market in 2009! Of course it’s cooled down so much since then.) The mortgage I took out on my Wellington apartment in early 2012 is part fixed, part floating. In fact the floating bit isn’t just floating, it’s revolving credit. I structured it that way just in case the house of cards I’d built (a.k.a. my job) toppled over. Two days after I moved in, someone farted and that was enough to send it tumbling. Within weeks my salary had virtually halved. From the moment I got the keys, my apartment has felt like a shell, a monument to a career I had some time in the distant past (and even when I had it, I didn’t really have it). The seismic saga has since turned it fully toxic. When I opened the door of my apartment after a month away, I almost cried. This place is so bare. It’s about time I turned my burden into an asset. As I keep saying, its saving grace (and it’s a big one) is that it’s in just about the perfect location.
I gave up on Fixed and Floating last October; I’d run out of things to say.

The winner of the supreme award at the watercolour exhibition was a portrait of Ben Hana, or Blanket Man if you prefer. It was so lifelike that it was hard to look at it without getting a little emotional. Somebody had snapped it up for $600. He was a Wellington icon of course. That someone like that was allowed to simply be is part of what made, and still makes, Wellington a great city. It’s interesting though how some people develop a cult following. He and my grandmother died four days apart (and just before I moved into my flat); unlike Ben my grandmother lived a very full life, but I don’t remember there being a shrine devoted to her in the village square when she died.
Dad’s three paintings (why couldn’t they put them all together?) were of a café in St Mark’s Square in Venice, an antique shop in Cambridge, and an old steam engine near Peterborough.

At the end of last year I started a Brazilian drumming course. I quickly gave up when they changed the format of the class and it got too big for me. I thought I’d do something vaguely similar this year. The marimba is like an amplified xylophone, and when five of us played together at various ranges (soprano, alto and tenor) we actually came up with something pretty cool. Playing that sort of instrument is all about patterns, and I’m reasonably good with those. The problem comes when you switch off the auto-pilot and start thinking about what you’re doing; then things can quickly go to pieces. We only used two mallets each, but some clever people can do four. Or six.

At least 300 people have died in a magnitude 7.5 earthquake that hit Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. I’ve felt three (thankfully far smaller) quakes since I got back from America.

Here’s a song by Elliott Smith that I Shazammed recently. Smith was 34 when he died. I’m 35. It’s time I stopped messing around and finally did something with my life.

Tennis

Interclub tennis – Week 2

October 20, 2015 by 0 Comments

I played interclub again last Saturday. We had a bit of a shocker in the doubles. My partner was a nice bloke but we’d never played together before. Our opponents clearly had, and they were simply better doubles players than the pairing we faced the previous time. There were very few of the ten-plus-shot rallies that I do reasonably well in; I guess it was, unfortunately, proper doubles. We were competitive in the latter stages of the first set which we lost 6-3, but got wiped out 6-0 in the second. We went oh-for-three (pardon my American) on sudden-death points. In one game on my serve in the second set, we lost the first three points, then won the next four, only to lose the last two. I double-faulted three times in that game in the swirling wind, including on the sudden-death final point.

My singles opponent (who we faced in the doubles match) was left-handed like me. This is usually bad news. He had a look of confidence about him as he stepped onto the court. I’m not sure I even got his serve back in the first game and I didn’t hold out much hope for the rest of the match. Remarkably I only lost one more game all match, in the middle of the second set when he hit four winning drop shots. I never imagined I’d win 6-1 6-1, and neither did he nor the handful of people watching. He came to the net too often; I was able to pass him and occasionally lob him. I respected his game though and kept my foot on the gas until the end.

My doubles partner lost his singles in three sets after winning the first set on a tie-break. He took a very long break after the first set for no apparent reason. I told him after the match that he should have got on with it; when you win the first set on a tie-break you have a ton of momentum and you need to make the most of it.

As a team we drew 3-3 but won 7-6 in sets. There was another interclub battle going on at the same time as ours, involving a 77-year-old bloke who was on the away team. Sometimes you’ll see that in the doubles-only grades, but in singles, wow.

Language learning

Why Romanian is a great language

October 20, 2015 by 0 Comments

I really enjoy looking at and thinking about language. My decision in 1996 not to study languages at A-level, because I’d never get a job if I did that, was immense muppetry on my part. I went down the scientific route, because that’s what I was born to do, and I’ve regretted it ever since. But better twenty years late than never. If I do end up teaching in Eastern Europe (and that’s my master plan) I’ll want to, and feel obliged to, learn the language. I’ve been looking at Bulgarian, Hungarian and Romanian, three languages that are virtually nothing like each other.

Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. That means it’s out of the question for me, since I’m thirty years too old to be learning a whole new alphabet. Only kidding, I’d love to, and I have some idea of Cyrillic already, but it does add an extra layer of complexity. My biggest problem with Bulgarian isn’t the alphabet, it’s the verbs. According to Wikipedia, “The Bulgarian verb can take up to 3000 distinct forms, as it varies in person, number, voice, aspect, mood, tense and even gender.” That 3000 figure is flagged as being dubious, but Bulgarian verbs still sound like they would mess with my head. I still wouldn’t discount learning the language completely.

Hungarian, I must say, looks bloody horrible. The “gy” combination, which is very common in Hungarian and even counts as a letter in itself, doesn’t appeal to me. It crops up in English from time to time in words like “edgy” or “gyrate”, to say nothing of “gypsy” which is lovely with those other descenders, but it isn’t something I’d want to see all the time. It isn’t even that easy to pronounce in Hungarian. Another digraph which is its own letter is “sz”; that’s a bit nicer than “gy”, but not much. Hungarian also has far too many diacritics. Its vocabulary seems to be very different from just about any other language, making it hard to get a handle on, and it’s a grammatical nightmare with a ridiculous number of noun cases. All in all, it looks extremely hard, and not that much fun to learn either.

Romanian, well that’s a different story altogether. To me Romanian is great and here’s why:

  • First and foremost, it’s a Romance language, but its strong Slavic influence gives it extra variety. There are beautiful words like frumoasa (the feminine form of “beautiful”), Russian-sounding words that you’ll see at the market like morcov (carrot) and cartof (potato), and words like scump (expensive) which is only not an English word by pure accident. Lots of variety is really important to me when learning a language. On the face of it Italian lacks variety (fairly small sound inventory and just about all words end in a vowel) but you’ve got geminated consonants, words beginning with “sb”, and wonderful stuff like that. And it sounds great. Maori also sounds great, but it has no sibilants, no voiced consonants except the three nasals, and no consonant clusters (of even two consonants) at all. Maybe it’s just me, but I find Maori to be missing something.
  • It’s totally phonetic. That might sound boring, but I find it quite refreshing when my native language is anything but.
  • Vowel combinations that get me far more excited than they probably should do: two, three, sometimes four vowels in a row, as in creioane (pencils/crayons). Then there’s copil (child) which becomes copii in the plural, and the wonderful copiii (yep, three i’s in a row) when you want to talk about the children. That word could make some good logos. When I lived in Auckland there was a restaurant in Northcote called Tastiii. Would you dare eat at a place called that? Maybe it was owned by Romanians. Words like copiii would be great for Scrabble – I always get too many i’s in that game. Scrabble seems to be fairly big in Romania. Ceausescu once famously banned it.
  • Sound changes between masculine and feminine, and singular and plural. These certainly make the language harder. It’s not just a case of changing an ‘o’ to an ‘a’ or sticking an ‘s’ on the end; you have to learn the different forms, just like mouse–mice or goose–geese in English. Luckily, because the changes are cool, I’ll want to learn them. That’s what I think is great about Romanian – plenty of weird stuff going on, but it’s all totally awesome weird.

romanian diacritics

  • A sensible number of diacritics. There are enough to pepper the page and make words look cool and exotic, without things getting out of hand as in Vịềtnẳmễsệ. Most importantly, there are only five different letters with accent marks. Two of those are pronounced identically (î is used at the beginning or end of a word, â in the middle). The â/î sound is a bit tricky because it doesn’t exist in English or any other language that I’ve studied, and it gets even trickier when combined with another vowel, as in câine (dog) or pâine (bread), two words that rhyme like they do in Italian (cane/pane). Some Romanians are lazy and type without diacritics; that’s a pain in the butt for people trying to learn the language. Is that a normal ‘a’ or has it got a bowl or a hat?

I’m sure I’ll find more cool stuff if and when I delve deeper into this weird and wonderful language.

My big plan

My big plan

October 18, 2015 by 0 Comments

My trip to the US has done wonders for me. I’ve been back the best part of a month and things haven’t returned to normal at all. I wouldn’t want them to. Normal was terrible. Normal meant life was passing me by. Now I know that life can be bloody awesome. This feels just like it did after the summer of 2001 when I recovered from panic attacks: hey, I can live like me and dress like me and be like me and this feels fantastic. I never thought I’d get back there again. I still found social situations difficult, as I do now, but guess what, that’s part of me, and I can live with that.

In 2002, after nine months or so of being me in my final year of university, I had to get a job. This of course had to be one of those corporate jobs where I couldn’t be me at all, because that’s supposedly what my degree had been geared towards, and I never got any of those jobs because I interviewed so badly. For the next nine months I lived with my parents, packed boxes in a warehouse, and struggled with depression until I got a poorly-paying but actually not a bad job that allowed me to move into a flat and, to a limited extent, be me.

I moved to New Zealand at the end of 2003. I got my first proper corporate job a few months later. And that was pretty much that. With the exception of the work I did on earthquake claims following the two devastating quakes in Christchurch, I haven’t been me since.

I really wish I could get the whole team thing (that’s a part of being me that frustrates me). I didn’t get it thirty years ago; I don’t get it now. But apparently next week I’m suddenly going to love being part of a dynamic team, blazing a career path in my chosen industry, until in five years’ time I’m managing a team of dynamos myself. What really happens? I survive a year or two in my team environment by generally being personable and not pissing people off too much, or even making it all that obvious that I’m there, then I get depressed, I have a change of boss, I can’t face any more Christmas parties with those people, my performance takes a dive, and I jump, hopefully before I’m pushed. I might be lucky enough to get another job, in another team environment, and the whole process can start over again. I’m still young enough (and the retirement age will be old enough by then) to go through more than fifteen further iterations. My latest one, in the water industry, is about as good as it will ever get, I’m with a really nice bunch of people, and it’s still utterly hopeless. The vast majority of my work days are a case of damage limitation; the possibility of achieving anything hardly ever arises. I’ve got this to look forward to at least fifteen more times if I somehow survive that long.

Except I don’t. There are things I’m good at that I can turn into a career. Being bad at teams doesn’t mean I can’t work with people and help people. I like helping people. Language fascinates me, always has done, and my plan is to rent out my apartment and, as I alluded to in my last post, teach English in Eastern Europe. Traditionally when people from this part of the world teach English they do so in Asia, but I want to do what I think will work for me. I think Eastern Europe would suit me more (and I have an EU passport which will be very handy for this, although with the refugee crisis there’s an increased chance that the UK will leave the EU).

In a couple of years I won’t be attending meetings about strategic goals. I’ll be doing a job I love. And during my time off I’ll be doing 36-hour journeys on rickety trains, stopping at places I can’t pronounce, eating food I don’t even recognise, and it’s all going to be amazing. Yes, I know it’ll be challenging, it’ll be scary, but that’s kind of the point (and aren’t “normal” jobs challenging and scary enough?). I’m going to make this happen.

I’m looking at Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, with Romania winning at this stage for two reasons. One, there’s a lot of unjustified paranoia about Romania that keeps tourists away, and keeps the country largely unspoilt (for now). Two, well I’ll talk about that in my next post.

Life :)

Life can be awesome

October 17, 2015 by 0 Comments

Four days a week I pick up and drop off my work colleague who lives near the zoo in Newtown. I talk to him more than anybody else on the planet. After work on Friday he could tell I was feeling like crap (well, I think I made it fairly obvious) and he asked if I wanted to have a beer at Bebemos. They have quite a funky courtyard area there. We had a long chat and I opened up to him, like I never do to anyone. Like me he’s a fan of Paul Simon, and we discussed and laughed about the lyrics from the Graceland album. He wasn’t even born when it came out but he knew all the words. When I got home I felt six times better.

The next day I was at the tennis club, basking in the sunshine and the glory of my two interclub wins (not really), but still massively frustrated with the latest chapter of my seismic saga. I had a chat with the guy I played in the singles and it turns out he owns an earthquake-prone apartment just off Dixon Street. He’s further down the track than me, and faces a six-figure bill. “You’ve got to get over this,” he said. But it’s hard when every time I drag myself up off the floor I receive another hammer blow. You bastards are going to block off my fucking window?! What next? “Do what you want to do. Don’t wait for this strengthening stuff to be over, because you’ll be waiting fucking ages.” This made me feel six times better.

I went to the market on the way home from tennis. I love the market. I’ve always loved markets. Although most of the produce is cheaper than at Pak ‘n’ Save, you do have to be careful. Anything with a label on it is best avoided because it’s probably been in storage for weeks. But some of the stuff there is amazing, like oranges, which I always buy from the same stall. These oranges are all different shapes and sizes, they have rough patches, they have bobbly bits, they have seams. Some of them even look slightly anatomical. They’re not uniform in colour. But they’re all heavy for their size, and when I cut one open, things quickly get messy because it has so much juice. It tastes so damn good. I can’t possibly only eat one so I have another. And another. They’re so good they’re addictive, and they’re about $1.50 a kilo. I buy them by the bucketload. I can’t do Pak ‘n’ Save oranges anymore; the ones from the market are cheaper, tastier and six times better.

Five of the best

When I got back from the market I met up with a friend at the Southern Cross bar, a five-minute walk from my apartment (which, in spite of everything else, is still in its same brilliant location). He’s one of the two blokes I went with on the TPP march just before I went away (as we now know, the march was all in vain, but it was still a great experience for me who had never done anything like that before). The main, indoor bit of the Southern Cross is absolutely huge, but the garden bar is just happiness: the plants, the lanterns, the wallpaper, and the benches all upholstered in different mismatched colours. I love it. If it was entirely up to me (and maybe it is!), the living room of my flat would look a bit like that, minus the wallpaper. It’s a funny thing: you’re supposed to keep all the tones neutral and not have too much clutter in your rooms, so that they look bigger, especially when you come to sell, which should always be soon. I’ve spent eighty bucks or something on my apartment since I moved in nearly four years ago, so my rooms are pretty bare. But they look fucking enormous. Some people even go further and match their lounge suite with their carpet and their décor art, while keeping that neutrality. These tend to be the same people who spend most of their time at work attending meetings about strategic goals or some such shite. How these people don’t get home from work one day, look at all their strategic furniture, and think fuck this, I’m booking a one-way ticket to Boston and jumping off the Tobin Bridge when I get there, I don’t know. Maybe some of them do. Maybe it’s Sophie, Tom and George who keep them strategically ploughing on.

I was digressing a bit in the last paragraph. It was really great to meet up with this guy. He’s an extremely kind, intelligent bloke, but not unlike me, he’s struggled with depression and getting and keeping jobs. He lives with his parents. He hasn’t told them that he’s toying with the idea of living in a van and travelling. I told him about my trip. I said it has had a permanent impact on my life. I then told him about my idea to teach English in Eastern Europe. I got very excited about both America and my new idea for a job. “Hungary! Bulgaria! Romania! I’ve done all these train trips and I can do more train trips! And I might, just might, actually do something I’m good at.” “Wow, that’s awesome, man,” he said. I spent eight days in Boston and three in New York (if you don’t count the tennis which really exists in its own little city). Most normal people would prefer the opposite, but what I did worked for me. Find what works for you, rather than seeing what works for everyone else and pretending it’ll somehow work for you, and life will be six times better.

Tennis

Interclub tennis – my first matches since 2011

October 16, 2015 by 0 Comments

Last Saturday I played interclub tennis for the first time since I moved to Wellington. I was a bit apprehensive as you might expect. The first thing I found out was that they’d changed the rules this season. Doubles matches would now feature a sudden-death point on the second deuce, and the third set would be replaced by a super tie-break up to ten points. I like to look back at matches I’ve played over the years; some I remember very well, a lot I’ve forgotten. The ones that live long in my memory nearly all involve 22-point games and/or three sets. Never playing any more than nine points in a game, or two real sets, turns everything into a whole pile of meh. (Do people still say “meh”? I have no idea.) The professionals have used a similar system for a while now, so change was probably unavoidable, but it was likely brought about by people in the first paragraph for whom playing four hours of tennis, let alone hanging around in the glorious sunshine (like we had on Saturday) in between matches, is completely incompatible with taking Sophie, Tom and George here, there and everywhere to achieve this, that and the other. I was very relieved to find out that singles was still three proper sets, with proper deuces, but give it a few years… Indeed, my singles opponent suggested before our match that we play a super tie-break instead of a third set, and I suggested to him “no bloody way” as politely as I could.

Anyway, on to the actual tennis. It was a fantastic morning for it. We played doubles first, and as isn’t always the case, I’d played with my partner a few times before so we knew each other’s games. This was a big help. Our opponents weren’t so good that involving them at the net meant instant death, and I felt able to play my natural game which usually means a lot of running around and scrambling. It was a scrappy match but that’s how I prefer doubles. My partner was up-and-down, as he usually is, but he became more consistent in the second set. We won 6-4 6-2. The sudden death situation cropped up five times: we won just two of those, but one of them came on my partner’s serve in the penultimate game. We saved five break points in that game – the most you possibly can under this format – and that was huge in the context of the match.

I thought I would win the singles. (Confidence! Amazing, isn’t it?) When I played in Auckland, winning the doubles but losing the singles was a rare occurrence. Sure enough, after ten minutes I led 4-0 having lost exactly one point in each game. But I’ve been there before. Opponents relax, they get used to my game, they simply get better. And he certainly did, most noticeably on serve. In contrast I started to get bogged down and didn’t want to take any risks (I was fully aware of this and tried to become more aggressive). The rallies got longer. We took longer breaks at the changeovers. Still, I led 6-1 3-1. That became 3-3. The crucial seventh game (to go all Dan Maskell) was a long, bruising affair which I won, but he then held for 4-4. I then won my own serve and was able to do enough with his strong first serve in the next game to get into the rallies. We had plenty of them. I dug my heels in on the match point, as if I was down match point, and eventually won another long rally. It felt good to come through that match against a tricky opponent whose game was similar to mine, and hopefully next time I’ll feel more relaxed and able to play my shots.

As a team (I played in the bottom position) we lost out by eight games after tying 3-3 in matches and 7-7 in sets. We still got a point for every match we won.

Travel: the US

Fantastic Fenway

October 16, 2015 by 0 Comments

I first saw a baseball game back in 1998, at the SkyDome in Toronto. It was, and still is, a multi-purpose stadium, used for rock concerts and all sorts. This versatility sapped the two-thirds-empty stadium of all personality. The experience was dire. It didn’t help that I had almost no clue as to what was happening. The home team, the Blue Jays, lost badly.

In 2004 I was boarding with a couple who happened to have ESPN. I was lucky enough to have the place to myself for a short time, and I couldn’t help but watch some of the (now famous) series between the Boston Red Sox and the Yankees. I couldn’t get over the Red Sox fans, how much it all meant to them, and how ridiculous their level of optimism was. Even if they miraculously came back to topple the Yankees, they still had another team to beat after that. And their supporters still believed they could do it. Which of course they did. The bloke who sat next to me on the train from Albany, NY to Toledo, Ohio (he wore a cap with a B on it, of course) happily gave me a play-by-play account of the oh-four series, including that steal.

The Red Sox struggled a bit in 2015; this made getting a ticket a bit easier. I went to the game against Kansas City on my second day in Boston, which had already been a fantastic day. I only just made it on time. Fenway Park is the oldest ground in the country, the smallest too in the major leagues, and I instantly fell in love with it. I was way back in the bleachers, but that hardly mattered. Oh wow, look at the Green Monster! And the manual scoreboard! I really like the scoreboard at the Basin, but this one is on a different level of coolness. It’s clearly hand-painted; the B’s in “At Bat”, “Ball” and “Boston” are all different (or maybe it’s a replica made from an original that was hand-painted; whatever). The scoreboard also shows the scores from matches taking place elsewhere (how come you never saw that at football matches in the UK?).

They played songs which people really got into, and there was the traditional organ music. That guy who plays the organ at Fenway, what a great job he has. There were the hot dog smells and sounds: “Hot dogs! Get your hot dogs!” I did get my hot dog and a warm Sam Adams from downstairs. Shit, did I really pay $15 for that? That’s $24 where I live. Amongst the sights, sounds and smells, there was a game going on. At least this time I knew what a double play or a stolen base was when I saw one. The Red Sox weren’t doing that well. By the middle of the sixth inning they were 5-0 down. But the crowd weren’t that bothered. It was a real party atmosphere. The names of the players got me as they flashed up on the screen. Mookie Betts. Xander Bogaerts. You have to have the right name to play baseball. The names were accompanied by a whole raft of stats. I now know what an ERA is. When we got to the bottom of the ninth, the crowd had thinned, but I was going to stay till the end no matter what. The Red Sox rallied quite strongly at the end, and there was some excitement when, trailing 6-3, they had the bases loaded with two outs. Just one big swipe for the sort of victory that kids probably dream about. There was one big swipe, but no heroics. The game was over. It took three and a half hours – the length of an average five-setter – and it just flew by. There was a wonderful bucket drummer outside and just so much joy. I haven’t seen that much live sport in my life, but that game would make my all-time top five. (The 2001 Wimbledon semis are way, way out in front.)

For interest’s sake I had a look to see how often someone has hit a walk-off grand slam home run to win by one. There are 2430 games in each regular season so in the history of baseball it must have happened a fair few times. It turns out it’s happened just 28 times total. And at Fenway, now in its second century? Zero. I could have seen history there! Never mind.

Some of the terminology in baseball is interesting. A “save” means something quite different from what I think it should mean. A “grand slam” is a very different feat from the similarly-named achievement in tennis or rugby, but at least that one makes sense to me. (I actually think of a grand slam as a sum of money, specifically $85, or one of each note that I ever see. Yes, I still use cash. I know.)

There’s something just nice about baseball. It moves at a pace that’s decidedly not 2015. For large parts of the game, not a lot happens. People have drawn parallels between baseball and Twenty20 cricket, but I’d say it’s more like Test cricket. Both sports work very well on the radio. You can listen to the commentary while doing something else, just like Dad might have tinkered under the bonnet of his car, with the baseball on in the background, in the fifties. Baseball also seems to attract interesting characters, such as Yogi Berra who died last month. Some of the stuff he came out with was pure genius. I tried to get some Yogi-isms into our last team meeting at work; I normally just sit there and say nothing.

Watching sport in Boston is extra fun because they have the best sports fans I’ve seen anywhere in the world. (Some people might use a different superlative from “best”, but I suppose I sort of am a Boston sports fan now.) I’d be on the T and two-thirds of the people in my carriage would be showing their support for one of the local teams, including me (I bought a Red Sox cap so I would fit in at the game, and wore it for the rest of my trip as a mascot, except in New York because I didn’t want to get beaten up). Support for the All Blacks, even during a World Cup like we have now, is small beer in comparison. I imagine the marathon bombing in 2013 “helped” unite the city and its sports teams. Baseball, like all major US sports, is highly commercialised. The Red Sox have an official motor oil, an official furniture store, an official hummus. Yep, official hummus. For some reason I found this hilarious.

While baseball has a lot of features I like, their football has all the elements in sport that I can’t stand, as if someone designed it just to annoy me (and it’s also dangerous). Saying that, I’d happily go to a Patriots game if someone bought me a ticket, for the experience. Basketball doesn’t really appeal to me either. Hockey though, that looks like enormous fun, and all the Bruins fans in the yellow-and-black and those huge B’s look wonderfully mad. Unfortunately hockey is a winter game and I don’t know if I’d go there at that time of year. But Boston, it’s such a beautiful city that I have to go back there some time, see at least three or four games at Fenway, and maybe get a bit closer to the action.

Travel: the US

US trip report – Part 3

October 15, 2015 by 0 Comments

I thought I’d note a few other observations about the parts of the US that I saw (and even though I travelled a long way it still only felt like I scratched the surface).

I found the general American public to be extremely welcoming, friendly, helpful, and easy to talk to. People whose job it was to be friendly and helpful were sometimes extremely so, but sometimes very unhelpful and aggressive with it, and I got everything in between. As for service being much better at restaurants than in NZ, because staff rely so heavily on tips, I didn’t see that. You got more service certainly, but to call it better would be like saying LA has “better traffic” than Wellington. You got the impression that waiting staff felt they needed to perform for their tip; I thought this was demeaning.

US physical currency is nasty stuff. Thai baht is six times more user-friendly. Let me see, I’ve got some black stuff, and some more black stuff… and everything required far too much black stuff. The taxes that varied from state to state (both in amount and where they applied), having to tip all the time, and the ATMs that only ever gave out twenties when you really needed a range, often made transactions a bit of a rigmarole.

I saw this everywhere. It seemed that you either have manicured lawns and a Lexus, or you can’t feed your kids. There didn’t seem to be much of a middle. It’s very different to Wellington where lots of people drive a clapped-out car (but they have one), aren’t going anywhere in their jobs (but they have one), are able to go fishing or maybe play tennis, go to Australia or Fiji occasionally, access nutritious food, and see the doctor when they get sick. I was thinking, maybe that’s why they don’t allow ties in baseball (when it would make so much sense to me to allow them). In the US, people don’t tie in real life. I think the middle is shrinking in the UK too.

Baseball. I enjoyed that so much that I’m giving it its own post (coming up next).

The flight back was long and knackering. Boston to LA was 6 hours. Then I had 7½ hours in LA and was able to go to Santa Monica beach (an unexpected bonus) before getting on the plane to Auckland – another 12½ hours. Air NZ have crammed in more seats on those 777s in the last few years, and you basically can’t win no matter where you sit. Of course I still had to get to Wellington, where it was wet, windy and 7 degrees. In Boston it had been 29. That same day I got a haircut – my hair hadn’t been that long in 13 years. It was also 13 years since I’d been as happy as I was in Boston.

Surprisingly, people at work seemed genuinely interested in my trip. That was nice. I’ve been in touch with my cousin – she goes to Boston for work sometimes and her husband and the boys have all been there. If it wasn’t for her I doubt I’d have gone there, so I’m very grateful.

Travel: the US

US trip report – Part 2

October 15, 2015 by 0 Comments

The organised tour, which ran from Chicago to New Orleans over ten days, was very well run. Our guide was exceptionally good. He knew all the history and always gave us maps and plenty of other information. If there was ever a hitch, he could come up with a plan at the last minute. I saw, heard and tasted a ton of stuff. But having to constantly be at certain places at certain times, and never staying more than two nights in any one place, became quite tiring. And there was this unwritten rule that you had to be there ages before, as I found out when I turned up at the coach four minutes before our scheduled departure and was quite unpopular. And I did feel out of place at times: most people were travelling with a partner, were about double my age, and were doing about their tenth tour. I’d give the tour a 9 out of 10 because it was really very good, but if there’s a next time I do one, they’ll have self-driving buses by then.

Gross generalisation, but Aussies and Kiwis are better travellers than Brits. They kind of accept that you might not be able to get a decent bowl of porridge in a hotel in Lafayette. (I mean, I like porridge as much as the next guy. I’ve had a bowl every day since I got back.) Brits seemed less willing to try new things or to adapt. Big generalisation as I say, but I think I’m being objective there.

Elvis was the big draw card for a lot of people on the tour. I get Elvis, I think, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one person’s face so many times in one day as when we went to Graceland. That got a bit much!

I enjoyed country music much more than I ever expected to, and the two shows we saw in Nashville were so much fun. It’s opened up a whole new world of music for me (and it’s a vast world) that to my shame I’d been almost totally ignorant of before. Those shows and all the bars with the live bands made Nashville my second favourite place on the whole trip. The second night we saw the Grand Ole Opry – the music there was absolutely awesome – just so much variety. That night was 9/11, so we saw even more overt patriotism than the rest of the time. Memphis was pretty cool too; I think I really liked that whole state of Tennessee. And isn’t that word just so evocative? Tennessee.

I got the sense that in the states of Mississippi and Louisiana and probably the rest of the south, the value placed on human life is smaller than elsewhere. I even saw that in New Orleans when three blokes were doing a manhole inspection in the middle of the road and there was virtually no traffic control. Katrina was absolutely devastating and heartbreaking, but had the same thing happened further up the country the death toll would have been far smaller.

People really do talk quite differently in the south; they really do say “y’all” all the time when talking to more than one person. In New Zealand “yous” is creeping in; this is nails-on-a-blackboard for some people but it does the same job as “y’all”.