Environment - Films - Photos

Horror watch

October 15, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I saw Threads on Saturday night. The last 60% of the film, from the attack onwards, was extremely chilling. I nearly didn’t see it through to the end. It was broadcast on the BBC in September 1984, three weeks after I started school. There were reminders of my early childhood everywhere: football scores, typewriters, cars similar to what we had, and most poignantly an educational TV programme called Words and Pictures. Educational TV was a big thing in the UK in the eighties. Us tiny kids would file into the TV room, then the teacher would wheel out the great big telly on a trolley, just in time for the ten-minute programme to start. Sometimes this was Words and Pictures. Seeing a garbled post-nuclear version of this – which made reference to skeletons and skulls – was haunting. Threads, in its way, was brilliantly done. It was also informative. My only gripe was that those born after the attack spoke a greatly simplified pidgin English; this was unrealistic to me. Tragically, the girl who played Jane died in a car crash in 1990.

Last Wednesday night, just after I wrote my previous post, I found a live YouTube stream of Hurricane Milton. Or rather, it was a stream of the tornadoes that preceded Milton’s landfall in Florida. There was a host – a qualified meteorologist – transmitting a barrage of tornado warnings, accompanied by a younger meteorologist in another room and three storm chasers on the ground. There were brightly coloured maps showing the path of the tornadoes in precise detail. A locality that got disproportionate attention was the village of Yeehaw Junction (what a name) with a population of just over 200. I’ve become skeptical of some modern technology, but they were using fantastic, life-saving tech.

Yesterday I cycled to Utvin in the morning. The village is larger than I imagined, with around 3000 people. Then in the afternoon I went for a drive. I ended up in the north of Timiș, not far from where Dorothy has her place. At one point, two kestrels flew overhead. Another time six or seven piglets ran out alongside me. There’s something quite wonderful about just being in rural Romania. I was a little too early to fully catch the full array of autumn colours.

Just three weeks until the US election. I’ve got a horrible feeling about it.

Utvin. Can you spot the cat?

The church at Remetea Mică
Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music

Home sweet home

October 10, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a no-show from one of those real millennials I once talked about on here. One of the ones who’s been to Dubai. That’s after reminding her less than two hours before she started. Yes, she said. Or rather, da. Then nothing. When she messaged me last month to say she wanted to resume lessons with me, I let out a deep groan to myself. Uughhh. I thought I’d got rid of her.

Yesterday I caught up with my cousin on Zoom. The one who lives in Wellington and has had cancer. For all I know, she may still have cancer. In an hour she didn’t mention her health once. Her siblings and even her mother have virtually no idea what’s going on either. All very bizarre. There was still the visibly drooped jaw but her speech wasn’t affected. We discussed my parents’ house, both agreeing that it was madness, then we talked about working from home. On that matter we disagreed entirely. Her number one son has almost finished at Canterbury and is going to Sydney do a master’s in robotics. Number two boy has just started working for Wellington Free Ambulance. The little chap, now all of 16 (time whizzes by), looks set to join either the police or the military. I thought my cousin might push all her boys into academia, so I’m glad the younger two haven’t gone in that direction.

Yeah. Working from home. A bloody great invention if you ask me. Obviously some very important jobs can’t be done from home. Even mine doesn’t always work online. Getting an eight-year-old kid to sit still and look at me can be quite the battle. Teaching maths online is rather inconvenient. I can never seem to find the pi key. But yeesh, there are millions of people in white-collar jobs (both good and mind-numbingly crap) where face-to-face contact is a near-total irrelevance when it comes to actually doing the job. Sure, there’s the socialising if you’re into that, but even that can be unbearably fake. The modern office itself is unbearable to a lot of people. If I went back to a large open-plan office I’d last five minutes. Two minutes if hot desking was also involved. Just fuck no. And if you live in a dormitory town (what a horrible phrase) in the UK, you’re probably looking at two to three hours a day just getting from your soulless housing estate to some equally soulless business park and back. Who wouldn’t want rid of that and have the chance to exercise more (the amount of exercise the average Brit gets is shockingly low) and spend more time with their kids? (Yes, I know, there are plenty of TGIM fathers – thank God it’s Monday – who like all that commuting and office fakeness precisely so they can escape from their families.)

My cousin is 55 and owns a business. To put it mildly, she wasn’t a fan of working from home. She talked about fostering team environments which may have been a thing 30 years ago but isn’t really now. When I spoke to Dad, he expressed a dislike of the whole WFH concept which I found very weird coming from him, but then again he is 74 and you can’t cure 74. It’s great, he said, that civil servants in Wellington are finally going back to work. Back to work! This amused me greatly. If Dad’s definition of work involves travelling to an office, he has done zero hours of work in the last 45 years.

Here’s the British comedian Michael Spicer’s take on the WFH phenomenon. My favourite comment to the video is the one that mentions commercial real estate investors and surrounding businesses like coffee shops. Sorry, but $7 cups of coffee aren’t a good enough reason to bring people back.

A terrifying storm, which goes by the less-than-terrifying name of Milton, is making landfall in Florida. There are several tornadoes. Joe Biden has just called it the Storm of the Century. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Milton. The name makes me think of the character from the Office Space (ha!) documentary comedy film. Another Milton I’m aware of is the nephew of the mathematician who wanted a name for 1 followed by 100 zeros. Milton came up with googol. This was then extended to the googolplex, which is 1 followed by a googol zeros. The name “googol” was the inspiration for the name Google.

On the subject of maths, it’s taken me till October to realise that the year 2024 is a tetrahedral number. In 2016 we were living in a triangular year: if you have 2016 balls, you can arrange them into an equilateral triangle with 63 balls on each side. Well, tetrahedral numbers take this to another level. (Or several other levels, to be precise.) You can arrange 2024 balls into a tetrahedron (or triangular-based pyramid) in which each face is an equilateral triangle. Specifically, 2024 is the 22nd tetrahedral number; there are 22 balls on each edge. It’s equivalent to the sum of the first 22 triangular numbers. This means that tetrahedral numbers (or years) are even rarer than triangular ones. The previous one was 1771; the next one won’t be until 2300.

Earlier today my student read an article about Threads, a 1984 docu-drama about a nuclear apocalypse. Frightening as it must have been then, during the Cold War, I’d like to find and watch it now.

Music. A new favourite song of mine is called Help Me See the Trees by Particle Kid. The lead singer of the band is Willie Nelson’s son. Here’s the song being performed at the Tomboy Sessions in Santa Cruz, California. There’s loads of other good stuff – mostly country music – from the Tomboy Sessions.

Family - Life :) - Photos - Romania

Eight years in this crazy place

October 8, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

As my work hours are getting longer again, my posts are getting shorter.

This morning I had a Skype chat with my aunt and uncle in Woodbury (the ones who visited me in Timișoara). She had a lot to say; he didn’t. She said they’ll be putting their property on the market. Time to pull the plug. Though with my uncle starting to lose his memory, I wonder how much a totally alien home might mess him up.

Today marks the eighth anniversary of my arrival in Romania. I’ve spent 18% of my life here. Yesterday I met Mark in town. We talked about a lot of teaching, mostly. But also his three children. And how much we both still like Timișoara. If only it wasn’t so hot in summer, this place would be just about perfect for me.

This was from Saturday. I still haven’t been invited to a Romanian wedding. The more I hear about them (400 guests? Lasting three days?) the more grateful I am.

A statue of Adi Bărar, guitarist for Timișoara band Cargo. It was put up just three weeks ago. Bărar died in 2021 after getting Covid.

Glory to God. Read the Bible every day. In Recaș yesterday.

This dog just wouldn’t budge, no matter what. I even took a video of cars swerving around it. At Bazoșu Nou yesterday.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Leaky roof and keeping up with the kids

October 5, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I suppose the big news from me is that the roof of this apartment block is leaking and needs a repair pretty urgently. We’ve had a quote for 65,000 lei, which (assuming it’s split evenly between the ten owners) means we each have to pay the equivalent of £1100 or NZ$2300. Now that I’ve left the world of money far behind me, that feels like a lot. It’s a lot of lessons, certainly. A lot of trying to explain to a ten-year-old boy the rule for adding an S to verb forms while a parrot is screeching his head off in the room next door. That actually happened yesterday.

I’m now teaching more kids than ever before. Fitting them all in is a major headache. At some point I may have to switch to group sessions. Tomorrow I’ve got four sessions scheduled, running from 7:45 till 4:30. One adult – the priest – followed by a trip to Dumbrăvița for the three kids.

There’s just a month until the terrifying US election. So consequential, but nothing any of us can do about it. I suppose I should at least be grateful that Harris has a fighting chance. Biden was heading for a drubbing (by recent standards) until mercifully he pulled out. I heard that John Key, former prime minister of New Zealand, has come out in support of Trump. Remarkable, isn’t it? He was leader of one of the most peaceful and least corrupt countries on the planet for eight years, and now he’s backing that way-too-old hate-filled criminal. He’ll be better for the economy, Key said. Even if that’s true (and it’s a big if), that tells you all you need to know about Key. As prime minister he emphasised economy at the expense of society, and now he’s even prepared to dispense with global stability. (And yeah, his fingers are in a lot of pies, and it might well be better for his personal economy if Trump were to win.)

Family - Life :) - Romania

Musafiri

September 28, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Musafiri means visitors. It’s a word imported into Romanian from Turkish, just like dușman (enemy), macara (a crane that you lift things with), mușama (oilcloth), and hundreds of others. And in a pretty rare event, I actually had some musafiri last weekend.

At 6:30 pm on Saturday, after a solid day of lessons, my university friend (let’s call him Jason) arrived in a campervan with his girlfriend (let’s call her Marianne) and her parents. They (or specifically her father) had driven all the way from Paris, stopping in Normandy, Germany, Austria and Hungary on the way. They came up to my flat. We chatted and eventually ate (I was getting hungry). I spoke mostly English, peppered with some French. Marianne speaks English at a native level, while her parents speak just enough to get by. Her parents’ intrepid travels made for some interesting conversation. They drove to Iran in 2019, got stuck in Turkey during the early stages of Covid, and even took the van to Russia after the war started in 2022. The mind boggles. I put Jason and Marianne up in my larger bedroom, I slept in the small one, and Marianne’s parents slept in the van in the car park.

Marianne, only 33, was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. With all her treatment, she understandably gets tired easily, so we took things pretty slowly. We made a late start the next morning, taking the tram into the centre of town, arriving at the Orthodox cathedral while Sunday mass (which takes hours) was still in full swing. The four of them found this a quite incredible sight, as I did myself the first time. (As I lived practically right by the cathedral, I quickly got used to it.) Marianne wanted to check out all the souvenir shops. Her other big thing was cats. She’s a cat obsessive. Timișoara is awash with cats, so she was in heaven – my apartment block’s cat-heavy car park was a rich source of photo opportunities.

We went to Porto Arte, the bar and restaurant by the river. The weather was excellent and the bar was doing a good trade – the bell, which rang every time a new food order came in, was going incessantly. From there we walked through the three main squares. They were impressed by the architecture. Jason and Marianne said the city centre was much cleaner than Birmingham’s – I found this comment rather alarming. Birmingham, like so many other British cities, is in a right mess. We went to the Bastion which had a newish tourist office that was informative even for me – it showcased the attractions of Timiș as a whole, not just the city. We sat in a nearby bar, inside to get out of the heat. (Marianne seemed quite sensitive to it. It’s just as well she didn’t come a month earlier.) We took the tram home. Marianne lay on the bed while Jason and I chatted. We covered some interesting subjects, such as the standard of maths teaching.

At around 7:30 we made our way to the Timișoreana beer factory, just a few minutes’ walk from my place. Unlike the previous two times I’d been there, all the action was in the outside area. I suppose it had been winter the other times. It was somebody’s 50th birthday, so we were treated to a rather loud rendition of De Ziua Ta by the Romanian band 3 Sud Est. There was also, surprise surprise, a cat among the tables. We ate and drank. Marianne’s parents struck up conversation with anybody and everybody they could find. Then a card game came out. A trick-taking game like euchre, this game used a special pack with pirate and mermaid cards as well as numbered cards of various coloured suits. There were no teams; the five of us played individually. The game’s big thing was that rather than trying to win as many tricks as possible, you had to predict how many you would win after seeing your hand, then try and hit that exact number. What’s more, players bid simultaneously. The game progresses over ten deals (only one card per player in the first round, increasing by one with each round). I was nowhere near winning, but it was an interesting game nonetheless.

Jason and Marianne parted ways from her parents, who were up early the next morning for the next leg of their van trip. Jason and Marianne rose rather later, and luckily I had no lessons until 1pm. I took them to the train station and said goodbye. They were heading to Budapest, then on to Croatia where they would finally fly back to Birmingham. Throughout the afternoon and evening (I had five lessons, finishing at 9:30), Jason updated me on their delays. The train was almost two hours late leaving Timișoara, then they had another hold-up at the border. It was close to midnight when they got to Budapest.

Having visitors seemed to make me feel better. It made me tidy this place up, for one thing, and added a more general sense of purpose to life for that short period. Since then it’s been a tiring few days. Right now we’re nudging 30 degrees – very warm for late September.

Some big news: Mum and Dad have booked their flights to Europe. They’re flying to Munich and then to Timișoara; they’ll arrive on (I think) 8th May. They’ll maybe spend two weeks with me before heading to the UK.

The US election is just 39 days away. The polls (for what they’re worth) are close. Some people have already voted; early voting started last week. The stakes are extremely high.

Language learning - Language teaching

Hungarian: the GOAT, and more language musings

September 18, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

This afternoon I had a session with two new girls aged 15 and 16. One of them is the daughter of my first-ever student and is clearly a voracious reader in English. Her vocabulary was unusually good. They both have Hungarian, not Romanian, as their first language, so when they spoke to each other I didn’t have a clue what they were saying. That felt weird. And weird is probably the best word to describe Hungarian. It’s almost what is called a language isolate: a language that shares no ancestors with any other. It doesn’t quite qualify because it shares roots with Finnish and Estonian, but it took a sharp left turn many centuries ago and is now firmly on its own. If Romanian, French, German, and even Serbo-Croat are animals of one species or another, Hungarian is a fungus. Because Hungarian is written using the Latin alphabet, I expect to get some kind of read on it, but it’s worse than Greek to me.

On the way back from Vienna, we stopped in the city of Kecskemét. It’s pronounced “ketch-keh-met”, but with a lengthened final syllable. That’s what the acute accent does. Just like in almost all Hungarian words, the stress goes on the first syllable. For us English speakers, we’ve already got a problem here. In English, long vowels tend to be stressed too. Take the word believe. The vowel in the second syllable is long, and happily the second syllable is also where the stress falls. It would be quite hard to say be-lieve while keeping the vowel lengths the same, but that’s exactly what Hungarian requires you to do.

Three signs on a loo in the Kecskemét bistro. Good luck!

Kecskemét means “goat pass” (simply, kescke means “goat” and mét means “pass”). So let’s look up kecske in Wiktionary, an extremely handy multilingual dictionary. It says goat, with some stuff about an uncertain etymology. It even gives me a picture of a goat. Great.

But when I click on the “inflection” arrow, I get this, a veritable explosion of word forms in both singular and plural:

All those endings tell you whether you’re doing something to the goat, with the goat, on the goat, near the goat, or whether something is being put inside the goat or falling off the goat or the goat is transforming into something else. It’s mindblowing that a noun can even have this many inflections. By the way, all the things in blue in the first column – dative, instrumental, adessive, and so on – are cases. English and French ditched cases, which were part of Latin, a long time ago. Romanian still has them – five, unlike the crazy number Hungarian has, and because two pairs of them share the same form, you can think of Romanian as having just three, of which one isn’t used all that much. Serbian has seven, and they’re all distinct.

It’s not just nouns. Hungarian verbs are fiendishly complex, too. There’s the whole concept of definite and indefinite conjugations. Definite would be eating a pizza, say, while indefinite would be just eating. At least I think that’s what the difference is.

When I got back from Vienna I fired up Duolingo in Hungarian. By the fourth lesson I realised it was hopeless and gave up. I can’t hope to even scratch the surface of such a language by playing a game, which is what Duolingo is. It doesn’t help with pattern recognition, which is vital when the language is so complex and alien to anything I’ve seen before.

Before Hungarian there was German. I felt almost ashamed at how little I knew of such a well-known language. While clearly much easier than Hungarian, German seems full of traps. Langsam, meaning slow, sounds slow. But then so does schnell (snail?), meaning fast. Then there are the crazy-looking space-bar-free words. Even some sensible-length words like Borschtsch, a kind of soup, look completely ridiculous. I saw a sign for Schifffahrt – a water taxi on the Danube – which looked pretty damn silly too.

Then on my trip to Maribor I was confronted with Slovenian. Just like Serbian and the other Slavic languages, it’s highly inflected, though nowhere near as extreme as Hungarian. Slovenian has six cases, one fewer than Serbian which also has the vocative. (The vocative is used when a person or thing is addressed directly; Romanian also has this case to a limited extent.) One major phonetic difference between Slovenian and Serbian is that Slovenian has final devoicing. This means that voiced consonant sounds at the end of the word, such as b, d or g, are replaced by their unvoiced counterparts, p, t and k respectively, even though their spellings may remain the same. Most Slavic languages and many others like German have this feature, and I can’t say I’m a fan. I like a nice strong b or g at the end of a word.

Just like Serbian, Slovenian is full of prefixes and suffixes. The cases give you the suffixes, while the prefixes are attached to verbs to denote completion or direction or a bunch of other things. A common prefix in both languages (I think) is po-, while -om is a common suffix. That meant I kept seeing pom a lot. It caught my eye because I now see that word every time I get in my car.

It was only when I returned from Slovenia, many months after my purchase, that I saw another car with POM on its plate, registered in Timiș. It was a sporty red Fiat with the top down. Then yesterday I saw a rather more prosaic POM – a white van – registered in Bucharest. It’s nice to know I’m not alone after all.

Family - Language teaching - Politics - Romania

The big bam!

September 16, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I said last time that seasons in Romania change with a sudden bam!, and what a bam! this has been. Its real name is Cyclone Boris (yes, these things have names now) which has dumped months of rain on us in a few days. In the county of Galați in the east, flooding has claimed six lives. I wonder how many Romanians died from the heat waves that immediately preceded all of this. Climate change is real. On a personal note, I haven’t minded the deluge. I feel I’m built to handle it, in a way I’m simply not with the extreme heat. Yesterday I met Mark in town. I got there early. Piața Victoriei was almost deserted, lockdown-like, so I could take in the architecture without worrying about bumping into people. We ate at Berăria 700. Obviously we didn’t sit outside as we normally would. Inside means you’re in part of the old fortress, which has a real cosy feel about it.

In town yesterday afternoon

Work is getting back to normal, though it’s a different normal. So many kids now. They all want (or their parents want, let’s face it) lessons just after the school day finishes and it’s impossible to accommodate everybody.

Part of a lesson on Friday

Last week I heard some dreadful news. A 17-year-old student of mine (we started when he was just 11) has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. His mother messaged me with the news. His English is excellent; he’s come on in giant leaps in the six years I’ve spent with him. He wanted to be a pilot. We often discussed planes, routes, accidents and incidents. Sometimes I’d talk about planes that I flew on as a kid, such as the three-engined DC-10. This diagnosis has surely scuppered his plans. For someone so young (and he had an old head on young shoulders) it’s so sad.

I saw snippets of last week’s presidential debate. Kamala Harris performed very well. She knew what buttons to press. The “rally size” button was particularly effective. She made Trump seem even more egotistical and unhinged than usual. Trump went on about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating cats and dogs. That was the clip played around the world. What didn’t get so much airtime was his admiration of Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. I doubt many in the US would even have known who Orbán was. But it certainly got some attention here in Romania. The prospect of Trump getting back in again is scary as hell. Harris needs to get herself out there more. More rallies, more interviews. She’s shown she can perform. Just seven weeks to go now. (I’ve just seen that apparently there was another attempt on Trump’s life while he was playing golf, though it didn’t get nearly as far as in July.)

Yesterday I saw my nephew on a WhatsApp video call with my brother. It was his second birthday. There were balloons and streamers and all sorts. Mum and Dad are now serious about a trip to Europe, probably next May. So that’s good.

Family - Films - The UK

One of each

September 8, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ll be getting a niece to go with my nephew. When my brother told me, I was over the moon. I don’t really know why. I might just be that so much of the toxic crap we face these days is generated by men. The due date is 22nd January. Hey, isn’t that around the date of the presidential inauguration? How about a little Kamala, then, if she wins? Goes pretty well with our surname. Of course they wouldn’t dream of calling her anything like that, but it’s fun to think of slightly out-there names.

Last night I had my longest phone chat ever with my brother. He’s not one for talking on the phone, or even WhatsApp video (as it was), but we managed a whopping 50 minutes. There was a lot to get through. The baby gender reveal (should be “sex reveal”, really), the New Zealand trip, the flight back in which my nephew screamed and bawled for hours, and my parents’ house. He was horrified by how impractical it was. How did our eminently sensible Mum and Dad descend into such madness? Then when I told him how much the renovation cost (he didn’t know), his jaw dropped.

This summer is the first time I’ve ever been seriously mentally affected by weather. The floods in St Ives, the humidity of Auckland, the howling wind and horizontal rain of Wellington, my pretty brutal first winter in Timișoara, even some heat waves I’ve experienced here, none of it comes close to the summer of 2024. It’s been unremitting. I’ve almost put housework on hold, because after 15 minutes I’m dripping with sweat and need a cold shower. With the air con, the living room stays nice and cool, but that’s meant I’ve been confined to just this one room. The good news is that seasons don’t change gradually here; you shift abruptly – bam! – from one to the next. The forecast tells me that we’ll get the bam next week, and it can’t come soon enough. One ray of light has been my sinuses. At just about the moment I got back from NZ a year ago tomorrow, they stopped running. I’d had a constant stream for a year and a half, mostly from my left nostril. Then like magic, it stopped. How I have no idea. I still get pain sometimes, and end up taking paracetamol or occasionally something stronger, but the stream drying up has made a huge difference.

Yesterday I saw One Life at Cinema Timiș with Dorothy. Starring Anthony Hopkins, it told the story of Nicky Wilton who helped hundreds of mostly Jewish children escape from Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia on trains to Britain, just before the start of WW2. The last train, with 250 children on board, never made it – it was aborted, tragically, when Germany invaded Poland. The film flitted back and forth between 1939 and the autumn of 1987, when Winton was an old man. (Winton died in 2015 at the extraordinary age of 106.) I clearly remember the autumn of ’87 when so much bad stuff happened. Mum’s mother was over from NZ at the time. She got bronchitis when she was with us, during which time world stock markets plunged, our garden was waist-deep in water (there are photos of my brother and I canoeing in the garden), an unforecast hurricane ripped through southern Britain giving us a day off school, and (the day before my grandma left the UK) a fire at King’s Cross underground station killed 31 people.

The inquiry into the Grenfell fire, which killed 72, came out last week. Damning stuff. So many players, all cutting corners, ignoring dire warnings about the cladding, putting their own profits above human lives, blaming each other. A good number of them need to be banged up. Owners of flats in the UK (600,000 people) are having to pay to have the cladding replaced. A lot of them simply can’t afford to. This is all a lot like the earthquake-prone building business in NZ which I was caught up in, only at least it’s getting some proper coverage.

Three new students, all women, at the end of last week. I really seemed to click with the last one; that’s always nice.

Family - Photos - Travel: Europe

Photos from Vienna

September 6, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tomorrow we’ll know whether my nephew will get a little brother or sister to terrorise. Mum and Dad are still recovering from their extended family time. I’m sure all five of them would have had a better time if my sister-in-law had stayed at home.

Now for some pictures from my Vienna trip.

The view from our apartment. Red squirrels abounded.

Above: Pictures from Schönbrunn Palace. The bottom photo is from the Gloriette.

The Gloriette: a display of strength and power

The next day: Walking to the Albertina, and below: some paintings I particularly liked.

Christian Rohlfs

Albin Egger-Lienz

Oskar Kokoschka

Rudolf Wacker. This might have been my favourite of all. Dorothy and I spent considerable time perusing it.

Franz Sedlacek. At first glance you think they’re birds.

Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, painter and scupltor

Marc Chagall. I could have stared at this one for hours.

There was a whole room of Picassos that I didn’t take photos of, then we saw the extensive collection of American photographer Gregory Crewdson which was well worth it. Each photograph included a frozen figure; the small-town America setting only increased the creep factor.

This little girl was transfixed by the violinist

These newsstands add colour to a city, but they’re thin on the ground these days

St Stephen’s Cathedral

The Belvedere

Cities need more buildings like these. The height and general appearance make you feel good.
Family - Travel: Europe

Vienna trip report (and some family stuff)

September 5, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

So last Thursday I drove to Vienna with Dorothy (70), Sanda (54), and Sanda’s uncle Valeriu (about to turn 80 and who had never been out of Romania before). Another long drive for me. After some stops along the way and a very slow run into Vienna, we finally made it to the Park & Ride. Sanda, who speaks excellent German, was able to ask someone how that whole system worked. Then we took the underground to our apartment which was in an old building similar in style to the ones in Timișoara. (Timișoara was part of the same empire then, after all.) I shared a room with Valeriu. My mother’s father was 77 when he first left New Zealand. Valeriu had him beat, and at times he was like a fish out of water. He relied heavily on his niece. (Valeriu lost his wife last year after a long illness. They never had children.)

The apartment had cooking facilities and we used them three nights out of four. The next day I was completely shattered. A combination of the long drive, broken sleep, and the sheer heat meant I couldn’t stop yawning the whole day. A shame, because we visited the beautiful Schönbrunn Palace, the residence of the Habsburgs until their monarchy ended in 1918. Valeriu was very keen to see everything there was to see about Empress Elisabeth, otherwise known as Sisi, who Romanians have great affinity with. She was stabbed to death in 1898. We did an audio tour of the palace – I had no hope of keeping up with the Ferninands and Josephs – then climbed up to the top of the Gloriette which sits at an elevated position at the end of Schönbrunn’s garden. I tried to decipher the inscription on the Gloriette with the help of Dorothy who once taught Latin and Greek. The way I was feeling, my favourite part of the day was in the morning when I had a very good coffee with Dorothy at an underground station while Sanda helped Valeriu buy an “Austria” baseball cap.

Day two was much better. Sanda and Valeriu went to a technological museum, while Dorothy and I visited the Albertina, a quite wonderful art gallery near the centre. The previous time I properly went to an art gallery was in 2006 when I visited the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. This was at least as good. The Monet to Picasso collection could hold you transfixed for hours. Zoom in, zoom out. What is this supposed to be? What was he thinking? What further wonders would he have produced if he hadn’t been killed in the war? How shocking was this at the time? Look how incredible those hands are. We must have spent four hours there. The thermostat was turned right down – it was pretty parky in there – but much better that than sweating and yawning and rapidly losing interest. The night before I’d found an out-of-the-way restaurant with local cuisine; the four of us met up there at 6:30. (I relied mostly on an old map. Outside the apartment, my phone was a brick with a camera.) We took one look at the prices and went next door instead. Sausages, goulash, beer. Perfectly good, only I could have eaten twice as much.

Our last full day involved us all meeting up with two of Sanda’s friends at a café slap-bang in the middle of the city, in the shadow of St Stephen’s Cathedral. Again we split up – Valeriu stayed with Sanda and her friends, while Dorothy and I wended our way through the Mozart zone to the Belvedere Gardens. We didn’t go to the museum; we just walked through the gardens which were free to enter. On the way back we had tea and an apple strudel in a café, then met the other two in the city centre once more. By this stage, Sanda had tummy troubles and Valeriu was understandably tired. I wonder what he made of the whole experience. He certainly travelled light; he came with one small holdall and no shorts or other summer clothes. He predates even the baby boomer generation and grew up in the sticks not too far from where I went in late June, and having never been abroad before, the idea of changing his wardrobe from the tried and true was alien to him.

Dorothy and I got on well. We talked a lot about language. That subject came up a lot with Sanda too; she is practically fluent in four languages (Romanian, English, German and Italian) – that level of mastery isn’t that rare in Romania, but it continues to blow me away. I did get slightly annoyed by Sanda’s tendency to organise everyone, even though she meant well, and her penchant for selfies. Valeriu had clearly done a lot of driving back in the day; much of our conversation focused on that.

After breakfast the next morning, we were off back home. A short loo break 170-odd km down the road, then a similar distance to Kecskemét, a small city in the centre of Hungary, far from the tourist trail, where we stopped for lunch. (It was close to 3pm by then. I was ravenous.) Sorting out parking payment was hard work. None of us could read the Hungarian signs. Does that mean three wheels? But I’ve got four wheels. What the hell? Dorothy and Sanda exchanged forint notes for coins at a bank – this took ages and Dorothy thought it was jolly good fun – while Valeriu and I stood by the car. Eventually that was sorted. Now for some food. A bistro round the corner. Looks good. Then it came to ordering our meals. A major performance. We found one guy who spoke English but he didn’t work there. Sanda made cow noises and flappy bird gestures. Google Translate came out. I was rapidly losing the will to live. We got there in the end, and it took them less time to bring us our food than it took to order it. I had a substantial meal of pork escalopes and chips. Great. But then two massive plates of food materialised that we hadn’t ordered – a communciation breakdown despite everyone’s best efforts. By 7:45 I’d dropped the others off and I was home, but not before a tight squeeze in the car park behind my apartment block which nearly threw me after being on the road for so long.

Yesterday I spoke to Mum and Dad. A sigh of relief. Bar the first couple of days, it had been a really shitty time for them all. Dad still isn’t right. My sister-in-law didn’t want to come to NZ anyway, as far as I could see. She’d rather have used up her leave allocation elsewhere – probably something involving a cruise. Mum and Dad were pissed off that my brother did most of the work when it came to looking after my nephew. He was up early while she stayed in bed. And as for my nephew, he’s a very bright little boy, and physically strong with it. He hurt my parents on several occasions, and seemed to enjoy it. (Yikes.) He can already count to twelve. Count me out.

I can’t wait for the sub-30 temperatures that we’re forecast to get early next week. Right now it’s still far too hot. My university friend and his girlfriend are staying with me for two nights from the 21st. Not many people other than students get to see the inside of my flat, so that’ll be slightly nerve-wracking for me. I’m now off to Dedeman to get flat-related bits and pieces. When they’ve gone it’ll all be back to normal.

Like my recent drives across Hungary – four of them – this post has gone on far too long.