a romanian adventure

This morning I had a Skype chat with a friend in Auckland, then I got a phone call from my parents. It was quarter to ten at night there, and they’d parked their car somewhere in Hampden where they could get a signal. On the way they’d been to Pleasant Point for Christmas Eve mass.

The next port of call was the penultimate tram stop on Line 4 to pay my rent, but I was engrossed enough in a book that I missed my stop and got off at the end of the line. It was only a five-minute walk back. My landlady was in tears when she told me that her husband, who suffers from severe depression, will be spending Christmas Day in hospital. On the trip back there was a bloke singing Christmas carols – he got a few lei here and there.

Egg vending machines. These are dotted around the city, and I finally plucked up the courage to try one (for Christmas, the time of year famous for all things egg-related). I inserted 6 lei into the slot, tapped in a number, and at that point I half-expected my carton of ten eggs to go ga-doonk. But no, the arm gradually lowered the box to the armhole at the bottom of the machine. They’re locally produced (you can tell that from the TM code) and are cage-free (the digit 2 tells you that), so the egg machine might become a regular thing.

Yesterday as I saw two pigeons picking at a corn cob that somebody must have bought from the Christmas market, I reminded myself that “corn” and “pigeon” have the same root in Romanian: they’re porumb and porumbel, respectively.

On Sunday my student asked me if I had a pension plan and how I’ll manage “when I’m eighty”. I try not to think too much about that.

In my next post I’ll tell you how my first real Romanian Christmas turned out.

Exciting news. I’m going to be experiencing, for the first time, a Romanian Christmas. Sarmale. Cozonac. I really don’t know what to expect, but it should be fun no matter what. One of my ex-students invited me to have dinner with her family, once I’d told her that I’d otherwise by spending the day on my own. And best of all, I should get to speak plenty of Romanian.

In the last week Timișoara and Romania have been marking thirty years of freedom from communism. Millions of older Romanians would prefer to be unfree. When I first came here, I thought these people (who were in far greater numbers than I’d imagined) must be mad. Totally barking. But little by little, it’s begun to make sense. The biggest difference to most people’s lives since 1989 has been the ability to consume more pointless shit more easily, while becoming less and less connected to one another. Life under communism wasn’t exactly a ball for most people, but it was probably less shallow than it is now. Earlier this evening I had a lesson with a bloke just three days older than me. He talked about how special his pre-revolution Christmases seemed compared to the hyper-commercialised ones we know today – of course I don’t know how much of that is down to lack of commercialism and how much is because he was at most nine years old.

I took the tram to the mall (eughh!) this morning. It was a grey, drizzly, English morning, but extremely mild for the time of year. (I’ve just looked back at my posts from 2016. It was brass monkeys back then.) Every time I take the tram I notice a new shop or some other edifice designed with the purpose of facilitating the consumption of unnecessary crap. Today it was a corner shop on Strada Victor Hugo. I’m sure I had a coffee from there one time in the summer of 2017 when I was traipsing up and down streets putting flyers in people’s letterboxes, but then it didn’t have a big shiny sign in English: “Be smart, buy quality”. I’ve learnt not to trust anything that describes itself as smart. At the mall I bought hardly anything Christmassy and instead grabbed a load of files and other stationery. At the cheese counter I simply gave up, and I later got my block of sheep’s cheese from the old lady at the market.

My steady stream of lessons has predictably slowed to a trickle, and I’m fine with that. I’ve been using the extra time to beef up my Romanian language skills. A useful resource to improve my listening are podcasts, and I’ve recently found a regular podcast called Pe Bune, where famous and semi-famous Romanians from the film, theatre, music or art world are given interviews lasting nearly an hour. The best thing is that the transcript is available.

Outside I can hear drums banging, whistles peeping and trumpets tooting. It must be Christmas time in Romania.

I spoke to my brother last night. He’d been skiing in France (Les Deux Alpes) with his army mates. I ended up speaking more with my sister-in-law than with him. She’s a lovely person; it still amazes me how he managed to find someone as nice as her. After that I had a long chat with my parents. It was good to talk to my mum for a decent length of time. Dad’s headaches are still unremitting. He survives cancer, and now this? Every day?

Yesterday one of my students called me to say she was at the Christmas market with her husband and eight-year-old son. Would I like to join them? That was kind of them, and I was only free because another student had cancelled. They’re from Bucharest, came to Timișoara for work, and are now itching to go back. I had some mulled wine and sarmale, and tried some șorici, or strips of pork rind. I couldn’t stomach it. There was a march commemorating the 30th anniversary of the revolution. My student and her husband thought it was all a waste of time. “It’s been thirty years!” As if that’s somehow a long time. It was clear that they’re part of the modern generation of Romanians, happy to forget their past.

On Friday I bumped into the elderly couple who live on the sixth floor. A different generation, a different world almost from the people I met yesterday. They lamented the benign December we were having, and longed for the Decembers of fifty years ago with snow up to their knees. According to them, Timișoara was going to hell in a hardcart, judging by the way people dress (flip-flops!) and their lack of respect for one another. I felt sorry for them as they told me about their aches and pains, and even more sorry when they said they had a son who had lost contact with them. However, I enjoyed the chat, and I came away feeling a certain pride that I was able to communicate in Romanian with people from a very different background without too many problems.

The election result. I saw it coming. An 80-seat overall majority for the Conservatives. I don’t think Brexit affected the outcome so much as Jeremy Corbyn, who was deeply unpopular. He’d been vilified. One of my students sent me a link to a Daily Mail article written in August about Corbyn’s choice of summer holiday destination. Corbyn had visited, guess where, Romania. An ex-communist country! And we know he’s a communist. But regardless of that, going to Romania proves that he’s weird. Not like you normal people reading this column who wouldn’t even be able to locate Romania on a map. And what’s more, he flew Wizz Air! How can you be a prime minister if you use a budget airline?

Labour picked up the wrong message from the 2017 election. Yes, they overperformed expectations and importantly prevented a Tory majority, but Corbyn was not the man to build on what was still, after all, a defeat. It reminded me somewhat of the 2005 general election in New Zealand, where National under Don Brash (in his mid-sixties) bounced back from a devastating loss in 2002 to only lose narrowly, but National realised they needed to hand over the reins to somebody younger and fresher. Labour (in the UK) are now in a pretty bad place. Corbyn’s acolytes are front and centre in the party. Unless that changes, we’re looking a whole decade of Boris and his mates.

So what does this all mean for me? Honestly I’ve got no idea. In a few months, my registration certificate with an expiry date of September 2022 might not be worth the paper it’s written on. I plan to visit the immigration office tomorrow, but I bet the bloke at the desk won’t have a clue.

Three cancellations so far today. Oh, and guess what, I bumped into S on Thursday, not long before my worst election fears became reality. I thought that if I hadn’t seen her in all this time, I perhaps never would, but I was cycling back from a lesson and there she was. She told me her grandmother, who must have been nearly 90, had died. Perhaps we’ll meet up again after Christmas.