a romanian adventure

I thought I’d describe yesterday, a typically terrific Tuesday in Timișoara, while it’s still relatively fresh in my mind.

I got up at 7:30; these days I rarely get up much earlier than that. I didn’t have any lessons until 12:30 so I made a trip to the supermarket and did some preparation, printing off Halloween and Guy Fawkes-related worksheets for my younger students. For Octavian, the ten-year-old, I added a few “squares that do things” to my Crazy Rabbits board game, trying to avoid the absurdity of squares that direct you to other squares that direct you to other squares, or worse, squares that send you back to where you came from, sending you into a vicious never-ending loop. I loved making Crazy Rabbits. The point of the game is to get the kid to recognise numbers written in words: “The farmer is coming. Go back to twelve.”

I grabbed lunch at twelve, then had my lesson with the young couple. I use one of the Cambridge courses for them, rather than creating everything off my own bat. The subject of this lesson happened to be online dating, but really it taught you how to say what you have in common (or not) with another person. We finished with twenty minutes to spare and I just played Hangman with them until the end of the lesson. This situation is likely to come up frequently (we have four lessons a week), so I’ll need some better filler exercises. They’d been badgering me to choose a suitable grammar book for them (they’re the sort of people who like rules), so yesterday, after some research, I suggested they get English Grammar In Use, another Cambridge-published tome. To my surprise, he bought it there and then using his phone. After the lesson I had to catch the bus to Strada Ion Ionescu de la Brad for my session with the lolly-stick-making company. As I reached the bottom of the stairs I realised I’d forgotten to take my sweets for Matei’s lesson, and all that extra faff meant I had to jog to ensure I made the bus. The bus was crowded, so crowded that I couldn’t reach the card machine without scrambling over people, so I didn’t even pay.

At the lolly-stick factory, two people showed up. One turned up late due to a meeting; they both left ten minutes early thanks to another meeting. We talked about the various ways of asking questions. Object questions (Where do you come from?), subject questions (Who comes from Romania?), yes-or-no questions (Do you come from Romania?), rising-voice questions (You come from Romania?), tag questions (You come from Romania, don’t you?) and probably some others. I was asked why you need to know that object questions have an auxiliary verb while subject verbs don’t. Why does it matter? Ah yes, that tricky question again. Why does it matter? How the hell do I answer that? A month ago I didn’t even know it was true, let alone that it mattered. I told them that at B2 level you’re expected to think about these things, but that probably wasn’t the right answer.

Finishing ten minutes early was a great help, because it meant I could get to Matei’s lesson on time. Just after the abandoned beige Trabant, I followed a track that took me from Strada IIDLB to the edge of a housing estate on the border of Timișoara and Dumbrăvița. The track is strewn with rubbish, and you sometimes (as I did yesterday) see people there who look a little unsavoury. In two weeks it’ll be dark when I walk along there. At a brisk pace it takes me twenty minutes to walk to Matei’s place. When I arrived at 5:30, he greeted me with a “boo”. His room was all Halloweened up, with fake blood splattering his door and walls. Halloween has no business being within 1000 miles of Romania’s borders, but if it makes a nine-year-old boy happy I’m not too bothered. I now always have my laptop with me when I see Matei, because I use it at the lolly-stick factory, so we watched some cartoons on YouTube, including one of the old Popeye cartoons (which I think are great) and some modern crap that Matei likes and I can’t remember the name of. We read some Captain Underpants, played a Halloween board game, solved a few dozen puzzles on my 4 Pics 1 Word app, and at then it was time to go.

I then had another twenty-minute trek so I could catch the only bus that would get me home in time for my final lesson of the day. I got back at 8:25, five minutes before our scheduled start, but my students were already waiting outside. We talked about festivals (traditional Romanian ones as well as imported ones such as Halloween and modern ones like Children’s Day), then I got them to match a total of 64 phrasal verbs (eight groups of eight) with their definitions, not an easy task. When we’d finished that, we had ten minutes left, so I brought out my handmade Taboo cards (describe a carrot without saying eat, vegetable or orange, that kind of thing) which made for (I think) a successful end to the session. At ten o’clock my work day was over.

Last week I passed a billboard advertising jobs at McDonalds. It showed the salaries for both burger flippers and trainee managers. I’m now earning more than a trainee manager at McDonalds in Romania. I’ve made it!

I’ll never make a ton of money at this job, but I’m now supporting myself now, just about, without having to rely on my rental income. And it’s extremely satisfying work. When I’m reading chapters of The Twits or Captain Underpants to my junior students, it doesn’t feel like work at all. Yes, Mum very kindly ordered some kids’ books for me – they turned up last week. My teaching job has given Mum and I something to talk about, and our relationship has improved as a result. The benefits of my job seem almost endless.

In previous jobs I’d show up on a Wednesday, and I’d have literally no recollection of what I’d done on Monday or Tuesday unless I’d written it down. Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what I’d done two minutes earlier. My memory was dangerously bad. A big part of that was my depression, plus the fact that I didn’t give a toss, which is part and parcel of the same thing. Now I continually amaze myself by how little I forget. Matei is on £16,000 with his phone-a-friend lifeline remaining; Elena wants to learn about phrasal verbs involving ‘get’; I’ve got a lesson on body parts planned for Oana and Cătălin; I’m just about to start Chapter 6 with Luminița; and so on. Neither do I forget (touch wood) the lesson times themselves, although I keep quite meticulous records of my past and future lessons.

It’s a cool, crisp, cloudless autumn morning here in Timișoara, similar to the mornings you get in Geraldine. My parents currently have Mum’s younger brother staying with them. He’s 66 and has recently given up the monotony of selling insurance. (He’s very quick-witted and would have made a great teacher.) I’m sure he’d like to give up the monotony of his marriage too. His wife never lets him do anything, apart from play golf and watch sport on TV. He’s never been further than Australia. But now he’s surprised everybody by booking a trip to Europe to attend my brother’s wedding. Good on him. He’ll travel around the UK with my aunt, Mum’s older sister.

New Zealand has a new government. I didn’t vote in the election, but would have voted Labour in a heartbeat had I done so. (I wouldn’t have voted Green except perhaps as a tactical vote; they’ve lost their way a little ever since Russel Norman left.) I’m happy, albeit surprised, that Labour were able to form a government. National were competent enough, but I was never convinced that they really gave a shit about people. Maybe Jacinda Ardern’s new government will work out, maybe it won’t, but we all need to keep an open mind.

Both Mum and Dad now think I’ll never come back to New Zealand. Never is an awfully long time, and I’d feel terrible about abandoning my parents in their old age, but they’re right that I won’t be leaving Romania any time in the near future.

I haven’t written for absolutely ages, and that’s for two reasons. One, I lost my internet connection. Because I hadn’t paid. In Romania they give you no warning; they just pull the plug. I felt a bit silly when I eventually found out the reason, but also relieved; I paid them for two months (just to make sure) and I was reconnected within minutes. I’m not sure the concept of direct debit has arrived in Romania yet, and I now realise there’s no use relying on my memory to keep track of all my manual payments – I have to actually write them down. The other reason is work. In the last three weeks, my workload has rocketed into orbit. I now have roughly 30 hours of lessons a week. It can be tiring at times, when you consider all the necessary preparation, but it’s awesome. Really. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, or do anything else. Being my own boss is the best feeling in the world. Freedom!

So in case you were wondering, I’m still alive, but I have to sign off because (guess what) I’m about to have another lesson. Hopefully I’ll write a proper post tomorrow.

It’s a year to the day since I arrived at my hotel in Timișoara after two days’ train travel. I surprised the receptionist by knowing how to say “four nights” and “water” in Romanian. Just to lie on that bed felt great. I’ve made it. Of course I hadn’t made it. I’d landed in a very strange country with no job, no contacts, no nothing. And I’m now very glad I did so.

I should have at least 20 hours of teaching next week, perhaps as many as 24. My evenings are now jam-packed with lessons. It’s bloody fantastic to be honest.

I meant to post this on Sunday but the internet on this laptop slowed to a trickle. It’s back to its world-famous-in-Romania lightning pace now, which is just as well because without decent internet I struggle to do my job properly. My internet woes sent me into a mad panic yesterday so I tried to relax a bit by heading to the pool (the temperature was in the low 30s). Going to the pool, or the ștrand as they call it here, is quite a popular pastime. It’s not as if we have a beach here. It’s a bit hard to say ștrand. At the start of the word you have to shtring together a bunch of consonants à la John Key with his “shtrong and stable”, but with a Romanian-style rolled R thrown in for good measure. Ștrudel and albaștri (the masculine plural form of “blue”) likewise require tongue gymnastics for me. For 17 lei you get to lie on a sun lounger and listen to slightly annoying music. I positioned myself as far from the speakers as I could get. The pool is great though. I met two English women there, probably in their fifties. One of them introduced herself as Marilyn but her friend called her Mazz.

FaceTime. Presumably it’s called that because the person on the other end can see your face all the time. That can be a bugger, especially when that person is my mum. She likes to comment on the chubbiness of my face. For some reason that’s where the weight goes, and I probably did put on a pound or two last week from all the plum crumble I ate. The previous weekend I picked about eight kilos of plums, from a tree-lined street not too far from Mehala market.

Today I had my 30th lesson with Matei. He made a couple of inspired guesses in the Millionaire game before getting greedy and bombing out on the half-million-pound question. Then he thrashed me 5-0 in Last Card. Yesterday was the start of his new year at school. His school is number 24. When he lived in Bucharest, he went to number 56. I imagine this fantastically creative naming scheme harks back to the communist era, when they wouldn’t have wanted anybody to stand out. There still would have been a number 1 though.

Two pieces of brother-related news. One, he got whisked off to the Caribbean at two hours’ notice to help with the fallout from Hurricane Irma. I’m guessing it’s the British Virgin Islands. Second, his wedding has been set for 26th May at the Royal Citadel in Plymouth. That’s a pretty awesome location for a wedding if you ask me, not that I’m the best person to ask. It should be relatively inexpensive too. If he’d married the last one I dread to think what it would have cost. She’d have wanted all the bells, whistles and gongs, that’s for sure.

Last week I received the sad news that Out of Sync, a Wellington-based group where adults on the autistic spectrum meet up once a fortnight, is coming to an end. Although I’ve never had a diagnosis, I went to the group from 2011 until the end of 2015. When I first went it was bloody great: eight or so slightly unusual folks pinging wildly from one conversation topic to the next, like a demented pinball machine. After a distinctly uncomfortable Monday at work, I could relax for a couple of hours. Then the numbers grew, new facilitators took over, and before long it had changed beyond all recognition. It had become a sort of workshop, with rules and pre-arranged topics. The higher-functioning members of the group got sick of being treated like kids, and a lot of them quit. But it still gave autistic people the chance (often the only chance) to meet others in a relatively safe environment, so it served a purpose. Next Monday will be the last session. The email I received cited general dissatisfaction with the group, the fact that they would need to move yet again, and the big one, reduced funding. That New Zealand, second in the OECD in X and third in Y, can’t afford to run a group like that is all kinds of wrong.