Life :) - Romania - Tennis

They’re coming to stay

June 10, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Dad – he FaceTimed me from the library in St Ives. They’re due to arrive in Timișoara at 11pm tonight. I’ll get the bus out to the airport and meet them there. We’ll probably stick around the city until Wednesday and then hire a car. Nothing is planned but I think we’ll go south of here to Herculane and Orșova by the Danube, on the border with Serbia. I’m really looking forward to seeing both my parents and a slice of Romania.

Now that it’s well and truly summer, the city is buzzing. Yesterday the sights and sounds and smells of Piața Badea Cârțan – a large market – were almost too much to take in. I hope my parents enjoy it. Maybe we could even go to the theatre, or something similar that requires money that I don’t have but Mum and Dad do.

Simona Halep has – somehow – reached the final of the French Open. Obviously that’s quite a big deal here. She was almost dead and buried in her quarter-final with Svitolina where she made an improbable comeback from 3-6, 1-5, and saved a match point in the tie-break without even knowing it was match point. She didn’t exactly have it all her own way in her semi-final either, but she was the more consistent player. Ostapenko, who hits the ball as hard as the men or so I’ve heard, will be no pushover. I’d quite like to see the final but my TV has packed in (it’s always something). Hopefully I can find a bar that’s showing it.

Update:
Simona didn’t win, and she’ll probably never get a better chance. She led 6-4, 3-0, with a point for 4-0, but the scoreboard was the only place she was dominating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone play such a high-power, high-risk game as her opponent did today. Ostapenko finished the vast majority of points, either with a winner or an unforced error. Perhaps Simona needed to mix things up a bit as Hingis might have done; I really don’t know.

Politics - The UK

There’s hope

June 10, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

At midnight on Thursday I tuned in to Radio 5 Live for the exit poll. I’d expected a Conservative majority of 50 to 60, but as Big Ben struck ten and the bells of Catedrala Mitropolitană struck twelve, I thought, I bet it’s 100. The projection, that the Tories would fail to win a majority at all, took just about everybody by surprise. That can’t be right, can it? The initial handful of declarations in the North-East did cast some doubt on the predicted seat totals, but they ended up being pretty much bang on. The Tories finished on 318 seats, eight short of an overall majority, and they now have to rely on the DUP, a party from Northern Ireland. And just who are the DUP? The U stands for Unionist, so they want to remain part of the UK (the opposite of Sinn Féin, who don’t even take their seats in parliament). They have strong Protestant links, they’re anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, anti-climate-change, and seemingly anti the planet being more than 10,000 years old. Obviously they’re just what Britain needs right now.

But I must admit I was pretty happy with the results. I had high hopes for Theresa May when she became PM last July, but she’s turned out to be hopeless. She speaks only in soundbites, she’s wooden, she lacks warmth and a personality that people can relate to. All of those frailties became glaringly obvious during her awful campaign. May kept repeating her “strong and stable” mantra. Did she borrow that from John Key, I wonder? (Although he said “shtrong and stable”.) One journalist branded her “weak and wobbly” which was closer to the truth. She’s in the wrong job.

As usual in recent times, the Tories neglected the young, which in their eyes are anybody under about 45, but this time they managed to piss off older people too with their “dementia tax” and removal of winter fuel payments to pensioners. They also wanted to bring back fox hunting. Seriously? On the other side Jeremy Corbyn, who had been viewed as little more than a joke by people across the political spectrum, ran a good campaign. He looked comfortable in his own skin, he was approachable, he actually looked like he gave a shit about people. As a result, turnout among under-35s was up sharply, and they voted in large numbers for Labour.

May called the snap election because she thought the Tories would win a stonking great majority and they’d be able to ram through a hard Brexit and whatever else they wanted. Her arrogance backfired spectacularly; she has been greatly weakened. For all of us who dream of a fairer society in Britain and elsewhere, there’s still a long way to go – the Tories got 43% of the vote across Britain after all – but this is a good start.

Between them the Conservatives and Labour polled in the low eighties, so this really was a return to two-party politics which the awful first-past-the-post system encourages. It would be fantastic if some sort of PR could be introduced (New Zealand-style MMP would work well), but I’m not holding my breath. John Cleese tweeted that he wouldn’t vote at all because he lived in Kensington, a safe Tory seat. In the event Kensington was the very last seat to declare following multiple recounts, and Labour scored a major upset with a razor-thin 20-vote win. It goes to show you never can tell.

Photos - Tennis

Some tennis and some pics

June 6, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night I played tennis with the language school guy who in actual fact no longer works for the language school. Instead he teaches privately as I do, while also working at Radio Timișoara as a sports news reader and commentator. On the bus I found him a bit rude and aggressive; he kept going on about what a shithole Timișoara is and how much he wants to leave the city, and perhaps even the country. We were being battered by a torrential storm, and I don’t think that helped. As we made our way from the bus stop to the indoor court we got soaked to the bone. Last time I beat him comfortably on the same (rather cramped) court, but this time I only scraped a draw, 3-6 7-5 from my perspective. In the early stages I struggled massively with my serve, and is often the case, the rest of my game unravelled. My return of serve is normally one of the strongest parts of my game, but I couldn’t believe how many returns I was ballooning over the baseline. At 3-6 0-2 I at last found some sort of form. I led 5-3 in the second set and I breathed a sigh of relief when I did eventually close the set out. A draw wasn’t great, but it felt so much better than a loss would have done. My opponent was much more consistent this time around, so perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Among all the double faults I did manage three aces. Afterwards we had mici and a beer at Berăria 700 – there was live music even though the place was almost empty.

On Sunday night I spoke to my brother. He had some quite forthright comments to make about the latest in a line of terrorist attacks to hit the UK. He was in a good mood other than that; he’d just passed his test for an HGV licence. The UK election is coming up later this week. I’m fully expecting a handy Tory majority, but some way short of landslide territory. I get on pretty well with my brother, and it’s great that we’re now keeping in regular contact, but if he was standing for election in my electorate, I couldn’t vote for him. No bloody way.

Here are a whole bunch of recent-ish photos:

Matei’s £2000 question: Is it a marathon or a Matei?
Padel tennis: it’s a cross between tennis and squash
Mici and hamsii (anchovies)
Glued to their phones!
It’s quite a sight (and smell) to wander through the flower section of any large market in Romania.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Tenc iu veri maci

June 5, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Thursday was Children’s Day. That’s actually a thing in Romania, and this year the government decided it’s enough of a thing to make it an official public holiday for the first time. Personally I think anything that encourages parents to spend more time with their kids is great, although I was dismayed to learn that the awful phrase timp de calitate – quality time – exists in Romanian. Religious festivals are also most definitely a thing here, and today is Rusalii which I think translates to Whitsunday or Whitmonday or is it Pentecost? Whatever you call it, it’s another public holiday, so millions of Romanians have bridged the gap between the two for a bumper five-day weekend. Children’s Day was a popular day for my kidless students to have lessons so it was relatively busy for me. In the evening there was a show at the bandstand in the rose garden and a big smoky barbecue outside. I had a scoop of anchovies (hamsii) and some mici.

Mum and Dad should be safely in St Ives now. They had a two-night stopover in Singapore and called me from the airport. They looked worn out. Mum will be 68 next week, Dad turns 67 at the end of the month, and long-distance travel is starting to become both tiring and stressful for them. Mum doesn’t help – she gets very wound up if the smallest thing goes ever so slightly wrong, and of course when you’re travelling long distances, things rarely do go exactly according to plan. Oh no, there I go again, slagging off Mum. In fairness to her, she’s been very supportive of my move to Romania ever since I suggested it, and she’s proud of me for having the balls to actually do it. I’m optimistic that I’ll get on perfectly fine with Mum when they come here in five days’ time.

I’ve now had my first two lessons with Cosmin. They were fine, although next time I must make sure we sit alongside each other rather than opposite. He had some print-outs from a Romanian-based website for learning English which were worse than useless, but unfortunately he seemed to treat them as gospel. They were full of spelling errors (“fourty”), phonetic transcriptions that encourage terrible pronunciation (tenc iu veri maci for “thank you very much”), antiquated greetings like “How do you do?”, and words and phrases (“daughter-in-law”; “degree”) that you simply don’t need to know when you’re just starting out. None of this was his fault of course, and it disappoints me how much crap is out there, peddled by people who don’t know any better (or worse, don’t care), that actively hinder the process of learning English for student and teacher alike.

I’d better go. Next time (later today?) I’ll post some photos.

Tennis

Weird end to the week (part 2)

May 30, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

I can breathe again. And for now, through both nostrils.

My tennis on Saturday was an event that the guy I met at the language school all those months ago got me involved in. It was run by the local branch of the Lions Club. I just wanted to hit a few tennis balls and maybe have a drink afterwards; I had no idea what I was getting myself into with this event and I was extremely nervous. It was in Dumbrăvița, not that far from where I teach that kid, but still far enough for me to be fairly clueless about the location. The language school guy and I caught the same bus, but when we got off, it was apparent that he didn’t know how to get to the courts from the bus stop any more than I did. He called some friends and we got there eventually after walking through paddocks with seemingly unowned dogs yapping away. He lent me a racket that he wanted to sell to me for 180 lei. I assumed he’d be my partner in what was a doubles competition between five teams, but for some reason I had a different partner, someone who was six-three, built like a rugby player, and (as it turned out) rather good at tennis. I hated every minute of it. I was double-faulting all over the place and could hardly keep the ball in play, while my partner walloped unreturnable serves and swatted away volleys. He was really tactile, high-fiving and who knows what else after practically every point, and man I hate that stuff. The combination of banter and competitiveness made me uncomfortable, and my dreadful play wasn’t helping. I really didn’t want to be there. Part of the problem is that unlike in Wellington, you have to be quite wealthy to play tennis here, and being wealthy in Romania seems to require a certain level of aggression which is certainly beyond mine.

The five teams played one-set matches against each other in a round-robin format. My partner was good enough to cover for my terrible play, and the first set was close throughout. Our opponents served for the set at 6-5 and had two set points; on the second of them they hit a ball from my partner on the full that would certainly have cleared the baseline. After that reprieve we reached a tie-break which we won 7-5. My play didn’t improve in the second set, but thanks to my partner we still won it, 6-3. At that point my partner decided to bugger off, and I just hung around, albeit on a beautiful sunny day, while the others played all the remaining matches that didn’t involve him (or me). He was gone for 80 minutes and I found it extraordinary that nobody had a problem with that. When he returned we won our third match 6-3. My language school friend then pointed out that the competition winners each received a racket, and suddenly the result of our fourth and final match mattered. I played a little better in that match which we won 6-0. We had some mici and schnitzel and castraveți and bread and beer, and then they presented the prizes. I found myself in possession of a brand new Babolat Power Drive racket. I hope I’ve got that name right. My partner’s wife was there; she also plays tennis and quite fancied having an identical racket to her husband. She offered to buy the racket off me. We looked online and saw it sold for around US$200. Crikey. I had absolutely no need for a racket that good. We agreed a price of 800 lei. She fished four 200-lei notes out of her car (is it normal here for people to carry that kind of money in their cars?) and handed them to me. Are these genuine? They seemed to be. I then gave my friend 180 lei for his racket. The event cost me 75 lei, so I profited to the tune of a second-hand racket and 545 lei. It was like I’d won Lotto. I plan to buy a bike with my unexpected windfall. Regardless of that outcome it was quite a nice day really and hope that if I’m still here for next year’s event I’ll be a lot more relaxed.

I’ve been putting flyers in people’s letterboxes all over the city. About a thousand so far. It’s quite a tiring job, but it looks like I do have one more student.

Yesterday would have been my grandmother’s (Dad’s mum’s) 95th birthday.

Language learning

Weird end to the week (part 1)

May 28, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a weird end to the week. On Thursday morning my Skype student cancelled 15 minutes before our lesson because she was about to go swimming “with the girls”, as she put it. I texted her to say that she should pay me for the lesson regardless, and she replied with a long rant, basically saying that I was a terrible teacher and she wanted nothing more to do with me. I then asked her how I could improve, saying that I’m still learning myself, but she said, “You’re the teacher! How can I show you how to teach!” Doamne. I hope I get the 200 euros she owes me, but other than that, I certainly want nothing more to do with her. I’d felt I’d done my best with her, so that exchange left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Yesterday Dad called me. Mum had gone to a funeral in Mosgiel; one of her many cousins had died from a slow-growing brain tumour at the age of 60. Apparently she held me as a toddler when we came to New Zealand the first time in 1982. This gave me a rare opportunity for me to ask Dad about life with Mum. Not much had changed. Dad said that one of these days, heaven forbid, Mum could find she has a tumour, and whatever Maureen from the golf club says or does would become irrelevant very quickly. As for me, I’d say my relationship with Mum has improved as a result of being 11,000 miles away. They’ll be here in just two weeks and I’m looking forward to that.

I played tennis today for the first time since December and I want to write about that but I’m going have to end this for now because my sinuses are killing me.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

This might work out

May 22, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last week was a good one. I had 14½ hours of teaching, I had an interview (that wasn’t supposed to be an interview) at a language school, and it looks like I have a new student. Maybe this crazy Romania thing might work out after all. In a sense it already has worked out of course. I’m living in a city that I love, doing a job that I love, doing my thing, without all that mind-numbing nothingness that I experienced day in, day out, for years. I’ve totally revolutionised my life, and how bloody cool is that?! But for my own sense of self-worth and, let’s face it, bank balance, I needed more work (and still do).

For the first time in eight months I ironed a shirt, and at 2pm on Friday I turned up at the language school just over the river, supposedly for an informal chat with two relatively young women. “This won’t be an interview.” Great. I was pretty relaxed. The woman on the right dragged out a copy of my CV which had some words like “actuarial” underlined in pencil. Presumably she’d Googled them. She described my decision to teach English after all those years in technical roles as “odd”. I did my best to emphasise that I really, really want to do this job, even if my CV might suggest otherwise. That felt a little weird. I thought of all those damn interviews in the past where was I totally unenthused, or worse. She then asked me to describe a time when I’d had to cope with a difficult situation in my teaching. I then said, “But you told me this wasn’t an interview!” The woman on the left, who teaches both English and French, went a little bit easier on me. The, er, informal chat lasted 50 minutes. They said they’ll contact me in the next week or two and I’m hopeful they’ll have something for me. Perhaps I’ll be able to help out in the intensive courses they run over the summer. Dealing with a class of students instead of the one-on-one teaching I’ve done so far will certainly be a challenge for me, but it’s one I’m up for.

On Saturday night I met Cosmin, my new student (hopefully that’s what he is) at a bar in the square here. He’s about the same age as me, but is married and has a boy of eleven. He lives in Dumbrăvița, where I currently teach the nine-year-old boy twice a week. Cosmin is pretty cosmic; he’s tall, sports a beard and has tattoos down the length of both arms, and on Saturday he wore several bracelets and a T-shirt just like the ones you’d get in Cosmic in Cuba Mall. For a living he puts up shades and marquees, and he wants to move with his family to Australia in November. I asked him to rate his level of English on a zero-to-ten scale; he told me zero. He started school under Communism and learnt French, not English. I’ll have one hell of a job getting him up to speed in just a few months, but I’ll try. We must have chatted for over an hour, my longest conversation in Romanian yet. Wow, I’m sitting outside here on a beautiful evening in a beautiful city, drinking the local beer and speaking a totally awesome language that hardly anybody else learns. Dammit, this is cool! Cosmin’s wife and friends later arrived, and he bought me four beers in all. If things go according to plan, we’ll start a week on Saturday. It should be good for my Romanian as well as his English.

Last week I had three lessons with my Skype student, but only one of those was an English lesson. She wanted some help with statistics, which is a requirement of her psychology course. The stats wasn’t too hard, but it was all in German so I was frantically Googling terms that, being German, ran to twenty letters or more. I was glad that I was able to help her.

Uncategorized

No more timewasters, please

May 16, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

My Skype student has pulled out of her lesson at the last minute again. She’s rapidly becoming a waste of time. Yesterday I put up three posters – yes, just three – and last night I got call from a guy called Cosmin wanting help with IELTS preparation starting this Saturday, but I’ll believe him when I see him. I’m pretty sure Cosmin comes from the same root as cosmic and cosmos, so it’s a pretty cool Romanian name. I’ve yet to have a student called Bogdan, which is one of my favourite Romanian names (and a very common one). So far the names of my students have run the alphabetic gamut from Adelina (who only had two lessons with me) to Zoltan (a Hungarian name; he was my very first student and after 20 lessons he’s still going strong). I need to put up more posters and run the risk of a fine. There appears to be no other way that works. I just want to teach; this promotional stuff isn’t much fun at all. It does make a nice change though that part of my job, the main part of my job, is something I really enjoy.

According to my property manager, somebody might be interested in buying my flat in Wellington. It would obviously depend on how much I could get. In one way I’d love to get rid of it – psychologically it’s been an enormous burden – but it does give me a good rental income that I’m relying heavily on, even if 30% of that money is eaten up by rates and body corp fees. And I quite like having a toehold in Wellington. I talked to my brother about this last night. In my shoes he’d probably flick it off at the first opportunity.

Simona Halep retained her Madrid title in a fantastic three-set final. The stamina she showed in the latter stages of the match was impressive, and it augurs well for the French Open which starts in a little under two weeks. I didn’t bother with Eurovision after that. Romania finished seventh, respectable enough without all the faff and expense of having to host it next year.

The weather improved yesterday and there were multiple long, snaking queues to buy ice cream. Men, old men mostly, were playing four different games in Central Park: chess, cards (with a deck that includes cups and coins), backgammon, and some game that looks like Mahjong but with colours and numbers (Google tells me it’s Rummikub; I’ve never played that). Last Thursday I brought a pack of standard cards to my lesson with the nine-year-old and I tried to play a polite version of Go Fish with him (“no, I’m ever so sorry I haven’t got a nine; unfortunately you’ll have to go fish”) but that didn’t seem to work. I might try Last Card with him tomorrow.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

A soggy time

May 14, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Eurovision will be starting in an hour. It’ll be the first time I’ve watched it with non-English commentary. I don’t expect I’ll see it through to end (a shame because the end, where they do the voting, is the most interesting bit). The last time I saw it my grandmother was still alive and I wrote about it on my previous blog. Gosh, that brings back memories. I miss her.

I’m currently watching Simona Halep in the final of the Madrid Open.

This is the third wet weekend of wet weather – and wet weddings – in Timișoara. Yes, in Romania getting married is still something people do. Now that the season is upon us, I see and hear about half a dozen convoys every Saturday. Last night we also had a fairly major thunderstorm.

It hasn’t been a disastrous week by any means, with 12½ hours of lessons, but that number still needs to rise. My Skype student isn’t the big provider of work that she used to be. The Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? games with my nine-year-old student seem to be a hit. I’ve had some useful advice from my students on where to go when my parents arrive here only four weeks from now.

Emmanuel Macron won the French election by a near two-to-one margin; it was even more decisive than I expected. Hopefully that will bring some stability to Europe, at least temporarily. Theresa May has been a disappointment to me – all you get from her are substance-free words. Very little action. But she’ll probably win a stonking great majority in next month’s election because she has no competent opposition outside Scotland. And as for Donald Trump, it’s all massively entertaining, if only it wasn’t so real. And dangerous.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Loose connections

May 6, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last weekend we had a flower festival that brought people out in their droves, even if the weather was kind of meh or however they say that in Romanian. The Philharmonic Orchestra played on a stage in Piața Operei (the other end of the square where I live) and they were bloody good. Since the long weekend the weather has gone from meh to persistently wet.

Some good news: my Skype student is back, after I’d almost given up on her. My faith in humanity has been partially restored. The bad news is that she’s as unreliable as ever. I didn’t have any lessons as such with her last week, but on Tuesday I spent two hours reading a pair of old academic texts on sociology that she sent me at short notice, and another two hours going over them with her on Skype. I worked 7½ hours that day out of a total of just 11 for the week including a lesson I’ve got later this morning (I feel safe to count that; I trust him). I still need more work. I’m extremely bad at making connections, promoting, marketing, all of that stuff. Online seems a waste of time. I have a website and a blog now (yes another blog) that I regularly update, but I’m buggered if I know how you’re supposed to get people to see it. I’ve even created a Twitter page which now has, wait for it, twelve followers, but I find it really hard to be arsed with social media. Communicating with dozens of people all at once doesn’t appeal in the slightest, and as for Facebook, I find that as creepy as all hell and have to force myself to check my account every other day or so. My friend who I saw in London last month has over 500 Facebook friends and nearly 1000 Twitter followers (how?) so he clearly doesn’t have any of the problems I do.

I still also need to meet more people. It’s tough. The problems I faced elsewhere in the world haven’t magically gone away here. To make and keep friends there’s obviously something that you’re supposed to provide socially that goes beyond a cup of tea, an inoffensive chat and maybe the odd joke, but in 37 years I still haven’t figured that out and I probably never will. The guy I played tennis with in December, who called me on a regular basis back then, now wants nothing to do with me or so it seems.

Next week I must get out a lot more, as I said I would last week but the public holiday and busy Tuesday and crappy weather and general lack of motivation on my part intervened. Teaching is great and I bloody love Timișoara, but my experiences here could still be so much fuller and richer and better.

Here are some pics from the long weekend. Hope you like them!