Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble - Tennis

Dribs and drabs

May 20, 2019 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I had a lesson with the 17-year-old girl, and then had a half-hour wait while some family member delivered her nine-year-old half-brother for my lesson with him. I was scheduled to see the boy immediately after the girl, but they had made a detour to a phone repair shop on the way. I told the girl that I won’t stand for that kind of crap from her family. Lesson first, phone second. Got that? During my lesson with the boy, my phone rang. My parents were FaceTiming me. Obviously I couldn’t answer. This frustrated me because the lesson should have been over by then. After we finished, I called my parents back from nearby Parcul Dacia. It was a pleasure to show them the park – a hive of activity on a sunny Saturday lunchtime, with games of football and four table games in full swing. Dad is still waiting for the results of his colonoscopy. We talked about the books that Mum had ordered for my birthday. They’ve been coming in dribs and drabs. When she read out the titles to me, I told her it sounded like a horse race commentary. Nobody’s Boy coming up the outside; Chasing the Scream bringing up the rear. I’ve made a start on A Death in the Family, which admittedly doesn’t sound a lot like a racehorse.

I’ve managed to pick up a cold, after what had been a good run by my standards. Last night we also had a thunderstorm, so I didn’t sleep a great deal, and I’ve felt sapped of energy today.

I failed to mention that ten days ago I had my first knock of tennis for two years. I wasn’t up to much, but the exercise did me good. If the weather plays ball I’ll book myself in for a session on the wall next to the courts in Parcul Rozelor. In 2014, after an extended spell off the court, I did some long wall workouts using the squash court in our apartment block. They were a great help.

Scrabble. I’m on a winning streak, and my rating is now tantalisingly close to 1500. A lot of that might simply be dumb luck. Yesterday I won all five of the games I played fairly handily, playing eleven bingos to my opponents’ one, but I did draw eight blanks. My favourite play of late is CHIRPED, a 60-point double-double. No bonus, no parallel play, no big X or Z spot, just a good old-fashioned word. I’m still trying to learn words, and my attention has shifted to fours. Learning words is like a giant game of whack-a-mole. Every time I learn a new word, it seems another has vanished from my memory.

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Grim

May 14, 2019 by 0 Comments

On Sunday morning my parents rang with some grim news. My uncle G, Mum’s younger brother, was in intensive care. G is less than two years younger than Mum; he came to my brother’s wedding last year in his first trip to this side of the world. Earlier this year he’d been diagnosed with early-stage bowel cancer. He’d responded well to chemo and his prognosis was good. At the end of last week he had an operation to remove the cancer, but it went horribly wrong. My parents tried to explain what had happened. They fitted a stoma bag which came undone and leaked, causing toxic shock and even a heart attack. He was given antibiotics but didn’t respond. Mum thought about making a trip to Palmerston North to see him but he wouldn’t have recognised her. I got an email from Dad this morning with better news – he is now lucid – and I obviously hope he’ll pull through without damage to his heart or kidneys.

Last week, just before this all happened, Mum was telling me about G’s son – my cousin – who had just booked a trip to Madrid to see the Champions League final between his beloved Liverpool and Tottenham. He was planning to go for just four days. Bloody ridiculous, I thought, to go all the way from Wellington to Spain (you literally can’t go any further without leaving the planet) just a game of football between a load of foreigners. He’s since told my mum, “that’s nothing now”.

My own dad is having treatment tomorrow. After a check-up on his colon they found a polyp which in all probability is benign, but he’s having surgery to remove it. That has put their trip to the UK next month in some doubt. I’m about to give him a call to wish him all the best.

Yesterday I got (and deciphered) the results of my CT scan, that were of course all in Romanian. There are certainly issues with my maxillary sinuses not draining properly, but there was no indication of what I should do next. I guess I need to see the ENT specialist again; it’ll be good to have a piece of paper to present him with.

We’re in the midst of a spell of ugly weather, probably the longest in my 2½-plus years here. It’s making getting to lessons – for both me and my students – that bit more awkward.

The weather is good for Scrabble. I got in twelve games over the weekend, losing just two. Unusually for me, I won some very close games, three of them by six points or fewer. One of my losses was also by just six points; my opponent was somebody who liked to fish off (or even exchange) a single tile, taking a big points sacrifice, in the hope of drawing a bingo. It’s something I rarely do. In my other defeat I felt I made a big tactical blunder. I had a small lead, but my opponent then played POSTING as a bingo, stopping one square short of the triple word, and setting up a big hotspot for an S, which I didn’t have. On my next turn I set up a second high-scoring spot, thinking I would be able to take one of the two available. But that was extremely risky, because there was no guarantee I’d be able to use either of them. My opponent instead took both (aided by a blank), scored heavily again with his next play, and I was suddenly a long way behind. This is still all a learning process. The good news is I’ve finally got my threes pretty much down pat. That took a while.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Fitting everyone in

May 5, 2019 by 0 Comments

It’s business as usual again here, after “normal” Easter, Orthodox Easter (that’s the big one), and Labour Day on 1st May. They call Western Easter “Catholic Easter” which is a little weird to me, coming from a place where Catholics, Anglicans and non-religious people all “do” Western Easter. People often ask me if I’m a Catholic, which they pronounce with the stress on the second syllable and with a “t” instead of a “th”: Catolic. I explain that, well, I went to a Catholic church every Sunday as a kid, but now I only go once a year at the most. I sometimes also say that where we come from, religion is a personal matter.

Anyway, after a bit of a lull (which was nice) I’ve got plenty of work again. Last night I was lying in bed thinking about the coming week (when I worked in insurance, I never did that), and I realised that fitting everybody in at the times they want (or even at times they don’t want) will be an impossibility. Somebody is desperate for a lesson tomorrow because he has a job interview the day after, and accommodating him has thrown everything else out of whack, not that it was exactly in whack in the first place.

Last Monday I had another attack of severe sinus pain. I had moderate pain from about lunchtime, but at around five or six, it ratcheted up several notches. I tried to soothe the pain with ice, and it subsided two hours later. Hopefully I’ll get the result of my CT scan in the next few days.

I’ve got back on the Scrabble horse, and things haven’t been that easy. A lot of tricky racks, bad draws, blocked boards, hard decisions (for me) that led to time trouble, and so on. After a run of 70 games out of 71 where I played at least one bingo (I doubt I’ll repeat that sort of record for a while; it seems so unlikely), I failed to play one in three of my next four. One bright spot was in a game yesterday, where I trailed by 138 but ended up with a 43-point win, without a bingo. The key moment was when I played off two tiles and drew two E’s (from a very E-heavy bag), allowing me to play ENQUEUE for 72. Do I really have enough E’s and U’s for that? Seems I do! I learnt that word early on; it’s one of the 60-odd seven-letter words containing five vowels, and from memory it’s one of only two such words where the consonants are side-by-side, the other being EUPNOEA, which means good (or normal) breathing.

In other news, it looks like I might finally have someone to play tennis with. We’re having our fair share of iffy weather, but fingers crossed our Tuesday morning game (or bash) goes ahead.

Life :) - Scrabble

Fair-weather friend

April 29, 2019 by 0 Comments

Today is Orthodox Easter Sunday. It’s as big a family occasion here (if you have one) as Christmas.

On Thursday I had the CT scan done on my head. The procedure lasted ten minutes, if that. After the scan the nurse gave me a CD, but my laptop doesn’t have a CD drive. Anyway, I’ll need to wait a couple of weeks for the proper results. As I was waiting I had to fill in some forms, and then the nurse asked me, “Ce greutate aveți?” I thought she was asking what problem I had that necessitated the scan, because the word greutate (meaning “weight”) is often used to mean a burden or difficulty. But then she gestured; she was actually asking how much I weighed. I came out with a figure of 76 kilos, but it was a guess. I hadn’t weighed myself for ages.

Yesterday I went further along the track to Serbia, just past the 22 km sign, so it was a 36 km ride in all. I turned back when I could see the weather was rapidly closing in, and rode as fast as I could back to Sânmihaiu Român 5 km away (which wasn’t that fast; I was now facing a crosswind). I made it to the pokie machine-filled café in the village just in time: there was a huge downpour with thunder and lightning. Soon after I got my coffee, water cascaded through the entrance, flooding the floor, and they shut off the power. The storm passed quickly, though, and I was soon on my way back home. It was a nice feeling to be amongst nature as soon as I left the city. I saw a majestic kestrel flying overhead, a heron on the riverbank, and the odd pheasant. On the outskirts of the city, the Bega was teeming with frogs. At one point I stopped and there was a school of fish, with an old man trying to explain to me how and when they spawn. (They’re spawning now, and fishing practically anywhere in Romania is illegal until early June.) Apart from that man, there was hardly a soul for miles around. People must have, like, families and stuff.

Yesterday S texted me to say we could meet up today if the weather turned out to be sunny. A literal fair-weather friend. She’d obviously seen the forecast. It’s about time I found somebody else.

I haven’t played Scrabble online for two weeks, not since the time my opponent aborted the game accusing me of cheating. Instead I’ve been trying to learn words. I’ve devised mnemonics for the top 50 six- and seven-letter stems, and used a combination of random functions in Excel to select one of the 100 stems I’ve studied, plus a seventh or eighth letter, and re-order all the letters. For instance, it might select URINATE plus a P (ha!) and randomise that as APITUERN. From that I’ll have to unscramble that lot to get the valid PAINTURE. The next time it might give me NAAIESR, and I’ll have to think, hmm, SARNIE plus an A, what does that make? The answer is it makes nothing at all. Sometimes the combination might yield half a dozen or more words. There’s a program called Zyzzyva that does all of this for you, but it’ll never give you a barren selection like SARNIE + A, and I think it’s important to recognise when a bunch of letters don’t make a bingo.

My brother and his wife have been on honeymoon in Thailand. I think they got back today.

Language teaching - Life :)

Another year…

April 25, 2019 by 0 Comments

I turned 39 last Saturday; the next day the Queen turned 93. My birthday was even less eventful than my average non-birthday.

Work has started to taper off a bit because of Easter (Romania’s public holidays take place over Orthodox Easter, which this year is a week later than its Western counterpart). Today was a fairly busy day, however, with seven hours of lessons involving two bike trips. I was off to Dumbrăvița first thing for an 8:30 start: two hours with an 11-year-old boy where I read him a couple of chapters of David Walliams’ Awful Auntie, we talked about Easter, he did some writing about owning a shop, I gave him a quick multiple-choice grammar quiz, and we played three homemade games including (for the first time) a version of the popular UK game show Blockbusters. Then I did some vocabulary and pronunciation with a 22-year-old in her final year of university, then it was back to Dumbrăvița for two hours with Matei, and finally home again for some grammar (present simple and continuous) and two crosswords with the woman who works at the coffee machine firm. In between I had to visit the clinic to reschedule my CT scan.

Yes, tomorrow I’ll be getting a map of my head done. That might shed some light on all my sinus pain, which varies from being almost unnoticeable to utterly excruciating. I really hope something useful comes of it.

Last week two of my students (a married couple) invited me to join them and some friends on holiday in Greece, in the delightfully-named region of Halkidiki. I’ve never been to Greece, and so much of the country looks beautiful, so I was happy to accept their offer, even if I’m always apprehensive about spending any length of time with anybody. They (we?) will be going for a week in early August. In other words, hot.

Talking of hot, we’re forecast to reach 26 tomorrow, and a balmy 29 on Friday.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :)

Footprints

April 16, 2019 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching dramatic footage of Notre Dame Cathedral ablaze. I visited it back in 2003 when I met my French flatmate there (we’d lived in student-level accommodation in the middle of Peterborough). It’s sad to see what is a beautiful work of art go up in flames.

On the 15th of every month I do my meter readings. There are four meters in (or just outside) this flat: electricity, gas and two for water. Yesterday was meter day, and I also happened to read an article about carbon emissions, so I went online to calculate the size of my CO2 footprint (click here). I was surprised at the answer. The centre of this city is increasingly clogged up with traffic, while I don’t even have a car. I don’t fly very often. I don’t think I consume much at all, as I sit here proudly sporting a threadbare seven-year-old T-shirt with a picture of a clapped-out VW camper van on the front (yeah I know, VW, emissions…). But it calculated my footprint as 4.9 tonnes per year, compared to a Romanian average of 3.5. (The UK average is around 7, and for the Western world as a whole the average is about 11.) I did err on the high side with my estimates, figuring that there’s always something I forget, so it’s possible my real total is slightly less. The real negative for me is living alone. In the summer I have the air conditioner going full blast because the heat would be unbearable otherwise. A big plus, however, which the site didn’t take into account, is that I have zero kids. My parents must have an enormous footprint, emitting 8 tonnes last year on their flights alone, and I’d dread to think what my Wellington-based cousin’s figure would be (I might send her the link). As for me, I’m trying to make 2019 my first flight-free year since 2002.

Yesterday was a pleasant day. On the way to my lessons in Strada Timiș, I intended to go to the offices of insurance company to arranging a CT scan for my sinuses, but realised the offices weren’t exactly on the way so I wouldn’t have time. That meant I arrived at Strada Timiș a little early, so I sat in the nearby Parcul Dacia, where old men were playing backgammon, rummy and a traditional card game. The lessons went reasonably well. I played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with my 17-year-old student, who did rather well in the end, despite starting out deliberating whether Sweden or Switzerland was part of the UK.

Language teaching - Photos - Scrabble

Headless chicken

April 15, 2019 by 0 Comments
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I spent most of last week running around like a headless chicken, trying to organise lessons at the last minute, wading through the disorganised piles of crap on my table in the process. At the weekend I took advantage of the iffy weather to restore some kind of order, and feel much more relaxed now. This morning I had a short coffee meeting with a new student, who will be starting Skype lessons with me tomorrow. She lives in Timișoara but I guess she feels Skype is still a time-saver. Yesterday (yes, Sunday, which I prefer to keep free) I had my first lesson with another new student, who works for a coffee machine-making company. She asked me two questions I get a lot: “What the hell are you doing in Romania?” and “Obviously you do some English teaching, but what do you actually do for a living?”

A problem lately has been long preparation time. I hand-make a lot of my materials. I’d go as far as to say the slightly offbeat homemade-ness is part of who am I as a teacher, and my students seem to like it. “We don’t get this at school,” they tell me, or “My Romanian English teacher just used grammar books.” But all that thinking and writing and printing and cutting and sticking takes time.

There isn’t a whole lot of other news. I thought I’d mention another of my experiences on the ISC Scrabble site, which unfortunately seems to bring out the worst in people. On Saturday I played seven games, winning four, but they were mostly against people rated lower than me, so my rating actually dipped a little. Not to matter. I then fired up game number eight, against someone I’d never played before. It was me to go first, and I had this rack: AEIUTZ and a blank. Hmm, there’s probably a bingo here, and it’ll score a lot. This was void, which means it’s perfectly fine to try words without penalty. Is ‘azulite’ a word? It rang a bell (a blue stone, something like lapis lazuli, perhaps?) so I try it, but no go. Perhaps it’s ‘azurite’ I was thinking of. I changed the blank to an R, and hey presto, 100 points. I felt a bit guilty at my unprecedented stroke of good fortune, but didn’t expect what happened next. He accused me of using a word finder, promptly aborted the game (doing the online equivalent of tipping the board up and letting the tiles fly across the room), then put me on his no-play list. I contacted the site’s help desk, saying that this sort of behaviour detracts from what should be a friendly game, but was told in no uncertain (and sarcastic) terms that if I wanted a friendly environment I should go elsewhere. It’s sad that basic civility seems to be in such short supply.

The Easter market from my window
Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

I need to get out more

April 8, 2019 by 0 Comments

I haven’t written for ages, because I haven’t had a whole lot to say. Work is absolutely fine (and that’s a big thing to be absolutely fine) but it would be nice to have a bit more of a social life. Spring has sprung and I can hear the pleasant ping of fluffy yellow objects hitting strings on the nearby courts, but I don’t have anybody to play with. (The concept of a club which you join and instantly have a playing partner or three doesn’t exist here. Not unless you’re willing to pay the earth, anyway.)

It’s safe to say that it’s all over with S. Lately she’s had to look after her grandmother who is nearly 90 and not in the best of health, but regardless of that, it’s obvious that she’s got better, more important things to do with her time than spend it with me. And soon she’ll be leaving the country to go on another of her grand tours.

As well as meeting people and getting out on the tennis court, I’d quite like to travel. There are extraordinarily beautiful regions of Romania that I haven’t yet been to (like the north-east of the country) or have been to but haven’t properly explored (such as Maramureș). So I plan to take at least a couple of weeks off in August, and perhaps a few days before then too. My friends from St Ives had planned to come over around now – we’d had the idea of going to the Danube Delta – but for various reasons they’ve had to knock that on the head.

A few of my students have said that I get quite animated in my lessons, in contrast to their experience at school or with a non-native tutor. They seem impressed at the various games and activities we do, even if continually coming up with new ones presents a challenge for me. I think I come alive in my lessons in a way I struggle to in “normal life”.

I’m finding Brexit compelling and exasperating in equal measure. Most British politicians are not arseholes, but the arseholes – the hardest of the Brexiteers – are certainly getting their moment in the sun. They are like bullies at school (and quite possibly were bullies at school), and make ridiculous comparisons between the Brexit crisis and the Second World War. The most likely outcome now would seem to be a long extension, but there’s a chance (15%?) Macron et al veto such a delay, the government refuse to revoke Article 50, and Britain are out of the EU on Friday night. In that case, Scotland will very likely exit the UK in short order.

I’ll post some photos of the very Eastery scene outside – the market started up over the weekend, and with temperatures soaring to 23 degrees, it was heaving out there.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

A beautiful day

March 25, 2019 by 0 Comments

It has been a glorious Sunday, with weather I’d describe as just about perfect. This morning I biked to Sânmihaiu Român, a village about 13 km from here but it feels a world away. Typical of a Sunday morning, there was almost nobody around, save those fishing in the Bega. There were plenty of animals though, such as a mother goat with her two kids that could only have been days old. At the village I drank a cheap coffee in the sun, then sat in a park to do some Romanian homework, then rode back. Though my bike is probably 40-odd years old, it has been a godsend. I’m able to get a decent amount of exercise and travel to lessons in a reasonable time. This afternoon I asked the lady at the nearby tennis courts how and when I can play. It isn’t a club as such; I’d need to actually find someone to play with. Not that easy. I’ve suddenly got the urge to play again.

Yesterday I joined S and her friend at a wine-tasting session at The Wine Guy, a small wine store near Piața Unirii. We spent 3½ hours there, almost half of which involved listening to the Wine Guy himself talk (in Romanian, so a good lesson for me) about the way wines are produced and classified, the process of becoming a sommelier, the varieties produced in Romania, and so on. Finally we got down to business, and tried out seven wines in all: three whites, one rosé, and three reds. We swilled them around, sniffed them, and eventually tasted them. People came up with all sorts of exotic aromas that they could supposedly discern, but to me it was a bit like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Still, it was interesting, and I realised how much we neglect our sense of smell in 21st-century life. Wine tasting seems enormously subjective to me, and at times I was pining for a ten-dollar bottle of full-bodied Pinot Noir, instead of the far pricier stuff we tried last night with their subtle notes of raspberry or caramel. This was only the third time I’d done wine tasting; my best experience by far was in Birmingham back in 2001, when our session was hosted by Oz Clarke of Food and Drink fame. On that occasion there was no messing about as we drank New World wines in proper quantities.

The topic of wine came up twice in lessons last week. Once because cork oak trees happened to be the subject of an IELTS reading exercise; the other time was in my Romanian lesson when I told my teacher I couldn’t for the life of me pronounce the first word of the popular Romanian wine Tămâioasă Românească. It’s a beautiful-looking word, but the pile-up of vowels in Tămâioasă requires a form of mouth gymnastics for me. She then said she struggled with pile-ups of consonants in English, and wondered why the difference. I told her that English was considerably more consonant-heavy than Romanian (at least 60% consonants, as opposed to around 50% or perhaps a shade over), she then looked at a line of text in both languages, and saw what I meant.

The New Zealand government’s response to the Christchurch shooting, in particular that of Jacinda Ardern, has been very impressive. Decisive, compassionate, genuine, in touch with the people, everything you could want. Whatever your political persuasion, New Zealand’s 21st-century prime ministers have all been very good adverts for the country. The leadership shown in Britain, of course, has been the exact opposite. There were several “We want Jacinda” placards at yesterday’s anti-Brexit march. I watched Theresa May’s brief speech from Downing Street on Wednesday night and it all felt so wooden. As Dad said, it was typically British. I might be more inclined to say English. Regarding the shooting, when the subject came up in conversation last week, my student made an inadvertent joke. When I mentioned that the shooting was in Christchurch, he said, no it didn’t take place in Christchurch, it happened in a mosque.

Albert, my 7½-year-old student, is certainly a live wire. Last time I spoke to Mum, I asked her how on earth she managed with thirty kids of that age, five days a week. Albert is a nice kid, although games present a problem, because he isn’t quite mature enough to realise that you can’t always win.

Scrabble. You meet all kinds of weird and wonderful people on ISC, the Romanian-based site I play on. A little while ago I played an 80-year-old woman from Sydney who talked very positively about the tournament scene down under. She mentioned somebody by the name of Bob, assuming I knew who he was. Excuse my ignorance, but who’s Bob? Apparently she was referring to Bob Jackman, a veteran Scrabble expert. I’ve also now played three games with a semi-retired actuary. Last weekend I played a lady from Scotland who had played 31,000 games. She was bemoaning her bad luck and lack of improvement. Maybe it would help if you took a break. She then mentioned that she suffered from ME, or chronic fatigue syndrome, and often struggles to leave the house. Yesterday I had perhaps my worst experience to date. My English opponent’s notes consisted of screeds of information about all sorts of things that piss him off about all sorts of players. I quite often see this (seriously, get a life people), and it rings alarm bells. Anyway, we play, he starts, I reply with a bingo, and then play short words on my next three turns because I can’t see any other options. Then he writes “you won’t be playing with me again”. I ask why, but a message flashes up on my screen to say my opponent has already added me to his no-play list, which means no-speak, too. Lovely. He then plays an obscure nine-letter bingo (a rarity which I would always congratulate, but of course I’m on his no-speak list) and I fall behind. Late in the game I find another bingo and lose by a single point, not that I particularly care by then. Perhaps that’s his tactic all along. Unsettle people by being an arsehole, so they no longer care about winning. To me it’s baffling.

I hope this fantastic weather continues.

Language teaching - New Zealand

A black day

March 16, 2019 by 0 Comments

Yesterday morning I switched on the seven o’clock news. To my shock, the first item (on Romanian TV) was a shooting that had taken place in two mosques in Christchurch. At that stage the details were fairly sketchy. “Between 9 and 25” deaths, they reported. After my first lesson, which finished at 9:30, I called my parents. Soon the death toll was being reported as 49, with dozens more seriously injured. The perpetrator is obviously a very sick individual, in the mould of Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011. I think the suspect even praised Breivik in his social media posts, although if you took everything you saw on social media at face value, you’d never leave the house.

New Zealand has seemed somehow immune from terrorism and extreme hatred, two islands of tranquillity in the Pacific. Now the country is dealing with its own 9/11. How could this happen? How could he get his hands on this sort of weapon so easily? I imagine legislation to tighten firearms laws will be rushed through parliament in the coming days. As for Christchurch, what a nightmarish nine years it has been.

For me, life has carried on as normal. Plenty of work this week (33 hours of teaching) with some quite knackering days mixed in. Yesterday I tried to get Albert (the seven-year-old) to watch Peppa Pig. It was otherwise a successful session, but Peppa Pig was a dead loss. This is boring. After less than five minutes. I get this quite a lot. I want to say “Get used to it buddy!” or “In a few years, being bored will be the least of your worries” or even “Tough shit!”. This morning’s lesson with the 17-year-old girl wasn’t easy. She has an £800 iPhone, which never stops beeping and buzzing and vibrating. Has she ever stopped to think that it’s weird to have a phone that most people in her city couldn’t dream of affording, having never earned a penny in her life? Today I wanted to take a hammer to it.