International travel - Romania

Uphill battle

October 14, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Travelling by bus is not the sexiest mode of transport, and so it proved yesterday. My taxi dropped me off at one of Timișoara’s bus stations in the pouring rain. I stood in a packed waiting room, hoping I’d eventually board the correct vehicle. The bus was small. It left on the dot of 1pm, as scheduled, but at 1:05 there was a loud ‘clunk!’ that came from underneath. We made a detour to the garage and the problem was fixed relatively quickly. As we travelled through the countryside, visiting small towns and villages, I marvelled at the beauty of it all. The ornate patterns, the bright colours, and yes, the buildings in a state of disrepair. The beaten up old Dacias, the faded, half-peeling hand-painted signs: I love all that stuff. At Lugoj a bunch more people got on and suddenly the experience wasn’t much fun at all. The bus was heaving. We arrived in Deva at 4:45; the trip had cost me just £6, or actually £7, hang on a minute, £8. Sorry, I’m trying to keep up with the plummeting pound but I can’t type fast enough.

Deva has been a bit disappointing, truth be told. The weather has been dull. This morning I took the cable car up the volcanic hill to the old fortress, and that was great. I didn’t at all mind that hardly anybody else was doing the same thing. I enjoyed the view of the town, which splits in two: a pretty part and an ugly one. As I walked down from the top of the hill I saw narrow streets full of beautiful, and often quite creative, houses.

Eating out is nerve-racking. (Should there be a W in that? I’m never sure.) I tentatively order something in Romanian, the 20-year-old replies in English, I persist with Romanian, but give up in the end, wondering why I’m even bothering. Tonight I went to some fast-food joint in the pretty part of town. “Ten minutes,” he said. “Please sit down.” Gah, stop it! When it came to the fillings, he said “tomatoes” and then “varză”. Cabbage, I said. You don’t know the word for cabbage, do you? Until you know the English words for all the fillings, you bloody well speak to me in Romanian. “Ardei”, “ceapă”. See, you haven’t a clue, and you’ve been learning English for how long?

It dawned on me today that my endeavours to learn Romanian, as an English speaker, are of the order of ten times harder than the other way round. Romanians are small malleable children when they begin learning English. They aren’t hard-wired 36-year-olds. They have almost limitless resources at their disposal, including all their classmates who are doing the same thing. And you can’t get away from English. There’s so much of it, wherever you look, that you can’t help but learn some. In bricks-and-mortar Romania, all content, all substance, is pretty firmly in Romanian, but so much of the embroidery is in English. At the laundromat all the instructions on how to use the machines were in Romanian but dotted around were slogans in English like “Wash all your worries away”. English songs, movies, TV, you can’t avoid it. And then the online world, where so much actual content is in English, is another matter entirely.

All of this makes me fear for the long-term future of languages like Romanian, and gives a sense of the uphill battle I face going the other way. I think the people at my hotel in Timișoara saw that and recognised that I’ve achieved a fair bit, considering. I felt buoyed after that conversation the last night I was there. Maybe this English teaching in Romania ridiculousness is actually going to happen.

Tomorrow I’ll take the train to my next stop. I’ve got high expectations of you Sibiu, so please don’t let me down.

Update: A bear that was on the loose in Sibiu has sadly been shot dead after a failed attempt to tranquilise it.

International travel - Language teaching

Promising

October 12, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I can’t say I enjoyed my first day in Timișoara all that much. My hotel, which is almost right next to a large abattoir, seemed a long way from town. I meandered into the city centre, enjoying the incredible buildings, but I felt disoriented. The lady at the tourist office had me wondering what the big “i” stood for. Inconvenience? That’s certainly what I felt like. I found Union Square, and touched Casa Brück and the Banca de Scont like I promised to nearly a year ago, but I wasn’t feeling it. I walked round Piața 700, one of the produce markets, and went to a nearby supermarket. There I caused a mega shit-storm by going in through the out door. Apparently that’s very much frowned upon. (I didn’t even know it was the out door. There were no signs.) They decided that the kind of person who enters through the out door is also the sort of person who nicks stuff, and I was manhandled as I tried to leave. I didn’t know what was going on at first. Eventually I was able to leave, but not until I’d had the mick taken out of me for saying “I understand now” in Romanian. After getting a pleșcavița for lunch I wandered aimlessly, taking pictures of graffiti and bumping into another bloke who was doing the same thing. He lived in Budapest. Unlike me, his body was also graffitied. We walked for about three hours, getting a bit lost in the process, and had dinner together. I got back to the hotel thinking I’d seen enough of Timișoara already.

Day two was a different story. It was a few degrees warmer and it was Sunday. Church day. Family day. People were milling about in their thousands in the beautiful squares. The place felt happy and lively. Peaceful too. I walked along the Bega canal and to my surprise the free boat trips were still running. I hopped on. The boat took us to a lock and back, and lasted about 45 minutes. I walked through the many parks and found one that was full of hammocks. I lay in one for a while. I then found an alley full of eateries not far from my hotel, and had a shaworma (or something) and a beer for just 14 lei, or about three quid. As I walked back to the hotel people were playing table tennis in a park. Some of them I could have probably beaten; others looked like regional champions.

Since then I’ve been to the museum which was all about the revolution, taken a few mystery tram rides, and got my mobile phone sorted. The events of 1989 feel close to home; you can still see the bullet holes in what is now McDonald’s. Outside the museum there is a piece of the Berlin Wall which came down just before the Romanian Revolution. Today I had fun (or not) trying to get a bus ticket to Deva, which is my next port of call. I went to the station (taking the correct tram, which was nice) but got nowhere. I made a phone call on a busy street; the lady at the other end read me out a phone number in English but she was hard to understand. Was that “four four” or “four four four”? I then made another call from the comfort of my hotel room and was able to book my bus ride in Romanian.

Speaking a foreign language, when you’re at the fairly basic level I’m at, requires a certain amount of balls. I’m naturally a shy person, so at times I’ve really had to steel myself. However, the people at the hotel have complemented me on my Romanian, in particular my accent. Tonight, one of the hotel staff asked me if I was a linguist. Not exactly, I said. She then talked about opportunities at language schools in Timișoara, saying there should be plenty for a native speaker who is good with languages, and gave me her business card. I’ve already stored her details on this computer in case I lose the card. It all sounds very promising but I mustn’t get my hopes up too much.

Deva is about 150 km from here but the bus is scheduled to take 3¼ hours, stopping at every little town imaginable. After that I’ll be heading to the beautiful city of Sibiu.

International travel

Rail tales

October 10, 2016 plutomanby 1 Comment

I might have been pushing it with the “I could do this for weeks” bit. When I wrote my last post from the Eurostar I was still very much within my comfort zone, but from Paris onwards everything became increasingly blurry. From Cambridge I travelled through three time zones using four currencies in five countries. Sometimes the train would split into two part-way, so I had to be careful not to end up who knows where. On the Munich to Budapest leg I shared a cabin with three Germans, one of whom lives in Auckland. Small world. Knowing even a little German beyond ordering two beers would have been useful for me, even though they all spoke good English and of course I had something in common with one of them.

At Budapest station there was a lot of faff, and although I’d slept reasonably well I was tired, so I didn’t spend as long exploring the city as I’d hoped. I needed a locker so I could offload my suitcase, but the one I tried decided to eat my money (800 forint or about £2.50). When I mentioned this at the information desk, I was told quite aggressively that the storage company had nothing to do with the rail company, and I shouldn’t even be asking. In other words, tough shit. I thought, I’m not in Romania just yet, but this is what I’m likely to get week in, week out when I get there. I did see some of Budapest by taking the red metro line from the train station across to the Buda side (I’m writing this just in case I visit again which hopefully I will). I saw Parliament, the Synagogue, some other very impressive unidentified buildings that I took photos of, and of course the vast Danube. My ticket to Timișoara cost me nearly 30 euros when I’d hoped it would be 15. For some reason I was unable to buy that ticket online back in July. I’ve emailed the man in Seat 61 to hopefully find out what the trick is. (Update: I already have. I needed to have booked it using a Hungarian site. That man is good.)

I remember saying I dreamt about train trips to places I can’t pronounce. The final leg of my journey took me to the Hungarian cities of Szolnok and Békéscsaba, and right on the border with Romania where we stopped for a good half-hour while our passports were checked, the small town of Lőkösháza. Can’t pronounce? Check. I’m so glad I didn’t even think of learning Hungarian. When I look at that language, even on a shop front sign, there’s just nothing to go on at all. I arrived in Timișoara at about 9:30pm on Friday. The hotel staff are extremely pleasant and seem reasonably impressed that I know a few words of Romanian.

If I do a massive train trip again, there are three things I’ll make sure I bring. One, a captivating book. The book I had didn’t grab me. Two, a map that shows the train route. Békéscsaba sounds a lot less daunting when I locate it on a map. Three, and most importantly, a greater supply of food and drink.

I’ll write about Timișoara in my next post. On today’s evidence I think I could just about live here.

International travel

My happy place: boarding a train

October 6, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m on the Eurostar, the second of five trains that will, I hope, get me to Timișoara. Travelling by train is bloody great. I think I could do this for weeks. My journey started with an early morning bus ride from St Ives to Cambridge. We just managed to avoid a protest in Cambridge that would have probably caused me to miss my train to London. Public transport in the UK is a much bigger deal than it ever is in New Zealand. Several times already I’ve been on a packed bus or train and one of the passengers has shouted a command: to vacate seats for elderly passengers or move down the carriage. The experience, which really can be cramped at times, has an almost military feel about it.

As I got a coffee at St Pancras I got a rare look “behind the scenes” at the café’s so-called Happy Board. The company had four values: Integrity, Freshness, Collaboration and something beginning with E that has slipped my mind. Ah, Excellence, of course. Employees’ ratings were posted on the Happy Board in columns of ticks and crosses. Next to Alex’s scores was a message in purple: “Not good enough Alex! Retrain!” This is 2016 so I’m guessing Alex has a 2:1 in psychology (or something) from a good university.

I watched the speech that Theresa May gave yesterday at the Tory party conference. It was compelling, and signalled the end of neoliberalism that has been part of British politics since I was born. I’ve never known anything else. Whether any of what May talked about actually materialises is another matter, and there was precious little policy in the speech anyway. For the foreseeable future the EU exit (which didn’t need to happen to move away from neoliberalism) will dominate.

On Tuesday night I dropped in on some friends of my parents who have lived in the same house, on the street I grew up in, since 1978. I like them. We must have chatted for two hours. It was an extremely cosmopolitan street back then: they said that it had a reputation for being “where the wogs and hippies live”. They still live a fairly alternative lifestyle all these decades later, and have always just made ends meet by running a craft shop in town. They voted to remain and said they felt numb at the result. The referendum brought out some very strong emotions in people that you rarely see even at a general election.

Yesterday I figured out where all the interesting British clothes have gone. They’re in charity shops, of which St Ives has at least six. I’ll definitely try and pick up some bargains the next time I’m in the UK.

The sun is shining and I’m whistling through northern France at 300 km an hour.  Yeah man, this my happy place.

International travel - The UK

England: latest update

October 4, 2016 plutomanby 1 Comment

On Sunday I did a six-mile walk through Hemingford Grey, Hemingford Abbots, Houghton and St Ives. It’s so easy here to go on a longish walk, or bike ride, without having to worry about personal locator beacons or wear lycra. It’s all so much more accessible. You don’t even have to wear helmets on your bike here (I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but they are a hassle). I walked past our old house, my grandmother’s old house, the tennis club, the school I went to until I was eight, and the place where my playschool used to be (it has been replaced by a smarter building and only the old sign now remains). I saw the water mill in Houghton in operation and watched a narrow boat make its way through Houghton Lock; it was travelling upstream. As I watched the lock fill up an old lady remarked how wonderfully slow and calm the process was. Being early October the blackberries were out, and in enormous quantities (I might fill up a shopping bag and make a pie tonight, but I’ll only have two evenings to eat it). The stinging nettles were everywhere as they were as a kid. The thicket linking Houghton and St Ives, following the Ouse, that I must have walked and cycled through hundreds of times to see my grandmother, had that same distinct smell. This time I didn’t see a muntjac deer. When I was almost home a brass band was playing on the Quay.

On Saturday I met up with my university friend in London. He was with his girlfriend from Normandy who, after just two years of living in Birmingham, is fluent in English which she speaks with a Brummie accent. I was blown away. What’s the secret?

We met in Covent Garden and saw one of those street performers who unties himself. We walked along the Thames, got some food from an outdoor market, then spent a couple of hours at the Tate Modern (trying to figure out at least some of the exhibits) and a couple more at a pub before finishing up at a pizza place on Tottenham Court Road.

The highlight of London for me was the pub, because that gave us the chance to chat. We talked about Brexit quite extensively. My friend was amazed by the result; he’d expected something along the lines of a 60% Remain vote. I’d expected a close vote, and although I was bitterly disappointed by the Leave result, I wasn’t all that surprised (as anybody who for some bizarre reason read my blog in June would have seen). We agreed that Remain failed to make an emotional case for their position (peace in the region since WW2 being the obvious one to make); otherwise they probably would have won. Following Theresa May’s speech on Sunday it appears Britain will be out of the EU (but I’m still not sure what that really means) by March 2019. My friend and I for some reason ended up discussing my mum. He said that you don’t win by having the most shit when you die. Mum would do well to understand that.

Yesterday I went to Cambridge, which is a beautiful city, especially on a lovely sunny day like yesterday. I tried in vain to find a Romanian dictionary. Well, they were there, but in short supply and well beyond what I was prepared to pay. My best bet would be to wait till I get to Romania. I know there are all kinds of dictionaries and apps out there, but with a physical dictionary you get to see adjacent words and I think you learn more as a result. I went into some clothes shops, expecting to find the more interesting items that you’d never get in New Zealand, but I was sorely disappointed. Unlike what I saw the previous times I’ve come back here, everything was deeply drab. Maybe austerity under Cameron and Osborne is to blame. In Oxfam I found David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, a large tome that I bought for £2.50 and will remain at my parents’ place until I next come back here.

I see this is my 100th post.

International travel - The UK

Back in Blighty

September 30, 2016 plutomanby 1 Comment

It’s over six years since I was last in the UK. When I arrived yesterday I felt a distinct weirdness, but I’m already over that. In fact right this minute I feel better than I have in weeks if not months.

I thoroughly recommend Emirates. All four legs of my journey were extremely pleasant. The staff were friendly and the food was the best I’ve ever experienced on a long-haul flight. Admittedly I got lucky by having at least one empty seat next to me, and sometimes two, all the way from Sydney. Emirates run a ten-abreast configuration on their 777s, as many airlines unfortunately do these days, and you can really use an empty seat or two there. The airline is a colossus and its mega-hub, Dubai, is heaving with A380s. Emirates fly nearly half of all the four-engined double-decker behemoths in existence. We spent a bit longer than we bargained for in Dubai as all planes were grounded for over an hour thanks to a rogue drone.

I watched some films on the plane but nothing remotely blockbustery (I’m fed up with that). I saw The Man Who Knew Infinity, the story of the great mathematician Ramanujan and his mentor Hardy who was played by Jeremy Irons. Given that it was set in Cambridge and I noticed that both my flight number and row number were prime before I got on the plane, this was an unsurprising choice of movie for me. I then saw Eddie The Eagle, the story of the British ski jumper from my youth, Where to Invade Next?, the Michael Moore film that suddenly made me want to visit Slovenia, and a weird animated film called Anomalisa.

Although everything went without a hitch, apart from the drone, flying half-way around the world without a stopover is always an ordeal. And even at Heathrow, 32 hours after I left Christchurch, there was plenty of travelling yet to endure. I was carrying 35 kilos of luggage. At least I beat the rush hour in London. I’d forgotten just how far it is on the Piccadilly Line from Heathrow: almost an hour. I then scrambled onto the non-stop train to Cambridge and took the new guided bus to St Ives (it actually sprang into action in 2011 not long after I was last here, but it’s new to me). I hit rush hour in Cambridge and I must have been a right pain in the butt on that bus with my bags. It was almost 6pm when I arrived at my parents’ apartment. I got a takeaway curry in town and at 8:30 I was out like a light. I slept for ten hours.

St Ives has changed surprisingly little. There wasn’t a Polski Sklep last time I was here, and Tom’s Cakes would appear to be healthier than the smoke-filled windowless betting shop I remember. But many of the businesses I remember from 2010, and even as a kid, are still running. And the river, the bridge, the meadow, the things that make St Ives what it is, have hardly changed at all.

My aunt popped in this morning but I missed her. She brought me some food and a copy of the Daily Mail, of which I can only bring myself to read selected bits. I was out FaceTiming my parents from the library and trying to recover the money from my frozen Barclays account.

On Saturday I’ll be going to London to catch up with a friend from university. There was a piece on the news about people born in the eighties being only half as wealthy as those born in the seventies. I was born in ’80, he in ’79. He qualified as an actuary ten years ago and has done very well for himself. He has quite an amazing mind and has always worked hard. I wouldn’t mind being half as wealthy as him.

Why on earth am I doing this? That’s what I thought on Tuesday just before boarding the plane. Even getting to that point was quite a challenge for me. Now I get the feeling that it might, just might, all be worth it.

International travel - Life :)

Not long now

September 26, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum’s behaviour on Saturday − rolling around on the floor for 30 seconds, screaming and shouting, and saying that she wanted to die − was a classic case of playing the victim and attention seeking. That was clear when I saw her looking at home furnishings online minutes later. She’s been playing the victim for decades, most often with Dad, but he never calls her out on it. There’s no point reasoning with Mum so I’ve just let time take its course. She’s much better now. Mum is intelligent (if by no means an academic), helpful (in her own way!) and very practical. It’s just a shame her emotional IQ, or EQ if you like, is a couple of standard deviations below the mean.

I don’t enjoy staying at my parents’ place anymore. Our lives are drifting apart; a mansion like this isn’t something I’ll ever have or want. The weather has been awful since I arrived. In Wellington I manage to get out even in the wind and rain, but here there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. My aunt and uncle came over last night for dinner. I get on well with them. Unfortunately the topic of conversation didn’t stray from real estate for the whole time we ate. “How did the Robertsons get seven-twenty for that? It wasn’t even renovated!” Mum said, “If that one on Tancred Street went for 679, how much would we get for this?” I said 680. Even I, with my very limited knowledge of Geraldine house prices, know it would go for at least $800,000.

Packing, which two days ago was finished, has now become unfinished. Mum has bought me some winter clothes and it would hurt her feelings if I didn’t include them. The weight limit doesn’t allow me to take both her stuff and mine. I’m unable to fully leave her behind.

My flight leaves Christchurch at 4:55pm tomorrow. I’m flying with Emirates. My first plane, a 777, makes short stops at Sydney and Bangkok on the way to Dubai. From there I’ll be taking one of Emirates’ extensive fleet of A380s to Heathrow.

I got an email from the marimba teacher asking me how I’m getting on. I’ve missed that a lot − it was the highlight of my week while I had a flatmate. I see the Red Sox have won their last eleven games and have almost wrapped up their division. Won’t it be great to write about travel, language, music, baseball and things that I actually care about? I hope I’ll get the chance. Not long now.

Life :) - Tennis

Falling out

September 24, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve managed to fall out with Mum. This isn’t the first time this has happened, or the 21st, but none of the other occasions involved her rolling around on the floor screaming and saying she wanted to die. There’d be no point in suggesting that she visits the doctor, which is probably what she needs. Minutes after dragging herself up from the floor she was browsing curtains on the UK-based John Lewis website. I’m no expert on these things, but that would seem to suggest that she wants to live. This all happened five hours ago and she still won’t talk to me. The easiest thing would be for me to apologise, but I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. Mum flies off the handle and ratchets up the stakes at the slightest thing, causing a lot of unnecessary stress for everyone. Today I called her out on that,  not that she paid any attention to what I said of course. She was just deeply offended and that was that (as always; you can never have a reasoned argument with Mum). This is awful timing when I’m about to go away.

One side benefit of our falling-out is that my bags are now fully packed. I thought I might not be welcome here anymore. I’d rather spend the next three nights in Christchurch than here in Geraldine, even with the added expense, because there’d be far more to do, but I expect I’ll be staying here after all.

I played tennis last Saturday for the last time in a long time, against the guy I was extremely lucky to beat last month. No such luck this time. He played a blinder. Everything he touched turned to gold. I played far better than last time too, but after losing four games out of five to concede the first set 6-4 I was out of ideas. My losing run extended to eight games from nine in the second set, and the glimmer of hope I got from winning the next two games was quickly snuffed out as I lost the set 6-2 and the match in an hour. It was a damn good hour of exercise though.

Timișoara has been named European Capital of Culture for 2021. It’s the same award that was bestowed on Sibiu in 2007, and hopefully it will have the same effect. Fantastic news for the first Romanian city I’ll get to visit (in just 13 days!).

My big plan

Out of there!

September 22, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Dad flew up to Wellington last Friday. We spent the weekend packing and cleaning and vacuuming and shoehorning items into the car in the teeming, unremitting rain. On Sunday we had two inches. The staff at Countdown were extremely helpful in getting us extra banana boxes. It’s amazing how much crap (and it is mostly crap) I’ve accumulated over the years. The van and trailer arrived at 7:20pm on Monday. Dad and I helped the driver and his younger assistant shift all the bulky items. They didn’t hang around. We turned up at the Bluebridge ferry terminal at 10:30 and boarded shortly after midnight. This feels like the start of my trip. We had a cabin which, with a loo and a hot shower, surpassed our (admittedly terrible) expectations. Although I was cold I must have managed at least four hours’ sleep, interrupted by the safety announcements as we left port at half-two. We got a wake-up call at half-five and were off the ferry by about 6:20. I don’t think Dad had slept a wink so I did most of the driving. We stopped at Blenheim (for petrol and a coffee and muffin each), Amberley (for tea and some chips) and Ashburton (for more petrol) before arriving at my parents’ place in Geraldine at 1:40. We just had time for a cup of tea before the van arrived on the stroke of two. Dad was cursing as my almost valueless crap kept filling up his garage space. My brother has already done his bit by palming off army boots and the like. My chest of drawers got damaged on the way; I wish now that I’d left that and the bookcase in storage in the basement. I paid $920 to have my freight delivered, little over half of what some other companies quoted me, so I can have few complaints. But moving is stressful.

That guy did apply to rent out my apartment and I happily accepted. He moved in yesterday so my place is already earning money. What a massive relief that is. My new tenant has spent the last eleven years working for an engineering consultancy in Auckland and has just taken a senior position in Wellington at the same company. His tenancy is for a relatively short term, until 19th February. I expect my property manager to bill me for this, that and the next thing over the next five months. The chair of our body corporate emailed me in her usual pompous style to say that they wish to move “imminently and aggressively” on seismic strengthening. I just hope the movement isn’t so imminent and aggressive that my tenant or his immediate successor will have to vacate the flat. God, I’ve hated the whole business of owning property and dealing with people who deal with property. I’m not cut out for it or in any way enthused by it.

Friday was my last day at work, where I was appreciated as a person more than I realised. My boss just about wrote an essay on my leaving card. I should try and keep in touch with him because you just never know, but really, could I face all those performance reviews and meetings and games? There was a remuneration review just before I left, and people complained about their derisory pay rises. One of my colleagues said she should have been rated as “achieving” rather than “growing” or “developing”. Hell, you’re 54. I’m buggered if I’m going to get a school-style report card telling me I’m growing when I’m 54. September has been a huge month for people leaving the company.

My flight to London leaves Christchurch on Tuesday.

Life :) - My big plan

Pretty vacant

September 16, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I still haven’t got anyone to rent out my flat, and time is getting pretty damn short for me. It wasn’t until yesterday that I noticed my property manager had changed the ad to say it had two bedrooms rather than three without telling me. I told her what I thought of that. She’d received some feedback that one of the rooms was too small. And anyway, as I realised yesterday, the advert was crap. Really, really crap. That’s why thousands of people were looking at the ad but not liking what they saw. The lead photos were of the outside of the apartment, the interior photos gave no sense of spaciousness, the major selling points were omitted from the blurb or relegated to near the bottom, and if a student of English had written it, it would have been dripping with red ink by the time I’d finished with it. On that last point, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I never said anything. I completely rewrote the ad for my manager; it now includes the dimensions of the bedrooms so nobody can have any complaints. I asked her to take some more photos. And perhaps most importantly I dropped the rent by $25 a week. The good news is that someone who viewed the flat almost a month ago has expressed interest now that the rent has been lowered.

On Sunday I played a singles match. So much spin of all varieties to contend with. I won the first set 6-2 − a slightly flattering score; it was really a case of me winning the important points. But I really struggled after that, losing the last two sets 6-1, 6-2. At one stage I lost nine games in a row; at least from 5-0 down in the final set I salvaged two games and some respectability. The whole match was done and dusted in 65 minutes. The main positive I took from the loss was that I had no trouble getting to the ball − I’ve got my energy levels back. It was what happened after I got to the ball that was the problem. I thought I’d done tennis for the foreseeable future but I now have to play one final match on Saturday, a rematch against the guy I recently beat from match point down.

On Monday my student and his wife made dinner for both me and his wife’s tutor who comes from America. After soup to start, the main dish was big on seafood including squid. The American tutor (who will still be teaching my student’s wife) has a much stronger bond with her student than I had with mine, and helps her with many things that aren’t directly language-related. It was great that they invited us over for what I gather was typical food from their part of Myanmar minus most of the spiciness.

On Tuesday I attended a quiz, mainly just to say goodbye to some people.

My dad arrives tomorrow.