Books - Other sports - Politics

Just a quick update…

August 27, 2018 by 0 Comments

Today I’ve been reading Station Eleven, a bloody fantastic book by Emily St John Mandel. I’m finding it hard to put down. I did however find time to prepare for tomorrow’s lessons and make a crumble with those plums I picked last weekend (but wouldn’t have done if I’d known someone was watching).

On Friday I heard that John McCain wouldn’t be continuing his brain cancer treatment, and less than 48 hours later he was dead. Although I was very glad that Barack Obama beat him to the presidency, I also felt that McCain would have done a fine job. Picking Sarah Palin as his running mate probably didn’t help his cause though. McCain was a staunch supporter of the Iraq War in 2003 but was seen as a maverick in more recent times; that’s more a reflection of how deeply conservative the Republicans have become than anything else. But his vote against the repeal of Obamacare last year was one of the more dramatic moments of Trump’s presidency to date. I’ve just read that McCain, who lived to 81, is survived by his 106-year-old mother.

Baseball. Yesterday morning I caught the tail-end of the marathon game between the Milwaukee Brewers and Pittsburgh Pirates. It went to 15 innings, finishing at quarter to one in the morning, local time. I was glad to see it because it was once-in-a-blue-moon crazy, and the sort of crazy that can only happen in the National League where the pitcher is forced to bat. The Red Sox, on the other hand, have lost five of their last seven, and are now only seven games ahead of the Yankees in the division race. That’s still a lot, but they have a tough run-in. It isn’t quite over just yet.

Language learning

Serbian commentary 2 — Three genders, no articles

August 25, 2018 by 0 Comments

At the end of last month I wrote my first in a series of posts on the Serbian language, where I mostly talked about the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Here is part two.

English doesn’t have grammatical gender. Tables and eggs and combine harvesters aren’t male or female or somewhere in between. For anyone trying to learn it, that’s a real blessing. English pronouns are gendered, however. How many genders English pronouns have isn’t quite clear, especially as all sorts of weird and wonderful creations like xe and zir and emself have cropped up in recent years. (I never teach any of that stuff, but I bet some English teachers do. I do however touch on singular they occasionally.)

Serbian, on the other hand, has three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, whether you’re dealing with nouns or pronouns. Romanian also features a neuter gender which acts as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, but Serbian isn’t like that: it has three distinct genders that act in three separate ways. A horse (konj, a three-letter word because nj counts as a single letter) is masculine, a cat (mačka) is feminine, and a tree (drvo) is neuter. A useful rule of thumb is that nouns ending in a consonant are masculine, those ending in -a are feminine, and those that end in -o ar -e are neuter. There are exceptions, though.

So how do you say “a cat” or “the cat”? “A horse” or “the horse”? The answer is, you don’t! Like most Slavic languages, there are no articles at all in Serbian. There’s no equivalent of a or an or the. Like the situation with genders I mentioned above, this is another example of having features in common with Romanian, but more “extreme” compared to what I’m used to in English. (Romanian has words for a and an but no word for the; to make a noun definite you instead have to alter or add letters to the end of the word.)

I’m quite happy with Serbian’s lack of articles. Definite articles in particular can be a minefield, as I’ve found out whilst learning Romanian and as an English teacher. It isn’t at all obvious to a non-native speaker that “Pacific Ocean” needs the in front of it, but “Central Park” doesn’t, and I commonly hear things like “after the lunch” or “both my parents are the teachers”. Even textbooks sometimes make mistakes here; one of my books tells you never to use the with islands. The author has obviously never been to New Zealand. As yet, I’m not sure what Serbians use to get round their lack of articles, but they seem to make extensive use of their words for “this” and “that”. I’ll talk about those in my next post in the series.

As for the gendered pronouns, these are on, ona and ono for he, she and it respectively. For “they”, you use oni for a group of men or a mixed-gender group containing at least one man; one for a group of women only; and ona for a group of things that are neuter. (Children happen to be neuter too, so you use ona when talking about kids, no matter whether they’re boys or girls or a mixture.) There’s a big added complication here, and that’s cases. The pronouns I’ve just mentioned only apply to the most simple nominative case, which we use when the pronoun is the object of the verb, as in a sentence like “He is happy” which would be On je srećan.

Life :)

Flyers and food

August 25, 2018 by 0 Comments

This morning I posted 250-odd flyers in people’s letterboxes in a part of the city that I’d picked essentially at random last night. I’d only posted three or four when I ended up in a longish conversation with a man of 79 (he said) on the corner of Strada Mangalia and Strada Johann Nepomuk Preyer. The man mostly wanted to talk about the history of western Romania, and what he perceived as a gradual brain drain in the region since it became part of Romania a century ago. I rarely got a word in edgeways. He seemed a perfectly nice bloke though. I’d missed last year’s flyer postings, when I’d get to walk down picturesque streets and try not to be attacked by dogs. I still had several hundred flyers left, so I thought I’d give it a go once more. There were fewer dogs today than I remembered, but quite a lot of chickens. Eventually I saw these two signs, which looked like they were for a place that used to serve food. The bottom sign was so faded I couldn’t work out what was FREE!! anymore. (It didn’t matter of course; if you have to buy something to get the free stuff, the stuff ain’t free.) To my surprise the place was still running, and I dared to walk in. Or around the back, and then in, to be more accurate. The place was extremely basic, and traditional Romanian music was playing. The meal was absolutely fine though; noodle soup (supposedly containing chicken), fried potatoes, pork schnitzel, some salad, and a small sweet pastry, all for just 10 lei (as advertised). I’d happily go back.

I didn’t use the loo there. I was happy to wait till I got home. The signs were pink for girls and blue for boys. Bărbați (“men”), which you can see on the right of the picture above, literally means “bearded”, which I currently am. There are two words for “man” in Romanian: bărbat (“man as opposed to woman”) and om (closer to “human”). The plural of om is oameni, which means “people”.

During my walk today I was thinking that having lived for nearly two years in Timișoara, visually imperfect but with a heart and a soul, I couldn’t possibly face living somewhere like the North Shore of Auckland again, with all its utterly depressing open home signs. (It’s interesting that Romanians’ desire for home ownership is just as great as in New Zealand or the UK, and not at all like Germany and France where people are happy to rent, but the property market here lacks any in-your-faceness.)

I spoke to Mum recently; she was frustrated after a bad day on the golf course. I suggested that she took up tennis seriously, and played golf purely as a hobby. If she really tried, she could do extremely well in tennis against people her own age, and the challenge of competition could be quite stimulating for her. She doesn’t have the same potential in golf, and at any rate the world of a golf club is a rather artificial one. I’m sure everything I said fell on deaf ears.

I’ve recently watched two streams of Red Sox home games. The first was dire (for me; I’m still unable to appreciate a pitching duel) and the second (last night) was heading in the same direction until the Red Sox broke out for six runs in a single inning on a flurry of doubles. Even when the action is exciting, it’s nothing like being there was three years ago. Still, seeing the vendors wander through the stands selling Sam Adams and Harpoon (another of their local beers) brought back happy memories. In fact, I was in Boston exactly three years ago. Today might have been the day I visited Cape Cod.

Life :)

A national tragedy

August 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

Today I heard the news that Greg Boyed, the New Zealand news presenter, had died while on holiday in Switzerland with his family. He had a very good job that gave him national recognition and respect; he had a wife and two kids. But he also had depression. That eventually got the better of him. So very sad. I’ve just watched the short but very moving tribute that his colleague Daniel Faitaua gave on TV One.

Suicide rates in New Zealand are a national tragedy and something of a mystery to me. I did however stumble upon this web page, whose authors clearly have even less of an idea than I do. One thing I do know is that the previous government gave progressively fewer shits about mental health with each of their nine years in power, and the current bunch need to make reversing that trend a top priority.

My own mental health has improved massively since I left New Zealand. As the recent article I read about “shit-life syndrome” spelt out, I had plenty of reasons to be depressed over there. No family, no real sense of home, few friends, and unsatisfying jobs where I spent the day looking at one computer screen or another and attending pointless meetings where I tried not to look stupid. And most of those things are still true now in Romania! Work is a biggie, though.

My mental health problems haven’t completely gone away, and I still take antidepressants, but by making a complete lifestyle change I seem to have escaped that endless desert of despair. My dad sometimes talks about the risks I took in moving to Romania, but it would have been bloody risky to have carried on what I was doing in NZ.

Life :)

Ajunge!

August 20, 2018 by 0 Comments

This morning I went to Mehala market to look for a racing bike, but didn’t find anything in my price range (which isn’t very high; purchases from that market are high-risk ventures). It got pretty hot there with all the mici smoking away on top of the air temperature which had already hit 30. On the way back I picked plums from a tree until I got shouted at: Ajunge! (Enough!) I must have collected four or five kilos.

Yesterday I Skyped my cousin in Wellington. We had a great chat, and I got to see the whole family. Her middle son had changed almost beyond all recognition. They thought similarly of me, as I now have a beard. I went through a spell of leaving it for a few days and then getting sick of it, but I’m well past that point now and I’ll probably keep it. I recently played I-Spy with Matei. He said he could spy something beginning with B.

When I heard the news that New Zealand were banning foreign ownership of property, my reaction was extremely positive. Under the previous government there was far too much tinkering around the edges when it came to the housing market, probably because many of their voters benefited from prices remaining sky-high. On a not totally unrelated note, this morning Dad sent me this article from the Guardian about the bluntly but accurately named “shit-life syndrome“. The UK is sadly following in America’s footsteps when it comes to shitness of life. My aunt suggested to me that Mum and Dad might come back to the UK to live permanently, what with both their children in this part of the world and the possibility of a grandchild or two. I think they’ll make regular trips to the UK, sometimes staying for months, but I’d say a permanent move is a non-starter.

On Friday my Skype student discussed the heavy-handed tactics employed by the armed police in Bucharest seven days before. It’s become something of a national scandal.

Four lessons planned for tomorrow.

Photos - Travel: Romania

Sighișoara trip pictures

August 17, 2018 by 0 Comments

As I write, we’re in the middle of a storm. For a moment I feared something as sharp and shocking as last September’s 15 minutes of carnage. It’s nasty out there and that lightning bolt just then was pretty damn close, but it seems we’ll be spared such horrors this time.

Yesterday was St Mary’s day, and about one in ten Romanians called Maria or Mariana or Marian or Marius (those last two being male names) or some other variant celebrated their zi onomastică. They’re basically tied with all the Johns and Janes and Joans, who have their big day in Johnuary.

Here are some pictures from Sighișoara and “Deer Meadow”:

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The big debate

August 16, 2018 by 0 Comments

Four lessons today, three of them with kids. My favourite moment was probably with the boy who never really wants to be there. We were discussing jobs, and he told me (in Romanian; he rarely speaks English) that he wanted to be either a hairdresser or a cook when he grows up. When I got home I was reading the Guardian and found an article by George Monbiot about obesity, where he notes the distinct lack of fat people in a photograph of a packed Brighton Beach during the heatwave of 1976. He said that excessive eating and lack of exercise are not the main drivers of the epidemic, and surprisingly the average British person consumes fewer calories than they did 40 years ago. Instead he blames the proliferation of sugary, processed foods. Whatever or whoever the culprit is, it’s obvious to me that only some of the blame lies with individuals. OK, so the choices we’re making now are making us fat, and 40 years ago they weren’t. Does that mean we’ve become stupider, lazier and less responsible in that time? I doubt it, and even that were the case, what’s the reason for that?

It’s kind of three steps forward, two steps back, as my teaching volume slowly picks up again. By mid-September I should be back to something like normal.

Since I last posted, the Red Sox have won all five of their matches, including a wild 19-12 game in Baltimore. That score wouldn’t be out of place in rugby. Last weekend also saw an ultimate grand slam, the 30th in the history of the Major Leagues, and something I got all excited about three years ago.

Fishing - Other sports

Fish!

August 11, 2018 by 0 Comments

Would you believe it? This morning I caught a real, living, breathing fish. I’d been out there less than ten minutes when a sudden tug on my line sent my adrenalin racing, just like all those years ago when I had a monster hand in a big pot. This was hardly a monster fish – it was about four inches long – but still. After I took the photo I promptly put little fishy back in the water. I think it was a caras, or a type of carp. I’ll check with one of my students who is a keen fisherman and, conveniently, should be showing up in around 45 minutes. The fish was near the edge of the water and I only had two maggots on the hook. I carried on for about two hours and didn’t get another bite, but it was nice just being out there, watching the snakes of various sizes and colours, and the dragonflies that appeared to change colour from green to blue.

Dad sent me pictures of two paintings he did of Mercury Palace (below), a building on the corner of Piața Traian, not far from Piața Badea Cârțan, where I often get my fruit and vegetables. The statue is of Mercury, the Roman god of commerce and prosperity. With the building being 109 years old and otherwise in a state of disrepair, it’s surprising that the statue has survived intact. I’m really pleased that Dad decided to make that view, which is now very familiar to me, into a painting. Even though it’s right up his street, who in New Zealand would buy a painting of Romania? Some of the Romanians based in Ashburton, perhaps? It’ll be interesting to see if it sells, or even if he attempts to sell it.

When I saw the Red Sox three years ago, I had no trouble getting a ticket. That’s mainly because the team weren’t doing very well. The next two seasons they were much improved but made no inroads in the play-offs. This year has been a different story; they’ve been absolutely killing it, and are likely to finish with a win rate of close to 70%. In a sport as finely balanced as baseball, that’s very high indeed. Last night they had a rare loss however, even though Mookie Betts hit for the cycle – single, double, triple and home run in some order or another, all in one game. That’s an unusual feat because four hits in one game is no simple achievement in itself, and triples are very hard to come by. Also last night, there was a crazy reverse-order team cycle, where the Seattle Mariners’ first four batters in the first inning hit a home run, a triple, a double and a single, in that order.

Travel: Romania

Deer Meadow — Part 2

August 6, 2018 by 0 Comments

Poiana Cerbului was peaceful and relaxing. I had sunny weather the whole time I was there, and thankfully it was never too hot. On Friday evening a group of eight French tourists arrived in their two cars. Again I had dinner with the old ladies. After the meal I drank two glasses of homemade vișinată, an alcoholic drink made with sour cherries. Luckily it was pretty weak. I went out for a walk that evening and met two farmers who asked me in three languages (if you count “moo” as a language) whether I’d seen their cow. Unfortunately I hadn’t.

The next morning, after being given vișinată as part of my breakfast, I chatted briefly with the French people. I tried to speak French, but I was mixing it with Romanian the whole time. And of course, I’m so out of practice with French now. I’m sure it would come back pretty quickly if I spent some time in France. I’m envious of people who can switch between multiple foreign languages. Both parents of one of the families could speak English fluently, and the father wasn’t far off fluency in Romanian; in the nineties he’d spent 18 months in Romania for his civic service in lieu of military service. He told me all about his time hitchhiking on horse-drawn carriages, and how much the country has developed in the last quarter-century or so.

To save the taxi fare I decided to walk to Sighișoara. It was about ten kilometres, four along the shingle track and the rest on a main road. When I arrived in Sighișoara I found a very pretty and old town, if a bit touristy, full of cobbled streets designed so that all the water flows through the middle of the street if it rains. Sighișoara’s history is German and Hungarian, and the centre of the town is very well preserved. I walked up the clock tower, around the fortress, and up a covered wooden staircase. And down lots of cobbled lanes, and eventually into a park where I could just sit down for a while and check the news online (the guest house had no access, apart from in a small corner, and to be honest I liked that). Then it was time to trek back to Deer Meadow. After all that walking I was pretty tired and hungry. I have blisters on my feet as I write now.

My stay at Poiana Cerbului was certainly worth it, even if it took me an insane amount of time to get there and back on the train. (Next time, I’ll consider hiring a car.) I got to speak a lot of Romanian and realise, hey, I’m not actually too terrible at this. I might recommend the place to my friends in St Ives, if and when they next come to Romania. The talkative lady took my business card, saying she might want some English lessons over the phone. I wonder if she’ll actually call me. Yesterday morning she got me to write down some useful English phrases for guests, along with a pronunciation key. For “welcome”, for instance, I wrote “uel-căm”. On Friday she gave me a book about reiki to read. Many of the pages had been annotated with what looked like the ravings of a madwoman – political commentary interspersed with bits of astrology and numerology.

One young guy from the French contingent celebrated his 17th birthday yesterday. They celebrated with breakfast birthday cake. I was thinking back to the day he was born, 5/8/01, when life had turned into a disaster zone for me. After breakfast I gave my hosts some money for meals, said goodbye, and then the French group kindly drove me to Sighișoara station. I had about two hours before my train left, so I called my parents on FaceTime. Nothing of note happened on the trains back. At Aiud I avoided that very unwelcoming bar like the plague, obviously. We clattered through five județe, or counties: Mureș, Sibiu, Alba, Hunedoara and Timiș. This reminded me of my train trip through five states from New York to Chicago. Late morning turned into afternoon, then evening and finally pitch blackness. We pulled in to Timișoara a few minutes before midnight.

Travel: Romania

Deer Meadow — Part 1

August 6, 2018 by 0 Comments

It absolutely bucketed down as I walked to the station early on Thursday morning, and by the time I boarded the train I was soaked to the skin. I made a beeline to the toilet so I could change my clothes. We don’t exactly have bullet trains in Romania, and the journey to Aiud, 267 km away, took more than six hours. If I counted correctly, the train made 17 stops. It was a pleasant journey until a gypsy whanau (or whatever the correct term is) got on at Alba Iulia. They were dirty, smelly and loud, and amongst them was a pregnant girl of about 15. They were also ticketless. You’re allowed to buy tickets on the train in Romania, but they cost about 50% more than at the kiosk. We’d gone two or three stops down the line from Alba Iulia when the ticket inspector did his rounds. He quoted the fare to the mother (or boss) of the whanau, but she was having none of it. Things got pretty heated. The inspector must have called the police, who threw the group off the train at Teiuș, the next station.

When I got off the train at Aiud, I was hungry and in need of the loo. Aiud is about the same size as St Ives, the town I grew up in, and in parts it is quite pleasant. I found a bar in a prominent position by the river. It was well patronised. I couldn’t see anybody eating, but I was confident they could rustle me up something simple. Even mici, if need be. As I sat down, I was met by some stares, followed by comments about my bags. Who are you? I felt uncomfortable. Humiliated, even. I did the sensible thing, and I got up and left to a chorus of guffaws. Just when I think I have some I idea how Romania works, I get that, which I might have expected in a dingy basement dive, but not there. I wandered around the town, frustrated at the lack of places that served food, until I came upon a place that supposedly did pizza. I went in, and after banging glasses together to get somebody’s attention, I finally got a beer and a bite to eat.

I wandered back to the train station, and had a conversation of sorts with a bloke on the platform. I was glad when the train arrived. The trip to Sighișoara was uneventful. From the station, I took a taxi to my accommodation, which was further away than I thought. “You almost need a tractor for this,” the driver said as we bumbled along a narrow shingle road. We got there eventually. The ride cost me 40 lei. Poiana Cerbului, “Deer Meadow”, was quite a wild place, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A woman of about 70 greeted me, and I soon met her older sister. They gave me some meat and noodles, an omelette (the eggs came from their own hens) and a salad, again using their own tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.

I had no trouble sleeping in my double bed, in an otherwise fairly basic room. For breakfast I had scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, a large salad and some bread to mop up all that oil. At this point I was the only person staying there. I had a long chat with the two ladies. The 70-year-old lady talked a lot. The older woman had one good eye, not many teeth, and a crude DIY tattoo on her wrist which looked like the sort of reminder note I sometimes write on my hand. She was much quieter. I didn’t want to take a taxi to Sighișoara and back, because I’d only brought 710 lei with me, half of which went on my accommodation, so a few more taxi rides would have just about wiped me out. So on my first day I explored the wood at the back of the guest house (trying not to get lost), walked along the gravel road for a bit, and mostly read A Moveable Feast, a very readable account of Ernest Hemingway’s time in Paris. I also chatted to the old ladies. This was great for my Romanian.