Carpet tax

We, and by "we" here I mean Hox and Erix SRL our hugely successful company, received a registered letter the other day. Actually we received a piece of paper informing us that we had to go to the post office to pick up a registered letter, but the upshot of it all was that we had in our hands a registered letter. It was from the Romanian tax authorities and was a detailed description of our tax debts for the year, by quarter. We had, of course, already paid our taxes, this letter was just to let us know what extra we had to pay. A total of 3 Lei (three quarters of 1 Lei each, and one quarter where we owed nothing). Three NEW lei, I should stress here, not three old lei. (3 New Lei is about 80 Eurocents, while 3 Old Lei would be about .008 of a cent.) Registered mail is not especially cheap here, although presumably the government gives itself a discount, but even so, I'm guessing there is a net loss to the tax people from this letter - adding up the cost of calculating it, printing it out, stamping it umpteen times, the labour of all the signatures, and then collecting and cashing out the money to the cost of sending a registered letter. And apparently (meaning: our accountant said so) more or less everyone gets one of these letters at this time of the year. The purpose (allegedly) is to keep everyone working in the employee heavy tax office, and to make it clear to the outside world that they are gainfully employed and busy.

Temperature update

It is getting warmer! It was only -19 this morning! I wonder if I can find out what the average temerature for January was in Csikszereda this year. I reckon it was probably somewhere between -15 and -20. Average. Roll on February.

Hunganian

My Hungarian is progressing. Painfully slowly but it is progressing. I attend a Hungarian class twice a week with two Romanians and a German (and for a couple of weeks a Greek bloke), and this is helping a lot. Here are my latest observations about the language: It is not as difficult as people make out. People are very quick to tell you how hard Hungarian is to learn. This is particularly mentioned by Hungarians themselves who are often at great pains to let you know that their language is amazingly difficult. I am not sure if this comes from sympathy for those learning the language and a desire to be understanding of errors, or from a kind of perverse pride in having a complex and impenetrable language (I actually suspect it’s more the latter than the former).

But it’s a myth (or at least an exaggeration). To start with, Hungarian verb tenses and conjugations are relatively simple. There are only three verb tenses, for example - past, present, and future. Contrast with English, for example, and its mysterious and unfathomable present perfect tense, the correct and shifting use of which is seemingly designed to ensure that foreigners remain foreigners and never mistaken for native speakers. Now there is a catch here, in the each verb tense has two sets of conjugations – one when the verb is referring to a defined thing and one when it is referring to something less specific. To give an example from English it would be as if the conjugation of “watch” in “I watched a film last night” were different from its conjugation in “I watched Top Gun last night”. [I’d like to point out that I didn’t, and would never again watch Top Gun – the one and only time I saw it was a waste of enough of my life]. But even with this you are left with a mere 6 separate sets of conjugations. While this results in more verb forms than English, it is many many fewer than most Latin languages. This area is actually the one in which English really shines in the simplicity stakes - in that each verb has very few forms – “watch” can be watch, watches, watched, or watching. And that’s it. I’ve never encountered another language that has this level of simplicity. The most complex verb in English – to be – has a grand total of 8 forms – be, being, been, am, is, are, was, and were, Look at any Latin language and all the conjugations of each verb and your brain starts to melt.

Like most Latin languages and unlike English, Hungarian also has a very clear correlation between spelling and pronunciation. This also makes it easier for the learner. If I hear a word I can spell it (well I’m getting there – I’m still often guilty of mistaking an “a” for an “o”) and if I read a word I can pronounce it (though I sound like a 5 year old sounding words out, especially with some of the long words that exist in Hungarian. Bogi sometimes asks me to read her a bedtime story – not because she likes the way the story sounds in my deeper masculine voice, but because it cracks her up to listen to me struggling through the words).

Where Hungarian is difficult, at least for this learner, is in its cases. Now because I’m a mediocre language learner I can’t just accept cases and immerse myself in them. I have to associate them with something in English. In this instance prepositions. So, rather than prepositions, Hungarian has dense thickets of suffixes. -vol, -völ, -hoz, -hez, -ben, -ban, -rol, -röl, -ra, -re, -bol, -böl, the list is (not quite, but seemingly) endless. I hope that one day my mind will clear and suddenly I will be able to automatically suffixise words like I’ve been doing it all my life. But for now, they just leave me tongue tied and gasping for air. Which word or words should take the suffix, which order should the suffixes come in (you can add more than one onto each word), which suffix it should be, and what the vowel in the suffix should be to obey the rules of vowel harmony. All of these questions have to go through my mind every time I say a sentence. And my mind’s not that quick.

So, I have invented my own hybrid language, which I call Hunganian. This is basically Hungarian but without the suffixes and with Romanian prepositions instead. You see, Romanian, while I’m not actually studying it, is similar enough to languages I have studied in the past for me to be able to pick it up relatively easily. I can’t really produce Romanian, but my listening and reading skills are fairly OK. And here in Csikszereda, if you can’t produce the correct Hungarian, you know what everybody’s second language is and you can try that instead. So, for example I might be in a pizza place and say something like “Kerek egy pizzát cu paradicsom, gomba, es paprika, de fara sajt” This is a Hungarian sentence with two Romanian prepositions in it (and one internationally understood Italian word). It translates as “I’d like a pizza with tomato, mushroom and pepper, but without cheese”, where the italicized words are Romanian. Or I’ll be in the chemist and ask for “D-vitamin pentru baba” which means (as you may be able to guess) “Vitamin D for a baby”, with the pentru (for) being Romanian.

Now, as it goes, this works fine. I can get things done and live a relatively normal life. Sadly however, Hunganian is a language that is only very locally useful. Outside Harghita and Covasna counties in the Eastern Carpathians, I suspect it will prove to be a language of no great value. Unless I set myself up as some kind of bringer of Transylvanian harmony and promote the language as a new kind of Esperanto, uniting people in a gloriously peaceful tomorrow.

[Just to riff a little further on the pizza sentence, I'm still not sure of the correct Hungarian version of my original Hunganian. My instinct tells me that it ought to be a "paradicsomos, gombás, paprikás pizza" which would translate something like a tomatoey, mushroomy, peppery pizza, but that sounds too clunky. There must be a suffix I could add to the pizza rather than to all the toppings. And yes, paradicsom is the word for tomato, and yes it does also mean paradise. The first Magyar to sink his teeth into one after they were brought back from the new world must have been more effusively positive than most Magyars seem to be.]

Random musings

I'm told that the "cold snap" is reaching its end. This morning for example at 8am it was a mere -30. That's a full two degrees warmer than the day before. One morning at around 6 (I think Wednesday) it got down to -36 which, as far as I know, is as low as it has got (so far). My inner masochistic lover of symmetry kind of wanted it to get down to -40 as I know that's the temperature at which the centigrade and fahrenheit scales coincide, and I could have told everyone I know that it was -40 without having to explain. Rather like the way that I always tried to pay my bills in the US on the 7th of July or the 10th of October or whatever, so I knew I was signing cheques (or "checks", I suppose)without having to think about which way round to list the date.

So cold was it that on the news there were pictures of the Black Sea at Constanta with the ice sheet extending 1km from the shore. Yes, that's the sea which froze over. It was 50cm thick too.

The US marine who killed a Romanian rock star (I mentioned at the bottom of this post) is being court martialed back home, and might get a slap on the wrist, or possibly even a clip round the ear, or if he's really really unlucky a good ticking off. This article (from the US military paper Stars and Stripes) says that he's charged with not only negligent homicide but also adultery. Who knew adultery was a crime? The best bit? The maximum penalty for negligent homicide is three years in jail, and the maximum penalty for adultery is one year. Wonder if they'll throw in a bit of torture too? Or does the US Military reserve that for foreigners held without trial?

I kind of want to write a long piece about how Hamas's election victory is a direct result of the brutal and vicious occupation and that it's exactly the kind of epitaph Sharon would have wanted, but I know whenever one writes about Israel/Palestine all these extremist psychos come out of the internet woodwork and accuse you of terrible things (the extremist psycho pro-occupation wing will tell you that you're condoning terrorism or an anti-semite or no better than Hitler for even daring to suggest that the occupation should be ended, while the extremist anti-semite wing of the internet will come out and condemn you to death for even daring to suggest that Israeli civilians ought to be able to go about their daily lives in safety). It's quite interesting in a blackly comic way to see the US govt tie itself in knots trying to big up democracy while simultaneously condemning the victors in what seems to have been an extremely well conducted election. "We respect the will of the people, but urge Mahmoud Abbas to keep Hamas in opposition" is one I heard yesterday. The endgame of this is that now Sharon has begat Hamas, Hamas may beget Netanyahu. And then we're all finished. In the meantime I will link you to this commentary by Gerald Kaufman in today's Guardian, who says it better than I ever could. (For non-British readers unfamiliar with Kaufman, he's a Labour MP whose been an MP for as long as I can remember - ie he predates Blair by many years - and is Britians most prominent Jewish MP. That last fact shouldn't matter or legitimise his views at all, but sadly in a world where criticism of Israel is painted as anti-semitism it does).

-32

-32. That's it. That's all I have to say. -32. Minus bastarding thirty two. Who turned off the Thermahaline?

The window in Bogi's room:

Gratuitous Plug

Regular readers need look no further. (I know I say that quite often in my endearing/irritating* self-deprecating way, but this time I really mean it. *Delete as appropriate)

This post is an merely attempt to use this blog's relatively high google profile, to mention that if anyone wants to come to Romania to learn to teach English, or take a one-month intensive training course in English language teaching, something like the CELTA, but actually the SIT TESOL Certificate, and to do that course in Transylvania with a highly qualified trainer, then I might suggest the following website.

This has been a public service announcement with entirely self-serving goals. I thank you for your time.

Fatherhood - One Month In

So, as promised (or threatened depending on your point of view), something about my first four weeks as a father, with passing references to Paula, the most incredible, intelligent, beautiful baby on the planet. Honest.

My reluctance to write this post is down to my own previous reactions. Viz, that babies were not a terribly interesting subject. True, they seemed to be interesting to most women, and to men who were new fathers, but aside from that (rather large) slice of the population, they just were a kind of uninteresting subject (like other people’s holiday photos – you look, and go “ooh”, out of politeness, but you kind of hope the conversation will move on). Confronted with the dread question “Would you like to hold him?” I was always paralysed and unable to answer. What could I say? “No, not really, I don’t really know how and I’m terrified I’ll drop him, and on the off chance that I do manage to hold him the right way isn’t he liable to vomit half digested milk all over me”? I always assumed that this answer, while honest, may be somehow offensive to parents, so I either faked some kind of bizarre elbow injury or attempted to change the subject.

However, I had seen a number of previously quite normal male friends somehow turn oddly baby-obsessed after the birth of their first born, so I guessed there must be more to the experience than suddenly sharing your house with a being that spends its whole existence sleeping, eating, crying, and shitting. And I was right. It’s quite remarkable in fact.

I’m not sure, even now, if the old me would have understood my fascination. How could I explain how incredibly interesting it is to see all of the various facial expressions? To be captivated by a yawn? To think that a long stretching movement is in any way intriguing? I couldn’t possibly explain it to him (the old me).

This, then, is why I’m reluctant to write about Paula on here. Non-parents will read this and …well, let’s face it they won’t even have got this far, they’ll have clicked on some other link already. Parents will learn nothing new from my observations, and will probably find them trite and at best faintly nostalgic. But, then if I don’t write anything about Paula and father-me, then I won’t really write anything (witness weeks of posts about the weather), so screw it, here goes.

Paula, as you may already have got, is great. She’s got some killer moves already, and can and does blow me away with her cuteness. She spends a lot of her time stretching. This, I surmise, is because when she was born she was 55cm long which is actually more than a third of Erika’s height. So it must have been pretty cramped in there and she really needs to spend some time unfurling herself. I like the way she can now spend time awake without crying. The whole sitting in a chair and looking around wide eyed at the world is dead cool. The last couple of days she’s taken to really looking at things – before there was a lot of vague staring into the middle distance, but now some kind of focussing mechanism has kicked in. Yesterday she gave her first faint awake smile.

I could go on and on and on about how she has this little internal diary which has entries like “8pm – Midnight: be grumpy and moan a lot” and “9am – Midday: investigate world around me”. Or about how she makes these little squeaks and quacks. Or about which position she likes to be held in. Or about how she recently discovered by accident that she can put her fingers in her mouth. Or about a million other things, that I suspect are just not that remarkable if you’re not me. And you’re not.

So, enough about her, I can hear you asking, and what about me? How has fatherhood changed me?

Well, I’ll tell you. Just as an example, my tolerance for crying has changed beyond all recognition. While once 5 minutes (max) in the same room (or even next door) to a crying baby sent me almost insane, now crying has taken on a whole new meaning. It’s no longer something to be escaped, but something to be translated. What exactly is being communicated here? Is this an “I’m hungry” cry, or a “I’m bored and awake and what are you going to do about it, hey?” cry? Recently, she’s even invented a new cry which sounds a bit like a goat. Kind of a mair-hair-hair semi-bleat. It doesn’t seem to mean much beyond, “I’ve just discovered I can make this noise and I’m going to try it out”, but for all I know it could mean “I have come bearing some important information from beyond the womb, and I really need you to understand it before I forget it in a couple more weeks.”

Things I do much more than I used to:

Sing. Quite often singing is an effective way of calming a baby (I have learned), and so I have done more singing in the last few weeks than in the last couple of years combined. However, there is a slight problem, which is that I don’t really know any songs. The only song that I know all the way through is Billy Bragg’s “New England”, which while it does contain the classic couple of couplets "I saw two shooting stars last night / I wished on them, but they were only satellites / It’s wrong to wish on space hardware / I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care”, is hardly lullaby material. The rest of the time I find myself singing snatches of songs dredged from some far corner of my memory, most of which are even more inappropriate than that one (The other day I started tunelessly intoning “In a river the colour of lead” before mentally going on ahead and realising that this definitely wasn’t to be sung as a baby soothing ditty. For those unfamiliar with fairly obscure early Smiths songs (what do you mean?), the first verse of that song runs: “In a river the colour of lead / Immerse the baby’s head / Wrap her up in the “News of the World” / Dump her on a doorstep, girl”)

Listen to music. And not just the rubbishy cover versions of early 80s indie classics performed by me. For whatever reason we didn’t listen to that much music before she came, but now, with the TV off much more and a desire for soothing tunes to reverberate around the room, the music selection is being delved into much more, which is nice. I have rediscovered a number of old favourites.

Do laundry. It’s bloody neverending.

Spend time on baby-related websites. Looking up every possible condition that she seems to have. Spots on the face? Baby Acne, apparently, or maybe Milia. Either way nothing much to worry about. (Who knew that babies get acne?) Crying at night? Eating enough? All these questions and more can be answered by judicious googling and a bit of patience. What did people do before the Internet? Actually have conversations with people? Weirdos.

Things I do less than I used to:

Watch TV. It’s rubbish for a start, and it’s loud and distracting and keeps her awake. There is one exception to this rule, and that is sport. I can watch it with the sound muted and it’s on late at night which is perfect for those late night rocking sessions when I’m trying to persuade her to crash out. Plenty of football on TV in Romania - and now that the African Cup of Nations has started it’s even more. (Plus if she wakes up in the middle of the night there is the Australian Open tennis to watch if need be.)

Sleep uninterruptedly. Though I still seem to get enough sleep. It’s just done in different sized chunks and involves switching beds occasionally (Bogi also wakes up and demands an adult to go back to sleep with her. She’d rather have Erika, but since Erika’s breasts need to be available to Paula at short notice, she tends to get me as a substitute adult). Having worked with new fathers before, I had wondered whether I was going to end up as sunken eyed and vacant as they often seemed to, but so far so good.

Blog. Frankly, writing about Romanian politics (even in these days of Nastase’s supicious aunt Tamara), the Romanian Hockey League, Hungarian/Romanian intercultural communication, and days out in Harghita county, even if I had any, is much less interesting than sitting and playing with Paula. And if she’s asleep then Bogi wants attention.

Go out. As alluded to above. Though this is mostly because it’s been so bastard cold of late. Paula’s experience of outside is so far limited to a couple of half hour stints on the balcony when the sun’s been on it.

But, anyway, to wrap up this overlong and not especially noteworthy piece, I am dead happy. Life begins at 40, they say (whoever “they” are), but I reckon they were a couple of months off. Plus of course, what preceded Paula was no less life, nor any less worth doing. So, it’s more like Different Life Begins At 39 Years, 9 Months, and 20 Days. Which is really not quite as pithy, though it is more accurate. Umm, yes. So, there you go then. I'll try and hold off from more such rambles until she reaches two months old.

Oh, and one last thing. A couple of days ago, a 7 month old baby (and his mum) came to visit. He looked ridiculously huge and disproportionate. I don't want Paula to be that big. It's all wrong.

Out in the Cold

The news (both Hungarian and Romanian news-es) have been banging on for the last two days about this vicious cold snap which is liable to arrive today or tomorrow. Advice has been given to people about how to avoid getting frostbite, how to avoid accidents on the road, and on how to start their cars. The predicted temperatures? As low as -15 in parts of Hungary, and as low as -20 in parts of Romania. Well, boo-fucking-hoo. We've just emerged from an entire week of being down at that level, and have we been featured on the news? Have the residents of Harghita county been given tips on national TV as to how to deal with the conditions? Have we bollocks. Romania is dead against any form of autonomy for Székelyföld, yet as far as any form of national media is concerned, it seems we're not actually part of the country anyway. Treat people as outsiders and they'll behave as outsiders.

Mind you, the low temps in Romania are apparently likely to hit Iasi and other parts of Moldavia, which I'm told, are often accompanied by some vicious wind called the Criviţ, which will of course make it a lot mlot worse than the conditions we have to face. (By the way, I've no idea how to actually spell the name of that wind, I've just transcribed it as I would imagine it to be rendered in Romanian. Apologies if its wrong.)

Long baby related post is still under construction, and will hopefully make it up here later today, to mark Paula's one-month birthday

Degrees of relativity

It's remarkable how the body starts getting used to things. Today is slightly warmer - at present it is actually in single digits of negative numbers (though only just)- and walking around outside actually feels quite pleasantly warm. Well, not warm as such, but not as painfully cold as it has been since Thursday. The last two days I'd been out and got a screaming headache which I think comes from the contents of my sinuses (whatever's in my sinuses) freezing solid. Whatever the reason, it bloody hurt. [By the way, is sinuses actually the plural of sinus? Or is it Sini?]

So warm is it right now that it's actually snowing. I have no idea if that old "too cold to snow" thing has any basis in science, but it certainly hasn't been snowing for a while. (Maybe snow is associated with slightly warmer temperatures because it's necessarily accompanied by cloud cover, which of course has a slight blanketing effect).

Apologies if this Blog seems to have slipped over into a daily discussion of weather conditions in Csikszereda. Right now the only two things that my partially frozen brain can focus on are the temperature and Paula. And I'm trying to resist making this blog turn into a daily discussion of ever so slight gradations in infant behaviour. Though I suspect by the time the week's out, I will succumb to temptation and deliver a riveting essay on all that is new and fascinating in the world of fatherhood. You've been warned.

Witness the Fitness

I have recently started going to a gym. This came about because (a) the winter is long and cold here, and the alternative is to basically sit around and hope that you remain vaguely fit through the six months of iceboundness; and (b) I had become increasingly aware of my expanding girth. So, anyway, to get back to the subject and without teling you exactly how heavy I was (although I can reveal that I have shed 4 kilos in a month since I started going - and that month included Christmas, New Year, and a significant amount of celebratory baby's head wetting type ceremonies), I have noticed a certain phenomenon which I am calling the Mating Dance of the Musclebound (or, for American readers, the Gym-y Johnson).

What happens is that there are a number of grunting men around, many of whom I see more or less every time I go (and I tend to go 4 times a week), and they busy themselves lifting increasingly large weights and letting everyone in the gym know through their manly and loud "oofs". There are also a few women who go. Now as I sit there and cycle or use that weird machine which kind of mixes walking and strange looping arm movements, like a drunken cross country skier, I am perfectly situated to watch the dance. Firstly one of the men will come over and solicitously enquire after the woman's fitness needs. They will offer advice on how to use a particular machine, how much weight to put on, etc (and occasionally demonstrate it themselves, only with an insane amount of weight on it just to show how big and strong they are). He will then stand around chatting to her while she uses the machine, or will possibly use some nearby weights so that she can still see him and he can still see her. (In all the days that I have been there the only person who has come over and offered me advice on how to use the machines is the bloke whose job it is to do so.) The other day, I even witnessed a man punching another machine in some peacock like spreading of the tail feahers. He hit it really hard too, and even though he hit one of the padded bits of it, I imagine it must have stung for a while. It must really be a pain for the female workouters, since they have to go through this every time. There's one particularly waifish young blond woman who has to fight her way to machines through a crowd of blokes.

The culmination of this dance is when the man suggests that the woman in question try out the inner thigh machine, which involves lots of slow inviting leg spreading. if the woman accepts, I presume the suitor knows he is in, and stands there leering and chatting while she coyly and demurely opens and closes her legs to his gaze. It's all very fascinating. It really ought to be one of the documentaries on Animal Planet, except that they take up their time making ridiculous shows like "The ten most brutal psychopaths in nature"

More weather

Regular observers will have noticed that it hasn't got above -10 since I last posted about the temperature. And indeed again today it's -22. I should point out that while the temperature on that thing there is pretty accurate the description of the conditions is way off. If it's clear and you can see for miles, it says: "Mist". If the visibility is reduced a little, and you can't pick out individual trees on the mountians overlooking the town, it says: "Fog" and if, like today, there is actually some fog it says "Heavy Fog". I suspect that whoever reports the weather to the site actually has cataracts. (The picture above of the cemetery would garner at least a "Fog" rating for example)

Photos

Not much to report from here, except to point out that it was cold today (Those logging in this morning will have noticed the little graphic to the right read -23, and at the warmest point this afternoon it reached the giddy heights of -11. Tomorrow is predicted to be even colder I believe) and link to some pictures.

Here are the latest ones of Paula, here are the ones of Csiksomlyo in the snow last weekend, and here is the photo album from which they can all be located.