Washer- 5 bani

Piticotgame- 6 lei

Scrabble- and Go game- 99,50 lei

Gogame, the ?cool? version- 200 and something

The game The good administrator- 20 something lei

The game Animals and continents- 10 lei

Leather tie- 150 lei

(C. V., 97)

I had given private lessons in high-school and faculty entrance examination ever since I was a student. In 1982 I was relieved to go to work and to get rid of the official atmosphere for the reason that I had to raise my children. Private lessons ensured me a very good income compared to the living standard during the communist regime. Like all my friends, I used to give private lessons without declaring them. I was not afraid of that and nothing bad ever happened. I always had enough requests to use up all the time dedicated to private lessons and sometimes to bring me good money. The requests came from my ex-students, from tutors who taught similar subjects or who could not cope with their own students. In the 80s most high-school students took the faculty entrance examination. I worked with groups of two or three unlike others who developed a real private lessons industry.

There were few gifted and interested students, some were hard-working, but most of them were a burden you were trying to get rid of quickly. Private lessons were a phenomenon of communist society, the result of the prestige acquired by academic education due to the ideology promoted by a regime which tried to usurp the elites. They were funny or terrifying observations of social style and classes. Once, a month before the entrance examination, I was asked to help a girl of a family in Otopeni to pass the exam at an industrial high-school. She had no chance, given her school training and intellectual potential. I tried to refuse her, but I could not resist the temptation and her family's insistence. Her father worked at the airport customs. One of her relatives came to take me to Otopeni by car and took me back (the girl's private lessons were a business of the whole family). When I came back, the car was full of household goods, cabbage, strawberries, cheese and especially meat. From customs I received coffee, foreign cigarettes, a bit musty (her father was not an influential man), but foreign anyway?