Sniffer dogs and late night coach journeys

I went home again last week for my baby sister's graduation (I feel old). She called us a month back to say that she had won an extra ticket to it, which spun everything into confusion. I had made my peace with the fact that I wasn't going to be able to go, but it seemed that I could hardly pass up the chance to laugh at her looking like Harry Potter once fate had smiled upon us and granted an extra pass. After a small paddy where I refused to take a train across France to Calais, Ben hit upon Eurolines, and we swiftly booked my passage aboard. The day arrived, I pulled my EuroBeret firmly down upon my head, and marched off. Everything went smoothly, except for a panicked half hour where I thought I must have missed the coach, being that I was off buying some pastry goodness when the announcement saying the coach would be half an hour late was made. I've written all this out in a Facebook message already, so I'll copy and paste it, because I don't want waste all my amusing musings on just one person. Here it is:

Anyway, we made shockingly good time to Calais, and I foolishly entertained hopes of getting on an earlier ferry, as we seemed to have arrived two hours before the ferry left. There was no such luck - instead we were subjected to TWO HOURS of customs, including sniffer dogs and a shrill angry french lady who x-rayed my stuff and demanded "what kind of girl goes to see her boyfriend for three weeks and only takes one bag?!" as I had cunningly omitted the fact that I live here too as it is rather unofficial. I'm really not sure what she was implying - that I'm not a girl?

So that was that. Then I was home for a week, but as this blog is entitled 'in Mons' and not 'in Mons but also sometimes Folkestone' I'll gloss over it and describe the coach journey back. I chose to travel overnight so that I could pass some of the boring travel time by sleeping, which I thought I might regret but actually worked better than the journey to England. This might be because the English customs were frankly lackadaisical in their attitude compared to the over zealous frenchies - they barely glanced at my passport, and the subject of sniffer dogs wasn't even brought up. Once on the ferry we all hopped off the coach and up into the bar where I got hit on by an ugly man who seemed to think that simply blurting out 'You are beautiful' and then follow me round would be a sure fire way to my heart. It was not. Instead I took refuge with some Australians (one was called Kylie, and it really says something about my willpower that I didn't mention the other Australian Kylie. It was the elephant in the room the whole time) who I then bothered for the rest of the crossing even though one of them fell asleep half way through a conversation. It was 2am by then though, so I decided not to take offence.

Once I arrived in Mons I had an argument with a taxi driver, who was convinced that Lidl was not on Chausee du Roeulx, and I didn't know how to say 'It damn well is on the Chausee du Roeulx because I live there and the light from the Lidl light keeps me up at night' in French so I said it in English and that seemed to get the message across, although it might have helped that I got so frustrated I said 'Lidl! Lidl Lidl Lidl SUPERMARCHE!' and he said 'Ohhhh, LIDL!' as though it was all my fault for incorrectly pronouncing Lidl, which I wasn't. He was, with his stupid Frenchy accent.

Snowy boots

Today it snowed in Mons, so we went for a wander in it.












Unfortunately the wet mush seeped through my black boots, so when we decided to do a big shop later on I very sensibly decided to wear my brown pair and changed my tights accordingly. Ben was chivvying me to leave because he wanted to get back and sleep, so I rushed out the door. Half way down the road I looked down and realised I was wearing one black boot and one brown; that'll teach me to buy the same pair of boots in two different colours. I couldn't be bothered to turn back and change them, so I had to wander round Delhaize looking like a dialhead. I made sure I spoke English very loudly, in the hope that the Belgybums would think wearing different colour boots is a cool thing to do across the water - basically, if I'm going down as a fashion disaster, the rest of you are going down with me.

Drowning in bin bags

I had a clean up today, and collected all the unused binbags. We now have a small pile of them, and keep being given more.

This is because of Mrs Busybody. Mrs Busybody is the woman who accosted me the time the man downstairs gave me a bin bag as a gift; she's the one who insisted I give it back to him. Anyway, it turns out she's a bit of a sticky beak (hence the name) and as I am not technically supposed to live here I try to avoid her, which of course means she jumps out at me at any opportunity. I think she actually waits and hides in the stairwell like a trapdoor spider.

Anyway, she seems to think I live in the other room, the one we rejected as it was already occupied by cockroaches, and we like to leave her with that assumption as it means she won't try to get me kicked out. This means that when she comes round with the weekly bin bag -they used to be posted in our postboxes, but they stopped doing that when someone started bending the doors of the boxes in order to get at the sac poubelle middle, which is ridiculous - how cheap do you have to be to steal binbags?! Even more annoyingly these door bending crimes apparently occurred just after she caught me taking the bin bag from the man downstairs - it wasn't me, I swear, but judging by the suspicious looks she gave me she thought it was. Although suspicious seems to be her default setting, so perhaps not - so anyway, when she comes round with the weekly bin bag she gives me one, and Ben one. But we go through one a week, so our little pile is getting bigger and bigger, until we've had to give them a drawer all to themselves, and I can barely close it anymore (this is an exaggeration, obviously, but the literary world would be nowhere without hyperbole).

It never rains (sac poubelles) but it pours (sac poubelles).

Naked ladies and churros

We went to Bruges last weekend - again for me, first time for Ben. As before it was beautiful, and we managed to see a whole different part of the city that I missed before with Alana (I'm not sure how, because it isn't that big a city). The whole city is lovely, although we apparently only saw fit to take three pictures, two of the river and one of us. We also stumbled across an art gallery that showed almost exclusively pictures of nekkid ladies - not nekkid in the usual arty sense, Jack painting Rose, innocent booby paintings - these were proper full on, RUDE pictures of VERY nekkid ladies. It was difficult to know where to look, although I'm not sure Ben felt the same way. We also managed to accidently wander through the grounds of a monastery and shopped in H&M, which somehow feels more interesting than shopping in H&M at home, although again, I'm not sure Ben felt the same way.
Upon our return we discovered Mons to be lit up with more nekkid ladies - only these were spray painted on to the side of many wagons offering cuddly toys and candyfloss. Ben suddenly remembered that he had been instructed by his co-workers to make sure that he tried something, but couldn't quite remember the name. "Chin-Chins?" He hazarded wildly. No, that's a bar that we went to once but left because it was really cold (bars and pubs here are not the cosy places they are in England). "Tamtams?" No, that's a mexican restaurant, coincidentally across the street from Chin Chins. He finally hit on the right name after seeing a sign advertising them ("Churros") and we bought a few. They smell good - like doughnuts, and for the first bite they taste like doughnuts, and we were happy for a wonderful if short moment before we realised that they were not, in fact, anything like as good and tasty as doughnuts. I mentioned this to Liam, and he said he'd them in France and then accurately described them as being "like very chewy week old doughnuts", and then even more accurately, as "poop from a dog with a star-shaped bumhole".

I'm going to leave you with that thought.

Back online

It’s been a while since I last posted – not because I couldn’t be bothered, but because we lost our internet connection for a while. And then when we got it back I was frankly too lazy to do anything with it, so a little bit because I couldn’t be bothered. But it was mostly the connection issue. I’d say probably 70% no internet, 30% lazy. More or less.

Since Belgacom got their acts together and hooked us back into the world of funny cat macros and Ikariam I have discovered that the trouble with trying to write a regular blog is that when one stops updating it, whether due to lack of internet or general laziness, it becomes difficult to remember what’s happened since the last post. It’s all too easy to just let it slide and do something else (again, see Lolcats and possibly notalwaysright.com), rather than try to remember everything that’s happened in the last month.

So let’s just agree that in the weeks I was absent there was a lot of hilarious generic Belgium craziness that I may or may not remember in coming weeks and move on to the here and now.

I did go home for a week, so that’s a week of hearing about boring Folkestone that you’ve missed out on, so it’s not all bad.

After being home I got driven back by my good friend Alana of “make sure you have more pants than he does” fame and was a little bit surprised that we made it safely, given the standard of driving that the Belgybums deem to be appropriate. Ben says the other night when I was still dans Angleterre he was awoken at roughly 1am by squealing car brakes, had a peek out of the window like any nosy person would, and saw a car pulled up partially on the kerb – what’s the opposite to parallel? Google says ‘perpendicular’ which I’m going to go with – perpendicular...ly to the road. At a 90 degree angle anyway. He then realised that the passenger had clambered onto the driver, and it whilst he was trying to process this new and confusing information that the car’s horn started to beep rhythmically, apparently waking up one of our neighbours who went out to see what the noise was, then got embarrassed and went back inside. Perhaps disturbed by this sleepily curious and latterly red-faced Belgian the cars’ occupants quickly finished what they were doing – whatever that might have been – and drove casually away. So I was pleased when we got here safely without crashing into a hastily pulled over car driven by some randy Belgies who just couldn’t wait until they got home. I mean, honestly.

Unfortunately we did have some car related woes – I tried to find Carrefours, a local superstore that sells pretty much anything you might ever want, including motorbikes and more importantly, fresh milk, that Ben and I walked to a month or two ago. However, although I'm relatively sure of my way around town on foot, I am not so hot on the crazy one way systems that the cars have to deal with, so instead of finding Carrefours I managed to get us hopelessly lost. It was only due to the fact that Mons boasts a large Bell Tower in the town centre that I was able to navigate and get us back to the flat, where we ate half a packet of biscuits and swore never to go anywhere without Sat Nav again. So I grabbed the aforementioned life saving device and asked it to find the nearest Carrefours, which it said was about ten minutes away.

ten minutes, that is, if you assume (wrongly) that as it knows its in Belgium (knowing where it is being its primary function, if you will) it would change the time from British time to Belgium time, ie one hour ahead. Of course, this was a foolish assumption, as when it told me we would arrive at 2.30pm, it meant 2.30pm English time, and 3.30pm Belgy time. But still a little freaked out after having to direct us back the first time, I was happy to leave everything to the Sat Nav.

An hour and five minutes later we arrived in France, and five minutes after that we arrived at the (French) Carrefours that our Sat Nav had felt would be the best option for someone who lives an hour and ten minutes away, in a completely different country. After spending fifteen minutes there we had to leave again in order to be home before Ben who didn't have the keys to the flat. On the way home we passed 3 Carrefours that the Sat Nav pretended not to notice, the deceitful thing.

On the up side, I did get to say that I took Alana shopping in France. I’m not sure she saw it in quite such a positive light.

Acrobats, marching bands and infringements of statue's rights

We had a marvellous weekend in terms of witnessing the strange events that are quickly becoming commonplace over here. On Friday night we went out to the Irish bar again and drank beer (that's not one of the strange events; I'm just setting the scene). After a few glasses (peach beer - mmmmm)we moved on, and wandered towards the main square, enticed by the crowd gathered there. There was obviously something going on so we took a seat at one of the many and varied cafes and watched.

There was a large crane in the middle, with what appeared to be zipwires attached to all the major buildings around the square, and women dressed in white just sort of hanging from them. Twirling. And on a separate building were two other women in white hanging from wires and jumping across the boarded up windows. To give them their due, they looked very graceful and elegant, but they were still basically jumping. And twirling. I didn't really understand what the point was, and said as much to Ben. He leaned over, still watching the twirling, and patiently explained; "It's arty."

On Sunday we went to Brussels and managed to find some sort of celebration going on in the Grand Platz, so we sat and ate a baguette and watched. There was a marching band about to start up, so we settled down to be entertained. However the entertainment came from a member of the general population, who, as the marching band began to warm up, pulled a small flute from his backpack and blew a few reedy notes. Then as the band began to march, he did too. He hurriedly marched over to them, all the while blowing the odd off-key note from his flute. They all eyed him with suspicion as he proceeded to follow them across the square, and then he tagged on to the end. It was brilliant. Picture, if you will, a little man wearing shorts, socks and sandals and a full on backpack, trotting along after a marching band who are all wearing the same regal uniform, complete with helmets from which stream magestic feathery plumes. He's wearing a cowboy hat. They all have large brass instruments that emit varying 'Pom-pom-pom' noises. He is capering after them playing what looks like a flute but sounds more like a recorder being played sideways. The music stops and everybody claps. He looks so proud that he could burst. The rest of the band grudgingly nod at him. We clapped too - you can't help but respect someone with that much audacity. The crowd scene pictured is a bit ... crowded ... so click on the picture and it should embiggen, and I have helpfully circled the flute groupie.

And to further drive the point home - the point being, of course, that the Belgians are all slightly mad - whilst waiting for our train back to Mons we sat and idly watched a group of Japanese tourists all posing with a solemn looking statue. Ordinarily this probably wouldn't be worth a mention but in this case someone had, in a fit of inspired drunken hilarity, popped a traffic cone onto the statue's head as a sort of pointy orange hat. It's what all the statues are wearing these days, you know. So the statue - possibly Zeus or someone equally Greek god-ish - was sat proudly wearing his hat at a jaunty angle over one eye whilst Japanese tourists sat on his lap for photos. That in itself was amusing enough, but it just got better. As we sat and watched and took photos of the tourists taking photos, a woman came striding over, said something to the Japanese tourists and removed the offending headgear! As though the tourists hadn't realised that it wasn't supposed to be there - that it wasn't part of the artists's original vision of Zeus! As though she'd seen them all taking photos and had thught "Just one minute!" All in French, of course - "Seulment une minute! Zeus doesn't usually have a hat! What the - some young scallywag has put a TRAFFIC CONE on the head of the ruler of Mount Olypmus and father of all the Gods! What an INFRINGMENT! And those poor tourists don't even realise. Well I'll sort this one out straightaway...". It has to be said that the tourists didn't seem fazed by her removal of Zeus's hat, so perhaps they hadn't realised that a traffic cone on Zeus' head isn't usual. They continued taking pictures, but I thought I could sense rather a lack of enthusiasm. Pictures of Zeus sans hat just aren't as good, I feel.
We know that she did actually say something like that mostly fabricated speech, because Ben overheard her say 'enfringement', which pleased him because it meant he could then say "Well, it was an infringemnt of his STATUEtory rights!" and then laughed to himself quietly for the entire journey back to Mons, more or less.

No. That was the last Jelly Bub.

I can take no credit for this at all, it's all the work of my baby sister. But i'm sticking it up here to illustrate why I miss her and home and Mama and Nana and the dogs (and of course papa but he isn't mentioned in the following exchange, although I imagine he'd probably have had something to say about it all) and everyone:

After having been told off for trying to feed the dogs boiled mints, Nana reaches for the jelly babies that Mama is so happily scoffling down. Ripping the last jelly baby in half, she scrapes some apple sauce onto the now horrifically maimed sweet and reaches down to the dogs.

MAMA: What are you doing?

(At this point I look puzzled and shrug at the Mama Bear)

NANA: Feeding the dogs a Jelly Bub

MAMA: You can't give them a jelly bub!

NANA: Why not? They like it...see.

(Jason spits out the appley, maimed Jelly Bub and walks off disappointed. Meanwhile Gizmo struggles to down both pieces of the sweetie goodness that was once a jelly bub and chews and chews.

SARA: I don't think dogs should have jelly bubs.

NANA: Well they weren't allowed the mints.

MAMA: (eagerly eyeing up the packet) Can I have another Jelly Bub?

NANA: No. That was the last Jelly Bub.


I miss home.

Creepier and crawlier

I feel, after the events of today, that we have been giving our beautiful apartment a hard time. It's really quite lovely. Never more lovely than it was when we returned to it from - I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.

Well, not quite the beginning, because I suppose that would be the day Ben called me up and said "Hey baby, how would you feel about moving to Belgium?" To which I replied "....Belgium?!" Which funnily enough was the standard response that we receieved from most of the people we told. So, not the beginning, but today when Ben got home from work. Usually he buzzes for me to let him in, but today he just marched straight through the door. I did not have time to remark on this new turn of events as Ben announced,
"Come on! We're moving!"
Caught off guard, I just said
"...What?"
He explained. The company he works for out here actually has two rooms ('apartments') in this block, and the other has just been vacated by the other student that was here. Apparently that's the better apartment, what with its working fridge and shower, opening window and connected phone line, so we went to check it out. We trotted excitedly down the corridor, Ben unlocked the door, and in we went.

One word summed it up, and that word is "Gunnnnnnackkkkkergh", a word which begins with mild distaste and ends in complete disgust and horror.

It was an awful experience. On the bright side we did find out where that one rogue cockaroach had come from.

So; from the top. The room itself was depressingly and half heartedly painted (and didn't have our cool 80s brick 'accent' wall) and had horrible blue lino like the stuff on the floor of a cafeteria instead of our nice cheerful mock wood effect lino (I never thought I'd say that). The furniture was dilapidated and it didn't boast the sofa that pulls out into a double bed that our apartment has, instead favouring the look of an old stained grannyesque chair that looked on its last rotton legs. It did have a small oven - I say 'did', because we've yoinked that. The toilet, whilst being gross, was also missing its seat. Well, not missing, because it was propped up on the wall beside it, but they were not strictly as 'as-one' as one might hope. The shower, to give it its due, worked quite well, but the scores of cockaroaches milling about put me off ever wanting to shower in there, whilst ironically making me desperate to wash. The window did open properly, but you'd need it to in order to get some fresh air in whilst spraying insect repellent. There were three cans of insect repellent just on the worktops, so it's not a new and exciting problem - oh no, they're ESTABLISHED bugs. The fridge worked, but was full of - you've probably guessed it, and if not you haven't been paying attention - dead cockaroaches.

That's the apartment they've been putting all the students in. This apartment, with its sturdy furniture and comfy sofabed and discerning lack of creepies and crawlies is the second choice. That's the room we would have had to had spent the last week and a half in if the girl before us hadn't had too much and gone mad/home months before we got here. No wonder she went!

So everything in our apartment looks much cleaner and shinier and nicer after that - AND, joy of joys, Ben's been given the keys to the bike shed, post box and rubbish cupboard (it turns out they were in his boss's drawer all along. Oh these crazy Belgian people!). So now our bikes are outside and we can access our post and keep the rubbish in an outside cupboard and everything (touchwoodtouchwooktouchwood) is right with the world.

Diabolical Fly Plots

I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that no Menaces, Flying, Scuttling or otherwise (touch wood) have been bothering us lately. Also, we discovered that it hasn’t been just us dealing with this cruel and unusual foreign bug invasion either; Ben speaks to Liam (his housemate from last year) most evenings because Liam is also on placement but in Germany, where they speak an even stranger language than the one they speak here. I overheard the following Skype conversation whilst making the dinner last night:
Liam: “I’ve got really good at swatting gnats. Flies too – it’s got to the point where I can sneak up on one (they’re really stupid), take off my top and WHIP it. I got one so good that it turned into goop.”
Ben considered this statement and said:
“Did you put your top back on afterwards?”
Liam laughed proudly.
“Yep.”

I can see where he’s coming from. Fly goop is the equivalent of a badge of honour in this war against the insect world. What really stood out was the inclusion of that aside; ‘they’re really stupid’, as though somewhere, sometime, Liam has encountered CLEVER flies. Flies that don’t just want to walk on poop and then on food. Flies that plan and scheme and connive in order to carry out some diabolical fly-plot.

Be afraid.

We also watched another film last night – Hellboy 2. Now, I was of the opinion that Hellboy the First was pretty bad, but Ben wanted to watch the sequel and I was interested in seeing the special effects and cool monsters. It was so dull, that half way through we both managed to get engrossed in a game of Spider Solitaire on my laptop (18 games won in a row. We’ve got a rule that states no game can ever be lost. Rewind right back to the start if you have to, but never give up. Strict adherence to this rule explains why I actually spent roughly two hours on a single game this morning. That’s two hours of my life I’ll never see again. Still, at least I wasn’t watching Hellboy.) There was only one bit that was worth watching – a bit that my sister had already mentioned, in the context of ‘There’s only one bit that’s worth watching’, and she was right. What really bugged Ben and I was the accent of a ‘German’ robot/incorporeal psychic energy thing. It was, even taking John Malkovich’s appalling French accent in Johnny English into consideration, the worst attempt at a foreign accent ever. As usual, as with any film we watch, I checked IMDb to see if there was any interesting trivia that I could impress Ben with. I discovered the following:

Del Toro had cast an actual, proper, born in Germany German voice actor to do the voice

He was not happy with the end result (was it the authenticity he had a problem with, perhaps?)

He cast, instead of this actual, proper, born in Germany German voice actor, SETH MACFARLANE.

Yeah, the guy who does Family Guy. Yes, he is very talented. But he is not German.

It gets better (worse?).

Seth Macfarlane based his German accent – wait, more emphasis – Seth Macfarlane BASED his GERMAN ACCENT on none other than JEREMY IRONS in DIE HARD!! He was doing an impression of a British man doing an impression of a German! Why?! For the love of God, why? If it had to be Seth MacFarlene, couldn’t he at least have tried to do an impression of a GERMAN? Would it have been so hard? He could have called up the guy who originally had the part - he probably still knows the lines, it’s not like any of them were unpredictable.

Moving on.

Whilst we were eating dinner last night, Ben was hit with sudden inspiration
“You could be really postmodern and write a blog on writing your blog.”He paused thoughtfully in order to construct a paragraph that he thinks sums up my blog entries thus far.
“You could put ‘Today I was writing in my blog and I wrote yeah, whatever, it’s cool and stuff.’” He looked at me helpfully, pleased with his contribution.

I think it’s quite safe to say that I probably won’t be writing a blog on writing my blog any time in the near (or far) future.

Monsters! Check.

I meant to say this yesterday but got carried away with the laundry blog that I'd meant to do the day before that. Ah, the story of my life.

I have also written it out once to my friend in Ecosse, and whilst writing it to him I realised it's not really that funny. It might, however, end up being relevant later (I don't don't how) and it also might help you gain an insight into my psyche, so here goes.

The night before last I woke up with a start, grabbed Ben and hissed "Ben! There's a monster! Ben! Ben!" I then shook him a little bit to make my point and then slowly the realisation that I was disturbing his sleep again filtered through and I said "... Um... It's ok... there's not actually any monsters. Sorry." And went back to sleep.

I've written it twice now and it really loses something in the telling. BUT. In the message to my friend in Ecosse, I had also tried to be clever and written part of it in my poor pigeon French. I meant to say something along the lines of "Hullo Tim! How are you? I speak French!" If I'd been able to work the French out for 'I learn it - from a book!' I would have done, because I'm sure Tim would have got the Fawlty Towers reference. I continued "Yes, truly, I am now a French lady." Which was all I could manage, at the time. And now as well, as my French learning does not continue apace. Anyway, Tim wrote back and said:

As I'm very poor at languages other than English, I thought I'd run this through an English/French translator just to see what it said. This is what I got:

"Good morning Timotee, cava? I am definitely, I speak francais tres definitely, I am a francois woman now, that's true. Check."

I thought that that surely couldn't be right, so just to make sure I translated the French into Russian, then that into Spanish, then that into French again, and then back into English. Here is what I got, which I'm sure you'll agree is far more legible:

"Good days, Did Timotee put sails? I am true, say three francais indeed, - francois the supporting woman, am true. Check."

I didn't put any sails I'm afraid, but it's good to hear that you're true (and the same goes for Francois, the supporting woman)."

So on that note, I thought I'd run through our laundry sign from yesterday. It's been through Hindi, Dutch, Spanish and Arabic, in some sort of order that i forget now (it's not important) and it came out with:

"Customer drought for the washing of their homes, to use only one child, are invited to the timing and customers who prefer to wash laundry"

Drunk with my new found power over language, I ran it through again, this time from Englsih into Finnish into Czech into Greek into German into Korean back to English. It presented me with:

"Drought to wipe binding, a child using their own homes and timetables to invite customers who do not want to wash."

Make of that what you will. Ben read it and said "It looks like a heading. Or.... a subheading."

Check.

The Underpants Rule

I mean that as in, 'The rule of the Underpants', not 'Yeah! Underpants! They're ace!', you understand.

I meant to blog yesterday about the adventure of the laundrette, but forgot in all the cockaroach related furore. So here is the post you would have had, were it not for the Scuttling Menace.

Before I left England for Belge my best friend popped over to say goodbye. We sat on my bed amongst the piles of clothes and shoes and books and new house paraphinalia and chatted, about how she would soon be coming to visit and about how we could go travelling and check out the Christmas markets in Germany and how we would both be okay communicating online rather than face to face and both feeling a little sad. (I was, anyway, I damn well hope she was as well or I'll feel a bit silly). She paused during the inconsequential chatter for a moment and looked seriously at me.
"I'd like to give you one piece of advice for going away. It's important, so remember it." She cleared her throat and leant forward slightly.
"Always make sure, Amanda, that you have more underwear than him. Then if it gets bad - I mean, really bad - he'll have to do it before you will."
"He'll have to do what?" I asked, wide eyed.
"He'll have to do the washing."
At this she nodded sagely, sat back and carried on with the conversation that we had been previously having about shoes.
Keeping her advice in mind Ben and I launched an expedition to the laundrette, and after intially trying to read the wrong signs we worked out that it was all in all, quite easy. Whilst waiting for our drying to finish tumbling (Ben found it particularly entertaining - "Look, there go your jeans! And your knickers! Weeeeeeeeee! They're having the time of their lives!") we tried to work out a sign above the wall of heavy duty dryers.
"I expect its saying not to leave your drying in there after it's finished." Ben suggested, sensibly. We wrote it down anyway to translate later at home.

"Les clients qui sèchent du linge qu'ils ont lessive chez eux, sont priés de d'utiliser qu'un seul séchoir à la fois et de céder la priorité aux clients qui ont lessive dans ce lavoir."

Here's what Google made of it:
"Customers that dry clothes they wash their homes, are requested to use only one hair at a time and assign priority to customers who have laundry in the wash."

And Babelfish:
"The customers who dry of the linen qu' they have detergent on their premises, are requested of d' to use qu' only one drier at the same time and to yield the priority to the customers who have detergent in this laundrette"

Ben then said, equally sensibly, that someone could make a mint if they managed to design a new translating site that took both translations into account and than worked out what it probably meant, rather than giving a paragraph of previosuly unrelated text.

The Underpants Rule! Yeah!!!

Notre ami, le cancrelat

Today has been a day of learning new things. How to use the laundrette (easier than anticipated). That Belgian waiters are not the most polite and friendly (pretty much anticipated). That our room may not have an internet connection or a phone or a key to the bike shed, letter box and rubbish cupboard or a window that opens properly or a cooker or a shower that works properly, but what it lacks in everyday essentials, it makes up for in bugs.
"But Amanda, you have mentioned the Flying Menace before! This isn't blogworthy news!" I expect you may or may not be thinking right now. Yes, that's true. I have. Thank you for paying attention thus far. And it might offer you some closure to know that I did stalk that little bastard down, and I splatted him. But no, there's another bug. Or there was. I'm getting ahead of myself...

Picture the scene. We're sitting watching a film (Drillbit Taylor - even Owen Wilson couldn't make it worth a watch. And yet the whole way through it seemed familiar. Could it be that I'd actually watched it once and been so bored by it that I managed to erase it entirely from my memory? Apparently so. Apatow - I just don't get the appeal. But that isn't the point) and (possibly thanks to my new glasses) I see a something - wait, that's not right. More emphasis - I see a something scuttling across the floor. It stops, as though aware I've noticed it, and in return I gasp, and grab Ben's arm.
"Ben - ohmigodohmigodohmigod - is that (horrified pause) ?!"
Ben looks over, grabs my slipper and thwacks it down on something that ISN'T EVEN THE THING I'M POINTING AT. He looks pleased with himself but by now I'm beyond words. I just waggle my finger frantically at the something now and make squeaky noises.
I should say, by the by - I'm not ordinarily the kind of girl who will jump up and down and/or faint at something creepy or crawly. I let spiders out - even big ones. I'll grab a moth in my hands and open a window for it. If a cricket jumps on me, I'll admire its long legs and big old antenna and then shoo calmly it away. In fact, I was once cleaning a friend's kitchen and discovered a mouse under the sink, but I didn't panic. I did try to keep it as a pet, but that just backs up my point. I'm not squeamish, not really. There are only two insect-types I can't bear - centipedes and millipedes. Gahk. But usually, I'm the kind of girl that can handle bugs.
Back to the story. Just as Ben sits back on the sofa, the bug makes a break for it, and Ben, to give him his due, is up like a shot and thwacks it twice for good measure with my poor slipper. I look at him with wide eyes, hardly daring to ask.
"Was it... was it a...?"
He looks at me and confirms my fears.
"Cockroach."
I did what any normal person would do (Ben, apparently, is not normal, choosing rather to be level headed and all come-on-let's-sort-this-out. Boring). I stood in the middle of the room and flapped my arms whilst jumping round in a circle with my eyes closesd, squealing "EWWWWWWWW!!!" rather louder than I probably should in this densely populated apartment block. If there had been a chair that looked sturdy enough, I would have been up there with my slippers, clutching at my skirt and shouting "Thaaaaaaaaamas!" until Ben told me to stop being silly and get down. As it was he just sat down calmly and said
"You're in the way of the TV."
I joined him hesitantly and watched the final chapter of Drillbit Taylor (I don't want to spoil things for you, so if you haven't seen it, make a mental note here and now to NEVER EVER WATCH IT) but all the while my brain was saying
"Cockroachcockroach ohmigodohmigod cockroach wheredotheylive ohmigod DOTHEYLIVEUNDERTHEBED gahkgahk calmdowncalmdown MYLEGISTICKLINGME!!! THERE'SASOMETHINGONMYLEG!! nonoit'snothing calmdowncalmdown" and so on and so forth. After the final scene of the film (unrealistic but unsurprising) Ben got up and searched for "Cockroach" on Google. Turns out they like damp areas, which means that - thank goodness - under the bed was not a likely possibility. I made Ben check anyway. Devoid of cockroaches. But under the sink - the drain there is leaking and we've generally avoided the whole area because it's, well, gross. So Ben did the manly thing and clingfilmed it all up so no cockroach can gain access to the flat anymore. From there, anyway. Unfortunately, I had seen it scuttling from another direction, which means that it probably came from under the door. This is good as it means we do not have to share bedspace with any cockaroaches, but bad as - actually, no that's not bad. Someone else can deal with it. So long as they don't read the same Wikipedia article we read, which mentions the best way to deal with a cockroach infestation. I quote, "The house centipede is probably the most effective control agent of cockroaches, though many homeowners find the centipedes themselves objectionable." Yeah, you click on that link. (Open it in a new tab, you don't want to go navigating away now). But you click on that link and you look at what they are RECOMMENDING people to INSTALL IN THEIR HOUSES. That's right. Creepy looking CENTIPEDES who are so mean they actually PREY ON OTHER BUGS. That's like saying, there's a small candle burning in the living room, I know, I'll flood the house.

So. Cockroaches. Yeah, we are livin' the high life.

Purple Nasties served by leprechauns

We went out last night to check out the town. We intended it to be a joyous exploration of our new home, but we managed to get as far as the local Irish bar and sort of stayed there for the rest of the evening. It boasts a bit of a dodgy entrance (a large expance of concrete that leads up to some more doors, as though the pub was built first and then the rest of the street inched forward around it) and we had to push past a group of intimidating cigarette smoking Belgian teenagers to go in, which served to lower our expectations, but once in it was pretty good. It's still legal to smoke inside here, and we stared at the ashtrays in wide eyed increduality. The novelty wore off after a while - I'd say when we got home and my clothes smelt - but it was, at the time, another wondrous example of how very different this town is to back home. The pub itself has a smoky, dimly lit ambience, and the barman are all Irish, which made ordering drinks a lot simpler, and probably explains the slight headache and nausea that I've been dealing with this morning, as it turns out they sell snakebite and black - the drink that anyone from Loughborough will insist is a 'Purple Nasty'. After trying a 'Méchant Pourpre' (yeah, you go look it up on Babelfish) I have discovered that they aren't as good as the proper Loughborough Nasties (which is not saying an awful lot) or as good as the local cherry beer, Kriek. So it was a good night of cherry beer and the Cranberries. We invented a new game of 'spot the nationality', and I correctly identified some Americans who then marched up to the bar and introduced themselves to the barman, who goes by the doubtful moniker of 'Wilson'. But any embarrassment he might have in introducing himself as such was probably dispelled by the fact that the American female shaking his hand told him her name was 'MacKenzie'. I mean, honestly. Then Ben got cross with me for doing a bad Irish accent and talking about Leprechauns.
On the note of the headache and nausea, when Ben cooked (reheated) our crepes for lunch he said, sympathetically "No Nutella on yours then?" to which I just gave him a look, and he sighed and loaded my crepe up with the wonderful chocolatey goop that everyone here seems obsessed with. "I like jam on pancakes" he then told me conversationally. Fortunately we have finally found out where to go for milk - Delhaize, up the road, which also sells sac poubelles, and is the word that I couldn't understand when all the Frenchies kept insistantly repeating it to me over and over again during the sac poubella saga.
"Delhaize! ... Non?"
"Du.... du lait?" I would ask in confusion. They would shake their heads.
"Delhaize! Er.... Delhaize!"
Then I would smile and say,
"Dulait! Merci beaucoup!" and wander off.
Now I look back, perhaps they were saying 'Du lait', as in, 'You must have discovered the only place here that sells milk that doesn't taste like cottage cheese, you Englishy! With your bizarre fresh milk liking ways! The place that sells milk also sells sac poubelles!" Maybe that's why Delhaize is so named. But probably not.

So, here we are

We arrived in Mons last Friday, so we've been here nearly a week. I think, anyway. I'm not entirely sure whether it's Wednesday or Thursday. I could find out, but where's the fun in that? I quite like the fact that I've lost track of the days. I don't think there's every been a time that I didn't actually NEED to know what day it is - even at uni, I had to know whether it was a Monday or a Tuesday. Not in order to go to my lectures, you understand, but for my social life - because, let's face it, turning up to Echoes 'nightclub' on a Tuesday instead of a Monday would have been a faux pas indeed. So, I'm not entirely sure what day it is. I think scratching marks into the wall to show how many days have passed might not be recieved too well by Ben, and besides, I'd only get confused about whether I'd made a scratch yet for today or not. It's a veritable can of worms.* Also, if I was that bothered, we could get a calendar. In fact, we've got one. A wall planner thing that my dad gave me. But that's not the point.
Moving on. My aims for this next year in Mons were to:

• Write a novel
• Learn to draw
• Learn to speak French fluently

So far I have not written anything, my sketchpad remains under the bed in the box it arrived here in, and French, it turns out, is a lot harder to learn than I originally anticipated. I don't really have much cause to speak French to anyone - unless you count saying "Je suis desolee, je ne pas parle francais" roughly four or five times a day. Having said that, I did have a somewhat stilted conversation yesterday afternoon with a man about binbags - if just for the pure, unadulterated joy of saying 'sac poubelle' over and over again. In fact, I just wrote the whole incident out in a message to my friend, so I'll just reproduce it here. Ah, my beloved copy and paste, the last refuge of the lazy.

Basically in Mons they have different bin bags for everything. And if you don't put your rubbish in the correct bag, they leave it, or worse, they throw it at your door. I imagine. I haven't seen any proof of this - they all just look the type. But they don't sell these 'sac poubelles' in the shops. I'm still yet to work out exactly why, but anyway. They don't sell fresh milk, and they don't sell any sac poubelles. We had some black bin bags that I'd sensibly brought over from England, but would they be accepted? What to do? I got more and more annoyed, and then decided to look up the word for 'rubbish' (ordures) and 'only' (seulment) and marched downstairs to ask a man I had seen sitting at his window. As I approached I realised that he was actually quite scary looking but by then I was commited. "Excusemoi monsieur!" I greeted him enthusiastically. I then pointed at the bin bags already left out for collection. "Le sac poubelle - c'est seulment blanc. J'ai sac poubelles noir - c'est dacord?" He shook his head. "Non, c'est blahblahblahblahblahfrenchyfrenchyblahblah sac poubelle blanc. Blanc." I said "Oh. Ou ... vendre ... la sac poubelle blanc?" He then gave me a long comprehensive description of exactly what one has to do in order to get a white sac poubelle, not a word of which I understood, so just as I was smiling brightly and saying 'merci beaucoup!' he disappeared then reappeared with a sac poubelle blanc. "pour moi?" I asked. "oui, oui, pour vous." Anything to get rid of the gibbering english girl, I thought. So I happily trotted back round to go back to my flat but got intercepted by some woman who had witnessed the whole thing, and then proceeded to show me that the bin bags were left in our post boxes, which is all very well except we haven't got a key for that, or for the bike shed might I add. She then implied in french that accepting Monsier Downstairs' bin bags was an error on my part, and made me go back and return them to him. So I trotted back round and tried to give them back. As he saw me his expression was one of 'Oh no, here she is again'. I tried to explain that I now knew they were in the post boxes ... geez this story is longer than I thought. To cut it short he told me to keep the bin bag, so I did and felt very proud of myself, until Ben got home from work with A WHOLE ROLL of the things. Someone at work had brought them in for him. Which to my mind is cheating, so clearly I won.

So hopefully the poubelle saga has been sorted. Now we just have the issue of the flat (aka, the room) being taken up with two large mountain bikes, as we haven't got a key to the bike sheds. I just can't understand why they keys for the front doors would have been separated from the keys for the post box and the bike sheds. Surely we need all of them at the same time? Is it a Belgium thing, or a poor organisational thing, or a Belgian poor organisational thing?
I have no idea about measurements - no idea about weights, temperature, or how big our room is in feet. Its about 8 of my stumpy strides by another 8, with a tiny hall area for the coats and shoes and a rather larger bathroom which boasts a large wall mounted cupboard where a large wall mounted cupboard clearly doesn't belong and is just waiting to cave someone's skull in. The shower itself has the power of a slight rainfall and the bedroom is as hot as a furnace, and the window doesn't open properly. It does however have more than enough storage space for all of mine and Ben's things, which I wasn't expecting, and a sofa bed that turns into a double - thankfully, because there was no way we'd fit in Ben's massive behemoth of a bed.

The room stays hot all night, which means that I sleep very fitfully, and when I sleep fitfully, I have bizarre dreams. I doubt I'm alone in this, and I only mention it so that I can also mention something that happened last night, around 3am. I woke up and asked Ben why, why had he put stones in my pillow? AGAIN? and then showed him the offending pillow. Ben blinked sleepily at me, and said, unsurprisingly, "...what?"
I repeated my question; "stones in the pillow, Ben! Look! Oh, it doesn't matter," before grumpily going back to sleep.
I wake up every morning covered in bites, from a mosquito or some such flying evil, but have as yet had no luck locating it and dealing out its overdue death. I'm beginning to wonder whether instead of sucking blood, it's slowly sucking out my sanity.

*Can of worms?! Who puts worms in a can? Why would you want to put worms in a can?!