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?!