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.