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.