Faux Angel Delight

We were amused by a packet in the dessert section of our local express supermarche that declared itself to be 'Plop!'. We considered buying it just for the sheer hilarity, but were instead convinced by a three pack of some sort of chocolate dessert mix as I thought it looked a bit like Angel Delight.

So I had a quick look at the instructions and didn't really understand anything except 700ml du lait, but I thought that was enough - 700ml of milk, easy peasy, mix it in, voila, Angel Delight. O ho, how I misunderestimated the Belgies - nothing is that simple. It came out all runny, so I shoved it in the fridge and hoped it would solidify somehow.

It did not.

"Are you sure you read the instructions properly?" asked Ben.
I shrugged and said something noncomittal, and threw the empty sachet at him to decipher.

"You were supposed to boil it," he told me after scrutinising the French words on the back.

So I popped the whole thing in a saucepan and wandered off. It began to burn. I rushed back after Ben alerted me and stood diligently stirring whilst it thickened up. There didn't seem to be any burnt bits, so I quietly congratulated myself.

I then poured it back into the bowl and put it back in the fridge.

Half an hour later we had a look and it appeared to be custard. Burnt chocolate custard. Not actually Angel Delight at all. Faux Angel Delight. Burnt Faux Angel Delight.

I am determinedly making my way through it anyway.

After publishing this post I spoke to my sister about it online.

The following conversation ensued.

Sara says:
How was your Plop?
Amanda says:
We didn't have Plop, we had chocolate custard.
Sara says:
oh i thought it was Plop that you bought.
Amanda says:
Nice to see you pay attention. We also have cockroaches here sometimes, did you know that?
Sara says:
Shut up. You cant talk about paying attention.
Amanda says:
Yes I can.
Sara says:
You tried to refrigerate uncooked custard.

Dammit. I should have guessed she would use that against me.

Burfdee and crayon eating puppies

It's Ben's birthday today and I attempted to bake a cake. I say attempted, because the end result was not as cake-like as I would have liked. For this I blame the Belgians - I have been baking cakes since my primary school decided to give cookery classes for all those not sporty enough to have been picked for the school teams and generally they turn out alright, so it must be the Belgian's fault. That's just logic.

I bought the ingredients a while back, and after staring blankly at the (small) range of flour Delhaize had to offer I thought the most sensible option would be one described as 'cake flour'. I thought, cakes rise, so this LOGICALLY must be self raising flour. It's my own fault really for trying to apply logic and common sense in a country where they come out to change bus posters at 1am but wouldn't come to connect our internet for three weeks. As you might have guessed it was not self raising flour, and Ben's cake looks like it's been sat on by a small elephant.

I ranted about this to all and sundry via the awesome medium of Facebook, and was particularly tickled by the response it got from my friend Joost, who pointed out "I couldn't possibly ever be angry at Belgianry - we of the North find they have a simplistic endearing quality about them, like puppies eating crayons. Which is why we don't let them in; they'd just get sick on our carpets."

And in Lidl whilst buying Ben's birthday dinner (pizzas - the boy is easy to please) the girl on the till who usually insists on looking in my bag said something unintelligible and I panicked. I thought she knew I was English, but apparently not. Anyway, I just looked at her with wide confused eyes and the man behind me in the queue said 'Anglais?' to which I said 'Oui, oui! Anglais!' and he smiled benevolently and repeated everything the girl had said in French, only louder. Nice to see that some things are the same anywhere you go.

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.

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!!!

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?!