We returned to Mons after our two week holiday at home for Christmas laden with Tesco branded goodies – namely minced beef (minced beef over here is usually mixed with minced pork – don’t ask me why), chicken (more expensive over here than steak), bacon, fruit and barley squash, bread that won’t go hard overnight, and three packets of digestive / hobnob biscuits. Oh, and a big old block of Cheddar – they just don’t seem to make good cheese over here, it’s all runny and smelly. Ick.
Not only did we make the journey back with groceries, but we had plenty of exciting Christmas presents as well – most excitingly a teapot, which we very much enjoy using (there’s a phrase I never thought I’d utilise), a new camera with which to further document our adventures, and books, dvds and computer games with which we while away the time not spent hunting cockroaches or trying to make sense of Belgium TV.
We joked about returning back to find a cockroach infested room (according to Ben, we would have walked in to find them playing music and watching our dvds “Oh, hey guys! We, uh, didn’t expect you back so soon … we invited some of our friends round, and you know, bred with them, and now there’s loads of us…. Hope that’s cool?”) but there was just one lone, solitary dead cockroach lying on the floor with his legs in the air. I felt sorry for him until another one jumped out of the cupboard and wiggled his antennae at me, and I promptly went back to shrieking and hating them with renewed vigor.
It snowed all day yesterday which was very pretty, although apparently it snowed in England too – what is the point of living in a foreign country if England is doing exactly the same thing? I feel like writing a letter of complaint. Ben got home and insisted we go play in the snow, so we did until my fingers got too cold and I remembered why I prefer to look at the snow from inside and not actually get too close to it.
I also forgot to write a bit about the Christmas Markets over here – we couldn’t decide for the longest time whether to go to the market in Bruges or Liege, and decided on Liege as it is apparently more famous and we’d already seen Bruges. It was a two hour journey away and we managed to miss our stop – an inauspicious start, but it turned out to be a bit more auspicious as the stop we ended up getting off at was actually closer to the market than the one we missed, so hurrah us. We decided to look for a hotel, but if we didn’t find one to just get the train back. Of course, all the hotels were booked up, so we made do with wandering around the fair, which was very pretty and Christmassy, but…
At this point I should explain how susceptible to the power of words I am. When I was home before Christmas my mum said “Ooh, Amanda, we’ve been invited to a hog roast! A HOG ROAST! Would you like to come?” at which point I replied, “A hog roast! Why, how wonderful that sounds! Of course I would like to go!” so I called my sister and said “Sara! A hog roast! How wonderfully Harry Potte- esque does that sound! We’re going to a hog roast!” and she said, very dubiously “Is it at a Christmas Fete - IS IT IN A VILLAGE HALL?”
More explanation needed here, I’m afraid. Sara and I have an inexplicable hatred of all things village hall. We don’t know why – my dad says it’s because when I was a baby they would take me to get my injections done in a village hall, but apparently they were more normal with Sara and took her to an actual doctors, so that doesn’t quite explain it. But village halls absolutely make my skin crawl. Perhaps it’s the lighting in there, or the general dreary atmosphere. Perhaps its because I’ve never lived in a village, and I don’t understand the camaraderie. But I can’t bear them, not one bit.
“Is it at a Christmas Fete, and will we have to sit at plastic tables with people we don’t know?” asked Sara, very sensibly.
“No, I’m sure it isn’t,” I continue blissfully, images of long wooden tables (Harry Potter again, I'm afraid), cosy log fires and mulled wine in tastefully decorated candle lit surroundings parading through my head. “I’m sure it will be lovely. A hog roast, Sara, a hog roast!”
“Alright,” replied Sara, doubtfully. “If you’re sure.”
It turned out to be a dead pig on a stick just outside a village hall. We walked in and everyone turned to stare at us. We were indeed expected to sit at plastic tables with people we didn’t know, and eat bits of pig (aka, ‘pork’) in a bap. It was a far cry from the delightful scenes I had envisioned when my mum first said hog roast to me. So we did what our family always does in such a situation – we hid in the cloakroom to eat our pork baps and made jokes to each other in hushed undertones, and I would like to say that Sara refrained from saying 'I told you so', but instead she made a point of saying it at regular intervals.
My point here is that the words ‘hog roast’ fooled me in a similar way to the words ‘Christmas Market’ did. Again, I expected something involving cosy log fires and tastefully decorated candle lit surroundings, and what we got was a market full of French people. But it was fun, and we went on a Ferris Wheel – unfortunately we weren’t even half way up when I remembered I’m a bit scared of heights, and it went round three times before they let us get off. Then we had a two hour journey home, most of which I slept for and played the odd game of Tetris on Ben’s phone. We arrived back in Mons tired and hungry, only to find a Christmas Market going on in our own Grand Place, and it was amazing. The ground was covered in glitter and there was an ice rink around a massive Christmas tree in the middle, and just off to one side there was a band playing tunes straight out of Narnia. It was incredible. All that way, just to come home and find that Christmas was right on our doorstep.
