Tuesday 19 February 2013

I'm definitely going to be hit by a car.

I've lived here too long and now I'm just strutting across the roads like they aren't filled with 1000kg metal blocks coming towards me at 40mph, with only a raised arm and the hope of eye contact with the driver to defend myself.


It's the combination of the metric and imperial systems in that sentence that I enjoy the most, welcome to Britain everybody.


A couple of months ago I was walking to a meeting and I dared to cross a road before the lights had changed (because it's not like the cars pay any attention to them, so why bother), and a traffic warden (I didn't even know they had these here) stopped me and asked if there was something wrong with my eyes. At first I thought he'd just asked me if there was something wrong and I just presumed I'd been looking particularly miserable, so I smiled and said no, I was fine. Then he repeated himself, and I wanted to say no, no there wasn't anything wrong with my eyes, but there were serious flaws in Belgium's application of traffic legislation, and that was the problem here. But I don't speak French that fluently, and it was early, so I just shook my head and walked off.


Last week I was actually nearly hit whilst crossing the road (define 'nearly hit' as you will, but he looked shocked to see me on the pedestrian crossing, put it that way), and as fate would have it, he parked on the road I was walking down. I just couldn't let this opportunity pass me by, so I felt the appropriate course of action was to point and shake my head in disgust as I walked by.


Anyone who knows me will know I would never do this even remotely seriously, but sometimes I forget not everyone I meet day-to-day knows me. This is one of those times.


He definitely tried to mime an apology to me from inside the car but I wasn't having any of it.


Read as: I definitely don't speak French well enough to lip-read it. Therefore I actually couldn't have any of it, because I have no idea what he was saying. He looked apologetic though.


In less life-threatening news, we discovered a really cool band this weekend when on a night out in the bit of Brussels near the canal - yeah, I didn't know there was a canal either - and you can hear them here:


https://soundcloud.com/mustacheeosapaches


Oh and I'm going home this weekend, which is pretty exciting.


See you soon Leeds.


xx

No comments:

Post a Comment