If you think I'm tired now.

This is literally nothing on how I was on Saturday. If you need a little example of how bad I was, then I saw a billboard for Les Mis on the way into Leeds (I can't find a picture of it, which will make this story more difficult for everyone, but stay with me), which had on it the word 'Unmissable'. But in my tired and evidently fairly stupid mind I read the first few letters and assumed it said 'Unmiserable' to which I thought 'Oh wow, that's a bad review' and didn't really realise how stupid that was until about an hour later. 

If you ever need to feel better about yourself, I am right here.

 As I was leaving Brussels I also saw a car with some carpet attached to it wrapped in a Carpet Right bag...is Carpet Right still a thing? (I've googled it, apparently it is very much still a thing, my bad).
 But this along with the amount of laundrettes and internet cafes, the dress code in clubs and the lack of appliances in my kitchen sometimes leaves me feeling a bit like, rather than moving to Belgium, I've moved to the early nineties.

And that's pretty much it, apart from sitting at Calais for like an hour checking everyone's passport because someone decided to be a maverick and get on the coach without having their name ticked off the list, so it looked like we'd gained someone between Brussels and the ferry port.

It also occurred to me that my preferred method of travel is also probably the preferred method of travel of organised crime because there aren't any baggage checks at customs...so that's good.

But my weekend at home was excellent, I got a job for the summer out of it and it was just so nice to be at home. Also I have to mention the amazing coordination between myself, Elle & Lucy. Managing to all come home on the same weekend without forward planning is a feat we should be proud of.

Oh, and to the guy who was so distracted by me being startled by a pigeon that you walked into a bin?
You got what you deserved.

Fun fact: Women in some cantons in Switzerland weren't allowed to vote in local elections until 1994. 1994. I had already been born by then. Switzerland, what were you doing?

Life Lessons

But don't worry, not the-'I can achieve anything if I try'-kind.

Not that I can't achieve anything if I try, just, you know, this isn't Tumblr. 

1. I would rather wash my clothes in the sink than get up and take them to the laundry. Really, I would rather take 4 days to wash/dry my dirty clothes than leave the house and go to the laundrette, pay 3 euros and wait for 2 hours.  I can't decide whether this is impossibly lazy or brilliantly  frugal.

2. In the same vein, I would rather drink black tea than carry milk to the office every day.

3. I cannot be alone. Now, this one I already sort of knew; but after 3 days of self-imposed quarantine this week when I was ill it became painfully clear that I either a) really like other people, or b) can't stand myself. But it did give me a lot of time to hand-wash my clothes...and paint my nails...and put on a face mask...and apparently to have a break down.

4. Almost a year after I left my job, turns out the music they played wasn't so bad after all. If you haven't heard Jamie Lidell or Mayer Hawthorne, then you should. 

5. I don't hate Brussels. Even with its impossible-to-navigate streets, and its weird weather, and that one missing bit of pavement outside the European Parliament that I fall into EVERY TIME. 

 I don't like it either, but the move to indifference has proved much more relaxing.

I also dislike it for very different reasons to the reasons I dislike Bath.  I don't like Bath because it's so nice. It's like if Zooey Deschanel were a small English city; it's incredibly lovely. 

It's so lovely that it bothers me.

I'm going home tonight, have a good weekend everybody.

xx

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 wonder Colin Farrell hated it.

Bruges I mean. I'm not surprised he wondered if that's what hell was like. After my experience this weekend I'm very much inclined to agree with him.

It started with a waffle. We wanted to share one, but obviously being two people we wanted to eat using separate apparatus. It quickly became apparent this would not be possible. When I first asked for the second set of cutlery I was greeted with 'no'. I thought it was perfectly deadpan, I didn't think he actually meant 'no'. So the very British part of me decided continued to pursue my request, only to be greeted with 'no', again. I looked confused, he stared blankly back and replied with 'If you're sharing the waffle you can share the cutlery'. I wasn't completely convinced that this wasn't a joke until we'd finished our meal alternating with the one set of cutlery we had. Maybe I haven't been in Belgium long enough after all.

Then we had lunch at a place where you can order only drinks but not, it would seem, only food. As we were told 'this is a restaurant, you have to order drinks if you're eating'. Now I've been to plenty of restaurants,in plenty of places, and I'm not entirely sure this is how it works. In fact I know it isn't, because I routinely don't order drinks, especially not in Belgium, because water is very rarely free and I'm yet to start bleeding money. I am however, not routinely thrown out of restaurants.

I think the most depressing part of this story is that even with the €4,50 each we paid for water, the bill still came to less than it would of had we eaten anywhere else.

I also hit an old woman in the face with a door. Although I initially thought I'd knocked over a small child, so breaking an old woman's nose was actually a fairly positive outcome.

Once you get over the emotional trauma though, I guess it's alright. It's really pretty but I was too busy being furious to take any photos.

Oh, and whoever walked past my office on Monday and pressed the intercom button. You pressed it too hard, it got stuck and subsequently set off the doorbell for a good 5 minutes before I worked out what the hell was going on and why all these white plastic phones on the wall were making noise. Some of those phones are in parts of the office I don't have a key for. You better hope I don't find out who you are. You are mine.

On a more serious note, for everyone who has read this, and for all the nice things you've said, thank you very much, it is very much appreciated.

xx

I've been really bad at this lately.

I've just been crazy busy and I'm trying to move out of/find someone to move into my house - more to follow when I've actually sorted this out and have a new place to live. But at least it's the 16th , so we're officially half-way through the worst month of the year. I didn't think the 'January blues' were a thing, and then I got back here last week and discovered they were a thing, and I had them. There is of course, every possibility I was just home sick and in a horrible mood, but blaming the time of year is just easier.

And if anyone's looking for a room in Brussels let me know - because apparently this blog has also become a sales pitch.

Then it snowed. It looks great don't get me wrong, I like snow as much as the next person, but I've been running maybe 3 times since I got back here and now it's too dangerous for me to even walk. I'm very lucky in the fact that I get to work from home quite a lot at the moment so I don't have to risk my life walking to the office, but even a trip to the bank this morning took about 3 times longer than it should have; and to those people who saw me nearly fall on my face - I hope you enjoyed it, I really do. In all honesty everyone else probably isn't finding it this difficult to get around, but I'm not that stable as it is, I'm not really expecting to make it out of January in one piece.

And yes, I know the picture of the snow isn't the most artistically brilliant one, but it's largely melted in the bits of Etterbeek that look nice because those are the bits where people move around a lot.

But in more positive news we went out on Saturday night and had probably the best night out since we got here (I say this a lot, I know, but it's for real this time) - I've really fallen back in love with going out since moving here, thanks Brussels.

This is another really short and uninformative one, I swear I'll be better at this once I've stopped showing people round my house every day/worrying about being made homeless very swiftly. I'll also explain just how I got to the point of needing to move out in the first place, I promise.

So I'm gonna take some time here to recommend some other people Youtube/blog wise you might want to check out just because I feel like this post should be good for something at least.

Touchdemode.com - This girl can put an outfit together, and her site looks brilliant, check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/user/thatssojessicaful   - I hope she doesn't mind me putting this here, but sometimes I watch this girl's videos and I just feel like she's stolen my brain.

And if you follow @thirdyearabroad on Twitter they always re-tweet some pretty good stuff from other people who've decided that moving once to go to university wasn't enough, and want to do it again 2 years later.

À bientôt!

xx

Happy 1 month in Brussels!

Can you believe it, as of last Saturday I've been here an entire month. I was actually crawling into the house at 6am Saturday morning - marking the time to the second that I first got here just 4 weeks ago. Needless to say I was just as tired but had spent the last 14 hours having much more fun than the first time around.

Aside from that, this week I have:

• Been kidnapped by a metro driver - apparently hilarious to close the doors before Marika could get on and drive away cackling like The Child-Catcher, leading to an epic journey, actually mainly down to the fact that we stayed on a tram for farrr too long and so basically went in a circle...


• Used translation headphones for the first time - getting the volume and language changing buttons mixed up when I was trying to write at the same time was a particularly confusing moment.


• Become increasingly angry and whoever shares a wall with me in the house next door - your alarm is your phone vibrating, and evidently it doesn't wake you for a good 15 minutes, but it does wake me, an hour before my alarm is due to go off. I will find you, and I will set you a more effective alarm.


• Bedding! - And as a result have just had the best 2 nights sleep (and possibly a nap on Sunday evening) of my (Belgian) life.


• Gone for my first run in about 8 months - my body definitely knew it. It can only get better.


• Finally been to a club with like, other young people in it, and good music and everything - that would be the getting in at 6am I mentioned, the best night I've had in a while.


• Done tourist-y things with my family - like see the Atomium, Mini Europe, eat overpriced sandwiches from a tiny cafe and be made to pose for countless photos with everything we saw - apologies for the ones included below, after 4 hours sleep, I was not photo-ready.


• Made exciting plans - including a home visit in November and a visit from a very good friend (Sally, I know you read this, and yes, this is you) in December so we can enjoy Belgium in all its festive glory.


• Finally caught up on Homeland - cannot believe I left it this long, brilliant.


• Probably used Skype more than the rest of my life put together - this would be the disgusting bit where I say thank you to anyone who's Skyped/messaged/spoken to/seen me this week - but that would be highly embarrassing, so I would never do that.

Songs of the post:

Placebo - Nancy Boy

The Vaccines - Ghost Town

Jay-Z & Kanye West feat. Frank Ocean - No Church in the Wild

Rolling Stones - Start Me Up

The Black Keys - Tighten Up

Royal Crescent, Bath. My piece of my second home in my third one.

Due to Italian traffic, the closest I've ever been to Pisa.

Bonne journée!

xx

Je suis arrivé!

I am officially living in Brussels now! Well, in the sense that I occupy a room here and I pay rent and work here and basically do everything here, but not legally, because I'm not registered as a resident.

The journey was actually quite enjoyable, although not being able to straighten my legs for the last 4 hours did make me a bit crippled, but despite this I managed to pass the time from London to Brussels very well after I made friends with 3 girls sat near me who were going to Amsterdam. I didn't sleep, but doing the journey by myself and only saying a fleeting goodbye to my parents on Friday morning meant I was pretty all over the place, so the distraction was nice and they were lovely people to spend the journey with.

My room (pictures below) is quite big, lots of storage space etc., and I look forward to having a cup of tea on the balcony in the mornings. Yes I have already bought and made myself a cup of tea, what can I say, I just can't resist home comforts. I also accidentally bought chocolate filled with rum truffle, which will teach me not to wear my glasses when I go shopping and everything is in French and Dutch. I now have a phone number, and I've explored Etterbeek and some more of Brussels with my house mate Rosa, we went to Saint-Catherine, saw Grand-Place and 100s of stalls selling waffles for €1.

I met my landlady when I arrived, she  is so lovely and helpful ( which is exactly what you need when you arrive when it's still dark and you haven't slept since that time yesterday), and everyone else pretty briefly and me and Rosa were out all day yesterday and everyone works during the week. Everyone has been very welcoming and nice and I'm sure I'll enjoy it here. I definitely feel much further away here than I did at University though, despite the fact that I'm basically speaking to everyone as much as I would do if I were still in the UK, but I'm sure once I'm more settled I'll feel much more at home :)[gallery]

That's all for now!

Au revoir!

xx