Merry Christmas and well done...

...on surviving the end of the world. We totally showed that calendar system which never predicted the end of the world in the first place. Nice work mankind.

I'm not ashamed to say I've eaten and slept my way through the last week and a half. I also love the fact that we only really 'do Christmas' with my immediate family i.e. the people who live in my house; because it means my Christmas shopping is done within an hour and Christmas Day is a genuinely relaxing time where no one has to cook or eat turkey and we don't have Christmas cake. No one really likes those things and you're just lying to yourself if you think you do.

That doesn't mean that after a week at home I'm not already craving independent living again, because I am. I know my mum reads this but I think she's heard me say the words 'I'm just going to kill all of you' enough times in the last few days for this not to be a particular surprise - they know I love them, it's fine. But I also am loving the people of Leeds, I haven't even been gone that long but I'd forgotten that everyone is so damn friendly here, I must have chatted to like 5 people in M&S alone on Saturday morning. Special thanks to the shop assistant in Tesco who skipped the song that was playing in the book department after I said it was making me lose the will to live. You deserve to have an extra nice Christmas.

So have a lovely Christmas and tell the people you love/like that you love/like them, because that's what this time of year is for.

I will be doing; so if you don't hear from me in the couple of days you can take that as a sign that I can't stand you.

Merry Christmas :)

xx

Being an intern means...

Writing your number on scraps of paper whilst everyone else exchanges business cards.

Hanging around the buffet, because you know you're not gonna eat this well until the next event.

Being served drinks at those events by someone who's at least 3 years older than you, and knowing there's a good chance you'll be standing exactly where they are when your internship finishes.

Having a tiny, personal celebration every time you make a new friend. Don't lie to yourself, we're all doing it.

Still assuming that if someone lives in/went to university at the same place as someone you know, they will know them. Even if however-many years of university has taught you that this is almost never the case.

Finally having a legitimate reason to be tired all the time.

Learning to use the photocopier, and in my case, taking about 20 minutes to find where the copies come out...all 10 of them because you were convinced it just wasn't printing at all. It would be easy here to jump to the conclusion that I'm an idiot, but it's mostly just an absolute refusal to ask for help. It's the same reason I get lost so much, and that I avoided using the phones at work for a whole year after I accidentally ignored the person who tried to show me the first time.

Like I said, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that I'm an idiot.

I'm going home in 7 DAYS, and it never feels like Christmas unless I'm home, so right now it's just like it's cold and there's Christmas stuff everywhere but it may as well be like, October as far as I'm concerned. But it did snow on Sunday morning, so to anyone from home who I told that it was 'so much milder here', I'm sorry, that was a lie.

Oh and this happened:

What so just because I work 9-5 I'm not allowed to fan girl anymore? Please. I was super excited. And if you don't know who this guy is, he's 1/2 of these guys, and they're really funny.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/mKJBB9rqfyE]

I'm sorry this is short and pretty uninformative and it's taken me like 10 days to write. I just seem to have been crazy busy and have about a hundred things to do in the next two days before Sally gets here (hopefully should have stopped freaking out by the time you get here, I'm ridiculously excited to see you, by the way), and my brain can't really focus on anything else. The next one will be better I swear!

So much love

xx

I'm still too tired to think of a witty name for this

I think I realised exactly how excited I was to go home when Wednesday seemed to be the SLOWEST DAY IN THE HISTORY OF TIME. I'm actually writing this bit before I've even left to go home, so that's where we're at, I'm blogging about my weekend at home before I've even got there. I watched Homeland, an episode of Civilisation, painted my nails, packed, ate large amounts of food, showered, straightened my hair and, in true Halloween spirit, watched Friday the 13th (the original, of course) and it's STILL not time for me to leave.

Now the acting in Friday the 13th is terrible, there's a massive overreaction to one of the group pretending to drown - even if he was actually drowning it would be pretty unnecessary to jump in AND use a boat AND a lifebuoy when he's, at most, 2 metres away from the platform you're on (although this pales in comparison to the ridiculous under-reaction of the guy in A Nightmare on Elm Street; who remains relatively calm whilst his girlfriend's blood-covered body is dragged across the ceiling).

But it remains a classic nonetheless; it's a film with all the questionable moral messages of a American slasher. If you have sex, well, I hope it was good, because it's the last thing you'll ever do. Smoking weed? Better enjoy that joint, because you're about to be stabbed in the face. Although the only surviving character does smoke weed and flirt outrageously with the especially 80's looking summer camp owner. All this whilst one of the first characters to die is a guy who couldn't be less in line to get laid - so what's the message here? Flirting with middle-aged men with disgusting facial hair is fine, but being a socially awkward teenager isn't? Is that what we're saying? I just don't understand your angle here Paramount.

And I'm back.

Okay, so I got back on Monday, but I've only just sorted my sleeping pattern out, just in time to do it all again tomorrow night, where did these last 3 days go?

So since these two weeks of my life seem to have revolved around coaches, it's only fair I share a little about what I've learnt about coach etiquette.

1. It's totally fine to spend like 20 hours with someone and never learn each others names,. To the couple who I befriended on the way there and then met again on my return - thank you so much for making those journeys bearable, and for buying me breakfast! I will always remember how much we all hated the Border Control staff and how angry we were when they started playing music in the bar we were trying to sleep in on the ferry. This also goes out to the girls I made friends with on my 'moving in' journey; thanks for making the whole thing seem a lot less scary, and for the tea. I hope my next set of coach friends are just as nice as all you guys.

2. Apparently if you're a fairly short female, any guy who sits next to you will assume you don't need your leg space and just use it to make their legs more spread out. Now, whilst this might be correct for some, even most girls below 5' 6", it is not true for me, and you should not assume it's true for anyone. For someone who's pretty short, I have pretty long legs, so I'm struggling to get comfortable as much as you are, and if I can't straighten out my knees for 5 hours, then neither can you, so back off my half of the seat.

3. If someone accidentally falls asleep on you, it is not okay to fall asleep on them back to make everyone more comfortable. What is okay however, is to sit there awkwardly and text everyone you know to tell them about this guy that's fallen asleep on your arm. I don't know this because I've actually tried to do it, I just know it isn't okay to intentionally fall asleep on someone you don't know. I can just imagine it would go down badly. But it shouldn't be that way, I think we should just agree that it's fine to sleep around each other, so everyone can have a more comfortable journey. As someone who basically always makes these journeys overnight, and by myself, I think it's difficult enough to sleep on coaches as it is without spending the entire time trying to sleep as far away from the person sitting next to me as I can. Because it isn't actually comfortable to sleep with my face on the window.

Also nice work America, you totally pulled that one out of the bag! I'm not going to delve into all things political here, and it's safe to say Obama isn't exactly living out all of my political dreams. But if you imagine you have to run a marathon, and then just before you start running, you take a machine gun to your feet...the political equivalent of that would be Romney being President.

Have another good weekend and I promise next week's post won't be about coaches.

Well, probably not.

xx

I get paid tomorrow...

...I have €7.17 in my purse, and £0.66 in my bank account. So it would be safe to say I'm pretty excited.

I went to Bruges! Despite the crazy weather (hail, sleet and sun...seriously?) it was by far one of the best days I've had since I got here. Even at the end of October it's just a beautiful and tourist-filled as you would imagine - but don't even bother imagining, there are photos at the bottom. The hot chocolate we had when we got there was probably the best I've ever had, and when your table is the one in front of a log fire in the cafe, it probably couldn't feel more like Christmas.

That's pretty much the only noteworthy thing I've done this week, apart from very stupidly, and unintentionally, use up all €15 of credit on my phone by calling home for 20 minutes (Mobistar...is this about what I said last week? Because that feels like an unnecessarily high tariff to me).

I'm beginning to get really annoyed at the woman on my French learning audio course - she just gets everything wrong all the time, I've never known anyone be this bad at repeating something they've just heard (I should point out that these are on my iPod and she is a 'student' who repeats back what the guy leading the course says, I'm not just getting really angry at some woman who's genuinely trying to learn French). As I'm only 9 lessons in, this is probably a bad sign - there's like 80 more to go, and by the end I'll either be able to speak French, or I'll have spent 10 hours yelling at my laptop. Maybe even both.

I'm also inadvertently following the X Factor, so I know Jade went last week, Union J and District3 are basically One Direction but...no that's it, they're just basically One Direction, and Rylan appears to only still be in the competition to frustrate everyone who watches it. All this horrendously useless knowledge has been gained through my Twitter feed, so thank you Twitter, for making me incredibly well-informed about a programme I have absolutely no interest in, and have never watched.

Finally,

I just had to share this site : http://www.lovepanky.com

Now coming away from the fact that 'panky' should never ever be used as a word (even when preceded by 'hanky'), there is just so much more that's just plain wrong with what they're suggesting.

For starters some of the stuff they suggest is just contradictory, I'm probably going to find it pretty hard to play with my hair if I'm not allowed to move my hands, and that's all gonna look pretty weird if I'm constantly shifting around on my feet at the same time, in fact I'll come out of this less of an attractive young woman, and more of a Weeble (Google it). I'm personally going to find it pretty difficult to express myself full stop if my hands have to be clamped by my side, but then with advice like 'speak softly' and 'barely speak at all', expressing myself clearly isn't the aim here. I think the worst thing is that if this actually works and his heart is suitably melted to the point where we start dating, he's going to get the shock of his life when I stop being cute, and start being myself. And then I'll have to start all over again, although maybe this time I could take their advice on being sexy, and the advice on that one is basically just 'LOOK AMAZING', which might require a lot more prep work, but at least I won't have to put on a voice.

Their first date advice is equally as frustrating, to be fair the article is entitled '14 Signs You're Ruining Your First Date Unknowingly'. It may as well be called '14 Ways Everything is Wrong With You and You'll Die Alone'. And the advice itself is a lot like being yelled at by a maniac - 'be yourself - but not too much like yourself, speak a lot, but not too much, show an interest, but don't be too interested, or friendly, definitely don't be too friendly don't smile too much, dress appropriately and under no circumstances agree to seeing him again,  - oh, and BE PERFECT IN EVERY WAY'.

If I actually read this before a first date I'd probably be a nervous wreck by the time I arrived and sit in silence for the whole date, convinced that even the slightest movement or sound would ruin everything.

It's probably wrong of me to direct this purely at lovepanky.com, I just happened to stumble across it this week and it brought up a lot of the anger I feel about dating advice more generally. I'm not even going to give alternative advice, because I never give advice, and even if I did it would be just as useless. Just behave like a normal person and you'll probably be fine.

This is my last post before I go home on tomorrow night for the Bank Holiday weekend, so if you're in Belgium, enjoy your days off, if not, then enjoy your normal-length weekend.

xx

Thanks to Ash and Francesca for their help in inspiring this post, I hope it's every bit as ranting and angry as you expected.

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