I guess I didn't hate January.

The never-ending saga of my moving house has finally come to an end. This also means I've achieved probably my only really serious New Year's resolution: to stop putting up with things that annoy me. Which unfortunately meant my landlady had to go. Or rather I had to go. Because she owns where I was.

I'm failing spectacularly with the other ones by the way, although I am now mentally berating myself for forgetting my glasses every time I leave the house, so that's something.

This victory didn't seem so sweet on Tuesday however; because cleaning nine flights of stairs rarely screams 'I've won!'. Being told to clean the last flight again even less so. And no, I'm not the sort of person who cleans stairs just because someone tells them to, but this woman has my money, and without a common fluent language between us, argument is just too tiring.

That doesn't mean I wasn't angry, and it certainly doesn't mean that I didn't vent to everyone I know. I mean the stairs, why do the stairs have to be so clean? Also why is it such a surprise that they don't look that great even after I've cleaned them? They're covered in years old linoleum and 5 people walk up and down them every day, how nice are they ever going to look. They're not even covered in the same linoleum all the way up. And the bottom flight are just badly painted. I'm not an interior decorator, and unless you're planning on using the stairs to eat from then I'm pretty sure they're fine.

But my new place is so nice I don't really care. It still doesn't have an oven though. Why do I never live anywhere with an oven? It's near an Aldi too, so maybe I'll be able to afford to eat all 5 food groups now.

Claire, I wouldn't eat meat from Aldi, you'll get ill.

Yeah well I've already had food poisoning since I've been here and I haven't cooked red meat in about 4 months. So quite frankly, Aldi can come at me.

I also have a double bed for the first time in my life, so I can now sleep alone in more space than someone of my size could ever need. Hurray.

This is all sounding a little bit too good isn't it? Probably a good time to mention that the walls have that 'distressed' look about them which makes it look ever so slightly like the house from The Blair Witch Project.

But I've got my own sink so, you know, whatever.

January didn't just mark the end of everyone listening to me complain about my landlady though, it involved planning things to look forward to, some really good films, some really great nights out, a lot of The Sopranos and it shouldn't be forgotten that I spent the first week of it at home with a lot of the people I love.

Oh and Justin Timberlake released a new single. So you know, it was a pretty good month actually.

Happy February everyone.

xx

Like dating but worse.

I was showing people my room pretty much from when I arrived back 3 weeks ago, and this didn't only given me the opportunity to gain lots of Facebook friends in a bid to avoid the charges spare room websites try and put on you if you want to reply to your emails, but also to be emotionally traumatised.

Finding someone to take my room has just been filled with rejection, criticism, and people who never call back; just when I think I've finally found someone they tell me they're 'seeing other places' and I never hear from them again. And whilst this is obviously not a reflection on me at all (since they don't have to like me, because I won't be there), I found myself feeling genuinely hurt every time someone didn't want to rent the room.

Some people even said it was too expensive, which isn't a complaint I've had before.

That definitely made that worse rather than better.

One girl was actually mortified that the toilet wasn't in the bathroom, and yeah okay, so that's maybe a little less convenient than you would like (you could actually argue that it's more convenient, but whatever), but I'm not sure it would shock me as much as it appalled her.  It's not like the toilet is that far from everything else, it's on the same floor as the bathroom and kitchen, it's not even a yard from them in fact, it's literally the other side of the stairs. It's not like it's in a separate building, you don't have to walk for a mile through a forest to get there, you just make a decision to go right at the bottom of the stairs rather than left. Quite frankly I think that if you can't deal with that situation then you should seriously consider if you deserve to live in a house at all.

That was probably a bit too angry, so you can see what I mean, I became pretty emotionally invested.

But the most important thing is that I now have somewhere to go when the time comes for me to end my contract on Friday, well sort of, I intend to have somewhere to go and I should be going there. Although given my success so far the house will probably burn down between my visit tomorrow and my being made homeless on Friday. Or they'll find asbestos in it, or it will be the only house in Brussels to flood. Something.

So I can say goodbye to Rue de Chambery with it's far too numerous stairs and dingy kitchen and shower that won't stay hot for more than 20 minutes and weird serial killer-esque extra rooms that we weren't allowed in and door that I couldn't open with just one hand free. I can say hello to somewhere with probably just as many flaws and annoyances but with the bonus of not spending my time avoiding the owner of the house because most of what she says makes me want to be fluent in French just so she would understand how angry I am. So that will be nice at least.

And I think it's a good indicator of what the current owner of my house is like that how nice and relaxed about my signing/deposit paying the owner of my new place is being is causing me a great deal of suspicion.

Maybe the house is filled with asbestos.

Merde.

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