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?

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

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

Someone hates me.

 

They must do. Why else would the heating in the office have stopped working? I know it's winter and it's cold and that's what happens but seriously I didn't take my coat off the entire day and  at one point I stood with my hands on the kettle just to warm myself up.

I can't tell whether that's better or worse than the fact that half of the bathroom is now in the dark, and it is of course the half with the shower in, because nothing is more exciting than shaving my legs in a tiny glass box with no light source. Living life on the edge as always.

But it's all fine because I'm going home for Christmas tomorrow, and spending most of the weekend visiting the German Market in Leeds which will hopefully be more impressive than any of the ones in Brussels. Although one did have a Ferris wheel which was pretty exciting and helped confirm something I already suspected - I have not entirely overcome my fear of heights.

What makes tomorrow even better is that because I'm getting the Eurostar it will in total take me merely 4 and half hours to get home, which is pretty much how long it used to take me to get back from Bath anyway. So in comparison to the 16 hour coach journeys I've done before, this is amazing. Although looking at the prices for January, I  will absolutely not be able to afford to do this on the way back, so looks like I'm back to sleeping in the bar on the ferry and rolling in at 6am again.

Also, Apple, I appreciate you have to update stuff and whatever and I really don't care how you choose to lay out iTunes but at least do it in a way which makes it possible for me to access the scroll bar at the side and/or reach the edges of the window so I can make it smaller so I don't have to choose between being able to use the scroll bar and the taskbar. Thanks.

If you're at work for another week like most normal people then have a good last week at work, if you're doing exams/writing essays then good luck, and if you're travelling home then have a safe trip :)

xx