Winter warmers

I'm, unexpectedly, writing this tucked up in bed in Luxembourg on a Monday afternoon. Unexpectedly because, although (thankfully) I had already taken the day off work today, I had planned to be back home in Brussels chilling out, rather than here. I took the day off because today is a nationwide strike in Belgium, and I thought I'd rather deal with that from the comfort of my bed than struggle to try to get to work and back. It's maybe 5 km between my house and work, so not really comfortable walking distance and I can't ride (and don't have) a bike, so seeing that I have around 7 leave days left for this year, it seemed easier to just call it a long weekend and opt out of the whole mess.

This was all planned out weeks ago, since the strike was announced far in advance. What I didn't see explained anywhere was that the widely-advertised strike on Monday, 15th December, actually started at 10 pm on Sunday, 14th. And since trains, especially crappy Belgian trains, take time to get places, I turned up to the station yesterday to find out that the 7.35 train was only going as far as Namur, since the 22.10 arrival time in Brussels would have run past the start of the strike... I mean, how ridiculous for one. And for another, I checked the times on the website at around 6.30 pm and it showed the train going to Brussels just fine. It would have still been too late to catch a different train, but at least we could have avoided a 45-minute round trip to Arlon if we'd known.

There are definitely no trains going today, so I'm hanging at Jules' apartment while he goes to work and then comes home and drives me all the way to Brussels tonight. What a champion.

Between the strikes, and rain and cold and darkness and impatiently counting down to the holidays, we all need some cheering up. That's why, in this hemisphere, we're lucky to have Christmas. At home, frankly, Christmas is badly timed. It's not far enough into summer to reliably hit good weather, then offices often close for a couple of weeks for Christmas and New Year, which means you're basically forced to take summer holidays then, rather than later in January or February, when the weather's generally better, and then there's absolutely nothing to cheer you up through winter (which admittedly is not as cold or dark as it is here, but still). But here, there's really no excuse not to warm up with a mulled wine, hot chocolate or Belgian peket and enjoy what the festive season has to offer.

My first inclination was that Brussels Christmas market probably wasn't worth bothering with. For some reason, I thought a big-city market wouldn't have any charm, and we should head to a smaller town instead. But it was recommended by people at work and it turns out to be pretty good. For starters, it's really big and spread over multiple locations, so while it's crowded, it wasn't too much of a crush. We filled up on the aforementioned beverages, and (in several different trips) tried out some wurst, raclette sandwiches and what purported to be authentic Quebecois poutine, which was disappointingly unlike what I had in Canada. (Where were the cheese curds? This one had chopped up blocks of what tasted like Emmenthal on it! Granted, I tried poutine in Toronto or Vancouver, I can't remember which, so maybe it's different in Quebec. Any poutine experts out there?)

In front of the Grande Roue in Brussels

Christmas tree in the Grand Place

Oh, and by the way, we found where you can get a fantastic view of central Brussels for free - on top of the carpark at De Brouckere! It was so full we had to go all the way to the 9th floor to find a spot, but you're rewarded with 360 degree views of the central city. They should stick a revolving restaurant up there.

St Catherine church is lit up for the markets

The Brussels Christmas markets by night

One of the occasions we visited the Brussels Christmas market was on my birthday. We both had the day off, and we celebrated pretty quietly, just shopping and visiting the markets by day and then champagne at home followed by a trip to the same local restaurant we visited for Jules's birthday.

Prost! New LBD I bought that day :)

Birthday dinner

While I was waiting for the bathroom at the restaurant, I got chatting with two women who were smoking in the lobby. Normally that would annoy me, but I was in a good mood, and somehow ended up confessing that it was my birthday. The guy using the bathroom before me overheard and said happy birthday to me, and he then went inside and told the restaurant owner that it was my birthday. She ended up bringing me out a birthday moelleux while the bathroom guy sang me a (strangely ballad-y and intense) Mexican birthday song, and then the whole restaurant (a dozen or so people) sang happy birthday to me. I was really quite touched!

The day after my birthday is Sinterklass, or Niklosdaag, or Saint Nicholas's Day, in this part of the world. I'm glad it wasn't celebrated at home, since as a kid I already found my birthday to be way too close to Christmas, but this year it was fun to share a little of the tradition with Jules. In Luxembourg, the Kleeschen (Saint Nicholas) brings a Teller (plate) of chocolates to good girls and boys, while the Housecker (the equivalent to the French Pere Fouettard or Dutch Zwarte Peet) brings sticks to naughty children. I must have been good for the first time ever, because the Kleeschen brought me my first Teller.

A partly-eaten Teller

That brings us (finally) to this weekend, which of course was spent here in Luxembourg, mainly shopping and visiting the Christmas market in town for souvenir mulled wine mugs and gromperekischelcher.

Lucky the Kleeschen didn't see me being naughty at the Luxembourg Christmas market!

Jules's head fits perfectly into the chalet roof

And we had a lovely winter dinner of baked Mont d'Or cheese

Sunset in Luxembourg

Just six working days to go for the year before a nice long break and my first Christmas with Jules's family (prepare the champagne). I hope you're all finding ways to cope with the cold and gloom too (even in Auckland, where I hear it's miserable too!)

France vs. Ryanair - who can screw my move up more?

So much to catch up on! My whole trip to Italy/England, for one. But let's delve into the more immediate past and cover the Metz move first, and then once I have a proper internet connection and can upload photos, hopefully my memories of the Italy trip won't be too hazy.

Talking of proper internet connections, I am still without home wifi. Which is ridiculous, since I am staying with the same operator (Alice, name and shame) and keeping the box etc., so I don't know what can possibly take so long. I probably should have taken the opportunity to switch (especially since they are charging me a reconnection fee and locking me into another year-long contract, grrr), but with everything that was going on, it was just simpler not to have one more thing to worry about changing providers. Tonight I paid 4,95€ for hotspot access via SFR. If you're ever tempted by this, don't bother. The site worked perfectly well when it came to registering an account and paying, and then ever since it's been the world's slowest and crappiest connection. I wasn't too surprised that I wasn't able to get on to stream coverage of today's F1 qualifying (would have been nice though), but I would have thought I'd at least be able to browse ordinary websites without the connection failing every two seconds. Not so. (Thus writing this in Open Office and hoping I can upload it successfully.)

Anyway, let's go back to the Tuesday before last, when I had to get up at 3.30 am to go to the airport for my flight back to Tours (mummy and daddy kindly both accompanying me). Everything went very smoothly – checked in, through security, on to a very sparsely-occupied plane and in to the very front row (ahhh leg room). A short time after that, the pilot came on to say there were air traffic control strikes in France, so we weren't going to make our slot. Ruh-roh. But we were going to keep sitting on the runway and go through the safety demonstration etc. because we could be taking off at any time. Shortly thereafter, it emerged that there was a problem with one of the windows in the cockpit and from my vantage point at the front of the plane, I could see a lot of coming and going of technicians changing the window (in fact, they left the plane door open the whole time and I was freezing my arse off). None of this was announced over the PA system for a long while until the captain eventually came on to say that they had been doing maintenance, but it would be finished before our slot opened up. Then the next thing we heard... "sorry, the flight has been cancelled because Tours airport is closing in an hour for the remainder of the week and our flight time would be 1 hour 5 minutes and they won't hold it open another 5 minutes for us". There definitely were strikes in France, but whether we could have gone if it hadn't been for the window problem who knows.

So we were offloaded and shepherded back through to pick up our baggage and go through security with very little direction on where to go. I managed to be one of the first in line for the Ryanair rebooking desk and promptly burst in to tears when I was told that the next flight to Tours wasn't until Saturday (from London Stansted, at that). Reminder : this was Tuesday, I was moving across France on Thursday and starting a new job on the following Monday. The options I was given were waiting for Saturday and going to London Stansted, travelling from Manchester to Liverpool and catching a plane from there to Limoges the next day, or rebooking with a different airline. And « of course », while they would pay for the flight from Liverpool to Limoges, getting from Manchester to Liverpool, paying for a hotel, and going from Limoges to Tours was my responsibility. The woman also declared that she couldn't tell me whether Ryanair would refund me if I bought a ticket with a different airline, since "she didn't work for Ryanair". I pointed out that this situation must have arisen before, so she must have some idea – and indeed, it was surely part of her job to know such information, but to no avail.

Still crying, I followed other passengers over to the FlyBe desk and forked over around 200€ for a ticket on the next plane to Nantes (including a £40 charge for my luggage, of course). By this time, the line for the Ryanair desk was a lot longer, so instead of queueing up again for the refund of my ticket (which, bought months ago, wouldn't have covered half of the 200€ anyway), I decided just to go through back through security for the second time this morning and try to sort out the money later (still haven't got on to that). It was still only about 9.45 in the morning by this stage, although I'd already been up a good 6 hours, but I decided I might as well kill half an hour before going to my gate with a cider at the bar. I ordered a half just to be sure, drank it pretty quick, so time for another half, then another... By the time I got to the gate at 10.20 or so, I'd downed a pint and a half of cider in around 20 minutes and was a teensy bit tipsy. Luckily enough though I had an exit row seat on a tiny little plane next to a grumpy old man, so I behaved myself on our flight to Nantes, which went off without a hitch.

I'm not sure what time I made it to the train station in Nantes, maybe about 2 pm, but I then discovered that the strikes in France weren't confined to the air traffic controllers – the trains were also striking. This meant there wasn't another train back to Tours until some time after 4 pm, and it was a slow TER train. It wasn't that expensive, on the upside, but it only got me to Tours just after 7 pm, instead of 10 am as originally planned. I lost the whole day, much-needed for moving purposes, and I had to push back my leaving drinks since I got home and had to get a load of laundry out of the way so it could dry before my move. I was so tired that I thought I'd only have the energy to stay out for an hour or so, but I did actually manage to stay from about 9 to after midnight, although it was a very quiet affair.

Turned out there were more hitches to come before I was comfortably installed in the new apartment...

My first manif'

Me at the demonstration



The demonstration crosses the Loire (I did not)



The starting-point at the Place de la Liberté - I like the building in the background, supposedly very Tour-ish



The long-awaited 4th corner of mystery is finally revealed in all its glory!



If you think building that chest of drawers wasn't tough, here's an excerpt from the instructions...


Not much blog-worthy going down, although I must say I should write more cutting book reviews, as the last one was quite the mysterious success! Summer has arrived in force (finally, I was going to work in scarves up until about the official start of summer on the 21st), with temperatures of up to 31 degrees (according to the computer) or 34 degrees (according to a pharmacy sign) today - hot whichever way you slice it. I'm not sure I can work/sleep under these conditions...

In exciting news, yesterday I finally bought a hammer and some screwdrivers and set to constructing my chest of drawers. It was a mission! Took at least 3 hours to do it... Bof! I'm pleased that it came together and I only made one major mistake that necessitated prying bits apart and starting over. I also bent the back of it by catching it under the door - yes, the back panel is thin enough that it fits under a door - but I hammered it out, sor'ed. This is very exciting because now I have lots more storage space and my underwears are no longer hanging up in a cloth hutchy thing for all to see! Crucially, it also means that the 'miscellaneous crap' that was in suitcases on my floor is now in the drawers and I can put the suitcases in the cellar
(* removal of suitcases pending). I can pretend for once to be a grown-up! (Yes, Dad, it won't last.) Touch wood, it so far shows no signs of falling over despite not being fixed to the wall - I knew Ikea put that in to deter sue-happy people whose children were fatally crushed under a runaway chest of drawers.

Also, last Thursday I went en grève (on strike) and joined my colleagues at a manifestation (demonstration). I was promised at work that this demonstration was about general living conditions and being fed up with constant cuts by the Sarkozy government and the erosion of the standard of living, and that it wasn't just about the retirement age - which is why I agreed to go, since I don't agree that the retirement age should stay at 60 or whatever it is. After actually attending the demonstration, I'm pretty sure they were fibbing and it was mainly about keeping the ridiculous retirement age that I have to pay for... Never mind though, it made me feel like a real Frenchie going on strike! We all know their legendary love for strikes and demonstrations, so I felt I should experience it at least once! The strike itself was pretty tame, we just marched down the main axis road to the sound of special strike songs, chants, and the odd vuvuzela (really). I spent most of the time chatting to the intern from work. We ditched the strike after a couple of hours when we reached the banks of the Loire (it was super slow going).

Apart from that, same old pretty much. Today I had just got to the park after work and was settling in to listen to my iPod and read my book when a guy pulled up on his bike and asked what I was reading. Whaddaya know, it was the same guy who hit on me in the street like 6 weeks ago. He didn't recognise me at first either, although to give him credit, once he heard me mangle the French language he remembered my name! I guess either he hits on every girl he meets or I'm just exactly his type...