Diamond shopping in Antwerp

One of the best things about living in Europe is the breadth of different experiences you are exposed to with a much lower entry barrier than back home. I can't say I grew up dreaming of buying a diamond ring in Antwerp, but if I had, it would have required meticulous planning, a month off work, days of flying, and thousands of dollars of expenditure before you even got to the diamond itself. Here, it was more like, okay so we're going to buy a diamond? Well, obviously we'll drive 45 minutes up the road to a city which has been synonymous with the diamond trade for centuries. I couldn't find a definitive answer on whether it is actually cheaper to get diamonds in Antwerp (and a lot of the online advice was based on people having to travel to and stay in Antwerp for the purchase, thus inflating their budgets), but the amount of diamonds you have to choose from is unparalleled anywhere else. According to Wikipedia, as of 2012, about 84% of the world's rough diamonds passed through Antwerp's tiny "Square Mile" diamond district, with US$16 billion in polished diamonds going through the Antwerp exchanges annually. So whatever you're looking for, chances are you can find it here, and if you can't, they'll make it for you.

What I don't think I've ever heard anyone say about buying a diamond ring is, holy hell it's intimidating. We first went on a bit of a dry run in Brussels, trying to get an idea of what things cost and what our budget should be. (I know that's not the way round you're meant to set a budget, but hey.) I wanted first to go to sort of chain or mall type jewellery shops, as I thought that would be less intimidating. Turns out chain jewellery shops don't really exist in Brussels. We found a few larger places in the middle of Brussels and circled nervously, gathering the courage to go in.

Once inside, the service wasn't great and the selection wasn't great either. They seemed to have only a couple of different models of diamond solitaires, which seemed strange. Plus I asked to see diamond solitaires in French and the woman brought a tray of wedding bands. We looked, confused, for a few minutes wondering if you first chose the metal you wanted, and then they made you choose the setting, and then the stone, but no, she just didn't understand. So we tried again, and she brought out weird dress rings. "Oh no, I just want something plain with one diamond", I said. "Oh, you want a solitaire" she replied. Um, yeah.

The second place we tried was an "Antwerp diamonds" place, which seems to be the Belgian way of indicating a shop that has a lot of different rings and different grade diamonds and you just put two and two together and they set the ring for you. This place had some pretty rings but it was a warm late summer/early autumn day and the shop was tiny and overly hot and I just spent the whole time in there dripping with sweat and feeling like the frumpiest mess on the planet, and so I couldn't meet the jeweller's eye, let alone concentrate on the glamorous business of diamond purchasing when I felt like my face was melting off. I've yet to see a movie where the dashing heroine goes diamond shopping with her foundation dripping, but trust me to make the occasion as unromantic and unaspirational as possible.

We retired defeated from the field of battle, and between the trauma of our first attempt and being busy with other things for a few weeks, it was over a month before we tried again. I did some further research online, locating specific places in Antwerp with a good reputation and drilling myself on haggling techniques and the fact that they're not better than me just because they work in a shop that sells expensive things. (They're not worse than me either, of course, but just trying to buck myself up.)

After a walk up and down Vestingstraat, a drab street currently undergoing roadworks but probably not very fancy at the best of times, we finally felt ready to move from window shopping to going into our first store. We started with Adin, which sells antique and vintage jewellery, partly because I thought it would be kind of cool to end up with a piece with a history and a one-off design, and partly because either you love it or you don't. You're unlikely to end up fussing around for ages trying to find what specific combination of the 4 Cs fit your budget and heart's desire. Luckily for us on our first attempt, the woman who helped us was super sweet and friendly and very patient with showing us everything, and the owner (I think) also came over and explained how diamond cuts were different in antique jewellery. We saw some beautiful pieces, but in the end I decided they weren't quite my style for something I'd be wearing day in and day out. I tend to go for plain jewellery, and was sure I would end up with a classic solitaire. But it was fun to see the vintage pieces just in case.

If I was going to go for something out of left field, this would have been a strong contender

The emerald Art Deco one was pretty, but I couldn't see wearing it every day

You really notice all the little cat scratches when you go ring shopping

These used a sort of illusion setting to make the centre stone look bigger. You could definitely get some decent-value rings if you committed to the vintage route

There was no hard sell and we left with a lot more confidence than we came in with, so I'm glad that was our first port of call. We went a couple of doors down to a place that wasn't on the list, but had some pretty designs in the window, Diamonds on Vesting. Again, there was no hard sell, and there was no problem writing down all the different specifications and prices and taking photos. There was a lovely twisted "coquette" ring, which really highlighted the diamond without being too obviously twisty.

It was kind of frustrating that many of the rings didn't fit on my fingers, but oh well.

We went to one more place on Vestingstraat, where they didn't let us take photos, but where I tried on a blue diamond (kinda cool), and then went to Diamondland, which has the biggest diamond showroom in Antwerp. A lot of reviews online said they took the time to really explain all the different diamond information to you, and so this was a good place to start. We actually went here first but they were too busy to see us, and I'm glad they were. They didn't do a hard sell, exactly, but this was the only place that made me feel uncomfortable out of all the places we visited. Rather than an aggressive approach, they took the buddy buddy "what's your name? wow, that name's so popular in my country! where do you come from? you look so much like my daughter it's amazing!" tactic. I did like that when she "swore", she said "corpus Christi!" though, which gave an agreeably medieval flavour to proceedings.

She took us to an upstairs room and started pulling out little envelopes full of different diamonds, from tiny .15 carat up to a carat. It was kind of cool to see the sparkly little beggars rolling around (and I actually managed to drop a one-carat diamond (supposedly) worth about 10,000€ which she had put loosely into a setting for us to look at), but it didn't take long for us both to (silently) be quite sure we wouldn't be buying here.

The sales technique was also not cool. She took a diamond which, according to the envelope it came in, was worth around 4,200€, and put it together with a ring that apparently she didn't know the price of, but guessed was worth around 300€. Put those figures together in the calculator and magically came up with 5000€. I didn't bother pointing out that you didn't need to be a maths genius to see that didn't add up, but she next assured us that she would go and talk to her boss and see if she could get a good discount for us. Normally they could give around 8-10% and she wasn't sure she could get that much, but she would really try hard for us. We had barely time to stifle our eye rolls before her boss "accidentally" came in, found a price tag of 200€ on the ring (yay! it's already cheaper!) and did some sums on the calculator, which ended up reading 3955€, although she said 3900€ out loud. Our original saleswoman cooed over what an amazing deal it was, and once her boss had left, wrote down the price of 3950€ for us, pointing out that she was even taking an extra 5€ off. In the store, we both politely said thank you very much, we'll have to think about it, yes, 5000€ down to 3950€, that is quite the discount, we'll sleep on it. But once outside, we were both like "geez, trying to take us for a couple of country rubes?!?"

So, drum roll... What did we end up getting? As I said, I was always sure that I would go for a plain solitaire - timeless, elegant, classic. But the more I researched and thought about it, the less sure I got. Maybe it would be better to go for something with a slightly less icky reputation than diamonds, both in the blood diamond sense and in the monopoly cartel sense (although apparently the monopoly has been broken/weakened in recent times)? I'm certainly not going to start accusing people of being sheeple falling for the slick marketing of Big Diamond, but I started to think more about the possibility of getting a coloured stone, even in the diamond capital of the world. Our reason for going into the aforementioned Diamonds on Vesting was actually some "sapphires" in the window (turns out they were tanzanites). Tanzanites are a rare gemstone (much rarer than diamonds) only found in a small part of Tanzania, with a blue-violet hue which can change depending on the angle. They are also one of the birthstones for December, which is a fun coincidence. Jules made me sleep on it - for longer than I would have liked, since the jeweller went away to China in the meantime - but we finally decided on something that I would not have imagined but I absolutely love!

Two tanzanite and diamond rings to choose between

Final choice! Thought I'd better get a manicure for when we actually got to bring this baby home

Transformed to a vivid blue in the early morning light

And, you guys, guess what??? I bargained! Me! Who's scared of everything! The ring was in platinum, and on our first visit the guy mentioned that it would be cheaper in white gold. So Jules and I fixed some numbers between ourselves that we would be willing to go to for the white gold or the platinum setting, and then I said to the guy, "our budget was X" (about 2500€ cheaper than the sticker price), "how close could we get to that figure with the white gold setting?" He didn't want to go quite that low for the white gold, but he offered us the platinum setting for basically the secret price we had agreed beforehand we wanted to pay for it, which saved almost 1500€! Possibly we could have haggled harder and got more off, but I was pretty damn proud of myself and pleased we got to the price we wanted, so I'll take that as a big win :)

Movin' on in

So while we were roadtripping around South-West France, wheels of a different kind were in motion. Jules and I have been together for over a year and a half now, which is a year and a half of what I term "medium-distance dating". Long-distance is a bit dramatic, since we spent every weekend together, and we've only been two to three hours' apart the whole time (traffic and so on depending). But still, it's obviously not quite the same when you have to say goodbye every Sunday evening and go back to your weekly routine on your own.

There have been high-level negotiations going on over when we could move in together, and the general consensus reached was to look into it some time after we got back from Albania. I think we both quite wanted to have at least one summer in Jules's apartment, which is sunny and has balconies on both sides, and it made sense to get summer holidays out of the way before he started a new job. Talk accelerated after Albania as well because it was the first time we'd spent longer than a week together and then it makes it harder to settle back into daily life without them.

Enough soppiness. Anyway, Jules started looking pretty much in the late August or the beginning of September, and within a week of sending his application to this one place, he had a phone interview, came up to Brussels to meet with them the following Saturday morning, and by mid-September, when we were due to go away on our trip, he was debating whether to hand in his notice before or after our holiday.

He decided to do it beforehand, and with the week's holiday, a weekend in London and another in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the month flew by and in mid-October, before I knew it, he was on my doorstep with all his portable possessions in the back of his car (his furniture thankfully stayed behind in his flat which is now rented out - and I never got to say goodbye to it!)

It's now two weeks in (more by the time this gets published, since for once I have stored up a number of posts in advance and am doling them out at a measured pace instead of dumping them over a few days and then radio silence for a month) and I don't think it has really dawned on me that he lives here yet. It doesn't help that we were back in London again the day after he moved in, or that this week he's gone away with his new work.

One major challenge is trying to fit two people's stuff into an apartment that has heretofore been set up for one person. Even just sorting through the duplicates of herbs and spices needed some strategic thinking (yeah, yeah, first world problems). So there's been a bit of an IKEA-fest, getting a second wardrobe, a little thing with drawers instead of the small coffee table, and replacing one of the bookshelves with a vitrine, which has the dual function of freeing up space in the kitchen and giving me somewhere to put my pretty things.

Room for more wine too :)

I fell in love with the Fables of La Fontaine series of Gien faience when I first moved to Brussels and have been collecting it since. They had a sale on a couple of months ago, and I rashly bought some of the Four Seasons plates too (on the left). I need to start having dinner parties so we can use them!

Coffee table replacement, aka storage for all the crap hanging about the lounge

I don't know how things will change from here. It's fair to say that living apart extends the "honeymoon period" somewhat, since it's always a special occasion when you see each other. But I'm pretty excited to do normal couple things like go to pub quiz on Mondays and occasionally meet up in town after work (Christmas markets!) or go to our favourite local restaurant which is only open for dinner on Thursdays and Fridays, so we could never normally go. And maybe I'll feel a bit more like my life is actually here in Brussels, and we might even make some friends (gosh, dreaming big here). It should be fun to find out :)

Update/ Time to publish this post and it's now been a month of living together. Still very early days of course, and to be honest, I still don't feel settled into the routine. It's more just like the weekends together have blended in to one another or something. The house is tidier, which is a bonus! I do clean, but I'm kind of a "big clean once a week" girl, whereas Jules is "little and often", which is a pain at the time but does result in a more continually clean dwelling. I miss having leftovers for lunch though! Hasn't quite filtered through to my brain to buy more food and cook larger quantities since the number of people eating has doubled. Boxes are mostly unpacked and stored, but will still be good to move somewhere bigger eventually, if only for the chance to get a larger fridge! (Also hampering that "cook bigger meals" thing.)

It's been five years

Well, to be exact, as of today it's been 4 years, 7 months and 3 days since I moved to France in September 2009. But that (plus six weeks or so) is going to have to do. I'm not going to make it to that magical 5 year mark where you can apply for French citizenship (I wasn't 100% sold on that anyway), because it's time to say au revoir France...

...and bonjour Belgium! Hello frites, yummy chocolate and endless rain (apparently) and adding a sixth country to the list of places I've lived. As of mid-June some time, I'll be on the move again (sigh), this time for hopefully a bit of a longer run in the same place - Brussels. My last move, a mere eight months ago, was so traumatic that I had zero interest in moving again any time soon (despite hating my apartment and the mega-commute), but a fantastic opportunity came up (hence my January trip to Brussels) which was way too good to say no to.

I had more-or-less settled in to commuting for around 1.5 hours each way, and my work for the first few months of the year was a lot more interesting (I'm back to deathly boredom now), but the new job offers so much more financially, in lifestyle terms and (hopefully) in the kind of work I'll be doing. Ever since I've known I'm moving, it's been more and more of a drag when the alarm goes off at 5.45 every day and when I stumble back in my front door at 8.30 pm. After working 40-hour weeks with 15 hours' commuting time, 38 hours plus about 5 hours' commute a week will be a breeze! As well as being character-forming, having to go through tough times of whatever description also helps you to appreciate any upturn in fortune.

Plus the payrise means I could shop around for somewhere I really wanted to live. Absolute non-negotiables: a balcony/terrace/garden and a bathtub. I've been dreaming for years of having some kind of outdoor space, and having a bath (with book, music and glass of wine) is one of my absolute favourite things to do whenever I'm in a hotel or wherever. I never quite had the budget to find exactly what I wanted before, so this time I didn't want to compromise. Jules and I spent last weekend in Brussels, and I've lined one up that ticks all the boxes, and is in what seems to be the perfect neighbourhood, balancing distance from work and the city, amenities, quietness etc. Happy days!

Talking of Jules (who reads the blog, so this is a bit weird), that's the part that's obviously not so great. I was waiting to hear back about the job before we met, and after a few good dates I kind of rolled my eyes and thought "I bet I'll get the job now, that'd be typical". It's almost a cliché that you meet someone when you're not looking (I wasn't - despite it being online, I had taken my photos down, which is basically man-repellent) or when circumstances are going to make things awkward. Sure enough, I got the news after we'd been dating for a few weeks, just before the trip to Cologne. I had planned on waiting until afterwards to tell him, so as not to spoil the weekend, but in the car conversation turned to my job (level of interest therein) and what my long-term plans were, and by the time we got to the hotel I was wracked with guilt and had to break it to him.

He took it very calmly. He's a calm guy, so that's not a big surprise, but after only going out for a few weeks, it would have been reasonable on his part to decide he wasn't into the prospect of a long-distance thing and that it was easier to pull the plug there and then. Which would have been a tad awkward stuck together in Cologne. But, happily, we decided to see how things went over the next 2 1/2 months or so until I left, and then... Brussels isn't that far from Luxembourg, really. It's still only been two months, but things are going well, so hopefully it'll be okay. I think the fact that we already don't live in the same city will help the transition, although I'll miss being able to catch up in the week for a drink after work.

So, I'm super excited! The stress is starting to kick in a little bit now too. It should be much less chaotic than last time (I can hire professional movers for starters), but with the added complications of being an international move to worry about. Who knows how things work in Belgium? And, naturally, I already have trips to Mallorca and Tours lined up for the end of May/beginning of June to suck money out of my bank account and time out of my schedule, but hey, there are worse problems!

I'm a bit sorry that, mostly due to those long hours, I haven't really got to know Metz at all. The last eight months have flown by at warp speed, I swear. The bi-country work/home balance is difficult to maintain: very hard to make friends in Metz, where I was never home, and I'd be tired at the end of the day in Luxembourg and just have to rush off to the train anyway. I still have a little time (moving formalities and holidays notwithstanding) to tick a couple of things like the Pompidou Metz off the list, and I'll be coming back to Luxembourg to see Jules, so all is not lost.

Metz move: settling in

After completing our 600-ish km trip across France, Caro and I arrived in Metz around 9 pm on Thursday night to discover that we couldn't bring the van in to the apartment building's carpark since there was a car parked too far down the driveway to comfortably get the van in, and besides, I don't have an assigned parking spot. So after getting my key from a neighbour (the landlord was away on holiday) we just dumped my mattresses and a few essentials inside and then circled the block for a long time before we found somewhere we could leave the van for the night, then found one of the few restaurants that was still open and serving at that time of night before hitting the sack.

The next day, we were up bright and early, and I raced out as soon as I saw the neighbour up taking his kids to school, to get him to promise to come by on the way back to help us hopefully get the van inside. He, thankfully, managed to track down the neighbour and ask her to move her car up further so we could get the van in. However, she really didn't move it far enough and, thanks to my inexpert direction, Caro ended up in one of those situations where I was seriously concerned she was about to take out the woman's car whether she went forward or back, and/or hit the front of the van on the wall. So I had to go knock on the woman's door again and ask her to move the car further, and geez was she not happy with me. I tried to explain that I was really worried that if she didn't, we'd end up hitting her car, but she bitched and moaned the whole time about how she was going to ruin her suit getting in to the car, she didn't have time for this, where was she going to put the car so we could get the van back out again, etc. etc. How about a little sympathy for the obvious fact that there were only us two girls trying to move an entire van-load of stuff in, and it would really be much, much easier with the van right next to my apartment? Anyway, always good to start off by making friends in the neighbourhood.

Once the van was in, the move actually went really well. By a combination of sliding the whiteware down the front of the van and dragging it in to my new ground-floor apartment (deliberately chosen for ease of moving purposes), we managed to get everything unloaded by midday, took the van back out and abandoned it about a kilometre away where we finally found a parking spot and spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking all of the boxes, arranging the furniture and building the bed (this alone took around an hour). Caro was a real trooper, and by early evening, everything was unpacked and set up ready for my new life.

Well, everything was ready except the small matter that I had no electricity. I seemed to have constant communication problems with the new landlord, whether by phone, text or email. I had asked him the name of the old renter, which the utility companies always want to know, and he informed me (this is not the real name, but very similar) that it was Robert Nestlé le N. Since that doesn't sound like a real name to anyone, I queried back, "Robert Nestlé le N?" only to receive back an email on a completely different subject. Still, I forged ahead trying to get EDF to hook me up in the new place, but they told me they couldn't find the address and they couldn't find Robert Nestlé le N, so I would need to get a number off an old electricity bill and also give them information from the meter. I tried to solicit this information from the landlord by email, but he had gone away on holiday without thinking that it might be helpful to write any of this down for me, so I had to wait until I got into the new place to call. Then when I did call, I just got the same answer - they can't find it, the number on the meter was no use, I needed the number on the old electricity bill.

So when the landlord turned up back from his holidays on the Sunday to do the inspection and the contract etc., I told him of my issues and he produced an old electricity bill. For a different electricity company. Turns out that EDF don't service Metz at all (and I thought they had a near-monopoly in France), and I needed to deal with this other company, which was closed on a Sunday.

So on Monday, I had to leave the apartment to go to work before their call centre opened, and of course my old phone didn't work outside France, so I couldn't call them from Luxembourg. However, my new contract was meant to be activated on Monday afternoon, so I thought I could get in touch when I got home on Monday. Turns out the new phone, which I got from my sister, was locked, so now I had no new phone and my old phone was already deactivated. So I had to get up on Tuesday morning, go to Luxembourg, and use a payphone to call back to France once the call centre opened at 7.30 am (yep, I have to be up and at 'em before that). Thereafter, they were actually really great. It's obviously a much smaller company, so there was no waiting before I got to speak to an operator, everything was set up straight away and - here's the kicker - they turned my electricity on on Wednesday without me even being there. I had grave doubts that it would happen, but I got home on Wednesday evening to see lights blazing in the apartment and to hear the insistent buzz of my epilator (yes, epilator) on the floor, which apparently had been going all day without burning out the motor. After 5 full days without electricity, getting up, taking cold showers at 6 am in the dark and then returning home after a long day at work to a cold meal, also in the dark, it was a huge relief.

So, work. I'm still settling in to the new routine, but it goes a little something like this. Get up at 6 am, get myself ready and run (I seem always to have to run, even with an hour to get ready) to the train station for the 7 am train to Luxembourg. Arriving in to Luxembourg, things are a little more tranquille, since the trip takes a bit less than an hour and I don't have to start work until 8.30. So I have normally been wandering into the supermarket at the train station to pick up a bite to eat, letting the rest of the commuters clog up the first buses before hopping on one of the very frequent bus connections to go to work. The bus ride takes about 15-20 minutes, so by the time I arrive at work, go through security (metal detector and x-ray every morning) and get to my desk, it's a little before 8.30 and I'm ready to start work on time. I can technically start any time from 8.30 to 9, which is good since it cuts down stress about late trains etc., but I have to basically do 9 hours a day from Monday to Thursday, then 4 hours on Friday morning, with Friday afternoons free. There's a bit of flexibility on how long you take for lunch, what time you leave etc., but there's a whole bunch of rules on not arriving too early or leaving too late or doing too little or too much on the one day, so on balance it's easier just to keep pretty much to the same schedule day-in, day-out. I aim to have a half-hour lunch, so that means working from 8.30 to 6 pm, grabbing a bus in time to get to the 6.30 train if I'm lucky, or 6.40 train if not, and then arriving back home at around 7.30 pm.

So it's a very long day, but so far I seem to have taken it in my stride without being too tired. Whether that will still be true when the days get shorter and colder and it just all settles into a humdrum routine, I'm not sure. At least I have no problems getting a seat on the train, especially in the morning, so I can just read the free daily paper, play Candy Crush, listen to podcasts etc. in peace, which isn't so bad.

As for work itself, my boss is super nice still. You may remember from the interview that I have a major girl crush on her, which persists despite the fact that she is preggers with her second child so we are probably not going to end up being BFFs and hitting the clubs together as in my fantasy land. The girl who is doing the same job as me and who has been assigned as my mentor is also really nice, and I think really pleased to have me on board, since the office we share with two others is otherwise silent as a tomb. It took until the Thursday before either of the other two had asked me a single question about my background, why I moved here, etc., which is bizarre, no? I'm not displeased to have a bit of a change from the constant baby chat and singing that went on in the old office, but it's so quiet in there that I'm afraid to open my mouth. Em, my direct workmate, has chatted with me a lot though, and taken me to lunch and so on with her, even offering to let me shower at her apartment until I got electricity, which is really nice (or maybe the cold showers were just not giving me the world's greatest personal hygiene). Maybe we can eventually transition to being outside-work friends, although it's a bit tricky since she lives in Luxembourg. She's on holiday now till the beginning of October though, so I'm on my own.

The work itself is pretty basic and pretty boring, to be honest. The thing is, I don't have quite the right diploma and zero experience in archives, so I can't do anything higher-level for the moment (it is the same for Em, who is obviously also over-qualified for what she's doing). But Girl Crush Boss (GC Boss) seems very hopeful that, with these few months' experience, we might be able to make the case in future that I have attained the three-year experience threshhold and thus move up in the future. Nothing is guaranteed, but I've been chatting to a lot of different people at the company, especially on Friday, when we had a special visit to HQ, and it does seem that a lot of people have been kept on for years, even if that meant bouncing around different contracts and even countries (I am again working for a prestataire - subcontracting/outsourcing company) and managed to move up to better jobs with more experience. Some of the work that got presented on Friday actually sounds genuinely interesting, so let's all cross our fingers that something good can happen in the future and I won't be back to the drawing board in three months' time (I don't think I can manage another move in the near future to be honest).

International house hunting, part 2

I'm freshly back from my weekend trip to Metz/Luxembourg, pretty exhausted after a late train that meant I got 5 hours sleep before coming to work this morning (and this was after wandering around Metz for a solid 12 hours).

Things didn't get off to a stellar start. Over several days, I phoned, left messages, pushed buttons on websites asking for callbacks and sent emails, and only one rental agency actually bothered getting back to me to set up an appointment in Luxembourg. I know it's August, but you'd think for the amount of money they get for doing nothing, essentially, they would bother to phone and give you the address of somewhere you scouted out yourself on the internet anyway. So I headed off with three appointments for the Saturday - two flatshares (ugh) in Luxembourg and one furnished apartment in Metz.

I was up bright and early on Saturday morning, not really able to sleep in since I was worrying about what the weekend would bring. It was a gorgeous day without a cloud in the sky as I took the train to Lux and made my way to the first apartment, within walking distance of where I'll be working. It was a nice house, sharing with the owner, a woman in her 40s, one other tenant and two border collies. My warning spidey sense was triggered when she asked if I would be cooking and when I said yes, she replied "I don't mind you using my kitchen, but I expect it to be left in the state in which you found it". Which is reasonable, but when will people get it through their heads that once you rent a room to someone it's not "your" kitchen any more, and it's not a gracious act of generosity to "let" people use it. We are, after all, talking about a basic human need, not saying "oh, I don't mind you using my Playstation 3" or whatever (Playstation 3s are still the cool new thing, right?).

The other thing with this woman was that there were 800€ of agency fees to pay to move in. The idea of using an agency to rent a room in your own house is pretty bizarre to me anyway - surely you have to be closely involved in vetting the person you'll be living with, so what's the point of an agency? The agent wasn't even present for the visit! I told her of the troubles I'd had getting any agents to call me back and she positively encouraged me to go on and on about how slack they were and how ridiculous it was to pay hundreds of euros to visit somewhere when the agent neither helped you find the place nor turned up for the visit. Some time later, I asked what the woman did... Yep, she's an estate agent...

She took it pretty well, saying that she agreed and that's not how she operated, but I was at first mortified, and then, thinking it over later, pretty miffed that she let me talk and talk and made little leading comments, without letting me know I was in the middle of talking smack about her profession for 10 minutes. Not really the most forthright way of conducting a conversation.

So that was off the list - too expensive for a flatshare, especially with the agency fees, and I didn't really want to live with the woman.

The next place was advertised as being 5 minutes away from the central train station, and the owner had told me to phone when I was at the station. My cellphone used to be incapable of texting or calling overseas, or working in a different country, but since I can now make outbound international calls, I assumed it would work in Luxembourg. Nope. The station was generously furnished with payphones, but it took me an age to work out how to use them (figuring out how to change the language out of Luxembourgeois helped) and then how to dial the number. The phone number started with 0035262... and I tried seemingly every possible version before going to ask someone at the ticket desk how to make the call. Turns out you ignore everything before the second 2 and don't add a 0 in front. Bizarre.

Anyway, the woman dispatched someone to pick me up in a blue Mercedes (possibly only in Luxembourg would this result in me chasing after the wrong blue Mercedes in the space of a 10 minute wait) and he drove me off to the apartment "near the train station". There's no way to describe this other than a bare-faced lie, as witnessed by the map below showing the distance between the train station and the apartment...

I was a bit concerned the guy might have actually been dispatched to kidnap me and sell me into a Luxembourgish sex slavery ring, but although the flat he took me to see could definitely have served as a flophouse, this was not the case. Apparently, run-down Dickensian-style boarding houses still exist and are cunningly hidden by vague descriptions that pointedly don't tell you how many people you'll be sharing with (or where the house actually is). The rent was reasonable in Luxembourg terms (meaning still not particularly cheap), and in return you would have the pleasure of sharing a kitchen and two bathrooms between a minimum of 12 inhabitants coming and going without any input from yourself. Slum landlords: alive and well and driving Mercedes.

So that was strike two, with one to go. My last Saturday appointment was in Metz, to see a furnished studio supposedly 31 sq. m, although I have severe doubts about that. It seemed miles smaller than that, although perhaps that was just the awkward angles making it impossible to use whatever space there was. It was also described as an "F1 bis", which is normally one room with a separate kitchen, which was definitely not true. That said, I got on well with the owner - we chatted for an astonishing 1 3/4 hours - and I probably would have just taken it for the location and ease of moving in to a furnished place, except it wasn't free until the end of September. This would mean spending hundreds of euros on temporary accommodation and having all the hassle of moving twice while starting a new job. Sigh.

I was too exhausted to care on Saturday night, dead to the world by 10 pm, but woke up on Sunday feeling fairly discouraged. I went out before 9 am for a walk to see a little bit of the town and came back thinking that I would just try to call everyone I could and just see if anyone would take me as a tenant, despite the short-term contract. To my surprise, only one woman said over the phone that she wouldn't rent to me, so I suppose I should have tried that earlier. Anyway, I managed to line up 4 appointments (although one was later cancelled when the tenant rang up at the last minute to say he had an apéro - drinks - to go to and couldn't show me the place).

The first was in a great location, close to the train station for the commute, but also near the centre of town. On the other hand, it was a bit dear and on the 4th floor without a lift, so I couldn't imagine how I would manage to move my stuff in. The second was a pretty charmless one-bedroom box on the ground floor of a building that was a little further away from both the train station and the centre of town, but doable. The third was a massive, three-room 70 sq. m place on the 1st floor, really beautifully decorated and close to the train station although not very near the centre of town and the same price as the first place.

I was in love with the last place (and it had a bath and a cellar and lots of cupboards!)... but I slept on it, and I phoned this morning to say I'd take the second place. The rent is 140€ a month cheaper, and since I don't know whether my contract will be renewed, it's not really practical to commit to a pricier place when I might end up on the dole and be completely unable to pay for it. Plus it will be easy to move in and if I can persuade Bob not to be a total scaredy cat, I can even let him outside some of the time. It's definitely not the apartment of my dreams - and it's going to cost at least 600€ to hire a van to move my stuff over, but obviously that's money that would either be going on agency fees in Lux or on temporary accommodation or whatever anyway, and that way at least I don't have to figure out what to do with everything and worry about getting rid of it all and ending up in a few months with nothing. And even with the train fares to Luxembourg, it's still cheaper than the 12-bedroom shack...

So yeah, it's all a bit nightmarish for a job that, at the end of the day, might only last 14 weeks or so, but what else can you do? At least now I can try to arrange the move, figure out how to get the whiteware down three flights of narrow stairs into a van, persuade Liz to drive me 1200 kms there and back, arrange to change adress etc. etc. And cross my fingers that something won't go horribly wrong at the last minute - I want that contract signed before I can relax!

AND now I can get excited about my trips to Spa and Italy :)

Lux travel

Or, how I tried something new and it paid off.

Let's fill in the backstory. As you probably know, I got hired for my current job starting in April, until the end of August. At the time, whether they believed it or not, there were many positive words about how my contract would "probably" be renewed, the subcontractors I am working for just had to iron out the formalities of their contract, etc. etc. Fast-forward to the beginning of June. I have two months left on my contract, the subcontractors' contract runs out the end of July and hasn't yet been renewed, and the UK project I was hired to work on will probably not get off the ground until 2014. Plus I have gotten rid of the entire backlog of documents that, when I arrived, filled about 7 shelves (with more arriving every day), and there have been days where I've finished all my work by 11 am and literally played Candy Crush for the rest of the day. Which isn't as fun as it sounds.

It didn't take a genius to figure out that things were not looking rosy for a contract renewal. Now the last time this happened, it was a great shock to the system and I ended up depressed, on sick leave, and ultimately unemployed. This time, I was determined to be proactive and start lining up something else while I still had a day job. So I marched into my manager's office, asked him about my contract, got the response I was expecting ("I don't know, but things don't look good") and told him that, with the clock ticking and no offers on the table from their side, I had to start looking elsewhere.

Cards on the table, I started firing CVs off, deciding to be confident and just go for anything I saw that looked vaguely appropriate, unlike when I was depressed and kept telling myself "you can't apply for that, look, you're underqualified/overqualified/probably the right amount qualified, but they won't want you anyway because x, y, z". Almost straight away, my phone started ringing and recruiters started doing that horrible, horrible thing French people do of ringing you out of the blue and submitting you to a mini-interview over the phone. I had one complete disaster where there was a bad line, I couldn't hear a thing the woman said, had to ask her to repeat everything, and actually spent the whole phonecall thinking it was another job entirely that was ringing me. (By the way, I find it incredibly rude that, even after I sent an email to apologise and explain again that I just couldn't hear, this woman hasn't got back to me to at least say "sorry, we're not going forward with your candidature".) Several others went a lot better, but they told me to get back in touch closer to the end date of my contract.

The one that actually paid off, however, was what I would have thought of as the longest shot of all. For I think the first time in my life, I submitted a candidature spontanée - I even had to look the term up in the dictionary to find the English equivalent (they suggested "spontaneous" or "unsolicited" application, neither of which I think sounds all that great). That is, I found a company online that looked like they might regularly hire people a bit like me, and sent them my CV even though they weren't advertising any vacancies. I've been to the seminars before where they tell you to do this, but honestly, I'd never really believed it would work. Even when they called me, I half expected they would just say, "cool, we'll keep you on our books", but the next thing I knew, they were inviting me to Luxembourg for an interview.

So, after hastily wangling two days off work, booking (reimbursable, thankfully) last-minute train tickets, spending a weekend of debauchery in Toulouse then having two much-needed sleeps in my own bed, it was off early in the morning to take a train, metro, train, and two-bus journey, spanning three countries, to my interview. The bus, from Germany, arrived at the Luxembourg city train station as scheduled, two hours before my interview, and after changing into my interview clothes and touching up my makeup in the train station loos, I decided to head straight up to the vicinity of my interview location. Thankfully, since of course I took the wrong bus (it went to the right area, but by a different route that didn't go past the stop I needed). The bus driver told me to go round the corner to the main road and wait for a different bus back down the road, but when I got there and looked at the map, I decided that it was just one straight road, it didn't look far, and the next bus wasn't for 10 minutes, so I'd just walk.

This was a bit of an error in judgement. What looked not far on the map turned out to be, I later verified, a 2 mile walk (by the way, it annoys me no end that I can't figure out how to change from miles to kilometres on Apple Maps). 2 miles in the blazing c. 28°C, humid sunshine dressed in a wool suit (well, I took the jacket off of course) with a full knee-length slip underneath (cos otherwise that woollen waistband is itchy!) on one of those long, straight roads that just seems to go on and on without you ever getting any nearer to your unknown destination. Pulling a wheely suitcase. Altogether, it took 1 1/2 hours from my arrival at the train station to reaching my destination, so thank god I always leave myself a lot of time. I used the spare 20 minutes before heading inside to try to sit quietly and stop sweating. Always a good start.

After checking in to the front desk, I headed into my interview with a woman about my age who had not only been very friendly over the phone and by email (signing off, unusually, Bien cordialement instead of just Cordialement) but turned out to be gorgeous, and wearing a dress that was tight and low-cut even by general office standards, let alone French women's standards. (Yes, this was Luxembourg, but she and her company were French.) I swear I spent the start of the interview just staring at her thinking "please hire me and be my new best friend". (There was also a man and another woman there, who were not candidates to be my new best friend/girl crush.)

The interview started off on a bad/confusing note, when it emerged that they had decided I wasn't experienced enough for the position we had discussed on the telephone. The good news, however, was there was a more junior post, that they weren't interviewing anyone else for (yet). One of the bad things about living in France is it's really hard to get a job as a librarian, as my training, experience and inclinations would normally lead me to do. So I have to apply for jobs in records management, which in fairness, I am rather comically clueless about (despite actually working in a records management position right now, and having studied it a bit at uni).

Obviously, I'd tried to brush up before the interview, but things started off slightly dodgy when she asked if the term "classification code" meant anything to me. "Yeeeeeeees....", I replied, praying there wouldn't be any follow-up questions (in which case I would have gone for the obvious, but probably hopelessly undercooked reply of "a code for classifying stuff?"). Thankfully, probably sensing that I in fact didn't really know, she moved on. More horror to come, when she inquired about what I had studied relating to archives/records in my Masters degree. I just kept naming random concepts - "authority control!" "authenticity!" "records lifecycle!" "preservation!" "retention schedules!" - like a mad person who had swallowed a records management glossary until she finally interrupted me and said "so, those are things you covered in your course?" "Um, yep..." We did get back on to firmer ground when the other woman asked why I'd applied and I think I did a pretty good job of pointing out how the values espoused on their website matched my profile and how although I might not have a lot of experience in records/archives I've proven my adaptability and ability to learn quickly on the job, but it was still something of a surprise when, at the end of the interview Miss Franco-Luxembourgeoise said "okay, well take a few days to think it over, then if you want the job, let us know". A triumph for my personal skills over actual knowledge and experience, or a reflection of the fact that they weren't interviewing anyone else? Who can say?

They only told me AFTER I accepted the position (which only runs till the end of the year, boo, but it's a start) that it was subject to confirmation by the IO (international organisation, arguably not quite as important as the IIO), so it was a semi-nervous wait for a couple of weeks until the news came through that I officially got the job! So now I need to fit in the last month at my current job, a trip to Belgium for the Grand Prix (woohoo), a week and a half in England and Italy, and then move to somewhere in the vicinity of Luxembourg (still thinking that through) and start a new job, in the space of the next six weeks. Help!

As for the rest of my short time in Luxembourg, I just wandered around really. The weather was gorgeous (once I was out of the the wool suit), and it turns out Luxembourg is really pretty! I knew nothing about it, but it's set between a couple of plateaux and valleys, so there are amazing views everywhere (and some steep hiking up and down hills), and it is so so green. I swear, you're in the middle of the city and you'd think you were looking out on an alpine village. I think I read somewhere that there is 30% green space in the city, plus it is dotted with the picturesque remains of the old city walls and other fortifications.

The Luxembourg Philharmonic (right)

View of the city from Kirchberg. Yep, the old self-timer on a wall trick.

Fort Thungen with the Musée d'Art Moderne designed by I.M. Pei, he of the Louvre pyramids. (I suppose once you've hit on a winning theme, you may as well run with it, eh?)

The Adolphe bridge, whose central arch was the largest stone span in the world when it was built at the beginning of the 20th century

Tiny village nestled in the Swiss Alps? Nope, just the central valley between the city centre and Kirchberg (facing a completely different direction from the picture above, but just as green)

View of the Grund quarter from the Bock promontory

The Grund again

Looking from the Bock towards the Grand Duchess Charlotte Bridge

The gorgeous Luxemboug Cathedral, a new favourite of mine

Valley with the (little) skyscrapers of Kirchberg in the background

Panoramic video from the Bock promontory, featuring the music of Elvis Costello (as in they were playing a gig, not as in I dubbed some in)! PS, if it is just looping at double-speed, it's not meant to do that...

War memorial

Moving on, staying put

So, as many of you already know, I've found a new job, and to everyone's enormous surprise, it's here in Tours! I honestly didn't think in a million years that I would find something here - it's not exactly the hub of the intellectual and commercial worlds, especially when looking for English-speaking stuff.

So on the one hand, I'm happy not to have to pack up my apartment and leave (yet), rehome the cat, say goodbye to my friends etc., and on the other hand there's a big part of me that has been itching for a change of scene for some time now. That said, the initial contract only runs until the end of August, so there's plenty of scope for me to be back out on my arse again shortly (they have said there is a good chance of another contract at that point though).

I'm also kinda terrified at the prospect of going back to work! There's the whole issue of just adjusting back to a normal routine again, on top of the normal nerves from starting a new job. Plus it's a role I've never done before (electronic document and records management), and in a private company, which I've also never experienced either in France or in my professional career (not counting jobs here and there when I was a student, etc.) And while I feel my French has obviously improved over the last few years, the prospect of writing reports in French and perhaps having to deal with people over the phone gives me the jitters!

But on the bright side, yay a job! I just sent the contract off today, so it's all official! I'm still not sure what the net salary is, but the gross is looking pretty good for someone coming off the chômage, and it is a really good chance to get some new skills and experience in a different field of information work and environment. Plus it gives me some permanence for the next few months, since I've felt in a state of limbo, never quite knowing what would be around the corner and if I'd suddenly have to leave town or even the country. This means I've been able to plan (separate) visits from a friend and my sister, and a weekend in Paris for Ella's wedding, yay! And I am already plotting ways to spend the extra cash - nothing too dramatic, but all the little things I haven't been able to indulge in for the past year.

So, I know some of you have been wondering about the outcome of the IIO job in Brussels. The bad news is, I didn't get the job :( The good news is, they put me on the waiting list for future positions. Normally, I would think that was the employment equivalent of "but can we stay friends?", but they have asked me to do some fairly involved follow-up stuff which makes me think it is a little more meaningful than that. I'm not banking on something coming of it, but I'm taking it as a positive sign and presumably I would be in a stronger position in the future. I would still love to work there, so let's hope so! Looking back at the fact that two of the other candidates at my interview already had some sort of IIO connection going makes me wonder if they basically always waitlist people before hiring unless maybe someone exceptional with just the right experience comes along...

Hi ho, hi ho...

It's off to the dole office I go. Or went, rather, this morning. I had to assemble a fearsome list of documents, only some of which were actually needed, but obviously one crucial document was a "work certificate" from the assistant job in Nice which I don't have, of course. I looked back through my emails to find the name of my contact person there and found one where she actually offered to send me one just before I left Nice. I was moving to Tours with no forwarding address, but she assured me it should get to me before I left. In short, it didn't, I forgot all about it, and now the lack of it has come back to bite me.

 Anyway, other than that, the woman was really nice - I was expecting some sort of ritual humiliation or something - and the "interview" consisted mostly of her confirming the details I had filled in online (which took an age with her two-fingered typing, I wanted to mutiny and take control of the ship) and then a bit of desultory job searching. She gave me a reference for a job in Chartres which is not only far from here but I don't like the sound of at all (working for an agricultural centre), but I suppose if beggars can't be choosers then they can at least not try very hard with their application. One thing I learnt is that, in addition to getting financial help to attend interviews out of town (which I'd already heard about), if you actually get a job somewhere else they pay up to 2500€ moving costs! I expressed the view that that was a LOT of money and she somewhat defensively listed costs like moving vans and petrol and that it "added up quickly". All I can say is, if I do move somewhere, I'm doing it with style with professional movers in that case!!

I'm a bit confused as to the all-important question of getting some money honey - apparently they look at my dossier over the next 10 days (which will probably stretch on and on given all the holidays in May) and then decide whether it's the government or my old job that has to pay the dole for me (this is the confusing bit). Then, either way, I would get paid for May at the beginning of June and so on in arrears. I hope that it does actually work out like that - I was looking at my bank balance the other day and thinking "okay, I have about 400€ to the end of the month, that's doable" and then it struck me that "the end of the month" is currently a bit meaningless since there's not guaranteed to be any money coming in at that point!

 The other big thing I did today was pop in to work. I hadn't been planning on doing so - it is just around the corner from the dole office but I had planned to skirt around by another route to avoid running in to anyone, but on the way there I was feeling okay and I decided to bite the bullet and go in to say hi. And wouldn't you know, turns out they don't all secretly hate me and think I'm a shirker (or if they do, they did a good job of hiding it). They even encouraged me to steal an external hard drive (not sure if I should put that on the blog!) - I was going to take it home to back my documents up and then return it, but everyone was all "what external hard drive? Was there an external hard drive on your desk before, because none of us saw one?" Ah, how easily we are led into temptation! I'll probably suffer some sort of attack of conscience and break in to sneak it back... Damn, talking of which, I should have given my keys back. Anyway, everyone was very nice although there was some of the stress-inducing chat about future plans and whether or not I want them to find work for me (which again, I realise makes me sound either like a crazy person or an ungrateful sod, but it makes me slightly hyperventally having to receive advice and make decisions and so on). But I feel very relieved that I went and talked to them and no longer have to fear that I'll run into them somewhere and have to scuttle away like a demented crab.

 The other big news is that I just got a call from my wacky Texan friend Greg, who is in Paris and will soon be in Tours!! I haven't seen Greg since 2007, which as discussed in said phone call, makes me feel old and him like he's wasting his life. But, as also discussed, at least we haven't been sitting in our respective home towns for 5 years making babies (no disrespect to those who have been). He's been metaphorically whoring himself about on cruise ships and I have, as discussed with Mary Kay this week, NOT been spreading the Good News. Greg and I first met doing the CELTA teaching qualification in Prague in 2006. Amongst other things, I spent several of the most uncomfortable weeks of my life sleeping on top of a blanket on the freezing concrete floor in his basement flat that he was convinced was full of poisonous gases. So the least I can do is put him up for an unknown quantity of time...

Anyone who wants to see what I was up to 5+ years ago or see Greg with his shirt off (oh là là) can consult such past gems as our tour of Calais, our trip to Cesky Krumlov (warning, there's a lot of cleavage on show in this one, what else is new though?), us drinking absinthe, or visiting a cemetery. Good times!

So what am I up to, anyway?

Regular readers may recall that I got the news some 7 (?) weeks ago that my contract wasn't being renewed. It seems hard in a way to believe that so much time has passed, and Monday is my official last day of work. One of the things that makes this hard to believe is that I actually haven't been back to work since the 21st of March.

That day, I headed out of the office planning on enjoying my UK break, catching up with Rick, and then fully expecting to head back in again on Tuesday 27th. On the way out of the office, a colleague stopped me and said that he had been asking around to see if anyone else in our organisation would be willing to hire me on temporary research contracts to translate or build up their websites or anything and that basically the feedback he got from everyone was "Who's Gwan?" He told me that I was too quiet and I didn't make enough of an effort to put myself out there and consequently that, although the team I had been working with for the last 2 years had faith in me and knew what I was capable of, to everyone else in the building, I basically didn't exist. This was hard to hear - as are most unpleasant home truths - and I left in tears, although at this stage I had no thought that I would not be returning.

On that Tuesday, I emailed my work and told them I'd take another day's holiday, choosing instead to have a leisurely start to the day before seeing Rick off on his train at about lunchtime. It had been hard to go back to work that first Monday after I received the letter telling me about my contract, but somehow when I woke up on the 28th, it was even harder. I think I'd had the UK trip and Rick's visit to look forward to, and I woke up suddenly feeling like there was nothing left to look forward to any more, no ray of sunshine on the horizon. No-one at work had replied to my email from the day before, and I irrationally felt "no-one cares whether I'm there or not" and, contrary to my usual responsible behaviour, I just didn't go to work, I didn't email, I didn't answer the phone when they called. I crumbled. I went to the doctor for the first of many times over the past 5 weeks, picked up the first of the series of sick notes I've had and retreated into a morass of depression and inactivity.

Each time my week-long sick leave was drawing to a close, I contemplated going back to work with panic, imagining myself walking back in to the - pity? incomprehension? unanswerable questions? - of my colleagues, and I couldn't face it. Nor could I imagine getting through an entire day without what has become a routine afternoon nap. In fact, for the first few days of taking the anti-anxiety medication prescribed to me, I felt like I could barely keep my eyes open for a few hours consecutively, or spit out a coherent sentence in French. I went looking once for the Pôle Emploi, where you have to sign up for unemployment, but after about half an hour out and about, I was too tired and gave up and took the bus home to go back to bed.

Since then, between those many doctor's visits, I've been trying to get back to normal functioning, but it's difficult planning for the future when it seems too hard sometimes to get up and go to the supermarket, let alone research and apply for jobs or contemplate moving cities or countries. I feel guilty about walking out of work and never going back - I wonder who cleaned up my messy desk or whether they all think I just shrugged my shoulders and thought "you're not renewing my contract? Fuck it." I wonder what effect that might have when I need a reference for my next job. I wonder what the next month will bring, now that I am officially unemployed and I need to start dealing with getting unemployment and worrying about how to pay the rent. But mostly, I'm just trying to put one foot in front of the other, to keep getting up in the morning, to not go under.

Disaster strikes

This has not been a good week. Working backwards, this morning I managed to get foundation all over a pale grey dress I quite like. I usually swear by if you wash something immediately, the stain will come out, but despite having it in a tub of soapy water licketysplit, the stain showed no signs of budging by the time I left the house this morning. Yesterday, I got a rejection email from a position I'd applied for. On Sunday, the charger for my laptop gave up altogether – it had been a bit dodgy, needing a bit of gentle wiggling at times to work, but now not only is it not charging, it is also ominously crackling and sparking, so I've had to put it out to pasture. Luckily, I can use the charger off an old laptop, except it doesn't fit properly so it can take minutes of patient fiddling to get it to charge, followed by it falling out again a second later if you don't stay perfectly still. On Saturday, I broke my phone while texting, inadvertently pushing some mysterious combination of buttons that sent it into 'backtrace mode' aka turning it into an expensive paperweight (well, expensive as far as paperweights go, cheap as far as functional phones go). I went online and there are a bunch of kiwis whining about the same issue – apparently it's a "known software fault" that they will fix for you in NZ, but that's no use to me now, is it? On Friday night, I got really drunk and may have made a fool of myself in a fashion I won't specify on the blog but let's say I'm not best pleased about it. And my camera, which as I noted, was playing up in Barcelona, is pretty much completely broken as far as I can tell. I seem to have awoken some sort of mummy's curse for electronics (last year, my ipod and my laptop went down around the same time as well). I suppose that will teach me for all those tomb-raiding expeditions I've been on. I've already bought a new charger (still waiting for it to be delivered) and camera and phone, because in times of crisis (see below) my brain has a bit of an unfortunate tendency to go THIS IS IT! THE END TIMES ARE HERE! and get all spendy. Bad brain.

All of this is leading up to the big one. On Friday, I received a letter telling me that my employment contract is not being renewed. Let me tell you, it was a shock. Last I heard was about the importance of English in the organisation and how everyone needed to make a big effort to get involved with international endeavours etc. and then they don't even have the balls to tell me this to my face. The letter didn't even say one word to the effect of "thank you for your work" or "sorry". We have supposedly had a new director since January, but he has already quit (effective in July I think) and he has never actually spoken to me. The whole place is in disarray and it seems like they are planning to shut down the whole project I currently work on and either get rid of all my colleagues or move them on to other things. It's true I haven't enjoyed my job for some time now, but at least it was something – and while I have been half-heartedly looking for another position, nothing's leapt out at me, so I was pretty much banking on my contract being rolled over (you know, as my old boss told me it would be).

So there's a number of things at play – firstly, I don't know what I'm going to do. There are 6 weeks left on my contract (6 weeks where, if this week's anything to go by, it will be mega-hard to drag myself to work and pretend to show an interest in working on something that might just disappear tomorrow anyway). 6 weeks is not a lot of time to find something new. Tours is not the sort of place where jobs for people who speak fair- to middling-French are hanging from the rafters, but finding a job somewhere else would mean trying to organise a huge move with very little time to do so. It's not like when I came to Tours any more, I own a whole apartment's worth of furniture and am signed up to leases and direct debits and so on all over the place. There's perhaps unemployment, but I've never been unemployed, let alone in France, and I don't know how to go about things. I've looked on the official website, but it seems they don't want to see you until you are actually officially out of work with the paperwork to prove it. But by that stage, how long does it take before you get any money coming in? And could, potentially, the fact that I am signed up as an auto-entrepreneur somehow kick me in the pants despite the fact that I'm not actually in business?

Secondly, there's the emotional factor. I feel a lot better now particularly after talking to my old boss, who has suggested several options and is willing to talk to different people in the organisation and put my name forward for jobs, if I want to stay in Tours. This makes me feel a lot better that someone who actually knows me and I've worked for is willing to go to bat for me. Even though not getting your contract renewed by an arsehole you've never met isn't exactly the same as being fired, it is hard not to take it as a personal judgement. I really don't know at the moment about the jobs she's proposing – they are very different from the line of work I'm in at the moment and it would mean potentially moving into a role where I had to use French a lot more which makes me a bit anxious. It's nice to have options, but I'm wary of feeling pressured into taking a job I'm not sure about and the whole thing turning into a disaster. (If anyone's read my blog for a very long time – hi mum! - you may remember the time when I applied for a job in Chamonix and they offered me a more senior role, which I took but then hated and failed spectacularly at and quit 2 months in.) My boss herself described my written French as "presque bien" ("almost good") but said that I don't speak French as well as I write (true). Well, at least she's a straight-shooter, so I can have some confidence that she has a realistic assessment of my level and what sort of jobs I could be capable of.

Everyone at work is being very supportive, but my usual fashion of working through things is silently and by myself, so it's getting a bit grating to have people constantly asking "what are you going to do? Are you going to stay in Tours? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?" That may be ungrateful, but it's stressful. I don't want to be reminded all the time that there's this looming impending doom to deal with, thank you very much.

After going through the experience of my flatmate stealing from me and not paying the rent for either of us and subsequently getting evicted, this feels like France has kicked me in the pants again. I don't know whether I want to tell France to go eff a donkey (we've all seen how you look at donkeys, France, don't try to hide it) or if I can pick myself up again and try something new.

On the plus side, this is going to be a good weekend, I just know it. Saturday is the Fête de Vins de Bourgeuil, where you pay 2 euros for a tasting glass and then go around and taste as much wine as you like (woohoo), then in the evening I have a housewarming/birthday party to go to (whether that's prudent after a whole day of drinking wine remains to be seen), and then Sunday the FORMULA ONE is back, I'm super excited even if I will have to watch crappy delayed highlights coverage online (if I stick around I'm gonna have to buy a TV, because nothing comes between me and my F1). Then next week, I go to England for my sister's birthday and to see my friend Ruth's new baby, and then when I come back my lovely friend Rick who I haven't seen for 2 years since I left Nice is coming for a visit. I'm a bit overwhelmed by everything, so in the meantime I'll be here drinking wine and watching F1 and fiddling while Rome burns...

Continued employment FTW

I feel like every time I post it's to apologise for not posting! I had some good news a couple of weeks ago - my contract has been renewed! And not for a few months, for a whole year! This happened before the decision on EU funding has even come through, so yay. My boss also said some nice things about me, although, bizarrely, at the same time she appears to think there is NO method or logic to how I do my job!

As they (don't) say, along with good news comes great responsibility... I had to write up a plan describing where I saw my job going over the next year, which was a bit stressful. It's quite good in a way, because I was encouraged to say what I didn't want to do (IT, anyone?) as well as where my interests lie and my ideas for the future. My main point was that I thought we should work on gaining exposure in the English-speaking world. This was enthusiastically received, which is good, and there is even talk of me maybe getting to travel to present our work to interested parties! Sweet! This bit wasn't even my idea, I was pretty much just thinking like emailing people or something...

Anyway, this is a long-term plan - our new site won't be ready to launch until September at the earliest (which seems far away, but you have to bear in mind that we all take 3 weeks off in August - sooo looking forward to this!) - and I don't want to be talking with anyone until the new site is in place. Partly because it's kind of dumb to present something that's just about to change in quite fundamental ways, and partly because there are all sorts of translation gremlins hidden deep within the code of the site where I can't winkle them out, and I don't want people to think I'm illiterate! This week we are having a team meeting to discuss starting to plan for this, which will probably be in parallel with trying to "sell" services in France as well.

Naturally, I like to stress about things, so I'm already starting to stress a bit about things like "what if I have to sell? I can't sell" and about how I can't really envision Professor B from University X being the least bit interested in meeting with a low-level librarian from provincial France. So I'll just try to channel what my Mum is going to email me shortly and say that "I'm so talented" and "I can do anything".

Not to get even MORE boring librarian, but I have to try to find some more open archives we can incorporate into our site as well. Which is hard and very, very boring. An open archive is basically a digital library that "exposes" its metadata so that another library can "harvest" the information - i.e. if we harvest stuff from the Library of Congress, then you can find that information by searching on our site. But it's just super hard 1) to locate open archives with a significant amount of records in our subject area 2) to ensure that the data is structured in such a way that you can harvest only the records related to that subject and not, for example, all the PhD theses on any subject (this is not a given by the way) and 3) to actually figure out how to get into the backend of the archive to carry out the harvest. I swear we had like one class on open archives at university and it was NOT practical and it did NOT explain how difficult this stuff is. And did I mention it's really boring? Think of this paragraph as a small taste of the boredom.

So anyway, I feel really pressured to find some good stuff because of course France being uber-centralised France, they have these amazing national open research archives and there really seems to be a big nationwide push towards open-access research. And so my boss thinks that everywhere in the world must be the same and I'm just the world's lamest librarian because I can't find the good stuff. And then I start panicking that I *am* the world's lamest librarian and there's probably really really obvious depots that I'm missing. I don't think so, but the librarian trap is that if you don't know you're missing something, well, you don't know you're missing it... PS in case any actual librarians read this - tips very welcome.

Anyway, so to get off the topic of stress, let's go back to the beginning and say yay. I don't have to find another job, I don't have to leave Tours, I don't have to figure out how on earth to transport all the furniture I've acquired this year AND it's been really sunny and wonderful this week. And I have booked a 2 week holiday in the Ukraine for summer, which I am uber-excited about! So there is a lot to be happy about!