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...

Party all the time, party all the time

Hello long-lost friends! It has been too long since my last blog post, although in my defense, not much blog-worthy has been going on. This doesn't mean I've been in winter hibernation (although I think everyone is ready for spring to bloody well be sprung) - there have been Fun Times Aplenty, but not really of the variety that make for a good blog post. Although I'm now going to run through them quickly anyway.

Sadly, my good friend Laura left Tours (and then she came back again a few weeks later for the weekend, but then left again for good). Such is the nature of expat life - people come and go and sometimes only stay for a short period of time (a year, in her case). On the upside, it means that expats are usually pretty open to meeting new people and making friends in a shorter time-frame than might be the norm (certainly for France!), but the downside is saying goodbye to your friends just as quickly. Of course these days it's much easier to stay in touch with things like facebook, and even though that's a poor substitute for real-life friendship, it does keep things ticking over in the hope that one day you might be able to reconnect with a handy network of people flung out all over the globe.

We hardly need an excuse, but of course people leaving also mean parties! I think Laura's leaving do was the week or so after I came back from Belgium, and we had a lovely evening consuming her left-over alcohol stocks (including too much of the aquavit I brought back from Norway for her - that stuff is lethal!), playing a game of Secret Santa where the prizes were all the little trinkets she hadn't managed to rehome or sell up to that point (I scored some tupperware and little serving dishes for dips or olives or what have you), and busting a groove to a dancing game on Xbox Live.

 This is hard to see, but I'm pretending to eat the box because it has "not for human consumption" written on it

Liz and Charlie. I wish I had their ways with scarves!

Liz, Philippa and Charlie

A couple of weeks after that, Cute Neighbour, who you may remember from my birthday party, invited me over to watch the rugby at his place. I'm not a rugby girl, but in any case he accidentally (?) invited me round 3 hours early, and we spent the time chatting about all sorts of things and it wasn't at all awkward. Pity he still has a German Girlfriend. The only downside was that he smoked so much I felt ill and had to shower when I got home! In return, the next week or the week after I invited him round to Liz's place for a cocktail evening, which turned into an all-nighter out on the town.

Me and Charlie

Me, Liz and Charlie

Gangstas

Me and Cute Neighbour. There is photographic evidence that I had my hand on his thigh for quite some time. Whoops!

Then Laura came back for the weekend last week, and we had a pretty restrained time of it by our standards. This included going out Friday and Saturday nights for a quiet couple of pints at the pub and having a couple of glasses of wine with lunch on Saturday though, so it probably still wasn't exactly what the doctor ordered.

Snapping a few selfies in the kitchen: no night is complete without it!

Also somewhere in here was the time we went out and Caroline and I ended up staying out until 7 am or so when the clubs closed and then I was lured back to her place for an 'after'. I did actually want to go home, but she guilt-tripped me into not letting her go off by herself with 4 blokes, so the night ended drinking gin smoothies (much, much better than I would have imagined) as the sun came up - until after 11 am, in fact!

That brings us to this weekend, which had all the makings of a classic: Saturday was the Fête des Vins de Borgeuil, Caro and Marcia wanted to watch the rugby on Saturday night, it was Philippa's birthday and St. Patrick's Day on Sunday, plus after the long winter break, the Formula One was finally back!

It was pretty rainy and miserable for the Fête des Vins, but that didn't stop us having a good time. How can you not have a good time at an event where you pay 2€ to buy a tasting glass (to keep) and then you can sample as much wine as you like? As well as the usual suspects, we were joined by a new friend Mel and her husband. In a Gwannel Sandiego first, I was emailed by Mel last week via the blog! I have met up with people, mostly in Paris, via the blog before, but this was the first time someone in Tours came across the blog and contacted me. It feels a bit weird - while I'm not silly enough to think it's not "out there" on the internet, I kind of don't think of it as something that people in Tours are going to be reading. But, that aside, we clicked really well, so it is great that it has brought us together. What was I saying at the beginning about expat life and making friends?

Liz and I stayed on at the Fête until nearly 7 pm, after everyone else had called it a day, which meant a bit of a mad rush when I got home to get showered and changed and redo my ruined nail polish (I need to learn it's never a good idea to try to rush doing your nails), while watching a replay of the F1 qualifying from the morning (it actually got rained off, but I still wanted to watch it again because there was a lot of action before that).

And then off to stand in the pub while the rugby was on. We were pretty late, but seeing that I stood with my back to the screen, I didn't care. Poor Scottish flower Caroline was a bit deflated by the result though, and ended up going home not much later. As for me, I stayed on until closing time (2 am) but considering we had started at the wine festival at 2 pm, I decided not to go out clubbing and probably got home around 3 (after quite some time of wandering around collectively trying to decide what to do/chatting in the street). I probably should have got some sleep, but I tried to stay awake to watch the F1 at 7. I actually did quite well, only falling asleep for the last half an hour or so, and then unfortunately waking up to get a glimpse of the podium ceremony, so I spoiled the result for myself. Oh well.

The Tours Goat has made an appearance on the blog before, but I had to take a snap of him all gussied up with balloons!

Wearing green (nail polish too) in honour of St. Patrick's Day - it was after midnight by this stage!Also, I want to know what's going on in the background with Charlie and some cute blokes... I was too busy watching the F1 (they ran the rest of it late because of the rain) to notice at the time.

So, fun times, even if writing about them all at once does make me feel like a bit of a drunken disgrace!

Bruges: Lace, blood and rugs

I have spoken before about the meaninglessness of the term "luck" when applied to the expat experience. But there's (at least) one thing I'm happy to put my hand up and say I've been lucky to do, and that's having the chance to visit some of the world's finest art galleries and museums and see the very best artists the world has to offer. From the Hermitage to the Uffizi, the Louvre to Tate Modern, the Kunsthistorisches Museum to the Vatican Museums, and many more - I haven't seen everything, but I've seen a lot.

Due to the vagaries of fortune, it can take a somewhat Herculean (or Pokemonian) effort to see all the masterpieces by any given artist, but between the Arnolfini Portrait and Man in a Turban in the National Gallery in London, The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin in the Louvre, the Ghent Altarpiece in, well, Ghent, to which I have now added the Madonna of Canon van der Paele in the Groeningen Museum in Bruges, I think I can safely say I've seen all the superstar works by Jan van Eyck.

Van Eyck is a helpful name to add to your memory banks for the next time someone challenges you to name three famous Belgians (I also suggest Hergé, Magritte, Jacky Ickx and Jacques Brel). According to Wikipedia, he was only "probably" born in what is now Belgium, but he was definitely active in Bruges in the first half of the 15th century, and his paintings charmingly invoke the fashions in clothing and furnishings that he would have encountered in his daily life. Long credited with inventing oil paint, it's now thought that he was merely superlatively skilled and innovative in its use.

That much is still glaringly obvious today. I don't know how long I stood staring at the Madonna of Canon van der Paele, but there is so much detail and such skill in rendering the different textures displayed in the painting and perfect perspective, that you could drink it in for hours on end. 

It may sound silly, but I was captivated especially by a humble rug. Even looking at my photograph of this painting of a rug blows me away. I can't even comprehend how he tricks your brain into believing that the rug is lying on top of a flight of steps, or how he distinguishes the texture of the rug from the thick, stiff folds of the Virgin's gown, the tiled floor or the rich brocade on the bishop's robes. If you look carefully, you can even see that he's painted in "cracks" on the fold line of the rug over the top step. It's not necessarily my favourite painting of all time (nominees for that post would include Magritte's Empire of Light and Kandinsky's Im Blau - which can often be spotted in photos taken in my living room), but it is one of the most astonishing in terms of its technical virtuosity.

As you may have gathered by now, one of the things I did in Bruges was visit an art gallery - namely, the Groeninge Museum. It's a relatively small collection, but this allows you to really pay attention to its fine collection of Northern Renaissance art (I took much less time on the post-Renaissance stuff). Another particular highlight was Bosch's Last Judgement - which is stylistically about as far away from van Eyck as you can get, with its bizarre, nightmarish depictions of hell.

Loved the guy pulling a face at Mary in this crucifixion scene

Goodness, is that a man or a satyr? Renaissance leggings certainly leave nothing to the imagination, at any rate

I'm not sure whether it comes across in the photo, but when I walked in the room, I literally thought that this was a stuffed bird in a box frame - probably the best trompe l'oeil effect I've seen

I got to the museum so early that I was able to make it out in time to get to the Basilica of the Holy Blood while the relic was on display, which happens at 11 am each day. I sat for quite a while looking at the lovely chapel and observing (from a distance) as a queue of people took turns to go up to the altar to kneel before the relic and pray, while an exhortation to do just that (and to donate money) played on a loop in five different languages. Not particularly conducive to prayerful contemplation, I would have thought. According to legend, the phial containing Christ's blood was brought back from the Holy Land to Bruges by Thierry of Alsace in 1150, however, more recent research has concluded that it was probably filched during the Sack of Constantinople in 1204. An impressive pedigree either way.

Basilica of the Holy Blood (Source: Wikipedia)

Sticking with the holy theme, in the afternoon I visited the Jerusalem church, a 15th century church that, like the Temple Church in London, was supposedly modelled off the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (although funnily enough, they look completely different) - rhis one doesn't even have a round bit, as far as I can tell. It is still privately-owned (and thus you have to pay to get in), apparently by the descendants of the original owners, who are buried in a fancy tomb in the middle of the church, which is kinda cool.

For the price of entry to the Jerusalem church, you also get to see the next-door "Lace Museum". This consists of a few rooms with different styles of handmade lace (which are, admittedly, quite impressive) and a few explanations about how lace is made and the different techniques or patterns which can be used. None of these explanations actually left me any the wiser about how lace is made, except that I possibly had a vague idea that it involved poking holes in a piece of cloth: this is not true. I was also informed that there were lace-making demonstrations from 2 pm onwards. By the time I had thoroughly exhausted the delights of the Lace Museum, it was still only about 1.57, but I thought I'd go into the demonstration room anyway. This consisted of an old lady who was apparently getting a lesson on how to make lace, and her instructor. After a brief (although friendly) hello, they both ignored me. All conversation was in Dutch, and the actual mechanism by which shuffling spools of thread around needles stuck into a piece of card resulted in lace still remain a mystery to me. I probably lasted until about 2.03 before the sensation of awkwardly hovering at the shoulder of an old Belgian woman got too much for me. Perhaps if I'd waited a bit longer, or perhaps if it was summer and the place was packed with tourists, there would have been more of a real "demonstration", but as it was, I pretty much felt both the church and the museum could have safely been skipped.

So that was that, other than the fact that the sun came out and I took photos on the way back to the hostel which didn't actually get transferred off my camera the first time (thus I didn't put any of them up on the last post). That seems to happen with annoying regularity - I quite often realise, "hmm, I'm sure I took more photos than that", but I wonder how often I've wiped my memory card with dozens of unseen photos on it. As everything's prettier with a blue sky behind it, here are some snaps of Bruges in living colour:

Markt square

Pretty church on the way to the train station

The back of the Church of Our Lady

The scenery on the train journey back to Brussels had a real Christmas-card feel to it - all flat, snow-covered fields with the odd church spire peeping through

(PS I figured out for the first time that you can move images next to each other with the mouse. However, I clearly was not 100% successful at getting them to behave exactly as I wanted them to - and can't be bothered fiddling about with the HTML.)

And the award for least creative blogpost title goes to...

In Bruges!

And indeed I was in Bruges about a month ago - and when I got back home I watched the movie In Bruges, which is pretty good, although I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that since even I had heard good things about it and I manage to watch about one film a year. This year, I've already smashed my average by watching In Bruges and Django Unchained, so I'm probably done until 2014. It was definitely extra fun seeing the places I'd been to just days before in a movie though (this is more thrilling for those of us who grew up far from the bright lights of New York, Paris or LA).

I've wanted to go to Bruges for ages (before the movie even). I lived for five months in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of France, literally half an hour away from the Belgian border, but while I got to go to Belgium about once a week on average (for work), the fact that I was working up to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week and the difficulties of making the public transport schedules work for me meant that I never made it to Bruges despite being relatively near by.

So when I had to go to Brussels, I knew I had to take the opportunity for a quick trip to Bruges. Since my train tickets (to Brussels and back) were on the IIO dime, I didn't want to take the piss by staying too long after the interview, so I only had from early evening on Wednesday to mid-afternoon Thursday to see the city. As with Bologna, I feel there are definitely more things I would have liked to have seen and done if I had more time, such as going up the tower in the Grot Markt or seeing the collection of Memling paintings in one of the museums, but it was great just to have the chance to see the place at all really.

I was expecting a very chocolate-box, fairy-tale feeling as I set out to explore the city on the first evening - I love the Middle Ages, and Bruges is meant to be one of the best-preserved medieval cities in the world. At first though, for whatever reason, I wasn't really feeling that magic. Maybe it seemed too touristified, despite the fact that it was very cold and snowy and picturesque and definitely not the high season. However, I wandered into a deserted snow-covered courtyard outside the Archaeological Museum and a carillon of bells (is that a tautology?) from the nearby Belfry started playing and it did feel a bit like a magical movie moment.

More next time on the specific sights of Bruges, first here's some photos from around the city:

The aforementioned Archaeological Museum at night

Statue on a bridge with the Church of Our Lady behind

The Basilica of the Holy Blood

Judgey bear (?) knows what you did

The Burg square

Town hall in the Burg square

Dude in the canal! He seemed to be in there deliberately to break up the ice, but damn, surely there's a better way! Or at least you put on a hat or something!

At least ice kitteh has her fur to keep her warm

The 122 metre-high spire of the Church of Our Lady

Frozen canal

Frozen canal with a view of the Church of Our Lady

If there's one thing they love in Bruges, it's light pollution

The Grote Markt

Me in front of the Belfry

A snowy square with that omnipresent Church of the Lady behind

Pavilion near the Groeningemuseum

Snowy statue near the Archaeological Museum

Interview at the IIO and a brief look around Brussels

Decided I had better blog the rest of my Brussels trip, because if I hear back that I didn't get the job, I won't want to do it! Obviously, between the four hours of tests, one hour panel interview, travelling about, preparation etc., I didn't really end up with a lot of time to see the city. I have been before, and I would have really liked to go back to the art museum, since I remember it fondly, but there didn't end up being enough time. I was also gutted that they opened up a new museum on the history of the book since my last trip, but when I visited it was closed just for the afternoon to change the displays :( This only gets done once every three months, but typically it was just at the only free moment I had to pop in.

Something I did make time for: eating chocolate and reading a book while soaking in the jacuzzi tub in my hotel room. Oh yes! I would have liked to add "drinking a glass of wine" to that mix, but I was being very well-behaved. I do love a good bath, even if the jets on this one were out of control - not that they were all that hard, but they created an almighty splash all over the bathroom! Oh well! It was, in fact, hard to leave my posh "luxury suite" in a chic but quiet central Brussels neighbourhood. I'm not accustomed to travelling in luxury (my next stop was a dingy dorm room in Bruges), but the IIO were picking up the tab :D

I also made it down to the Grande Place three times - not hard, since it was close by and it is just stunningly beautiful. My night photos didn't come out very well, but I was lucky to be able to swing by to take some snaps in the some late-afternoon sunshine after the test day. The city in general looked very nice with the snow, especially when it was sunny, although it was quite treacherous to walk on the icy pavements.

As for the interview, it was pretty much your standard 5-person panel affair. I felt like I talked a bit too much and said things I didn't mean to, especially about my last job (I didn't slag anyone off or anything like that, but I didn't mean to say anything about how we all got let go, and it just came out somehow). I was glad that I'd studied up on the history of the IIO and so forth, as they did ask, and I was also able to slip in a couple of questions of my own which showed I'd done my homework. I just wish people would actually ask about your skills and why you'd be good for the job instead of all of those "what would you do if this happened" or "tell me a time when you had this problem", because no matter how many interview guides I read or times I practice, I seem to either get stuck for an answer or feel I'm coming across as insincere, or say something I didn't mean to. I suppose from their point of view that's the idea, but it is frustrating.

So anyway, I suppose it was pretty average across the two days, apart from the good result on the French test, so I don't really have high hopes, especially since a couple of the candidates already had some sort of IIO connections. Still, it was a nice free trip and an interesting experience, and as I said last time, I think I did well to get down to the final 5. I got an email from another Brussels-based international organisation recently, saying that it would take them longer to draw up a shortlist because they got almost 300 applications. The IIO is way bigger, more important, and better-known than that place, so I can only imagine they got hundreds of applicants too!

This creeps me out, because I could have sworn this was a real woman, but she seems to have morphed into a lace-making soul-sucking demon mannequin while I wasn't watching

The very beautiful Grande Place - third time was the charm for photos with blue skies

Staute of King Somebody (I think). Informative stuff, as usual

My cushy hotel room

An amusing chip shop sign

I actually took this photo of the Mannekin Pis on my last trip to Brussels in 2007. This time, he was just in boring undressed mode

 

A pretty shopping arcade near the Grande Place

The pretty Notre Dame du Sablon church, as viewed from my hotel room windows