Lucky (move) number 13

So I worked out when preparing my "Decade in Review" that I've moved 13 times in the last ten years. Oof! In fairness, most of the early moves just involved me and as much stuff as I could carry (which, contrary to my father's nay-saying, was around 40 kilos). But on the other hand, all except two moves (in Tours and Brussels) have involved changing cities and/or countries. That is, how you say, a pain in the arse no matter how much stuff you have.

The most recent move was prompted by the boyfriend moving in last October. My old place was 45 sq metres (I think? Like my glasses prescription, this is something everyone else seems to know - for themselves - but I always forget), which was great for a single gal plus cat but not so much when Jules moved in and inconveniently insisted on bringing things like books and clothes with him.

So we gave notice just before our trip to NZ and once we got back the hunt was on to find a new place before the end of May. We actually only saw three places, ending up taking an apartment one street over from our old place. I would have liked having a direct transport link to work, but otherwise, we know and like the neighbourhood, so it made sense to stick with this area.

Plus the new place ticked pretty much all the other boxes. It's way bigger, a duplex (two floors) around 140 sq m (although a lot of space is lost to things like the stairs and the sloping roof on the top floor. Talking of which, a slopey roof was, unsurprisingly, not one of our requirements, but we are very pleased to be on the top two floors. As my sister can testify, in the old place a demon child lived above us who loved nothing more than to rampage up and down on our ceiling making as much noise as humanly possible. So now we get to be the ones annoying the downstairs neighbours, with no retribution. The third big problem with the old place was that it only had a small fridge with a freezer compartment. Even the motorhome we stayed in in New Zealand had a bigger fridge! It was a real pain having to shop basically every other day since we couldn't have much frozen food and anything big like a big bag of spinach basically took up 1/4 of the fridge space. Lastly, it met the terrace and bathtub requirements, so pretty much a home run.

New terrace. On, like, the only sunny weekend this summer, in which we spent 90% of the time indoors moving house

Finally, a move with a furniture lift! I'm so easily impressed

Bob surveying the empty (old) apartment. He has been a super trooper with the move! Even knew how to go up and down the stairs from day one!

 A bigger place meant more furniture, so we have spent the last couple of months busily shopping at IKEA and assembling our purchases. We had the idea to get a nice mid-century sideboard and found a few in antique shops that were gorgeous (and expensive!) but we didn't get our act together to buy one before the move, and then afterwards there would be the problem of how to get it into the apartment. It would basically mean hiring a lift, with all the hassle and the expense that involves. So, sadly, we stuck with our all-IKEA decor since that, at least, we can haul up the narrow stairs ourselves.

The light in the kitchen was the worst. Ugly as hell and hung down too low

We switched it out and added extra bench space - the right-hand side is all new, from IKEA (I'm sorry I didn't take a before picture of the kitchen, because this was where we made probably the biggest change)

Then the finishing touch (almost, there's a couple of bits and pieces we still haven't sorted out) was the long-awaited arrival of a few boxes of things from New Zealand. Mostly books and a few paintings, this was stuff I'd left behind 7 years ago when moving to Europe. I'm so excited to have all my old university books back, many with notes and highlights, all reminding me of my student days. I don't tend to over-sentimentalise books too much (it irritates me if you see some craft project using books online, like a découpage or something, and all the comments are HOW DARE YOU DESECRATE THIS BOOK? Yeah, this mass-market paperback of which a billion copies exist. It's not a sacred object. End rant) but yeah, my uni books are still special to me!

It was like Christmas when all my stuff arrived from NZ

The finished product

I still dream of a room with floor-to-celing built-in bookcases. But a wall of Billys (already full!) is a start

My (and Jules's) preciouses

The week of the move, we had just come back from Berlin (I swear, I can't move without sticking an international trip in the mix, just to stress myself out), and that weekend was also the Brussels Food Truck festival. The evening before M-Day, we snuck out after a full day of packing to get some fresh air and sunshine and conveniently have dinner without needing any of our packed-away utensils. Win win! This year, for security reasons, it was held in the Park Royale - which was actually great on a hot day, with plenty of shade and grass to lounge about on.

It was a popular event on a Friday evening

Jules tucks in

Peko peko was one of our favs from last year

Wine and some sort of fried cheese-chorizo lollipop makes a happy Gwan

This is actually a different park. But another nice day (rare)

So, as moves go, #13 was relatively stress-free. It's been fun decorating and fixing up the place and we're pretty happy so far. Signed a three-year lease, so long may that continue!

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).

Metz move: mission accomplished

Right, so things had already been screwed up with the strikes in the last exciting episode, so Wednesday morning dawned with lots still on the to-do checklist. The general plan was to go pick up the moving van, already reserved and paid for online, that evening with my lovely friend Caro, and then complete the move on Thursday morning, leaving Thursday evening for the cross-country drive.

So Wednesday was to be devoted to some administrative stuff and packing, none of which had been done of course due to my being away for the previous 12 days. Back on the 31^st, when I was on my way to the airport to England, I had got a letter from my rental agency acknowledging the notice period and telling me that I had to inform them of my leaving date for the inspection at least 10 days in advance. I was literally on my way out the door at this stage, so knowing my phone didn't work in England, I planned just to send them an email to make the appointment. Full disclosure, my route to the airport took me past their office and so I could have called in and made the appointment on the way, but I had already been browbeaten into letting them have my keys to do visits on the Friday before, and there was noooooo way I was going to let them persuade/cajole/threaten (technically the lease says you have to let them in for at least 2 hours each day) me in to leaving the keys with them for the whole 11 days I was going away. My holiday with my parents was already planned long before I got the new job (which would have started from the 1st of September if I'd been available) and had to plan out my move, resulting in some chaotic, stressful timing finding the new apartment and getting everything together. So I wanted to use my holiday as just that - 11 days where I could just chill out and relax and leave the stress behind in France. 

So I'd duly sent them the email from the UK as soon as I arrived (and I had actually already told one of the staff members I was leaving on the 12^th), but got no response. So I called in to the office to explain this, and you should have seen the guy flip from all smiles to absolute rudeness the minute he understood that I was leaving the apartment the very next day. He totally refused to listen to me, patronisingly explained to me that email was « not a guarantee » because had I heard of spam filters? (seriously, what is this, 1997?) and said that I didn't give a f--- (vous vous en foutez) about anyone but myself, which is seriously unfair. I'll hold my hands up and say that it would have been better if I had locked down the appointment 100% before leaving the country (but that probably would have resulted in them blowing up at me for going away for almost two weeks without giving them access to the apartment anyway), and I could have tried again to email them (not phone them though, since again, phoney no workey), but the guy was just unbelievably unpleasant, screaming at me and refusing to listen to the fact that I had told one of his colleagues informally and that it wasn't my fault if their goddamn email system doesn't work properly. I mean, when's the last time anyone's ever seriously said to you that they sent you something you didn't get, or vice versa ? It's 2013, normal people do business on the internet. I'll give him the right to be quietly pissed off, but he should have been a professional about it. I'll guarantee you that he wouldn't have spoken to me like that if he'd been trying to get my business. At the end of the day, it meant I was leaving the apartment about 2 weeks early (since I could only send my notice in once my new job had been confirmed), leaving them time to do any necessary renovations and show the place to new tenants in one of the busiest apartment-hunting times of year to their heart's content, while I continue to pay the rent.

So by the time I took care of that, changed my details with my bank, arranged for my electricity and internet to be cut off, took out an insurance policy on the new flat, bought a new sim card since I would need one that would actually work in foreign countries, arranged for my mail to be rerouted and went to the town hall to pick up parking authorisations for the van (turns out it's BYO traffic cone, that I did not know), it was early afternoon. So I packed up as much as I could until Caro turned up and we drove into the burbs to pick up the van at Leclerc.

And here's where more troubles began... We were nice and early for our pick-up time, but had to wait for an age since there was only one woman staffing the desk and taking people out to inspect the vehicles etc. When it was her turn, she confessed that she hadn't been doing the job that long, so she'd go through the checklist for internet reservations to make sure everything was in order. And then shortly thereafter, she flipped her lid because Caro didn't have a French ID. We pointed out this was a normal turn of affairs when you're not French, and here was her passport, UK driver's licence and French proof of address. All of which, by the way, had already been scanned and sent in online at least 2 weeks before. The woman just kept repeating "you're not French, I can't rent to you, I can't take the risk, it won't go in the computer, I don't understand your licence, etc. etc." We tried everything to persuade her, pulling every card out of Caro's wallet – health insurance, French driver's insurance, student card, etc. etc. - to try and prove that she resided here and drove here all the time. Why that was even necessary, I don't know – after all, foreigners have got to make up a pretty big slice of the rental pie, even if not necessarily van hire at Leclerc specifically. It was after 5 pm and the woman, to her credit, was valiantly ringing around seemingly everyone in the entire world trying to get an answer from non-existent higher-ups as to whether she could let us take the van. My heart was seriously sinking into my boots as we heard snippets of conversation such as "that's what I said, we couldn't risk it...", and I really thought she wasn't going to let us have it, and then I have no idea what I would have done.

At long last, she evidently managed to get through to some blessed saviour, who okayed the hiring of the van, so with typical French officiousness, she then took photocopies of everything, retyped in all the information that I'd already entered into the website while making the reservation, and somehow blocked (for a month!) 800€ on my bank card as a security deposit. (She almost gave Caro a heart attack by initially insisting that it had to come out of the driver's bank account, until I pointed out that I had paid for the rental fee with my card, so why not?) All this took at least an hour, so by the time we were finally, happily, on the road with the van, we were even further behind schedule.

Caro had a conference presentation the next day so she had to leave, but once Liz had run her back to Leclerc pick up her car, she (Liz) stayed to help me pack, so we got a good deal in boxes that evening before it was time for bed. We hadn't managed to park the van nearby (I had blocked off a space but someone just moved the rubbish bins in our absence despite my parking permit, thanks), so I set up the parking authorisations on the footpath and just hoped for an opening the next day.

I was up at around 6 on Thursday morning, stressing out about everything that had to be done before the 1 pm inspection (and I had been shouted at that it would be 1 pm PRECISELY and I had to be ready with all my stuff out at that time). At 9, half an hour earlier than I had thought, the doorbell rang and the guy I'd hired to help off leboncoin turned up. He must have been at least 50, and I had stressed repeatedly, by phone and by email, that I had heavy things to move down several flights of narrow, awkward stairs, was he absolutely sure that he could do it ? He was absolutely sure, but it turned out that a key part of his master plan involved making me help him. And here I thought hiring someone meant that I *wouldn't* have to do the worst of it myself, silly me. So I got on the phone to Liz, who had promised to be there before 9.30, but who is always late, and once she got there, the three of us tackled the giant, taller-than-me fridge.

It was actually surprisingly not too bad to get down the stairs, despite a few awkward bits. The worst part was probably that the guy, who was going down first, with Liz and I taking up the rear, absolutely did not understand/listen at any point when we told him to stop. Every time it was like "hold on, hold on, stop, stop, STOP !!!" before he would respond in any way by stopping pulling the item further down the stairs. I'm not sure what the problem there was, since he would almost certainly have the worst of it if we had dropped a giant fridge or insanely heavy washing machine on him.

Talking of the washing machine, the handle on the pipe was broken and so we had to dispatch Liz off to her place to pick up pliers and drop Bob out of the way while she was at it. She took a loooong time about it, first because apparently Bob escaped in her apartment, and then she dropped off the pliers on my doorstep and it took her ages to find a park. Joy of joys, this gave the dude and I the chance to take down the oven and then the washing machine all by ourselves. If you've ever moved a washing machine, you can maybe sympathise on how awful this was. I think I seriously just about died. It was SO heavy. The dude had not a drop of sweat on him and I was about as cool, calm and collected as someone having a massive embolism. Liz conveniently turned up just after we finished with it (I am honestly very grateful for her help, don't get me wrong) and said that I was bright red and looked like I was just about to explode. And she's seen me do a Step class. Added to this the fact that the dude had judged it to be unnecessary to tape up the cords on the back of the washing machine (my side) so I was constantly in danger of tripping up on them going down the stairs. And of course he didn't listen any time I told him to stop because of this, despite the fact that I am quite sure I would have killed him if I'd tripped up and fallen down the stairs with the world's heaviest washing machine on him.

That was the worst of it, but it was still a hugely tiring job getting the rest of the furniture and boxes down three flights (really, 6 half flights plus two short flights of steps by the front door, then across the road – we never did manage to find a parking place for the van, so it was up on the footpath on the wrong side of the road), and I was just wiped out by the end of it. To the dude's credit, I had told him 1 hour just to help me with the whiteware, and he stayed for three and never got stressed out or annoyed about anything (I mean, I paid him for three hours, but still, I could see some people getting less than cheerful in that situation. On the other hand, it would have been mighty nice if he's come with a trolley or some ropes or anything that one might reasonably expect a semi-professional to have to make the move easier). Still, no way that fridge and washing machine were coming out of the apartment with just Liz and me!

By the time the move was over, we had about 45 minutes to try and speed-clean the apartment, which frankly, was not looking great. Caro turned up from her conference at about T minus 30 minutes, so we each took a room and tried to do our best to power clean at least the most grimey spots where 2 years' worth of dust and dirt had settled (under the fridge, for example). I hereby apologise to the next tenant who has to clean my hair out of the shower drain, but I had to do the same when I moved in. Such is the circle of life.

We were still frantically trying to put a few finishing touches on when the agent arrived. He tutted a bit to find the landing full of all the last little bits and pieces (cleaning equipment, for one), reminding me that he had given a strict 1 pm deadline, but overall, this time at least he kept his cool, and was even semi-pleasant. Whether he felt bad about how he'd acted the day before, I don't know. He was meticulous in noting down the damages, essentially places where Bob had scratched the walls, which I'd had no time to cover up and couldn't really deny. Plus the bit where Liz had tried and failed to paint over some mould (when she told me she'd given up because the paint didn't match, I'd pictured a tiny discreet test patch, when in fact she'd gone with a huge stripe before abandoning it, cheers love). So we'll be waiting and seeing how much of the bond I get back (they get 60 days to make up their minds on that one, I'm not holding my breath).

After a quick shower and a bite to eat at Caro's, it was time to hit the road for the 7ish-hour trip to Metz, which was really not bad at all. It was so sweet of her to drive me there (no way am I capable of commanding a giant van for 600 kms of French roads), help me unpack everything in to the new apartment, and of course, drive back all by herself. Liz was an enormous help as well, very lucky to have such lovely friends, although as I sit here by myself on my first weekend alone in Metz, where I have NO friends, I miss them very much ! :(

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 :)

International house hunting

How young is too young to have a stroke/heart attack? Cos I really think I might be about to. My sleep app recorded a miserable 36% sleep quality last night as I tossed and turned (and gave up altogether in favour of watching classic Father Ted), and today I feel like one giant ball of nervous energy.

My original plan for the new job was to base myself in Trier, Germany - easy(er) commute, cheap (normal-priced) housing and what fun to live in Germany for a few months! Once I started doing more research, however, it emerged that most German agents charge a standard 2.3 times the rent as their agency fees, and I can't/won't fork over 1000+€ plus bond for a 4-month lease. There are, of course, non-agency options, but it seems Germans aren't that keen to reply when you write to them in English.

So Plan B was to live over the French border in Metz, which seems a pleasant enough city although the commute is further and involves a train and a bus = multiple opportunities to run late. There's a lot of stuff going in my price range - this is very much the time of year to be looking, since there's a lot of movement with people changing jobs after the summer break or students coming to university, but that also means more competition. Hence I booked a trip to Metz this weekend to do some searching onsite. I don't really want to book something sight unseen, and there's not really any point emailing someone to say "hey, I'm hours away and can't visit and don't want the place until mid-September, but will you keep me in mind"? I've only enquired with one agency so far - who said they wouldn't rent anything to me. I have a sinking feeling this will be the case with anyone I ask, since I got rejected from every agency I tried except one back when I was looking here in Tours, and that was when I was only a couple of months into a (supposedly) renewable one-year contract. I understand I'm not a great prospect - only less a four-month contract and no French guarantor, but it still seems so harsh! Landlords aren't allowed to kick you out for not paying the rent in winter, so I suppose they don't want to take on someone whose income stream is forecast to dry up on the 1st of January and then is free to merrily squat there until April, or whenever winter is officially finished.

So, while I might try making some calls in Metz tomorrow (which is a public holiday here), it looks like it might be Plan C, live in Luxembourg itself. This obviously has the big advantage of not having several hours' worth of daily commuting, but the prices are insane. About 800€ seems average for a studio (or even worse, a flat-share, ugh), which is about twice the rent on my apartment here, which is a one-bedroom. Then there's the charges, bond and agency fees to think about...

I found one agency that is very flexible - leases start from 2 weeks, everything is set up for you and included in the rental price, but some of the properties they let seem the stuff of nightmares. Imagine sharing a house with 12 bedrooms in it but only one kitchen/living area/laundry, with people coming and going continually and no control over who you're sharing with, with the possibility that one week you could be sharing the space with 11 other tenants, and the next, with 22 (and still paying like 700€ for it)? I don't think I could stand it.

I feel like I'm going to take this job, and a few months later end up homeless with no money and no job. Something to look forward to then...

Doing theses at work again - here's an example of Australia's finest... Btw, I checked, the mistake is in the original, not the cataloguing. Cringe!



Talking of work, we had a meeting the other day where my boss reported back that the policy is that everyone on short-term contracts (like almost all of us in my department) be fired after 3 years. What the hell kind of way is that to run an organization? I may have said this before, but just remember that if you ever hear people going on about French bureaucrats having a sweet job for life and then retiring at age 40, sigh...

I signed the lease for the new place this morning, yay! Now waiting to hear when I can move in, it's empty but they are finishing up some renovations. Soon I hope!

Thanks again for everyone's kind words and support, on the blog and in 'real life'. Special big ups to my sister for being my guarantor and my parents for helping me out on the financial side, love you xxx

Housing update

I'm always reluctant to blog about things before they happen, to minimise disappointment or not jinx stuff or something I suppose. But all going well, I've found a new flat, I'm just waiting for my lovely helpful sister to send through a giant ridiculous list of documents to be guarantor and then I can sign the lease on Tuesday. I think this is a traumatic experience for her, luckily French bureaucracy taught me to hang on to all documents and sort them into a proper filing system months ago, so I had things like my tax return, insurance certificate, payslips etc. at my fingertips instead of stuffed in a drawer or the bottom of a suitcase (or carried round in my handbag until fallen to pieces) as was my previous wont.

Anyway, it's not far from my current flat, a bit closer to town actually, and really near the pretty-but-plagued-with-dickhead-men park I often go to in summer. Which is good, because still no garden or balcony unfortunately :( However, there is a proper bedroom, living room (not kept locked, suck on that crazy landlady) and kitchen, nice shower etc. and should work out around the same price as where I am now, although I admit I'm nervous about the electricity bill. Also, this is dumb, but I can't remember many of the details of the new flat, I'm hoping I don't get in there and find there's actually like a portal to the netherworld in the living room that I missed when I visited! Everything just blurs together after a while, but when I was in there I know I thought it was okay, so I'll ask a few of the questions that have occurred to me since before I sign the lease and then just trust that it'll be fine!

One thing you might not realise is that, unless they make a point of it in the ad, that in France 'unfurnished' really does mean unfurnished. There's not even burners for cooking, let alone an oven! Plus of course I have very little of my own, and no family or whatever to give things to me, so I really am starting from scratch furnishing the place. I've started trying to pick up some cheap things in the sales, the list seems to get longer though every time you go to the shops and spot something and think, "oh yeah, toilet brush" or whatever. Have fantasies of having nice things and matching sets and so on, but in reality it's just cheap and practical. It is still quite fun 'playing house', and then of course I'll get to arrange everything how I like in the new place :) Good news as well is I went to the local second-hand electronics place and I they deliver and install stuff for only 35 euros, no matter how many items! Great deal I think, I was worrying about getting stuff up to the third floor!

I will fix a date to get the keys on Tuesday - have to find a balance between not wanting to take it too early and pay double rent for the end of July and having time to move. As I think I've said, I leave for Paris/Ukraine on the 2nd of August, so hopefully I can get things a bit organised by then. I think I will start off a few days before whatever I designate as official moving day and just start walking stuff over in a suitcase, it's close enough. Hopefully that way I can minimise some of the chaos and mess, probably not really, but it will be nice to have some of the basics in the cupboards rather than everything coming together in boxes.

Will have to hire a van, my bed is really the only big thing, but since I don't have a car might as well anyway. My friend Liz has volunteered to drive - they won't hire to me because I'm still on a provisional licence here, plus me drive a van ha ha! I'm a bit worried about taking my bed apart too, it might never go back together! It's from Ikea and was fairly traumatic to put together in the first place... I was talking to some of the people at work who've volunteered to help me though, and they expressed reservations about taking a double bed down one flight of stairs and then up three, fair enough I suppose.

Not looking forward to having to open an account with the electricity company and so forth either... Flashbacks to when that was a major and traumatic part of my job in Chamonix. I 'managed' (read: made a pig's ear out of managing) about 200 chalets and half a dozen hotels, a good number of which had their electricity cut over summer, and so, amongst other tasks, I had to arrange for it to be switched back on for the winter season. If you've never dealt with a French electricity company, or any company in a foreign language even, you might not think that sounds too bad, but it was an absolute nightmare. Workers at the electricity company would just laugh and hang up on me when I called, I had chalet owners ringing me 5 times a day to scream at me that the electricity still wasn't on (which, fair enough, I was crap at my job, but still unpleasant) and the electricity company, if they did deign to talk to me, going "oh no, we went and turned it on last week, no idea what they're on about". Actually, all this ringing around flats has gone a fair way to curing me of my phobia of French On The Phone, which also stems from my Chamonix days, let's hope that everything goes smoothly with the electricity this time and I can put some of those memories to rest! (Too much to hope?)

Anyway, that's probably enough disjointed reflections, I'll keep the blog updated as things progress!

Lounge lizards

Just back from my two apartment viewings. I said I would take the first place, but just heard they rented it to someone else, quite upset about that. So right now I have nothing else lined up, other than the very dirty place which does have some advantages, but price isn't one of them.

Now, the second one... This was flatting with one other girl. On the face of it, it's a nice place, not my ideal neighbourhood, but nicely decorated etc. and cheap. So the woman shows me around - bedroom first, then kitchen and bathroom and then we went into the flatmate's room, where I tried to engage her in conversation and pretty much got nowhere. Then the landlady asked what I thought of the place.

Me: "Um, can I see the living room?" (Which we had already walked past)

Her: (Seriously acts as if it's the most absurd question she's heard in her life) "Oh no, the living room's not for you. The ad said a bedroom, it didn't say anything about a living room, it was very clear on that point."

Me: (Confused) "Oh. So... you live here too?"

Her: "No, we don't live here, we come and use the living room about once a month. The rest of the time it's kept locked" (!!!) "Oh no, we would charge much more if you got a living room too, that would be three rooms - a bedroom, kitchen, and living room - you could charge 700 euros for that!"

A bit later...

Her: "Even though the ad only says bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, you get to use the corridor" (Are you sure? You could probably charge a toll for walking through there you know.)

Firstly, that's what I have now, and I definitely don't pay 700 euros - maybe I would if it was for me alone, but it's called flatting lady. Secondly - WTF, is this the fricking Secret Garden of living rooms? You keep a room under lock and key in someone else's home, you come to use it when you fancy (WHY do you want to sit in a living room in someone else's home?) and the rest of the time you'd rather it sat empty than got used by the people actually living there? Are you insane? And do you not see that being "very clear" in the ad would actually involve saying "there IS a living room, but we keep it locked up and reserved for our personal use, and expect to be able to come round to your home for chillaxing purposes whenever, because we're nuts", not just not mentioning it at all!

More flat stuff

Just got back from an appointment with the agent to talk over what's going to happen with my current apartment etc. She didn't flat-out say that I couldn't find a flatmate and stay here, but she was so discouraging that she might as well have (I would have to find someone whose two parents would both agree to be guarantors for the entire rent, she wouldn't accept my parents as guarantors for me, whoever I found would have to agree to sign a lease only until the end of April when my contract is up and to move out early if I moved out etc.) So I just feel like it's not even worth trying. On a positive note, she said I could meet her again on the 11th of July and let her know whether I would be staying for the month of August - if I do, I only have to pay my share of the rent. However, the electricity and so on might be a problem. I gave her a rent cheque for June and July, which she's waiting till the 11th to either cash or give back to me, depending on whether it turns out that G's parents have paid the whole rent for those months or not (she's still waiting for their cheques to come through). So that at least gives me a little more time, albeit not much for making that decision. I have an apartment viewing tomorrow that I like the look of on paper, and that's available on the 1st of August, so it would be perfect - I leave for the Ukraine on the 2nd, so would have a bit of stress moving everything and packing etc. and then coming back to chaos and perhaps no electricity after my holiday, but at least I'm not at work.

Oh and just to prove this whole thing is the gift that keeps on giving, she asked about whether I would be willing to show prospective tenants around our place. I'm not too keen on people coming and gawking about my flat to begin with, but I'm even less keen on having that to deal with the appointments and keeping the flat super clean on top of trying to go to work and sort out finding my own flat. I said that I thought she should take that up with G, and she said she would call her first, and then me "but G often doesn't answer her phone". Geez, in that case maybe I should not answer my phone either, obviously being responsible hasn't done me a lot of favours thus far!

So wish me luck for this place tomorrow - it's only one room (plus kitchen, so they get away with calling it a one-bedroom instead of a studio) but it has a balcony and a garden, it's in the neighbourhood where I already live, not too dear and it has a properly-equipped kitchen and a bath! My current concerns are: might be too noisy, it's on the main road although I think from going past on the bus it must at least be set back from the road a bit, and I'm suspicious about places with baths that they will be that horrible arrangement I had in Nice where there's no support for the shower head and you have to hold it all the time. Also that it might be kind of depressing living in one room (even a 31 sq m room). However, trying to think positive! Was all cry-y at work today, that is in the 5 1/2 hours I was actually there...

Apartment angst

Got a call on Tuesday night (I still hadn't seen Géraldine since getting back from Strasbourg) from the agent, saying that G's family had agreed to pay back the money but not to be her guarantors, so we had till the end of July to move out. I asked about the possibility of staying on and finding a new flatmate, but she didn't sound too favourably disposed to that. I have a meeting with her tomorrow (right on the other side of town, real pain) so perhaps we can talk more about that. She mentioned the possibility of my staying till the end of August, but I don't really know under what conditions (i.e. if I would have to cover the whole rent, which I can't) and anyway all the electricity etc. is in G's name, so I can't really take that over for one month if I had to leave afterwards. She said that G's parents had agreed that she could move in with either one of them, either near Tours or in the Ile-de-France.

So in a way it was at least good that I didn't have to make a decision on what to do. But on the other hand, now I have to move. I really like this apartment for one, and moving is a giant hassle for another. I have started looking at flats, and, while maybe I'm being too fussy, they all kind of suck. Either too small or badly situated or seem too noisy or too hot or too expensive, and then as I said, there's the problem of furnishing them, especially as several I've seen don't even have so much as a fridge or a couple of burners to their name. The French really take 'unfurnished' seriously...

Above all, it's just stressful. I'm not sleeping very well, as you can tell from the 2.45 am posting, I'm teary and not concentrating at work. Yesterday I was only actually at work for about 5 1/12 hours between apartment viewings, and spent half of the morning answering my phone. In a way, I don't care, and no-one's likely to say anything, but it does pretty much take the piss. I don't feel psychologically ready to make a decision, partly because I don't yet have everything firm in my mind about whether I might be able to stay on here, and partly just the whole "I don't want to move" thing. I saw one place yesterday where they were very keen to have someone sign the contract for tomorrow (1st July), there was another guy viewing the place who was very eager, and I was just struggling not to cry because I felt so pressured by the situation and the guy questioning me about how quickly I could come up with a deposit and all about how much I made etc. etc. He even asked if he could call me early tomorrow morning - "would about 6 am be okay?" I actually blurted out "oh God no" in English and then clapped my hand over my mouth ha ha. I don't think he understood me though!

Am feeling increasingly bitter towards Géraldine. She has apologised, but has yet to ask me about what I'm going to do and how I'm coping. On Tuesday after I got the phone call, I was worried and texted to ask if she was okay - it was getting quite late and I was imagining her really upset somewhere. Then she comes in and is all "oh, I don't know what the problem with the guarantor is, I haven't been able to talk to my dad yet, that's probably why he said no". Firstly, why haven't you talked to him? It had been almost a week by then and the agent obviously had managed to speak to him. And secondly, either she's in denial about the situation or is just not taking it seriously. Not that I want her to be weeping and begging my forgiveness at every turn, but it doesn't seem fair that she seems to be all "oh like, whatever" about the situation when I'm so stressed out - and I don't have the luxury of having family I can go to. She hasn't offered me any help finding somewhere or finding someone to live here, or to give (or at least sell) me any of her furniture and stuff if she is going to move in with her parents. I feel like I've been very understanding and concerned about her and I'm just not getting any of that back, even though she's the one who's completely screwed up my life (and I know that sounds VERY dramatic - I don't mean my entire life forever and ever, I just mean my life as it is right now in this apartment, I just don't know how else to put that).

Anyway, I'm pretty upset so I'll leave it there. For what it's worth, Strasbourg was nice, I managed to relax and forget about all this temporarily, which was good. Even managed a few cultural things between stuffing myself with Alsatian food.

Orientating

We have orientation tomorrow, right now I'm at the youth hostel where they booked us all for the night before orientation - lots of people, not all in Nice proper of course. Mostly Americans, mostly girls, pretty much as expected. I actually haven't met all that many people who will be staying in Nice, but there's about 80 people, so I'm sure there are more.

Good news is that I think the apartment is ours and we can move in tomorrow, although the lady was stressing me out with French On The Phone, so there's possibly some kind of hidden snags that I don't know about... As predicted, Lisa was not keen, so we found another girl at orientation, Kelly, who was straight off the plane and only too happy to jump into a ready-made apartment! I will be very relieved to be somewhere settled so I hope there's no sudden pitfall. Fingers crossed.

Nothing else really interesting - oh I visited the library and it looks kinda like an old secondhand bookshop, but seems okay. She basically just said come in whatever and do whatever, so we'll see what my schedule is like... She seems to think that I would have to train again in France to work here as a librarian, so that plan might be out the window :(

Alorrrrrs

So today was once again pretty much consumed with flat hunting. At least today we got out to view somewhere - on the minus side, it's about a 25 minute bus ride from the centre, but there are a lot of pluses - it's a nice place, in a quiet suburban area with some shops and so forth around, and it's completely furnished with everything you could want - oven, microwave, dishwasher, TV, washing machine, linen, cutlery, crockery, beds etc. etc. And enough wine glasses to entertain in style! There are three little balconies, which is nice, with a pretty nice view from the living room, which will be someone's bedroom, but it's closed off with a door, so that's okay. There is a table in the kitchen so there'll still be a bit of a common area outside people's rooms. So I think it's a good deal. We could keep searching forever for the perfect, cheap, central place, but to be honest, I just want to get somewhere and have a place to call my own again. Lisa, the German girl, seems less keen on the whole idea, so we'll see how it goes tomorrow at any rate... But I just don't want to keep moving (we have to leave this hostel tomorrow because they've booked us in somewhere else - according to Google, the absolute WORST hostel in the entire world! - for orientation) and then I would love to be able to move in somewhere instead of having to haul my bags again. And stop paying hostel fees, of course. Plus the landlady seems really nice etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, as they say in France, on verra... Stand by in other words..

Nice to be here

After a decent night's sleep, I feel slightly more qualified to give you the rundown on my recent movements. Can't really comment on Nice yet, just took a taxi to the hostel yesterday and then we just went down the road for dinner last night. A big plus is that all the people I've met so far (being taxi driver, hostel guy and a couple of waiters) have spoken French to me, both at the beginning of conversations and in response to me talking, which is brilliant! Normally in tourist places like this, they start out in English half the time, and if not, they switch to English as soon as you open your mouth, even though I can clearly order off a menu or whatevs. I would be lying if I said I understood absolutely everything or could remember every bit of vocab I ever need, but I feel this is a good start and my brain is getting back into the French swing of things! We will be heading more into tourist-ville today to check out the F1, hopefully at least, (Emily, the American assistant at my hostel has kindly volunteered to come watch, despite having no clue about F1!) so we'll see if people still speak French to me there.

Probably won't be able to get much more done today, as it's Sunday and practical places close. Emily asked me to come along with her and a German assistant who's arriving shortly to look at apartments next week, and I admit, it's tempting... I know I was adamant about living with French people, but I think I will at least tag along and see what happens. I *do* want to live with Frenchies so I don't just slip into that anglophone-ghetto lifestyle, but it would be nice living with people I know I get along with, and are going through the same things as me. So we'll see. Plus everyone I contact about apartments tells me to ring them, which drives me nuts because I always explain I don't have a French phone yet, but more importantly (I don't tell them this part though) I hate/am terrified of speaking French on the phone - it's so much harder than in person and I was scarred for life by my experiences in Chamonix.. How hard is it to set up an appointment by email, anyway? I suppose it's a cultural difference, because not ONE person has suggested anything by email, or answered any of my emailed questions, they all just say "we can discuss that when you call me". Sigh.

Anyway, I should think about leaving my room at some point today! Last night Emily mentioned getting breakfast if I wanted - it's a real relief to have met someone that's nice, easy to talk to, around my age, and as she said last night - normal! My first friend in Nice :)