Week 2

Right, I now have a new home. My new home is nice, huge actually for 3 people, well the sitting room is anyway and day to day more unusual furniture appears. I now have a bed which is nice. Well, a mattress, I put the bed bit of it in the sitting room to make a type of chaise-longue thing because it is FILTHY. The flat was empty and the furniture that is being brought has obviously been sitting in a barn somewhere because it is old and not at all clean. Some of it is nice, we now have a very oldy worldy cubboard in the kitchen but Alice (my italian flatmate) refuses to put stuff in it until we have cleaned it. I agree. We were meant to be getting a proper kitchen table, not quite sure what happened there as what we do have is a big hunk of wood on tressels. Anyway more furniture is always good! We want to get lots of stuff for it but as we will only be there for 4 months there is kind of no point.

However, we have put up posters to make the place more homely and have decided to get certain things. We have a bizarre assembly of things in the flat. There are a lot of metal saucepans and slow cookers (for stews and such) but the singly frying pan is frankly lethal. We have two cookers but no washing machine (this is coming tonight) and a dishwasher but no mixing bowls or cutting knives. We are very much on the same wavelength about householdy stuff and it’s great that she is a student because I get to gatecrash erasmus things, again! Also she has more free time than me so can scout out whats good and not and then show me. Of course i would prefer to discover things on my own but it is better than not discovering them at all! I am also meeting people through her as she is a forgeiner and desperate to make friends too.

I moved in on Saturday and the first thing that Alice and I did was go to the Telecom shop and setthe internet up. Of course it won’t actually be online until the end of this week but we set the ball rolling! She also needs skype msn etc urgently! On Sunday we discovered our local market and have decided not to bother with supermarkets again as the produce there is much fresher and nicer. And actually not as dear as anticipated so we are going to be typically french now and trundle on down to the market for food. The markert is open 6am till 1pm so I can go before work and buy some stuff in an emergency. Which is nice to know as catching the bus at 8 and getting back at 6 kinda leaves me with not much time. I wish that my camera was working, it would be so nice to be able to take photos of everything because when the sun shines it is really very pretty. It seems to be the drill here that there is one day of glorious sunshine, not a cloud in the sky followed by wind heralding the next day of rain.

Work is fine, the people are nice, I’m going to be a total expert on planes by the end of this : P, it’s quite interesting seeing how the world of commerce/business works, never been exposed to it before, don’t think I’ll go into it later though, not enough words, too many numbers! I don’t mind numbers, I can work with them fine but lets just say they don’t fire my imagination!

I’ve noticed here that EVERYONE drinks expressos, I’m the only one who drinks tea and there are two tea cups and the rest are teeny tiny expresso mugs. In Germany the drinks were much more milky, lots of cappucinos etc and a lot of tea, black, green, red, white, fennel, fruit, roiboos, you name it, we drank it. Of course one of the first things that I did when I moved in properly was by myself some earl grey. I think I am actualy addicted now as I genuniely can’t get up in the morning without it!