Bruxelles is really hot, but not in a really consistent way, which makes it all the more disappointing. It’s sunny and humid each afternoon but not actually hot. It’s not really warm enough for shorts but still too hot for long pants. I’m really looking forward to the cold settling in, odd though that may seem. Because I’ve only been able to bring a very limited collection of clothes with me for the entire year, essentially what I can carry, I had to rationalize that I’d be needing overall cold weather gear much more than warm weather shorts and tops. My family did send a box of a couple clothes and a duvet (thank god) so I can live a little here, but the weather is still awkward. Next week is due to drop down to 17 degrees, so that will be nice. Hopefully we’ll have a bit of rain too, since we haven’t really had any for about two weeks. When I get these extremes of weather nowadays I yearn for a bit of change. Is that just me being fussy, or real concerns? Who can say…
In other news, I’m trying to pick classes and get them to work with my timetabling. The system for sorting out what classes I have to take, how many ‘ECTS’ credits each one is allocated and so forth is a complete shambles. We have to look at a printed booklet, an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file as well as two separate (though on the same domain) websites. It’s a mess and horrible to use. I’ve been making a spreadsheet of the classes I could potentially take just so that I’m not always havign to be re-computing my requirements, and so it does it on its own. Needless to say, just getting the data to put in to the spreadsheet is the hard bit, reading the convoluted descriptions ‘avis’, and deal with vocabulary that, rather unhelpfully, is not in any of the four dictionaries I have here! Like the word ‘holocaust’ is not actually used as it’s translated, but they apparently use ’shoa’ as well! Perfect!
I live just off a pretty little square which is great for being near things, but not so great with the lunatics who appear to feel fine in shouting their heads off in the middle of the night (like right now at 12:30AM), the cars or motorcycles who rev their engines to death and then squeel around the area for about 20 minutes at three o’clock in the morning. It’s also not great if you’re not a fan of pigeons or dog poo. How is it that Paris, a city of a much larger population manages to control the waste on its streets, while Bruxelles, not a poor place, is apparently unable to do so in even the most upmarket areas. Every step you take is at risk of encountering one of any number of foul substances. It’s not pleasant.
Classes start Monday and no, of course, I’m not fluent. Can I just fast forward through the next three months please? That’d be nice.
The next three months will fly past - your learning curve will be so steep, it will be more accurately described as a vertical line - and you won’t have time to panic about your language skills… Yeah, and in 3 months we can go shopping to add to that tiny wardrobe xx