The moment...

You know, the daily moment, when I just want to drop everything and leave...

Last night, when I came home from the office at 2 am and just wanted to sleep, there was that smell again that I had so far associated with the wet chimney (my landlord promised me 5 weeks ago that he would close the old fireplace with a piece of wood - because whenever it rains it rains through the chimney which results in a puddle on the floor of the fireplace - not that boarding up the fire place would stop the rain coming through the chimney, but you would not see it anymore...). This time the smell was really strong - maybe because the weather changed. So I followed my nose and I found it behind the bed. The mold on the wall,  just right next to my head (I also found a hundred more ants when I moved the bed - Yup - I am still not alone in my flat).
Since I moved into the flat I have had the suspicion that my landlord's words "tout neuf" meant something  like "I covered everything that you would not want to know about with tiles and wallpaper and paint" and that my lasting cough that pretty quickly dissapeared when I stayed elswhere last week might be related to that. 
So I have finished work a bit early tonight - only worked until 9:30pm :-)
Now I have some time to search for pre-formulated letters online and look at some vocabulary and legal stuff to cancel my lease -  I wonder if I can get out of the lease early given the conditions in the appartment - so a lot of research in a language that I will probably never master ahead of me tonight. It will be difficult to find a new flat, because of the amount of paperwork and that you need a guarant that I cannot provide because I don't know anyone in France. Given that I have not been home befor midnight the last 5 days and my supervisor only yesterday suggested that I should start a few hours earlier than 7.30 in the morning, I will at least not have to worry about where to sleep should I find myself homeless.

The flood

Last night I slept in the office on three chairs. It was late by the time I had finished and I just didn’t want to go back to that flat with the sofa that smells of mice and the smelly chairs. But today, I just felt I had to shower and change clothes and maybe sleeping on a mattress would not be so bad. So at 1:30 am I shut down the computer and decided to go home.

On the way home in the car (yeah, I went home in my very own car for the first time!!!) I thought that now everything may be good and I manage to cope with life in France, at least for a while and that it was time to tell the people with the van to deliver my boxes that are still in Glasgow.

Am I going to write about today’s moment – the “I am going to pack my bags and go home moment”? About the flood in my flat, the soaking wet rugs and the soaking duvet (at 2am in the morning – looking forward to 4 ½ hours of sleep before I go back to work)? The moment when I wished I had at least one friend I could phone and ask if I could crush on her sofa tonight. I don’t think I have the strength to write about this moment and how all this happened – it is 4am by now, I will try to get at least some sleep in spite of a washing machine that I filled with smelly soaking wet towels and clothes and that will be taking a stroll around the kitchen, banging backwards and forwards for the rest of the night.

I need to get out of this flat as soon as possible. The question is where am I going from there – am I going through the effort of finding a new flat or am I going to give in and finally pack my bags and leave this whole project and France and go back home?

Pictures from the neighbourhood.

The local supermarket (They don't sell bread - that one is a lie.)

A street corner. (I don't know if there still are any children in this village nowadays)

It never ends

I went back to the office to pick up my bike and finish some work. Opening the door of my flat the first I smell is the odour of times past and mouse urine. I need to convince my landlord that that sofa needs to dissapear immediately. My worry is that "immediately" in this country means at least 3weeks. 

Finally in bed that night I still keep killing ants far into the small hours.

Interior design

I just had the third of the daily "I want to pack my bags and go home" moments today.

I continue killing ants while the electrician works on the kitchen. My landlord disappears. After 20minutes he comes back with a sofa, so that after 4 weeks in an empty furnished flat I will finally have something to sit on.The arrival of the sofa is a big event. It does not fit throught the door and needs to be lifted through the window - three people help, some kids stand around and stare into my living room, some more people stop to watch.

Et voilà:

My landlord takes a seat - "Hardly used this sofa - comme neuf". "And" - he continues with that beaming face - "it can be converted into a bed". He demonstrates to everyone who is standing around how to turn this fantastic sofa into a bed for two. In a hurry he lets the dirty covers disapear that have probably been hidden inside since sometime in the last century.

Everybody leaves - my landlord promises to come back with two chairs. I sit on the sofa. There is a well known odour of gardenhouse and .... mice. I open the sofabed - within seconds I have found the little black pellets (I call myself an expert when it comes to mice).
Yup - mice infested smelly sofa. I don't know how to tell my landlord, who is always convinced he does the best - and for French standards he probably does - he can't understand that where I used to lived a furnished living room looks more like this.

The invasion

Coming back from Perusson, I open my front door and I find that I am not alone.There is a massive invasion. Thousands of ants  all over the kitchen floor! I follow their street along the new rug, into the bedroom, they reach my bed, they are on my mattress – just everywhere. I had already killed a lot of them with a sponge and washing up liquid and was still crawling over the floor when my landlord arrived at my front door with an electrician – because after 4 weeks I will finally get an independent access to power and will not depend anymore on some dodgy link to my landlord’s power source. Hopefully from now on when I switch the heating on while the washing machine is running at the same time I won’t find myself in the dark anymore for the rest of the night. My Landlord's face drops "I thought we had killed them all” – so I learn that this is not a new problem. He tells me that I need to get a little round box with ant poisoning. I sigh and hope I can order that stuff online and do not have to get to the next shop about 50km from here. 

I've bought a car!!!

I purchased a car on Saturday without even looking at it (When I arrived at the garage (which is only 36km from here they told me that the car was away right now and they would let me know when it gets back but I could try the same model...).  I don’t care anymore – I am desperate for a car - I sign anything blindly. 
Today was the day the car was back - I managed to get a lift to Perrusson and dit a little test drive. I don’t know how this car could do an extra  2500 kilometres in the past 4 days, but - well - who cares about minor questions like that –  and the Odyssey with the car – it is now a 6 weeks long nightmare – will hopefully be over in a week's time when I can pick up my very first and hopefully last car ever in my life.