Pages

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Sun 20 Dec

Lots of snow outside. Lots. At least 3 inches I reckon. We went out to clear some of it from the car. Usually, it'd be living in our garage, but the garage door decided to break down on Friday.

Whilst I was delighting in the joys of proper, fluffy, soft snow, I also heard news of Eurostar's breakdown. The stories of passengers being stuck in the tunnel for several hours and people spending up to 16 hours on the train. And what's worse, the lack of food and water and information for all those on board. Eurostar announced that it had cancelled all services for the weekend and wasn't sure when they'd be resuming. All because of some fault which meant that frozen ice on the trains was melting onto the electrics when they entered the tunnel and causing them to breakdown.

Met up with our first 'language exchanger' this afternoon. Spent a couple of hours chatting in French and then English. Very useful and good to finally meet a local. She was born and raised in Mons but hopes to live in Far East Asia some day. It's always funny when you do a language exhange. You're never really quite sure how much either of you have understood about each other.

The cafe she chose was a gay cafe, in the traditional sense of the word. Not yoof-speak 'gay,' as in crap. Or even the original meaning of the word. Anyway, had already cottoned on to this soon after we arrived. The camp barman, with a lisp (it's bad enough trying to understand French, let alone when it's spoken by someone with a camp voice and a lisp too!), various photos of naked men, and women kissing other women, plus the sounds of Donna Summer and Gloria Gayner (plus that awful "It's raining men song") in the background sort of gave it away. And of course the poster in the bogs which read: "we're here, we're queer, get used to it!"

Still, the chatting went well and we all seemed to get on and will do it again soon.

No comments:

Post a Comment