Everyday Life

Like driving, everyday life as an expat is more difficult, but it's consistently interesting.  Here is a peek into the quotidienne.

We have a washer, but no dryer.  We hang it on racks, on lamps, on door knobs, on radiators. As Amelia commented,  the towels feel like toast when they are dry.  I take the sheets and duvet covers to a laundromat since they are too large to hang dry.  

When we first got here I demanded that everyone wear their clothes until they were REALLY dirty.   I gave up on that when I realized I don't want to throw away the 9 years I spent trying to teach the kids to put their clothes in the hamper.

We also don't have a dishwasher,  The kids pitch in more here, drying dishes, sweeping and helping hang clothes.

We cook very simply, as we did in Richmond.  Always a big salad and fish or pasta or omelettes or pre-made quiche.  The store bought entrees like quiche are really yummy here.    Anyway, it took us a while to figure out the french directions on the packages.  They use celsius of course, but also provide instructions for the "Traditional French oven" which has no temperature on the gauge- just numbers 1-7.    Not too hard, right?  Our oven looks like this:

Here is what we figured out:
3:  Very hot
2:   Oops!  3 was too hot last time!
1:  No idea, we haven't used it yet


We have long dinners.  School starts an hour later here, so the kids stay up later.   And lately, it's difficult to even think of dinner because it is so darn BRIGHT out.  The sun set last night at 8:40.

When we arrived in January, the sun was rising at close to 9 a.m. and setting at 5 pm, for a mere 8 hours of daylight.  In February I tricked the kids into starting screen time at sunset, rather than the usual 5:30 PM.  They were very pleased with it until the end of the month.  We compromised by moving it to 6PM which seemed reasonable then but now seems like noon.

Every month we gain about an hour of daylight.  The weather is much less variable.  We had low 50's as the high quite often in January, and now a good day will be in the low 60's.  The average high for April is 54, May is 62 and June is 67.  Which is actually quite pleasant when it's sunny.  (44 days a year of strong sunshine on average :( .)

A little more on the hard part.  My friend Christina, another recent expat, put it perfectly.  She said "You can only do one errand a day" but then she corrected herself  "actually, you can only do less than one errand a day."

We have a bath and a sink upstairs.  Downstairs in our unheated foyer is the toilet and small sink with only cold water.  Our upstairs sink started seriously leaking on March 22nd.  We moved our toothbrushes and Scott's shaving gear downstairs and emailed our landlady. She was in Brussels helping (she is a doctor) so it took her a few days to reply with a recommended plumber.  Then it took me a few days to get up the courage to call the plumber, and when I did, I left him the wrong french phone number.  I called again a few days later when I realized this, and again read from my script on google translate, leaving him the correct french phone number.

Our french phone is cheap,  9 euro cheap, so I am never quite sure if I missed a call, or if someone ever DOES call, how to answer it.  After a few days I asked our landlady to try.  Then we set off for about 10 days of travel. By that time the landlady found another plumber who communicated by email and used google translate, and we had an appointment the next morning.  He had no English but luckily I had learned some basic plumbing vocabulary- sink, faucet and leak!  All fixed in an hour, today, three weeks later.

It is market day so I am heading out with the kids for flowers and veggies and bread.  My Aunt Laurie, who spent many winter months in Germany taught me about treating myself to flowers.

Final photo:  Scott looking for hotels for our next trip while I am doing taxes.  Quotidienne theme and all.