Hot to Cold

I had asked for the Lille area before going to Mayotte, four years ago now. It was right at the top of the list. However, the French National Education points system didn't see fit to send me there at the time, and sent me to the other side of the world for the fun of it. She wants a big city in a cold area? Let's send her to a run-down village in a very hot area and see how she likes it. After the four years in Mayotte, I had plenty of points because I'd been a long way away in a pretty awful school, so I asked for the Lille area again.

In March 2015, just before knowing if I would get the desired area or not, I went up to Lille, planning to find a flat there. I wanted to own my own flat for the first time ever, and Lille seemed like as good a place as any to do so, as it's a student town and any flat I might buy could easily be rent out to a student when I wanted to go walkabout again. In about ten days, I went round ten or so banks to find out how much I could borrow, visited twenty-five flats, signed paperwork promising to buy one particular flat and made a friend out of an estate agent, who happened to be the one who sold me my flat. I then went back to Mayotte and thought of nothing else for the next four months.

On July 11th, 2015, I took the plane from Dzaoudzi through St-Denis-de-la-Réunion and on to Paris, where Nanny and Papi collected me from the airport. They were staying in a gîte called Les Caperies in Richebourg, near Béthune and La Bassée. We got to the gîte at some impossible hour in the morning, accompanied by unhappy grandparents having had to navigate through wrong turnings in the dark and two cats, one of which was wailing vigourously. Dumped everything on the floor in the bedroom and went straight to bed and to sleep. We'll worry about the rest tomorrow.

Over the next few days, we visited IKEA (horrible, labyrinthine, busy, exhausting place), Conforama (furniture and electronics store, closed so that they could remove the asbestos from the walls, so everything was in a tent in the garden), Electro Dépôt (cheap and cheerful white goods store with confusing parking) and Bouygues Télécom (phone and Internet company who introduced me to 4G, told me that I couldn't have a phone plan because I was English and explained that they were going to give me 120 TV channels... what do you want me to do with all that?). We sampled various restaurants in and around Lille, eating local food such as émincé de boeuf with Maroilles (smelly cheese) sauce or carbonade flamande, like boeuf bourguignon but cooked with beer instead of wine. Local food in Lille is mussels and chips, chips and chips, and anything cooked in beer. Light, nutritious and good for you.

Friday 17th was the day I signed the paperwork at the solicitor's office. I'm now a proud home-owner. With lots of work to do inside the aforementioned home, as it's empty except for the kitchen, and the kitchen needs redoing completely. I've been instructed not to exhaust Nanny and Papi, but they started off by coming up the four flights of stairs and exclaiming that I obviously didn't want them to visit too often. Humph.

 

This is the kitchen in my new flat. It's going to need quite a bit of work to make it practicable. To be honest, it was pretty much liveable when I bought the place, but I'd like to have it my way, so we've been ripping out the old built-in (but horrible and very low down) fridge and freezer. I wanted a new fridge-freezer to go in the right-hand corner, but there are great big gas and water pipes down there and whatever does go in will not only not be able to go up against the wall but will also stop the window opening completely. The first thing I bought for the kitchen, being English, was a kettle, but we can't actually make any tea or coffee at the moment because there's no electricity yet.

The electrics in my flat are actually pretty ancient, as is the loo, which we've just realized is leaking from a rubber joint that is too old to be found in the shops any more. Everything's pretty ancient, really. The block of flats was built in 1930. Things have been redone: the collective boiler which feeds the whole block (well, there's only five of us), the roof, the façade, the staircase, the interphone. Nothing major needs doing or redoing soon, which is good news as I don't have an awful lot of money left and will have even less once the plumber has changed the whole loo and the electrician has rewired the flat. There are pipes all over the place, sticking out of the tiles and the walls: there's an especially lovely one which comes out in the middle of the kitchen wall tiling for some reason.

The furniture, however, is resolutely modern: it's all from Ikea. And that is a problem in itself. We went to Ikea to have a look round, and I collapsed upon coming back home, completely exhausted. Looking round was not a good idea. However, they had a helpful website, so I chose everything I wanted from there. Delivery from the website was announced as two weeks, but the local shop could deliver on Monday (two strong guys heaving twenty-six large boxes up the stairs, sweating profusely), so we filled the car up with the not-too-heavy stuff and carted that up the stairs. Fitting it all together was fun, and I now have the user manual for all Ikea furniture the world over: follow the pictures to get it in the right place, then bash it until it fits in.