have home, won't travel

at least, i very much hope not :P

we got up early enough this morning to pay a visit to the tailor, purchase a kindle for pg at bureau et gros, and then head out to de la savane, the metro station with the awesome transformer-style giant metal fist through the wall that will from now on be the landmark that tells us we're home.

note 1: it was really, really cold today. we didn't realize how cold until i'd already made the wrong call and decided to wear just my jacket. a sweater would've made all the difference. a ski mask / scarf would've stopped my nose from freezing up. and winter hasn't even started yet.

note 2: when i bought my kindle, i was in south africa. i ordered it online, and two days later a package arrived at our doorstep. i was super excited and well impressed because, well, south african mail is not exactly world-class. pg ordered her kindle from canada, a first-world country on the same land mass as the place where kindles are produced, and only a couple of hours' drive from there. not only was it cheaper to buy it in the local store - no "international" shipping charges - but amazon's estimation was that if we didn't cancel our order it would arrive sometime in mid-december.

that's just ridiculous.

anyway, back to the story. we arrived at the head office (next door to our building), and spent ages pouring over the rental contract. it's pretty standard stuff, albeit refreshingly different from anything we're familiar with. unless you're in default, the law here really looks out for the tenant and it's quite generous.

so we eventually signed everything, and tomorrow morning we'll pick up our keys. the guarantee from my company is good enough that nobody needs to sign surety for us (an issue that k-twang had) and they took a single month's rent as deposit.

we were going to take a bus straight to ikea, but getting to the stop took a little too long (in the freezing cold and wet) so we turned back to subway for a good lunch and reorientation, then tried again. after the bus arrived, the few minutes walking to ikea were directly against the wind and bitterly cold. even inside the building it would take quite a while before we warmed up again.

ikea is ikea; we found a decent (and reasonably priced) sleeper couch quite quickly and moved on to a kitchen table and chairs. we went through the rest of the sections but that was all we were really interested in. we paid for the stuff and then went through to delivery to discover what a mistake having paid was... they can bring everything tomorrow (at a pretty steep cost for so little), but the window they'll arrive in is FOUR HOURS and they refuse to call before, meaning that we'll have to sit in the otherwise empty apartment for up to four hours.

and we don't even know if we'll be sleeping there tomorrow night; that depends on whether or not we manage to find bedclothes and towels.

my phone's not-quite-gps almost got us quite lost on the way home, and then i decided to get off the bus two stops too early, which in that cold and the rain wasn't a good call at all. eventually we made it back to the metro, then back home to dress warmer before going downtown for dinner and a movie.

i burned my lips on the tofu :(
otherwise, the meal was pretty good, and we had time for video games before the movie. pg didn't do so well with house of the dead, and i had a horrible experience with the ac/dc pinball machine (the ball kept getting stuck, not even tilting would release it), but we eventually found something we could both enjoy in dance, dance, revolution. that's a lot of exercise, though!

---we saw the man with the iron fists, which is made of win. that was a well-told story with great characters and a superb blend of iconic ye-olde chop-sockey and tarantino-esque. the only issue i had with it was that the narration was entirely anachronistic; freed slaves in those days just couldn't have talked like that.

but it didn't matter: it was visceral, gorgeous, and a whole lot of fun.

---the return home seemed warmer. we played with pg's kindle, which is much cooler than mine (hers is the standard kindle wi-fi, mine is the 3G) and we might have to do a swap at some stage (hers can use the french dictionary, mine not so much).

is that everything? it's been a long day and we have a busy one tomorrow as well.

a happily busy one ^_^