AROUND THE HOUSE

RECYCLING
I will first bounce back from what our anonymous blogger wrote about the recycling in order to begin my next section aimed at helping you getting around the house more easily.
I do not know where our blogger comes from but in Bournemouth, two bins are used in order to recycle. One of them is for recyclables: cardboard and glass, aluminum etc. The other is for household waste.
This is a bit different from the way recycling works across the channel; in Brussels, 3 plastic bags are used, one for household waste, the second one is for plastics and aluminum, and the last one is for paper and plastic.
I don’t know that one system is better; all I know is that it’s more common to use hard bins here, which has the advantage of not having to clean up the mess made by hungry foxes in the morning…

CLEANING UP
One month ago, when I moved into my newly acquired house, my first goal was to vacuum my bedroom. I went to the storeroom, and found this object:



It was king of like what cinema analysts call a ‘red herring’ i.e. you expect to see something but you end up seeing something different.



This is the kind of experiences that make you realize that you’re away from home. How to explain… it is not that I hadn’t ever seen this object before; it’s just that this kind of vacuum cleaner is really rare across the channel. Face with the incomprehension of my housemates as I asked them to help me turn it on, I decided to investigate my artless reaction; I decided to look up vacuum cleaner in English than in French (aspirateur) on Google images. I was reassured to see that there were 11 out of 21 “hover style” vacuum cleaners on google’s first page against only 3 when typing “aspirateur”. They say that language influences the images in our heads…



When you get to the UK, you will most certainly find a washing machine in the house/apartment you’ll rent; sometimes you’ll also get a tumble dryer. This is pretty uncommon in student houses across the channel, which is causes casual travelers to flee from certain trains on weekends, fore they are full of students carrying their huge bags/backpacks/suitcases (full of clothes) on their way back to their parent’s houses.