Foreign Perspectives

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Bonsoir!

It’s been pouring all day. Yes, folks, it really does rain in the south of France.

Anyway, seeing as the weather wasn’t great, we thought we’d have a bit of lie-in so it was a bit of a rush just after 9am when the doorbell rang. That was our first potential employee. By the time I managed to get downstairs, the French was operational enough to tell her that we might be looking for people around the end of June.

We had another bin-trip over lunch to clear out another trailer load of junk left by the previous owner. At the current rate, it’ll be the end of the month before we’ve gotten rid of it all.

Since it’s the start of the month, it was time to drop off the first pile of invoices with the accountant so that’s where we ended up this afternoon. Unfortunately, it’s mainly bills that I need to pay rather than bills that people have paid me but all being well that split will change by the summer. Time too to see what’s involved in employing someone. It seems simple. The minimum salary (SMIC) is ‚€7.19 an hour but that’s gross, of course, so they end up with about 80% of that and employers taxes mean that it costs about ‚€10 an hour for me to employ someone. There’s also the complication of the 35 hour week here with a maximum of 48 hours. In practice, the hours we would need someone would be a bit bizarre: probably about 2/3 hours in the late morning/early afternoon to make the beds etc. and the same again in the evening to look after the restaurant. I suspect we’ll need at least two people to do that.

That’s the gorge around the corner that we were at yesterday.

A bientot,

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Bonjour!

Yesterday (Friday) was total chaos.

We started getting up around 8.30 as usual and planned our day out: French in the morning for me, then off to the Mairie to see about getting ourselves registered and finishing with a trip to the accountant.

The door bell rang about 5 mins after we decided to do all that.

Five Belgians had arrived for our gite, a day early. It’s really a gite for at most three so we started organising extra beds in a big hurry. Wendy managed to persuade them to go off and take a drive to collect supplies while we got organised.

We got one extra bed in and realised that no way could we fit five in so I called Alistair (the adventure tours guy) to see how his gite was fixed up. His is for nine and fortunately was free so we offered them that when they got back. Had to drive them up to his place as it’s a bit hard to find and impossible to describe how to find in English, never mind French. We set off for his place just after noon (yup, three hours to sort out the gite!).

On the way back we spotted a big bin by the roadside so I dropped Wendy off at Champion to get supplies for the next couple of days (`tis May Day on Saturday and everywhere is shut) whilst I headed off to pick up the trailer and fill it with rubbish. As we’ve not got to the Mairie we’re still running with domestic size bins a) have more waste due to the hotel b) have heaps of junk from the move and c) have heaps of junk left over from the previous owner to get rid of. One trailer is about two big (ie 2 wheelie bin size bins) bins full. Fortunately we spotted a couple more big bins on the way back to collect Wendy.

Thought we’d pick up some outdoor furniture for the gite too but they’d went and sold the table we were looking for.

By them Alistair had arrived. I stayed with him while Wendy went off to get some more shopping done.

I mentioned that our main toilet wasn’t working which ended up in a race to the DIY store to collect a new one plus more tools to finish off fitting the lock on the front door.

We didn’t know how to turn off the water so had to wait `til our neighbour arrived at 9pm before completing the fitting of the toilet which by 11.30pm was operational.

In the meantime we have also sorted out the Sky satellite which is now in a position which should let it work in the gite. Which means another trip to Castorama on Monday to get another satellite tuner for the gite (assuming it works with our box).

We are all totally knackered!!

Oh, and it was James’ birthday on Thursday so in the midst of the above he was pedalling round the courtyard in his little car and pushing his bike around and generally wanting to be involved in all the action. He’d his eye on the bag of toys that the little Belgian boy had brought along and was getting set to mug him for them.

And early on my French mobile arrived. I’m on 00 33 6 981 420 65.

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