Foreign Perspectives

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Everyone’s seen the Bastille Day parade in Paris but you can say that you’ve seen the Estagel parade.

Yes, folks, that is the entire parade from the guy at the front with the wreath, the mayor with his little sash and the military might of Estagel (both policemen and the fire engines in the background).

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Bonsoir encore:

I’ve missed the 12th but it’s the 14th today so Estagel will be coming alive with parades, riots, etc. shortly. Well, a parade and more than likely everyone will be too pissed to riot as there’s free plonk once the parade is over.

Had our first bunch of total **** arrive last week. Got a call from England early in the week to reserve rooms for two families who were driving down to a villa in Spain for a couple of weeks. We’re around the half-way mark between Calais and Alicante so we’ve had a few similar groups before. Anyway, these **** booked rooms, evening meals and breakfasts for eight: with such relatively large numbers, you need to buy a fair bit extra of the fresh food, of course. They were stopping off around Tours which is something like seven hours non-stop drive to here and, as they were intending to set off around 0830, we figured that it would be at least 7pm before they turned up: well, you’ve gotta have some rest stops, don’t you? Not these ****. Nope, they turned up around 5pm (ie pretty knackered due to no stopping). They left again at 5.20. The **** had decided that they may as well drive on to Alicante so our bin had a big heap of stuff added to it right away.

Anyway, net effect is that we decided that it’s time we started taking deposits from people so there’s now a little button on the website to let folk pay me money as of yesterday on the english page. Haven’t worked out how to do it in French yet.

Actually, they are the only English folk that we’ve had stopping (OK, only for 20 mins). Our marketing is bound to be better in English than it is in French, yet something like 2/3rds of the people staying so far have been French (sadly, they’ve only spent about 1/2 of the total money: have to see about increasing their expenditure).

Techie question time again: Remember the ADSL wireless connection? Well, it turns out that there were three problems with it. For a start, it’s pretty hot here and the gear was running somewhat higher than the recommended operating temperature: adding a fan has cooled everything down nicely. Second, the wireless link was hanging after an hour or so: applying the Netgear patch has sorted that one. However, it now has a peculiar problem: it tries to dial all the time but only connects when I leave the normal phone off the hook (just discovered that last night). This seems to be 100% consistent. Is there anything I can do, or is it a problem for France Telecom?

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Weddings are hard work!

We were pretty much completely full last Friday and Saturday with a wedding party. Not really all that profitable as the previous owner had went and negotiated a rate about 25% below our high season rate and, of course, they all eat out. Somehow, we managed to get almost all of the rooms reset by Sunday lunchtime which was just as well as a bunch of folk stopped that night… we made almost as much with the four Danes as we did for the whole wedding party (and with a lot less hassle too).

It was actually raining today. Thought I’d say that, just to cheer you lot up. Of course, it’s sunny as I write this and seriously warm too.

Techy question: now that the ADSL connection appears to have been sorted out, I’m using that a whole more of the time. I have a France Telecom ADSL modem connected to my trusty Netgear wireless router and I access this from the Toshiba Tecra, wireless. However, after about an hour of surfing or whatever the wireless link goes down. It starts working again (for a shorter period usually) if I switch the router off and on again. Is it just the router overheating or something? It’s usually around the 30C mark here. Would just firing up a baby fan for the router sort it out?

Nearly forgot… it looks like we’ll be installing airconditioning much sooner than expected. Seems that there’s a scam (sorry, scheme) that lets you install it at a monthly cost around the same as the heating would normally cost you and the French government send you a cheque for 15% of the total amount in February of the year following installation. Doesn’t appear to be a downside. It’s one of those heatpump type thingy’s (ie it works like a really big fridge).

In case you’ve missed it, William G is on his way to becoming a French resident. I was supposed to meet him in his new house last Thursday but with the wedding and a couple of additional last minute arrivals I just couldn’t make it (hence lack of several cases of wine, David). Anyway, the whole family are heading over on July 14th. Could the last person to leave IT please switch off the servers?…

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