Foreign Perspectives

Archive for November, 2004

We’re starting to make a bit of progress with the backlog of administration and it’s looking like in another week or so we’ll be up to date.

Yesterday was “toilet day”. We have a growing collection of toilets that aren’t operational for a variety of reasons so we thought that we’d blitz them. Net effect is that the two at the back of the dining room are ready to go though we need to put a new seat on one of them, the room 10 cistern is filling up normally, and the two outside toilets just need a bit of cleaning to get them going. The only serious one now is the one in the lobby which is still blocked up after the latest stupid guest flushed something down it and clogged it up (no, not that!).

We reckon that we need a new car for next year as the RAV4 isn’t really up to carrying the people and stuff. Sooo, we’ve started thinking about what we need and have come up with the following little list of essentials:
– 4wd, because we hope to do tours into the ski areas in due course;
– 6 or 7 seater, because we’re starting to do a lot more airport shuttle runs than expected and also because we want to do little tours;
– diesel, because it’s costing us a fortune in petrol.

We’d like automatic too ‘cos Wendy can’t drive manuals and ‘cos I’m to lazy to drive them.

I was thinking that a long wheelbase Landrover would do the biz but I gather that they’re awful to drive so that’s put me off them. In the frame for consideration at the moment are the Mitsubishi Shogun (called Montero here) and the Nissan Patrol.

Does anybody have any thoughts on those (or indeed other cars we should be looking at)?

Dunno what happened, but we’re up to over 120 readers a day of Mas Camps News!!

There’s a couple of the banks here that have offers of FREE MONEY when you open accounts for your kids. Red rag to a bull, of course…. Sadly, Societe Generale operates on a nationwide basis here so there’s only EUR 16 going on their EuroKid account.

However, Banque Populaire are one of the regional banks here with something like a dozen separate banks over France and the local bank is offering EUR 15 per child. Soooo,… nah, ’twas too good to be true: only the local bank seems to have that offer at the moment.

Just about everyone that moves here either has or opens very quickly an account with Credit Agricole. It’s certainly the simplest choice as they’re in every village of any size in France and they also have an English speaking branch in Normandy (you can use their accounts in the other Credit Agricoles without any real bother). It’s also an expensive choice: since they “improved” their computer system a few months back they now charge over EUR 5 per month just for the priviledge of having an account with them. Oh, plus the EUR 40 or so for their debit card. Anyway, you’re looking at EUR 100 a year just to have a very basic account.

Once people are here for a while, they tend to say “WHAT?” to the bank charges and change banks. I’m told that “the” one to go for is currently Banque Populaire where you can actually get a fully operational account for all of 20‚€ per year.

Anyway, we’re doing a little more checking to confirm things then closing all of our personal accounts with Credit Agricole and moving to Banque Populaire (who, in these parts, seem to have branches just about everywhere that CA do).

Remember a few weeks back that I said that I’d plonked all these little e-mails onto a blog (now living at Foreign Perspectives)? Well, I was looking at the stats this evening and I’ve managed to pick up 1000 readers since then!!

Fame at last. Wendy reckons we should go for the “fortune” and try to make some money out of it.

Our basic game plan is to refresh/update every room in the hotel over a five year cycle. The accountants amongst you will equate this to writing off the room contents over five years but for sheer simplicity and to avoid a big bill what we’re actually going to do is to update two rooms each year.

Step one is to get two new beds so last week we set off to find 1) a really nice bed for our “honeymoon suite” and 2) a good but much cheaper bed for one of our ordinary rooms which is in dire need of replacement. What we’ll actually do is to move the existing “honeymoon” bed to one of the outside rooms (and dump the one it currently has) then replace an OK bed in one of our non-ensuite rooms, moving that bed into the naff non-ensuite room.

French beds are sold differently which makes price comparison rather difficult. Generally the “bed” on sale is actually only the headboard and frame. To that you need to add a base and a mattress. Net effect is that a bed we really liked for the honeymoon suite was prices at EUR 319 but ended up as more like EUR 700. The cheap bed started off at EUR 116 and ended up as more like EUR 500. We’re still shopping around as I’d like a cheapo bed for more like EUR 300 and the honeymoon for more like EUR 500.

The English folk staying last week were our first to be here when we needed the heat on in the dining room. Sounded like a simple task but we still haven’t worked out why the radiators in the dining room aren’t working. They’re working everywhere else so we reckon there’s a valve somewhere that we’ve not turned on but so far we’ve not found it. anyway, in the meantime we thought we’d get a superser type thing. Turns out that they’re not that common here so we ended up heading off to the other side of Perpignan and all we now need to get is the gas bottle. Picked up a leaf vacuum thingy too as we’re up to our knees in the things at the moment.

At last, we are able to accept American Express cards. We sent the initial e-mail to them in June or July and they called us a couple of weeks ago. In the meantime we’d asked the bank to sort it but that was a couple of months ago so I guess that’s not happening anytime soon which is just as well as we got an offer from Amex themselves to set it up free (vs 50‚€ for the bank) and 3‚€ a month vs 5‚€ for the bank. Still nothing back from Diners Club though but I guess we’ll need to give them a couple of months.

I’ve knocked together mark #1 of our Living in France page, so comments/critique on https://www.foreignperspectives.com/livinginfrance . As you’ll see, there are a number of areas that need filled in.

A first… it’s warmer in Belfast than it is here!!

A good time to get going on the backlog of administration that built up over the summer. Once we hit the start of July nothing got done that didn’t have to get done right away, net effect of which is that I’ve just completed the accounts for June and am about half way through the July accounts. All being well, I’ll have caught up with things in a week or two.

We have our first ebay client with us at the moment. Didn’t make too much on the room charge but they had a meal last night which has brought the income from them well up. We haven’t really sussed out the ebay sales yet but are optimistic that we’ll do OK with it once we get a good formula sorted. So far the score is: first attempt at full price, lots of interest, two pathetic bids, no sale; second attempt around half price with breakfast included, less interest (further into October explains that I think), one sale (that’s the guys that are here now); third attempt also around half price but ex-breakfast, some interest but no sale yet (the listing is still current); fourth attempt with no accommodation charge (yes, John, FREE!!) but compulsory meal purchases, quite a lot of early interest (also a current listing).

Anyway, must head off as we need to get some more serious clothing… the t-shirt and shorts aren’t really up to the current weather.