Foreign Perspectives

Archive for August, 2006

James started his education in France today in a nice little country school not far from us.

Frankly, we were quite amazed how easy it was to get him accepted at the school. Back in June we found out that the enrollment for the school closed on June 23rd so it was a bit of a rush to get to the school to find out what they needed from us to enrol him there. A birth certificate, of course, then they wanted a copy of his insurance (all of EUR 10 a year), medical certificate and, as we don’t live in the schools commune, a letter from our mayor to say that he was OK about James going to their school. Very surprisingly, they didn’t consider farming him out to some school for non-French speakers which is the usual tactic in this area.

So far, he seems very happy with the school and couldn’t wait to get back after lunch.

We’re told that he’ll be speaking his first French words in a few weeks. You’d think that he would grow up bilingual but that’s not usually the case unless you put the kids into a bilingual school. Just before we bought this place we met someone who would “obviously” be bilingual: he was born in France around 20 years ago to English parents. In fact, although he had a perfect english accent he wasn’t fluent in english. How come? Well, 20 odd years ago there was no satellite TV, no Amazon and few brits in that particular area of France. Net effect was that the only english he heard was that of his parents so his accent is perfect but when he reached maybe 12 or 13 he started to go out with his friends more than being in with his parents. So, his english is that of a 12 or 13 year old. For instance, although he was working as an estate agent, he didn’t know the names for parts of houses because, of course, those are words that you learn as an adult. All his specialist vocabulary would be French too as it’s hardly likely that his parents would have spoken to him about geography or physics. These days it’s much easier as the children can watch UK TV, read books in english and even get magazines but you do need to make a point of developing their english if you want them to be truly bilingual.

One other thing to watch if you’re moving here with kids is that once they hit 16 they won’t get any education unless they’re either fluent (and “able to get by” doesn’t count) or you move to an area with a relatively large expat population. What happens in areas like this is that at 16 they are sent to CIPPA which is a France-wide organisation with the objective of getting kids prepared to go into the lycée (ie age 17-18 school). Now, that’s fine if you’re in an area where the main reason that kids aren’t able to go into the lycée is that they don’t speak French because they’ll teach them French. However, in our area CIPPA is almost exclusively aimed at getting children from French speaking countries with low education standards up to the required standard and they don’t teach French: in fact in our area it appear to be impossible to get into a school after age 16 unless you speak fluent French and there is nowhere for such kids to actually learn French either. Funnily enough, everyone assumes that there is “some place” that will teach your child French at age 16 but having spent almost three years being passed from one such organisation to another around here, I think I can safely say that there isn’t such a place.

Actually, we started off pretty sure that there was no problem getting kids into school regardless of their age. You never see any problems like that on the “moving to France” TV programmes for sure but I guess that arriving at enrollment with a TV crew in tow helps remove any problems that there might be. However, in “real life”, when you start off at a school their first reaction is to send you off to the CIO to have your educational level tested. Fair enough, but CIO can’t actually test a child that doesn’t speak French so they send you on to another outfit (can’t remember the initials). The other guys just send you straight to CIPPA who, as noted above, are worse than useless in this area if you don’t speak French. CIPPA in turn immediately send you back to have tests of your ability done which, of course, the CIO can’t do if you don’t speak French but, eventually, CIPPA do accept you. Not that there’s much point as we found that they just brand non-French speakers as being lazy and lacking in enthousiasm when they can’t answer question papers in French and hand back a blank answer sheet at the end of the day. So, if you’re unlucky enough to be directed to CIPPA in an area with few non-French living there, you may as well give up any hope of your child receiving an education in France.

Arnold

The rolling green fields that you see as the plane comes in to land are the first indication that this isn’t the Spain of the costas.

The coastline is quite different from that of the southern costas. Whereas Marbella is nothing like the small port that it grew out of, the port of A Coruna is still very much the centre of activities of the town. Yes, developments have more or less swamped the small old town but they are developments for a thriving town and not the wall to wall hotels and apartments of one of the costa ports.

Towns like Santiago do get their fair share of tourists but even there the tourists are confined to quite small sections of the town. Move outside those and you’ll find a real town.

So, no, this isn’t the tourist Spain that you probably already know. It’s an altogether different place.

It’s different in other respects too. For one thing, this is one of the areas of Spain that was never conquered by the Arabs so along with the other northern coastal provinces is one of those that has always been Spain.

The impact of that is most evident in the culture of the area. It has a very celtic undertone to it all with bagpipes (albeit without tartan designs) being almost as commonplace as they are in Edinburgh. In fact, in many respects Santiago feels like a smaller and warmer version of Edinburgh. Strangely though, the local language (Gallego/Gallician) isn’t a celtic based one.

Would you like to go there though? If you’re just aiming to lay on the beach and get a tan, probably not as all that green scenery is indicative of a good deal of rainfall. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a part of Spain with more culture than you’ll find in Marbella and less people than you find in Seville then it’s a good choice.

If I’ve convinced you then there are a growing number of transport options available to you with flights to Santiago and A Coruna in Galicia and others further east in Asturias plus the port of Santander just a few hours drive further on. These are all bookable via the links at the right. There aren’t massive quantities of tourist accommodation but you’ll find sufficient if you book ahead.

Arnold

Is the Camino de Santiago a real pilgrimage these days? I had the chance to visit the city numerous times over the course of last week and the area in and around the cathedral was constantly thronged with people and even more so on Sunday.

Does that mean that they are real’ pilgrims though? Well, I suspect that the majority are, at least in part, for when we went outside the central part of the old town we found virtually no tourists at all. In fact in the new town I don’t think that there were any. That in itself is quite unusual as you would normally see some tourist overspill’ into the non-touristy sections of any town.

In tourist terms, there seems to be next to nothing touristy’ about the place on the whole. Yes, it certainly has the ancient building around the centre, but it doesn’t have the tourist shops in anything like the numbers that you’d expect given the number of visitors which implies that a fair number are pilgrims rather than tourists. It certainly does have loads of restaurants but even pilgrims have to eat so that’s not something that says tourist’. And at night, it is very lively with street theatre all around the central section and spilling out into the park but, again, even pilgrims do things at night.

However, I wouldn’t say that all of the pilgrims are quite in the mould of pilgrims of old. The pilgrim who looked haggard from his/her walk along the camino was very rare and most arrived in pretty good shape with modern day backpacks in place of the cloth bag or whatever passed for the equivalent in days of old. Considerable numbers come on bicycles too as evidenced by the number of bikes being packed in the airport. Actually the airport is something of an indication of pilgrimage activity with a massive list of destinations for such a small airport.

One rather major thing that makes life as a pilgrim somewhat easier these days is that you now only have to walk 100km to get your Compostela (200km on a bicycle) which seems like nothing in comparison to those who walked goodness knows how many miles down France and across Spain to get it not so long ago. Let’s face it: 100km is nothing. Even I would consider doing that!

Overall, I’d say that there is, if not a majority, then a sizeable minority of proper’ pilgrims. It’s just that these days, the route isn’t nearly so hard going as it was in olden days. Things have changed considerably when you see credit card’ listed as one of the essential items to take on your pilgrimage.

Arnold

I spent last week on an intensive Spanish course in the University of Santiago so this weeks entry is all about that.

Santiago is quite a small town and I managed to walk round pretty much all of it on the Saturday just prior to starting the course. Inside the surroundings of the old town it’s pretty much packed with tourists everywhere but when I ventured out into the new town surrounding it on Wednesday afternoon I found that it was just as nice with a number of nice parks but virtually no tourists. It was much more pleasant because of that as the tourists tend to congregate along a very limited number of routes through the town.

If you want to see a service in the cathedral, go very early on Sunday as the pilgrims and tourists are at their maximum then.

If you want to watch a film whilst you’re there, bear in mind that they will be in Spanish only (ie no subtitles) so you’ll need quite good Spanish to follow them.

The town remains quite lively at night too. The new town quietens down around 10pm but the old town remains lively well after midnight with numerous bars and cafes open until very late (or early!). Around the cathedral area you’ll find numerous lively groups of musicians playing well into the night with one particularly entertaining act under the arches in the building directly opposite the cathedral. If you’re in a rush, be wary of the elderly troubadours with their engaging, if overlly long, patter selling CDs of love songs along the streets leading out of the cathedral square. In the park on the way back to the university we even found quite an elaborate and engaging puppeteer act.

On Tuesday we were off to A Coruna which is on the coast. Quite a different town than Santiago obviously but still with a small old town where you can see a number of churches. It’s still quite a major port and a much larger town than Santiago although you can still manage to walk around the main tourist sights in an afternoon (ie the port area, old town and Hercules Tower).

But, what about the course? Well, it consisted of around three or four hours per day of classes plus a number of workshops on aspects of the Spanish language and Spanish culture. That might not sound like a lot but it’s hard to keep going in a foreign language for as long as that and everyone was quite tired at the end of the days (running from 9am to 10pm Sunday to Thursday). As it was largely a series of conversation classes, the progressive improvement in Spanish ability wasn’t so obvious as it is in normal classes but I’m confident that I speak Spanish a lot better now and was able to try that out this morning with some Spanish guests that we have. Not sure if I’d say I’m fluent at the moment but I’m further on the way than I was a week ago.

Arnold

People seem to think that it’s always dry and hot way down here in the south but even in August it rains. As in other places in the world, seemingly always on public holidays, so naturally since August 15th is the major French holiday it’s raining today.

Since it’s the French holiday season, we’re pretty much completely full and therefore get some bookings from people who want one type of room but because it’s not available, book something completely different. This morning for instance one of the places we list with called to say that they’d received a booking from an Italian family who’d booked one of our non-ensuite rooms and then amended the booking to say that they’d be bringing along their five year old too. When a family books our ensuite double and then adds a child that’s OK but it just ain’t possible to put three people in the non-ensuites.

So what’s happened with the booking? Well, we’ve just received it and it only lists two people with no mention of the child so they’ve probably told the booking site that they’d not bother bringing the child. I think it’s safe to say that the three of them will be turning up on Thursday though but we won’t be able to fit them in.

We also get people booking who’d rather be staying somewhere else which is a bit of a pain for us and for them. On the whole, we’d rather have people staying who actually wanted to be in our quiet place in the vineyards with the views of mountains and Queribus in the distance. We also find that it’s a whole lot easier to deal with people who appreciate this type of area and range of attractions which is why we go to some length to describe everything as completely as possible. Not everyone reads that of course and we get a trickle of people who actually wanted to be in a city but managed to book somewhere with a description that says in the first sentence it’s 20 minutes outside Perpignan. Sometimes that’s OK and they appreciate the change but sometimes it isn’t and we’ve had several recently who just hated the area and consequently gave us a terrible review criticising us for being in the countryside and not having nightclubs nearby. The worst, so far, was an english lady who seemed to only know one word: “disgusting”! She booked a twin room (the only one still available) then complained that it wasn’t a double, complained that we weren’t at the beach, complained that the room wasn’t ready (despite arriving before checkin time), complained that it was overpriced (despite being under half the price of the place she’d stayed in the night before),…. and then stormed off, attempting to damage our property by firing stones from her screeching tyres. Funnily enough we were able to rebook the room and, despite her insulting and aggressive attitude followed our policy of refunding the charge less the costs we incurred (though we were sorely tempted not to!). So instead of a total ******* staying we had a very nice French family who’ll probably be back someday.

Arnold