Foreign Perspectives

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A week ago we thought that the coming week would be relatively quiet as the bookings were quite patchy but we received quite a flood of bookings during the week and are just about completely full now. We had three new bookings this morning before the breakfasts were over!

That seems to be typical over most of France at the moment going by the enquiries flowing through Chambre d’Hote and Our Gites in recent weeks, some of which have the whiff of panic about them. However, there are some regions with accommodation availability at the moment if you look outside the normal places around France. They aren’t dumps either - friends of ours still have availability in their absolutely beautiful chambre d’hote in Burgundy.

As usual, next week will probably be quite different as the French will be finishing off their holidays next Saturday night leaving French accommodation available for everyone else for the first time since around mid-July. Thus, chaos can be expected on the roads up to the end of next weekend. That’s worrying me a bit as I have to catch a plane to Santiago from Barcelona next Friday.

Must head on - yet another night of mainly overnighters has left us with five rooms to makeup for this evening. Thankfully most of the bookings for the coming week are for several days.

Arnold

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The August 15th holiday in France produces one of the highest levels of traffic in the country, topped only by the first weekend in August. All across the country today (the closest weekend to the 15th) tempers are getting frayed and cars getting shunted with the time taken to travel from A to B increased massively regardless of whether A or B are 15 kilometres or 1500 kilometres apart. Even turning into our driveway can often take 5 minutes!

To give you an idea of how much traffic this represents, they have a little sign going onto the motorway at Perpignan which lists the traffic conditions under four headings. The top two options are the only ones used on this particular weekend: the photo is what they consider to be “difficult” conditions (ie the traffic is still moving most of the time, but at something like 20km/h) with the next one up being “blocked”.

It’s not just the traffic of course but all the trappings of tourism that experience “difficult” conditions today. Naturally, everyone knows that it will be a nightmare to travel this weekend so they try to get going on the Friday or even the Thursday thus spreading the chaos over an even longer period. As the 15th falls on a Tuesday this year, there’s a fair to middling chance that next weekend will be just as bad. Just this morning the new owner of the hotel in the next village came round to ask if he could borrow some sheets as he’d completely ran out due to the very high number of overnighters that this spreading creates and we’re round to the laundry several times a week now with very full loads of sheets & towels.

Popularity: 5% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Using a foreign credit card anywhere in France over the last 18 months or so has been even more of a nightmare than usual. Why? Well, 2004/2005 was when just about all the countries in Europe decided to move to the EMV standard with their cards ie to add a chip and require people to use a PIN when buying things; this was also the period that France decided to upgrade their card processing machines to accept foreign chip cards.

Net effect: chaos in the shops. Whilst in years gone by it was a nuisance if your card didn’t have a chip, over that period it was a nuisance if it did as the shop assistants hadn’t a clue what to do with foreign chip cards with many being refused. The reason for that was simple - the banks gave no training whatsoever when they upgraded the software on the card machines. Also, as things were in transition elsewhere there were three different types of foreign cards with chips: those with a chip but no PIN, chip with a signature and then proper chip & PIN cards. Worse even as there are two types of chip & PIN cards: those that require you to select a language first and those that go straight to English.

We found that in some shops you just couldn’t use some foreign cards. What happened was that if you had a chip card requiring you to select the language, a message came up on the shop assistants terminal saying “wait” whilst on the keypad it said “select language” so they wouldn’t give you the keypad and then said that the card wasn’t working.

But we now seem to be almost into the promised land…. Carrefour’s petrol station in Perpignan now accepts foreign chip cards. So, at least foreigners can buy petrol on Sundays once more, after a gap of around 10 years.

Arnold

Popularity: 3% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!