Foreign Perspectives

Things were working out quite well with them but the girl that had been specifically recommended to us left the accountancy firm late last year. As she spoke quite fluent English and knew how accountancy worked in the UK, the firm had used her to attract a lot of English speaking clients.

Unfortunately, when she left they found themselves with a whole lot of English speaking clients of which the majority don’t have good enough French to be able to use a normal French accountant. They in turn don’t speak good enough English to be able to deal with them properly either. Net effect? Well it seems that they decided not to bother doing anything with the clients that she had brought to the firm.

We only found this out last week after we received what is now a growing pile of penalty notices from various organisations due to our books not being done and called them to see why these were arriving.

Anyway, after being told that “this firm is in a bad way”, we’re now looking for yet another accountant.

As with leaving the last accountants, it should be “interesting” to leave this lot. We already have penalty charges which exceed the bill that they sent us recently so I’ll be forwarding a bill to them.

Within about ten minutes, he’d fallen on one of the slides. Well, several by then as that’s what kids do. However, the final one he fell on turned out to be a very rusty metal one with lots of jagged pieces of metal sticking up and so he cut his eyelid quite badly.

We were very surprised to see how poor the maintenance was and would have expected that particular slide to have been replaced long ago. Additionally, whilst we were expecting the park staff in the area to make a point of assisting us with a child with a potentially quite serious eye injury, we were just vaguely directed to the medical centre. It also set us wondering if the rides are similarly poorly maintained and just awaiting a major accident to have that discovered.

To some extent, the excellent Port Aventura medical centre suggests to me that the number of accidents caused by various aspects of the park are fairly significant and that the park isn’t nearly as safe as it should be.

So, do be careful in Port Aventura with your kids even in the “safe” areas for infants because they aren’t as safe as they should be.

As usual, when we want to get away early the last guests didn’t check out until the very last minute so we didn’t set off for Sitges ’til noon. That worked out pretty well as with a break for lunch at the nice little café on the border we pulled into the hotel around 4pm.

Sitges is a very lively resort in the Summer months but is a good deal quieter once you get into Autumn. Although the majority of the shops were still open, the town had a feeling of closing down for the Winter about it with a number of the more upmarket shops already closed up and the much lower number of tourists limited the extent of the promenading pretty much exclusively to the central section of the beachfront.

I was quite disappointed in the old town as it’s almost entirely taken over by various government offices and has a very “restored” feeling about it.

There’s a fantastic Australian-owned restaurant called the Beach House which Wendy wanted to try out but I guess it may be one of those that closes up for the Winter as we couldn’t find it.

As we went a little bit out of season, the selection of accommodation was massive of course. We ended up staying in a very nice four star aparthotel which is normally EUR 400 odd yet only cost us EUR 70.

So, quite a nice town to walk round, but you’d need to go closer to the main holiday season to make the most of it I think.