Foreign Perspectives

Archive for September, 2007

When you immigrate to France one of the things that they look for is a medical.

Seeing as Wendy’s Australian, she duly got the invitation for that medical exam in December 2004. We sat there for several hours and then just had to leave as we’d guests coming and loads of things to do. They said that they’d make another appointment.

That “other appointment” is this afternoon.

Yes, three years later!

In that time, Wendy has been to the doctor several times of course and even had a baby here so it does seem a bit silly that they’re inviting her for a medical at this point. Still, it’s France so they need documentation even if it’s pointless.

One of the problems with working in the tourist industry is that you’re really busy right through the main holiday season and therefore need to take your own holidays out of season.

That tends to rule out some types of holiday. For instance, many beach destinations are out as they’ll be closed down for the season by the time we’d be able to go. The weather isn’t so dependable out of the holiday season either so we need to take more care about the type of destination we consider.

At the moment, we’re looking into two quite different holidays for ourselves.

The first will probably be late October/early November and for that we’re aiming to do a mini-citybreak. Flight prices drop dramatically by then so we’ve quite a wide choice in principle though as it’s just a short break we don’t want to pay a fortune for the hotels at the other end (which ruled out Venice: the prices were unbelieveable) and also it’s a lot cheaper if you don’t need to get a hotel at the airport so that knocks out flights leaving early in the morning.

The second is Christmas which may surprise you. In fact, we are usually empty over the Christmas period as the locals don’t “do” Christmas. Anyway, the net effect of that is that we have a window of around 7-10 days and we’re hoping to go somewhere “Christmasy” for it. Options for that one include Brussels (surprisingly cheap on the hotel front as the bureaucrats have, of course, left for their own holidays) and southern Germany. In principle, we’d have liked to do Edinburgh or London but the flight prices knocked both of them out of the running.

After that? Well, we’ll be full in early January but would like to get away somewhere warm sometime in the late January to early March period to break up the Winter for us.

You might think that the south of France would be ideal for walking holidays and it is, but the Summer months are just too hot for any kind of strenuous activity. There are some walkers around in the Summer of course but generally they have to severely curtail the range that they walk each day.

However, once we get into September it’s one of the best times of the year for it. The days are generally sunny right up until December although the majority of walking holidays are undertaken from around mid-September to the end of October. It’s still warm enough for walking after that but you need to consider the areas that you’ll be passing through as those at higher altitudes can have snow after October.

We’ve just said goodbye to our second party of walkers this week who have just started off on their walk towards Queribus with a view to stopping in Duillac this evening and hitting Peyrepertous tomorrow.

Let’s face us, the vast majority of us know diddly squat about the situation in Burma.

It’s one of those peculiar places in south-east Asia that aren’t on the flight path of the major airlines that we tend to get around on so there aren’t any stopovers there such as are commonplace in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. So, very few of us know anyone who has been there on holiday and therefore we know even less about it than we do about many countries around the world in this day of widespread international travel.

So, in many cases it is a country that simply doesn’t appear on our radar until something really serious happens there.

Sadly, that “something really serious” is happening right now. The government (if such a word can be applied to the people running that country) don’t want us to know about it but thanks to the communications infrastructure in place these days, the only thing that they can do is try to round up those that would write about it from within the country and yet still the news gets out despite their major-league clampdown on freedom of expression. So we have the Burma Blog among many others.

Buddism is one religion that just doesn’t get into any kind of conflict so it must be some measure of how bad it is when even they have been dragged into events taking place in Burma.

Let’s hope that the situation is resolved as quickly and with as little bloodshed as possible.

The pattern of bookings this year has been rather peculiar right from the start and seems to be continuing in the same vein.

Last night for instance, we had only one couple in although we really should have two but ‘tother one was one of our “visa application bookings” so we weren’t really expecting him to arrive.

Tonight, not only are we full, but everyone is taking meals too.

What October will be like, we’ve really no idea at the moment as the majority of people are booking just a few days to a couple of weeks ahead these days which means we generally have no idea how a given month will turn out ’til we’re well into it.