Foreign Perspectives

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If you’re looking for a property along the Mediterranean most of the time you’ll not be too bothered about which particular country that property is in. The snag is that the majority of property listings sites operate on a country by country basis so you’ve to hunt round a whole lot of them if you’re determined to find the perfect property for you at the best price.

Medhead is different in that it aims to cover all the countries around the Mediterranean in one place. At the moment, the majority of their properties are in Spain and their italian property listings are fairly short (although with some excellent properties amongst them) but that’ll change as they expand their marketing. You can, for instance, search on the type of property you’re interested in without specifying the country and there are some really fantastic bargains on the site eg a 10 bedroom, 4 bathroom property for under 200,000‚€ in Granada.

If you’re selling a property, the site provides an instant and accurate translation of the basic details of your property into the seven languages that the site supports thus you have a much greater potential audience for your property than you would on most listings sites.

Popularity: 32% [?]

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If you’re thinking of travelling to a French speaking country this summer, now is a good time to make a start on getting your French up to speed as, for the most part, French speakers are very, very reluctant to switch to English for you.

There are loads of places online to learn a bit of French and most will provide you with more than enough French to get by on holiday. The e-language school take something of a textbook approach to the subject which would be a little dry if you were doing an intensive course run along the same lines but it’s ideal for picking up the French that you’d need on holiday and seems pretty comprehensive in its coverage of both the required vocabulary and grammar that you would need.

In fact, if you managed to work your way through all the topics that they cover you’d rarely be short of the words or grammar that you need in day to day French.

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You’d think that that these days banking practices around Europe would be fairly standard. After all, the banks handle international business every day so they’re in constant contact with their counterparts in other countries.

Of course, it’s one of many areas where European business practices are far from standard.

Take the UK and France for example. Two countries with a very long history of interaction so you’d think that many things would be similar except that they aren’t.

In the UK, credit cards are commonplace and it’s normal, expected even, for people to have several of them. In France, credit cards are a relatively new phenonmen and remain very rare.

In the UK, almost everyone has an overdraft and the banks prefer you to be permanently overdrawn as they collect more fees that way. In France, they’ll close your account if you’re overdrawn more than a couple of months.

In the UK, debit cards don’t have any purchase limit on them. In France, you can’t buy more than 3000‚€ a month usually, which is why you often see people resorting to cheques towards the end of the month.

In the UK, nobody will accept a cheque without a cheque card (a card issued by their bank and guaranteeing the cheque will be paid). In France, almost everyone until recently accepted cheques because if you bounced a cheque you could be banned from having a cheque account at all. That actually worked well until very recently when the economic situation seems to have caused something of a run on dud cheques so the effect is that more and more businesses don’t accept cheques which is sure to cause trouble soon so long as that debit card spending limit remains.

Any one of those differences can easily fell you if you don’t know about it in advance.

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