Foreign Perspectives

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Just as suddenly as it arrive, the grape harvest is over and with it the bands of grape pickers are gone from the villages and their little clusters of caravans and vans.

This year the difference wasn’t quite so marked as just about all the wine growers bought the grape picking machines last year so they don’t need anything like the number of pickers that they did in years gone by and therefore the little campsites were much smaller.

With the arrival of assorted Eastern Block countries into Europe this year, the mix of pickers changed quite substantially as indeed has the face of the workforce elsewhere in Europe over the last year or so.

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Although France has been moving online rapidly in recent years, many existing laws and customs don’t fit in well with the online world.

You can certainly buy books and such online no problem. The purchase “contract” is very clear and, even in France, it doesn’t require a signature to buy a book. Having said that, the way that Amazon constantly runs “sales” is probably illegal in France as sales are limited to specific periods of the year here so perhaps someday a French bookshop will get them banned.

You can’t buy commercial goods so easily though as you generally need to prove to them that you’re a business. So, whilst you can sometimes place an order, you sometimes find that they want documentary proof that you are a registered business. Elsewhere in the world, just because you’re a “wholesale” sales outfit doesn’t mean that you aren’t legally allowed to sell to the public, but here it tend to.

Even buying car insurance online doesn’t seem a runner. We could only find one place that would even provide an estimate online and even with them we still have to go in to the office to provide the documentation and pay for it.

So, yes you can buy online in France but there are significant limitations in what they’re allowed to sell you online which don’t apply elsewhere.

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We’ve had quite a run of Brits who live in Spain stay with us on their way to/from the UK over the last few months.

With few exceptions, they have all assumed that southern France will be just like Spain. So the resorts will be fully open ’til November, the restaurants will start serving food from 9pm, and so on.

Well, it isn’t like that at all.

The beach resorts in France start closing up in the first week of September and are almost completely closed down by the end of the second week. Of course, that suits us as we get a jump in bookings for the second two weeks of September.

Far from opening at 9pm, the restaurants here have all closed by then and usually won’t serve you much after 8pm. In fact, by then your choice is usually limited to McDonalds and the like. Even in the busiest week of the year for Perpignan (which is this week), they still close at their normal times. This seems particularly daft this week as the town is full of journalists and there’s a very popular nightly show which runs to midnight yet everywhere is closed by the time it finishes.

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