Foreign Perspectives

Archive for September, 2007

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.

Since we use two bakers, we get two bills, of course.

However, as we use one of the bakers mainly for the weekend and the other mainly for during the week, you’d think that the bills would be substantially different. Funnily enough, there’s actually very little difference in them which is quite peculiar.

The reason why they’re fairly similar is that we’ve been getting growing numbers of Spanish staying during the week whilst the weekend is normally reserved for the British. The Spanish rarely take breakfast but the British nearly always do, so the weekend bill generally ends up higher than the mid-week one.

How come the Spanish don’t take breakfast though? Well, they’ve become used to the normal level of French breakfasts and it just ain’t enough for them so they eat elsewhere for breakfast for the most part although any that have seen the breakfast we put out have often wandered in and started eating which is something of a complication for us as we only get the croissants etc. if the people have ordered breakfast the night before.

We had quite an interesting family staying with us for a few days.

The older parents wanted to move to France and therefore everyone was over on a scouting trip for about a week. Now, that’s a sensible thing as they wanted somewhere that their grandchildren (thankfully not also in tow) would like and a trip together gives everyone a chance to throw in their 2 cents.

However, the downside of this type of group is that it’s difficult to reach an agreement which everyone can live with.

The parents (in their 70s) wanted to buy somewhere small that they could look after easily enough. The grown-up children were more interested in spending a bit more and getting somewhere as an investment.

It is actually possible to get a solution for such a seemingly divergent set of criteria but what’s required is that everyone sit down together and state what they really want rather than leaving a whole lot unsaid as seems to have been the case with this particular group. With such a meeting, it’s usually possible to come up with a specification containing the essentials and the desireables which can then be used to aid an estate agent in finding your ideal property.

Even if you don’t have a disparate group, it’s useful to draw up a specification like that as you’ll be much more likely to find your ideal property than if you don’t have that.

One thing that constantly surprises me is just how bad the stock control system is in Metro/Makro.

Despite billing themselves as the supplier to hotels, without fail they run out of hotel soaps in June every year and don’t get them back in stock until September. Hard as it may be to believe they’re even worse with the little shampoos which go out of stock in May or June and usually don’t come back until well into October. They do have loads of the little body lotion bottles though which have been sitting on the shelves unsold since June (I marked one of the boxes way back so, yes, they are exactly the same boxes!).

I’m not just singling out one slippage either. Fanta? Not from June to August. Water? Very limited availability right throughout the Summer.

Don’t these people have automated reordering systems in place?

I find that after a while the focus of our blogs tends to drift off from the original idea and so, sometimes, it’s useful to change the domain name to reflect the new focus of the topics in it.

So far, that’s resulted in this particular blog living in three different guises over the course of almost four years. Mark one wasn’t a blog per se in that it was basically a mailing list that I used to keep everyone back home up to date on what we were getting up to. A couple of years later, when the mailing list became a bit unmanageable it moved into its original blog format although the content remained pretty much the same. Then last year we thought that it was time to revitalise the whole thing and put it on the Foreign Perspectives domain.

Now, its Wendy’s turn. To begin with she kicked off her blog on her own domain but didn’t really get into it for the first few months. She has now though and usually has three or four posts a day before you even count sponsored ones. Anyway, it was time to get it onto a proper domain which is Cultured Views. Of course, the snag now is that we have loads of places that we need to tell about that change of domain and there’s the issue of seeing about getting the pagerank moved over too.

Since she has a proper domain now, ’tis time to think about promoting it and we’re hoping to get going on that over the next couple of days.

Interestingly, one of our most successful website launches is our very new Whole Earth Guide. For reasons which totally escape me, our article on opening a bank account in America has proved to be an immediate success for the site and consequently we’ll be extending the expat banking section of the site over the coming months.