Foreign Perspectives

Yes, it’s the time of year when all good bloggers write a time-delayed post to totally clog up the Internet…

What happened last year? Well, the world economy took a definite turn for the worst as y’all know. We were expecting that to hit us bad but what it did in practice was to change the nationality mix which we normally get over the summer from Brits/French to German/Dutch/Danish/French and generally lengthened the average stay which in turn bumped up the profitability. Somehow I fancy that the economic downturn won’t be quite so benign on the travel industry over the coming year.

I did what was supposedly the hardest course in the university as the final one for my modern language degree and found it to be the easiest one that I’ve yet done. The net effect of that is that I had a considerably easier finish to the degree than expected and picked up my BA (Hons) Modern Languages in December. For next year, I’ve already signed up for a course on Child Development which is notionally the first one in my psychology degree although I’m really only doing it to help with looking after the little guys.

Although the last five years have been great here for the kids, now that their school life is getting underway we’re finding that the French education system locally just isn’t up to dealing adequately with non-French children. As we’d expected from comments last year James isn’t doing at all well in the local French primary school.

For a whole bunch of reasons we find ourselves in the process of moving to a France/UK split for our lives at the moment whereby we’ll be in the UK September to June and in France July and August. That will let us get James’ and John’s education back on track and should help neutralise any sustained downturn in the economy too.

If nothing else, the coming year will be an “interesting” period to come for us.