Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Bookings’ Category

Whilst it’s great to have WordPress available free, what’s not so hot is that now and again you hit little bugs in the software that you can’t do a whole lot about.

For example, at the moment, I’m continually getting “MySQL server has gone away” which is a time-out thing. There is a fix for it but unfortunately not for the version of WordPress that I’m running at the moment so I’m going to have to upgrade to a newer version soonish.

Ordinarily, I’d have upgraded right away but I want to move the blog to a new hosting service too and I’m having problems with the blogs that I’ve already moved so I’m going to try and live with that “server has gone away” message for a while yet as I don’t want to do the upgrade on the old hosting service.

As usual when there’s a Spanish holiday, we were pretty much completely full over the last couple of days and yet nobody took a breakfast!

In some ways that suits us as it gives us a bit of a break from the need to get up very early to do the breakfasts.

But why don’t they take them though? They certainly take breakfasts in hotels in Spain so why don’t they take them in France? Although it’s hard to give a definitive answer I suspect that it has a lot to do with the absolutely pathetic excuse for a breakfast that you get in most French establishments although funnily enough the price is the same or even higher than for breakfasts in the Spanish equivalent and in Spain you get a very full breakfast for that money.

So, it’s probably down to the French not really “doing” breakfast as a proper meal.

In common with all Spanish holidays, we’re completely full with Spanish guests this evening thanks to the Spanish holidays on December 6th (Constitution Day) and December 8th (Immaculate Conception).

Or, rather, we’re full of people from Spain but going by those that arrived last night not all of them will be Spanish. Thanks to the rising nationalism in Catalonia, the Spanish language isn’t actually taught in the schools just south of the border and it’s becoming increasingly common to have “Spanish” guests arrive who can’t speak Spanish. Unfortunately, the emphasis on Catalan means that it’s the only language that they can speak truly fluently and we’ve been reduced to hand signals on a couple of occasions in the recent past.

In fact, the introduction of Catalan only schools from around 1983 looks like it will have the effect of cutting off Catalona not only from Spain but from the rest of the world too. That date of introduction means that the first generation of workers who only speak Catalan have been coming into the workforce over the last couple of years and with that it’s becoming more and more difficult to deal with shop assistants who are, of course, at the younger end of the workforce.

Although, it’s nice to see that a local language is on the rise, the concentration on Catalán to the exclusion of other languages seems likely merely to alienate all the non-Catalans. Whereas elsewhere in Spain it’s expected that the locals will speak English, in fact most of the younger guests that we’ve had over recent months couldn’t speak English well and for that matter couldn’t speak French well and Spanish not at all.

You might think that we’d see long term guests more than we see overnighters but in fact it’s the reverse that’s generally true.

There are two different reasons for this.

Firstly, the long term guests who come out of season are generally staying with us because they’re visiting relatives who live nearby. This means that they basically disappear right after breakfast and don’t come back ’til quite late in the evening.

The long term guests that come in the Summer season are quite different. In general, they have researched the area very well and know exactly what they want to see and how long it will take them to get from here to where they want to be each day. We don’t see much of them because they never need to ask us what there is to see locally nor do they need to ask directions.

In fact, it’s usually those staying two or three nights that we see the most. They’re generally not quite so knowledgeable about the region and neither know exactly what there is to see nor where they would go to see it.

Between one thing another we didn’t get around to seeing the rally at all yesterday.

The morning went in a bit of a rush to get the rooms sorted out for all the race officials who were staying with us last night. Since they generally book the whole building, we were using a few rooms that hadn’t been used for quite a while which usually turns up a few minor problems that have arisen since their last use. That in turn meant a rush out for a few bits & pieces which took up the afternoon and then we’d to sort out the couple of things that turned up.

They weren’t using our neighbours as a pitstop this year so we didn’t even see the cars there!

Anyway, we’re hoping to get away this morning to see them on the next leg which is just up the road from us.