Foreign Perspectives

Actually, I dispair of the local cafes in general. One of them refuses to serve foreigners unless the waitress hears them speaking French and another is openly hostile towards them yet both are increasingly dependent on the tourist trade.

So if you need dependable 24/7 service, ’tis best to look somewhere else than France. I do hope that the expected flood of brits still to come here think that it’s still cute when their electricity conks out at 5pm on Friday and there’s no service ’til Monday morning, even from “24/7” places.

Most booking sites send contact details for the guests when the booking is received but this one doesn’t and in fact all we get is an arrival date and a name.

When this couple arrived they started by complaining that I didn’t know the flight arrival times to Girona airport. Actually, we do. They’re from about 7am to midnight every day and we even check actual arrival times for guests as there have been considerable delays of late. Still, they didn’t accept my explanation that we’d not been told of their arrival time so added that to the complaint letter. We’re still at a bit of a loss as to how anyone would have told us though as they booked the flight separately from the accommodation so the place they booked us through didn’t know when they were arriving either.

But then it gets a bit surreal. They’d asked me after checking in about eating that night and I’d said that they’d have needed to eat in Spain as all French restaurants stop serving around 8.30pm and after that it’s McDonalds or nothing. Quite a big part of their complaint was that I didn’t give them any information about eating out that night. Of course, that’s because they couldn’t eat out that night as it was about 9.30pm by the time they arrived. However, as they’d not adjusted their watches they figured that it was only a little after 8pm.

It’s even worse than that though as they somehow managed to stay most of a week in France without adjusting their watches so had quite a run of difficulties over that time, most of which they seemed to be blaming on us. When they came down at 11am for breakfast, it had been cleared away (that being 10am for them, of course), when they went for lunch at 2pm (1pm for them), the restaurants were closed, etc. Actually, they STILL haven’t realised that they were running an hour behind the rest of France despite having to run for the plane as they arrived just as the checkin for their flight closed.

Slightly more comical was their complaint about the antiquated hairdryer being a bit smelly. In fact, it was the room heater that they were using and the smell was the burning of their own hair.

So when you get off a flight, do check what the local time is.

It’s important to keep on top of that transition as you can easily stock up on, say, butter only to find that you’re still sitting with the same box of butter a month later and have to throw it out when it reaches the expiry date. Non-perishables aren’t so bad really but we only finished off the soap we bought in mid-August last year almost exactly a year later.

Most noticeable perhaps are the French. We don’t get that many arriving ’til around July 15th when all of a sudden we’re pretty much full of them. They stop just as suddenly too around the Saturday nearest August 20th. Last year we turned away 12 separate couples on Saturday August 21st yet it was six weeks after that before we had any more French staying with us!

Just cutting out the almost daily restocking trips from the Summer frees up a substantial amount of time for us. No more do we spend over 7 hours a week just driving the sheets back and forth to the laundry, and that’s before you even consider that we don’t need to make up the rooms and tables every day. This year we’re actually fairly full for September with more in than we had July last year. However, we can get away with not “working” the rooms too hard and the longer stays typical of the Autumn make life considerably easier.

So what do we do with all this “spare time”?

Well, first off we need to catch up with administration that just doesn’t get done over the Summer. Then there’s the small matter of my upcoming Spanish exam which is coming up in less than 2 weeks. The combined effect of the Spanish plus the admin backlog means that we don’t really have free time ’til about mid-October.

At that point, we need to get going on running up our to-do list for the coming year as it’s very easy to find yourself in March with nothing done. We’ve not yet sat down and written it out in detail but broad objectives at the moment are:

– maintenance of the house side of things;

– review of the hotel rooms to see what needs doing;

– refresh of the hotel website (a never ending task);

– complete overhaul of the pyreneesthemes.com site: we started regrouping that last year but it needs to be organised more logically;

– integration of the villarenters.com and sales properties with ourgites.org and ourholidayrentalhomes.com;

– spot of marketing of the ourinns sites;

– tidy up of the foreignperspectives.com site.

Not to mention finishing off the Spanish books (though, surprisingly, I will be pretty close to doing that before the exam for a change). I’m also hoping to organise a residential for myself in Santiago next July. Next year will probably be different as I hope to be starting the English course in October which, hopefully, will be the final one of my BA (Hons) Modern Languages.

As well as the work-related things, we’re also hoping to get away for at least one short-break and hopefully more than that.