Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Simple really. Just about every single “moving to France/Spain/wherever” TV programme has three things in common: 1) they don’t speak the language and 2) they meet the mayor on the first day and 3) they never ever have any problems with the French administration (or indeed, seem to do any!).

Well, I’m fluent and Wendy’s not too bad at the French either so that blows us out for a start (it doesn’t make for quite so good TV if the protaganists can understand each other).

Although we own the only sizeable accommodation in the area (the next down from us has one apartment in total), we’ve yet to see the mayor. Bit odd as one of his priorties is to attract more tourists to the area and where are they going to stay when they get here?

And, as you know, we’ve had a considerable amount of involvement with the French administration over the last lot of months.

Oh, speaking of administration, we’ve actually got our drinks license now. Seems that we didn’t have to wait for the notaries to get their act together and find the relevant documents: all we had to do was to go along to the mairie and say that we’d like to transfer the license. Well, not quite all: it is France, after all. Nearly though, for the only thing we’d to do extra was to go along to the customs & excise people (although that did take three weeks as they are only in residence in Rivesaltes one afternoon a week and had moved anyway) and hand over the form that the mairie had given us: no additional documentation!! I for one was totally staggered to find that we didn’t need anything else. Supposedly the local gendarme should have done an investigation of us first but that’s the mairie’s responsibility and I think we’ve raised so many “issues” with them already that they weren’t going to rock the boat.

Anyway, moving here is quite different when you don’t have a TV crew in tow.

We’ve been building up our winter to-do list over the last couple of weeks and are gradually working our way through it though there are more things getting added on than taken off at the moment.

One thing that’s now gone is our dutyfree shopping trip. We did the trial run on Friday only to find that the various groups of DOE equivalents are digging up large stretches of the road and, seemingly, all of Andorra’s capital. Net effect is that it took us more than twice the time to get there and that’s even with us taking the two tunnel shortcuts. We definitely want to do some kind of Christmas/December event but it’s back to the drawing board at the moment. We’ve left the listing on our own site at www.mascamps.com/packages/en.htm for the moment but there’s just too much driving time at the moment.

More from the end of year booking too. They’ve discussed it all amongst themselves and the net effect is that the offering on December 31st will be a whole lot easier for us to do although we’re still quite concerned about the lack of time to clear up before the breakfast the next morning.

To cheer you all up a bit, we’ve actually had to put on the long trousers, proper shoes and a jumper today. Mainly due to the wind though as without it, we’re still in t-shirt weather which is some going this far into November.

At the third attempt, we managed to sell a two night break on ebay. Just £35 including breakfast which is less than we’d like but since it’s more than zero we’re still ahead. We’ve added another version for £29 without breakfast so we’ll see how that goes. What we’d really like to do is to add multiple rooms but our rating on ebay isn’t high enough to do that yet (and probably won’t be for several months at this rate). Still, in principle a reasonable way to shift rooms out of season.

We had a bit of a rush of blood to the head yesterday and thought that we’d run up our first little tour with activitybreaks.com . It’s a dutyfree Christmas shopping trip with two nights here and a day in Andorra for shopping, all for the bargain price of EUR 356 for two. There is a LOT of information that you need to enter onto their site for a tour so after we’d finished we thought it looked a little light and we’re off to Andorra later this week to do a trial run and research some options whilst we’re there. We also need something for the final day as finishing it after breakfast makes it look rather empty. At the moment, we’re thinking of adding either a mini-version of our proposed wine tour (ie just the one vineyard) or possibly a tour of Perpignan (there’s a Catalan Christmas festival on in December). Any thoughts folks?

Remember the prefecture saying that we can’t have a Carte de Séjour without a long stay visa? Well, ignoring the problem seems to have made that requirement go away as we got a letter from the office of migration (OMI) this morning saying that Wendy can have her CDS on payment of the fiscal stamp of ‚€220. They also made an appointment for her to have a medical test next week. Unfortunately, both of those requirements breach European law so we’ve a letter off to tell them that. Still, at least them accepting that she’s entitled to a CDS is a step forward.

I’m sure you’ll all have gathered that this was a bit of a busy week!

Last Sunday we were doing quite nicely with our first couple of days of having the place to ourselves since sometime in July. Wendy had a bit of a rough night of it and after breakfast announced that we should maybe make our way to the clinic. That was at 10.23. Not in a rush or anything: loads of time to get shaved and all that. We were driving along at a nice pace ’til we passed Estagel (the little village next to us) when I started getting strangled and got told to call the clinic right away. As it turned out, that wouldn’t have been a great move and instead I went a whole lot faster (well, John, we now have proof that there aren’t any speed cameras along this bit of road!).

We pulled into the clinic car park just about 11am when she announced that her waters had broken. I thought that was an appropriate time & place to call the maternity folk. They’re not really geared up to people calling them from the car park so by the time they’d wandered down, Wendy had hobbled in and was almost at the stairs. Don’t know why, but we never did find out how to work the lift so she’d to head on up the stairs which is far from easy in her state.

We figured it was best not to “ring & wait” at the door of the maternity unit and headed straight for the “salles de naissance”. I’m sure that the Ulster Hospital would have been telling us that it was probably just a urinary infection as they did with James. No time for any messing around wiring her up as by then John was well on the way and we found out that our visit to the anaesthetist was a waste of time as things were too far on to do a spinal or epidural (they don’t do “gas & air” over here).

Anyway, cutting out the gory bits, John Philip Anthony Stewart made his appearance at 11:08. Yeah, it was that fast.

We did the checking in bit afterwards when the first “little” problem arose. Seems that thanks to my (soon to be former) accountant, I was the only one with any health insurance or at least the only one on the Carte Vitale (health card). So, they wanted me to go to health place and sort that first thing on Monday.

Monday, Orasanté (the health place for self-employed folk round here) said that they couldn’t cover her as the (soon to be former) accountant had registered the business on May 1st, not in February as he was told to do, and because Wendy had her “declaration of pregnancy” dated April 26, nothing doing. However, the CPAM would do it.

Off to the CPAM. No, you’re not covered. What about my e111? Off for behind the scenes discussions for 30 minutes. Nope, you need to get an e111 dating from before you are pregnant. Can’t. The UK only issues them from “today”. What about the european freedom of movement legislation which allows for pre-existing conditions? Off for another 30 minutes. We’ll have to refer it to our international people. Anyway, a very good opportunity to practice my French.

Walk out to find that by now the car had been towed as a 5 minute appointment had now run to over an hour and a half. The pile of bills for the (soon to be former) accountant is mounting up… so far EUR 50 not being paid for the registration which is wrong in every key aspect, EUR 100 for reconnection of the phones because he hadn’t done the registration on time and now EUR 130 to retrieve the car. That’s not even counting EUR 200 of lost bookings because we couldn’t accept the French equivalent of accomodation vouchers due to his mistakes in the registration and who knows how much for the week that the phones were disconnected.

Phone call… CPAM international. Yes, you are covered. By Orasanté. Doesn’t matter that the (soon to be former) accountant hadn’t registered you before April 26. You were pregnant before you got to France and covered for 42 days before the birth therefore it’s Orasanté’s problem. Nope, I don’t know what happens if you arrive pregnant and drop junior before 42 days elapse.

Tuesday went in attempting to retrieve the car which is far from simple as everyone “knows” that it’s in the place behind the train station. It’s not even close to the station.

Wednesday we finally managed to get Wendy and John home. Didn’t manage to register him though which was becoming a larger and larger problem (you “must” do it within three days of the birth in France and by now we were on the fourth day). The place was closed by the time we got there so we finally managed to get the registration done it was day five (ie Thursday). We’d quite an argument when we left the clinic without paying. All maternity cases are paid 100% in France and the admin people in the clinic know that but simply won’t accept it without having an “attestation” to that effect. Attestations take at least 2 weeks to produce yet they wanted it that day (and they know that they can’t be had in less than 2 weeks). This was the best opportunity yet that I’ve had to practice arguing in French. You just can’t put a price on lessons like that!

Had another go at the health registration on Thursday with John’s paperwork. Seems that the attestation will be here in a few days because we applied for it about two weeks ago. However, it won’t list Wendy as being 100% cover as they said on Monday that they (Orasanté) weren’t the place to cover us (see above).

Anyway, more anon on the above saga as we’ve to call into the clinic on Monday…

There’s a big photojournalism and photoreportage festival on in Perpignan up to the 12th of September so just about every hotel in the place is full of Reuters, BBC, etc. We’ve started to fill up ourselves as a consequence of that (we’d have been full except that we only really got onto the booking systems during July). For next year, we’re planning on running a package deal for the thing but at the moment we have the usual problem that we don’t know why people are here ’til they come. Anyway, we’re currently ferrying two guys from the Times of India (one of the world’s largest circulation English papers) back & forth, we’d one of the award winners in a few days ago and there’s a few more groups coming over the rest of the week.

Remember the saga of getting a British passport for James? Actually, quite laugably, he can get one from Paris no problem. Well, I need somebody to sign the forms to say that the photo is a “true and fair likeness” but that’s the only problem. We start John’s saga here…. fired off an e-mail to the embassy in Paris a while back who said that I need to check with the Home Office how I go about proving paternity as per the new immigration & nationality legislation; they promptly referred me back to Paris, who, of course, have jursdiction. Another e-mail early in the week came back to say that he isn’t British and needs to be “registered” first. Nope, ’tain’t right as the new (as of 2002) legislation (very, very specifically the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 part 1 section 50 9(C)). They’ve not replied yet.

Oh…. could someone check if any of our Foreign Office colleagues know someone in the Paris embassy who could speed this along a bit for me? We’re hoping to get a little holiday soon-ish and would be needing a passport for him.

American Express are weird. Just before we left I thought that it would be a good time to finally get around to applying for one as I figured that if need be I could just transfer the account over here (although in practice it looks like hardly anyone takes it here). I fired off the application for their blue card (I’m too stingy to pay the money for their charge cards) and it came back “no”. Never thought any more about it until I got the maildrop from William at the end of July when I found buried in that a “60 second” application for their gold card which was addressed to me at my parents address (which I’ve not been living in for years now). Well, less than 60 seconds later, I’d filled it in for the laugh and off it went. Just got the latest maildrop of credit cards that I’ve not gotten around to changing the address of and what should I find but my brand new gold American Express card! So you apply filling in your proper address and they don’t give you it. You fill in an address from years ago and they send you an even better card. Weird. Still not very useful in France but it does look very pretty as the whole card is a gold hologram. Oh, and I’ve even got a free sportsbag for applying too!

I think that it’s safe to say that next week is very unlikely to be as eventful as this one!

Bonsoir encore:

I’ve missed the 12th but it’s the 14th today so Estagel will be coming alive with parades, riots, etc. shortly. Well, a parade and more than likely everyone will be too pissed to riot as there’s free plonk once the parade is over.

Had our first bunch of total **** arrive last week. Got a call from England early in the week to reserve rooms for two families who were driving down to a villa in Spain for a couple of weeks. We’re around the half-way mark between Calais and Alicante so we’ve had a few similar groups before. Anyway, these **** booked rooms, evening meals and breakfasts for eight: with such relatively large numbers, you need to buy a fair bit extra of the fresh food, of course. They were stopping off around Tours which is something like seven hours non-stop drive to here and, as they were intending to set off around 0830, we figured that it would be at least 7pm before they turned up: well, you’ve gotta have some rest stops, don’t you? Not these ****. Nope, they turned up around 5pm (ie pretty knackered due to no stopping). They left again at 5.20. The **** had decided that they may as well drive on to Alicante so our bin had a big heap of stuff added to it right away.

Anyway, net effect is that we decided that it’s time we started taking deposits from people so there’s now a little button on the website to let folk pay me money as of yesterday on the english page. Haven’t worked out how to do it in French yet.

Actually, they are the only English folk that we’ve had stopping (OK, only for 20 mins). Our marketing is bound to be better in English than it is in French, yet something like 2/3rds of the people staying so far have been French (sadly, they’ve only spent about 1/2 of the total money: have to see about increasing their expenditure).

Techie question time again: Remember the ADSL wireless connection? Well, it turns out that there were three problems with it. For a start, it’s pretty hot here and the gear was running somewhat higher than the recommended operating temperature: adding a fan has cooled everything down nicely. Second, the wireless link was hanging after an hour or so: applying the Netgear patch has sorted that one. However, it now has a peculiar problem: it tries to dial all the time but only connects when I leave the normal phone off the hook (just discovered that last night). This seems to be 100% consistent. Is there anything I can do, or is it a problem for France Telecom?

Weddings are hard work!

We were pretty much completely full last Friday and Saturday with a wedding party. Not really all that profitable as the previous owner had went and negotiated a rate about 25% below our high season rate and, of course, they all eat out. Somehow, we managed to get almost all of the rooms reset by Sunday lunchtime which was just as well as a bunch of folk stopped that night… we made almost as much with the four Danes as we did for the whole wedding party (and with a lot less hassle too).

It was actually raining today. Thought I’d say that, just to cheer you lot up. Of course, it’s sunny as I write this and seriously warm too.

Techy question: now that the ADSL connection appears to have been sorted out, I’m using that a whole more of the time. I have a France Telecom ADSL modem connected to my trusty Netgear wireless router and I access this from the Toshiba Tecra, wireless. However, after about an hour of surfing or whatever the wireless link goes down. It starts working again (for a shorter period usually) if I switch the router off and on again. Is it just the router overheating or something? It’s usually around the 30C mark here. Would just firing up a baby fan for the router sort it out?

Nearly forgot… it looks like we’ll be installing airconditioning much sooner than expected. Seems that there’s a scam (sorry, scheme) that lets you install it at a monthly cost around the same as the heating would normally cost you and the French government send you a cheque for 15% of the total amount in February of the year following installation. Doesn’t appear to be a downside. It’s one of those heatpump type thingy’s (ie it works like a really big fridge).

In case you’ve missed it, William G is on his way to becoming a French resident. I was supposed to meet him in his new house last Thursday but with the wedding and a couple of additional last minute arrivals I just couldn’t make it (hence lack of several cases of wine, David). Anyway, the whole family are heading over on July 14th. Could the last person to leave IT please switch off the servers?…