Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category
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Is neutrality ethical in wartime?
February 15th, 2007 | 
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Frenchless in France raised the issue of how ethical it really was for Switzerland to be neutral during the war.
I’ve always thought of it being a noble thing to be neutral but as she pointed out there is another side to that neutrality. Swizerland turned away many refugees that could have escaped persecution under the Nazi regime. Yes, there were many Swiss who did help a great many refugees but as a nation they rejected all of them. Aside from that there is the issue as to what would have happened had the war gone Hitler’s way. Would that neutrality have been respected had Switzerland found itself surrounded by Nazi occupied countries? I think not.
I’m sure that it is useful to have a neutral venue like Swizerland to hold peace talks and the like but it seems to me that it can come at a terrible price during wartime.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.When are restaurants open in France?
If you go by the signs, they are open from as early as 8am to as late as 11pm or so. However, if you try to order a meal it’s a very different story. The most common times are from about 11am to 10pm but in practice almost all such restaurants only serve food from noon to 1.30pm and from about 7.30pm to 9pm. Even the French fast-food chain Quick only serves its full menu a little bit outside the noon to 2pm period so you can’t even have a burger at 3pm if you wanted one unless you go to McDonalds.We still get caught out by those hours. A coffee-shop (salon du thé) opened recently in Estagel and we’ve been meaning to try it out for ages. We were running a little behind schedule on Sunday so thought that it would be a good time to get a sandwich or something from them as they had a sign saying that they opened from noon ’til 10pm. What happened when we turned up at 3pm? The waitress came out and said that they weren’t serving meals until the evening. The funny thing is that we were their only customers that day so the five staff will once again be sitting almost all day doing nothing. In fact, we’ve only ever seen the staff inside so perhaps we were their first ever customers.Perhaps we’ll be more lucky with the kebab shop but somehow I can’t see it.
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.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
New ventures in France
Almost the first thing that people do once they move to France is to look for something else to do. Many people come over with the thought that the income from a few gites will support them into their old age but, sadly, it’s not quite so simple as that. Self-catering just doesn’t seem to be capable of providing enough money to fully support a family and B&B can’t be totally relied on either.So, people branch out. Many of the gite people find that there’s quite a bit of spare time during the week and often start doing odd-jobs for other expats around the area. Others find the allure of the computer a great attraction and once they’ve polished up their website for the nth time they start considering other internet ventures.
Sadly we don’t have quite so much time to spare as the gite people but even so we’ve managed to clock up quite a few website sidelines for ourselves since we’ve been here. The first major one was our thriving B&B and gite listing sites which between them attract getting on for 1500 visitors per day, a number exceeding the number of visitors of many commercial listing sites.
Since then, we’ve separated off our regional guide into the ever expanding Pyrenees Themes and our transport pages into PerpignanFlightsAndCarHire. Of course readers of this column will know that Foreign Perspectives is also growing and branching out with our directory launched in January. Now that we’ve one directory on the go, we are making a start on another and hence the birth of the Whole Earth Directory recently.
Why bother though? Well, it turns out that some people are making a fair amount of money on some of these ventures and it looks quite likely that a friend of ours will be matching his real-world income with his Internet income within the next year or two.
So, if you do move to France, don’t expect your initial job to necessarily provide most of your total income once you’ve been here for a few years.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Free B&B / self-catering listings sites
Just before the peak season last year we thought that we’d try a mailshot to promote our listings sites and fired off a few hundred e-mails.We offer a listing broadly comparable to that from sites that charge around £100 and up and attract a reasonable number of bookings for those listed too which isn’t surprising as we get around 1500 visitors to the site per day at the moment, more than several sites charging around £50 get. However, the word “free” actually put people off and we even received a number of e-mails accusing of being behind some dasterdly and dishonest scheme.So we added an option of paying £29.
Net effect? Well, our take-up on the mailings this time is getting on for 5% (vs 1% on the trial). Funnily enough we haven’t had anyone actually pay the £29 which is OK because we’d prefer that they didn’t but it seems that putting a value on it is enough to persuade people to put their time into adding their information to our listings.
We’re going to stick with the current e-mail and £29 for the remainder of this batch of mailings but are thinking that perhaps we should put the notional charge up to £59 as persumably that would mean the site was twice as valuable and therefore might attract more people. That might sound slightly illogical but it appears to be the way people value a listing. Our notional competitors is a site which we had the chance to buy early last year but didn’t as we couldn’t really put a value on it. Interestingly at the moment, the new owner is firing out e-mails several times per month trumpeting that he has the fastest growing listings site around. That’s probably true, but unfortunately for him almost all of that growth is through his offer of 6 months free. We’ve just recently taken him up on it ourselves but only because it’s free and don’t expect to renew when the offer runs out which is probably the thinking of 99% of people that he’s picked up lately.
We had the benefit of seeing some of the figures behind the site in the course of our negotiations with the former owner and feel fairly confident that the new guy will go bankrupt if he gets a renewal rate from the free offer of anything below 30% or so yet the typical rate is more like 5% which equates to the people who actually get bookings from the site over the free period.
Compared to charging sites, ours naturally have a 100% renewal rate in that once people go on, their membership doesn’t expire. A typical small commercial site has a renewal rate of more like 70% so they have to replace the 30% that they lose each year with new entries. We’re actually growing faster than that and will probably finish this mailshot with around 300+ entries vs 100 or so this time last year.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.French food in France
Everyone in the world seems to have the impression that French food is the best in the world. But is it? Down in the south of France, the answer is very definitely “no”.The menu that just about all of the local restaurants offer is determined by whatever pre-prepared food they can buy in the local cash & carry. The net effect of this is that there is next to no variation between one restaurant and another as each one serves the same bland diet. In fact the only variation that you’ll find is in the typeface and layout of the menu itself because the cash & carry don’t preprint those.
The only exception to this seems to be the excellent Auberge du Cellier where Pierre will regale you with a trully excellent French meal. Ironically, his restaurant receives dreadful reviews although that is to your advantage as it means that it’s relatively easy to get a reservation. How come the bad reviews then? Simple really: Pierre concentrates on the food and largely ignores everything else which is just how it should be whereas the restaurants that receive the good reviews concentrate on everything else and don’t bother too much about the food.
So if you want to eat an excellent French meal, try any French restaurant outside France or the Auberge du Cellier down here.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
