Foreign Perspectives

Then there’s the comments on the pages. You may have seen a few entries with comments but I’ve received a good deal more comments than that. Snag is that the others are basically spam. That’s actually a good thing though as it shows that the site has a decent profile on the internet (otherwise they’d not bother trying to get their links onto it). Strangely, the vast majority of spam comments target one particular page from early 2005. Thus far, I can’t really see anything particularly special about the page but if the spamming of it keeps up, I’ll have to see about adding something to it to see how they’re finding it. It isn’t a single spammer either as you might think.

Whilst the majority of people running B&B or self-catering places incorporate their blog into their main property site, we don’t. How come? Well, way back we did do that in a way as it was originally known as Mas Camps News. At that time, the bulk of the postings (which represent the early postings in Foreign Perspectives) were related to the property in some way but the later ones were more to do with our life in France and not really that specific to the property. Also, having the FP site separate gives us a lot more freedom in what we can write.

Still, aside from the current lack of feedback, it is quite an enjoyable activity.

The normal landries couldn’t cope with the volume that we needed and were quite expensive so we started looking for an industrial laundry or rather an Laverie Industriel which seemed likely to be the proper phrase for such a thing in that the little laundries were called laveries. We looked, and looked and looked without success. That didn’t really surprise us as the organisation of the French phone book is unbelieveably bad and the yellow pages can only be used to look up the phone numbers of places when you know which town or village they’re in. So we struggled on for a bit and the backlog of ironing built up.

Eventually, one of the local hotel owners called round to say “hi” and we found out where the laundry was. It’s not called a laverie industriel though, it’s called a blanchisserie as you can see from their truck.

One of the things that the laundry deliveries makes quite obvious is that France basically shuts down over the Winter. That changes the running order for laundry volume considerably as we don’t close therefore our little trolley is filled to the top unlike those of the larger hotels which, as you can see, are only about half full.

Anyway, be aware that even if you know the French word for a small version of something, it doesn’t always follow that you can work out the name for the larger version of the same thing.

In common with most things in France, the dead hand of government is evident here and shops are only allowed to have sales on set periods each year so the “Boxing Day sales” can’t start until January 10th and will end on February 17th (up to the 20th in some Departments). It is, of course, typically French to have overlly strict government regulation where much less is required and, of course, to ignore everything outside France. Amazon France seems to get away with ignoring the limitations on sale dates although I imagine that’s only because the French regulators haven’t gotten around to looking at the Internet site yet.

Unfortunately, that date means that each year the shops locally lose a considerable amount of business as many Spanish come here for their Dia de los tres Reyes (day of the three kings) on January 6th. In Spain, January 5th is effective Christmas Eve and the children receive their presents on the 6th (though globalisation means that they generally get presents on Christmas Day too these days).

One of the things that we did ourselves, in common with a considerable number of French who live around here, was to check out the pre-Christmas offers in Spain. Among several things that we bought there was the lovely little Nikon S10 (the updated version of the S4) for EUR 299 vs the £405 (about EUR 600) that Jessops in Belfast were asking for the outdated version. Of course, that means that we paid the slightly lower Spanish taxes rather than the French ones and naturally such practices mean that the French customs people create a massive backlog of cars at the border point with a view to illegally attempting to recover the French tax from people. In fact, the French government seem to be the only one on the continent that’s ignorant of the fact that no additional tax is payable on personal imports from another European country.

So, sorry if you were looking forward to some Boxing Day sales in France but at least you’ve not long to wait now.

For instance, if you go to most Christian countries in the world in the run-up to Christmas you’ll see little nativity scenes in the streets and shopping centres. Not so in France. Here the decorations are devoid of any religious symbolism. In fact, it seems to be entirely aimed at helping the shops sell more. OK, there’s a whole lot of marketing going on in other countries at this time too and perhaps the Christian message doesn’t get such a high profile as it should but at least in the other countries you do get reminders of the meaning of Christmas through the decorations in the shops and the nativity scenes put on by everyone.

Here in Catalonia that seems particularly odd because just across the border in the Spanish Catalunya all those symbols are in evidence everywhere as you can see from this nativity scene in one of the shopping centres.

That absence makes for a certain lack of Christmas spirit too. In other countries, the post office work flat out right up to midnight on Christmas Eve and don’t leave anything in the sorting centres if they can possibly avoid it. Here, they couldn’t care less and Christmas presents often aren’t delivered until a week or more after Christmas Day. As always, France get these things the wrong way around: in Spain we were given a calendar to say thank-you for choosing to eat in the Dong Xing restaurant in Girona yet in France the postal workers are quite insistent on you buying their calendars for a service which they clearly don’t follow through with (consequently Wendy’s decided that she will be equally insistent on not buying it next year).