Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

You may have seen news of the extensive fires in the Gallician countryside over the last couple of weeks.

Naturally, in the summer fire breaks out in numerous areas of Spain but a considerable number of these were set deliberately. I was staying at the University of Santiago and the fires came within about 1km of the university campus which is rather too close for comfort. Think of the heat and smoke coming from a log fire in your home and magnify that 1000 fold and you’ll get some idea of the problems that this causes. Surprisingly though, some homes on the hill opposite the university seemed to be virtually intact despite having been surrounded by the intense forest fires. I wonder though if they were quite so unscathed as they appeared to be when seen from a distance?

The fires were largely spent by the time I arrived but by that time the population had begun to hold a series of protest rallies. Interestingly for me was that they felt very much like the protest rallies that you see now and again in Northern Ireland so I guess this is another sign of the celtic heritage of the region. Even the slogans were quite similar with “Ulster says No” translating to “Nunca Mais” (Never Again) and, of course, the use of bagpipes. All that was absent was the police in riot gear!

Arnold

James started his education in France today in a nice little country school not far from us.

Frankly, we were quite amazed how easy it was to get him accepted at the school. Back in June we found out that the enrollment for the school closed on June 23rd so it was a bit of a rush to get to the school to find out what they needed from us to enrol him there. A birth certificate, of course, then they wanted a copy of his insurance (all of EUR 10 a year), medical certificate and, as we don’t live in the schools commune, a letter from our mayor to say that he was OK about James going to their school. Very surprisingly, they didn’t consider farming him out to some school for non-French speakers which is the usual tactic in this area.

So far, he seems very happy with the school and couldn’t wait to get back after lunch.

We’re told that he’ll be speaking his first French words in a few weeks. You’d think that he would grow up bilingual but that’s not usually the case unless you put the kids into a bilingual school. Just before we bought this place we met someone who would “obviously” be bilingual: he was born in France around 20 years ago to English parents. In fact, although he had a perfect english accent he wasn’t fluent in english. How come? Well, 20 odd years ago there was no satellite TV, no Amazon and few brits in that particular area of France. Net effect was that the only english he heard was that of his parents so his accent is perfect but when he reached maybe 12 or 13 he started to go out with his friends more than being in with his parents. So, his english is that of a 12 or 13 year old. For instance, although he was working as an estate agent, he didn’t know the names for parts of houses because, of course, those are words that you learn as an adult. All his specialist vocabulary would be French too as it’s hardly likely that his parents would have spoken to him about geography or physics. These days it’s much easier as the children can watch UK TV, read books in english and even get magazines but you do need to make a point of developing their english if you want them to be truly bilingual.

One other thing to watch if you’re moving here with kids is that once they hit 16 they won’t get any education unless they’re either fluent (and “able to get by” doesn’t count) or you move to an area with a relatively large expat population. What happens in areas like this is that at 16 they are sent to CIPPA which is a France-wide organisation with the objective of getting kids prepared to go into the lycée (ie age 17-18 school). Now, that’s fine if you’re in an area where the main reason that kids aren’t able to go into the lycée is that they don’t speak French because they’ll teach them French. However, in our area CIPPA is almost exclusively aimed at getting children from French speaking countries with low education standards up to the required standard and they don’t teach French: in fact in our area it appear to be impossible to get into a school after age 16 unless you speak fluent French and there is nowhere for such kids to actually learn French either. Funnily enough, everyone assumes that there is “some place” that will teach your child French at age 16 but having spent almost three years being passed from one such organisation to another around here, I think I can safely say that there isn’t such a place.

Actually, we started off pretty sure that there was no problem getting kids into school regardless of their age. You never see any problems like that on the “moving to France” TV programmes for sure but I guess that arriving at enrollment with a TV crew in tow helps remove any problems that there might be. However, in “real life”, when you start off at a school their first reaction is to send you off to the CIO to have your educational level tested. Fair enough, but CIO can’t actually test a child that doesn’t speak French so they send you on to another outfit (can’t remember the initials). The other guys just send you straight to CIPPA who, as noted above, are worse than useless in this area if you don’t speak French. CIPPA in turn immediately send you back to have tests of your ability done which, of course, the CIO can’t do if you don’t speak French but, eventually, CIPPA do accept you. Not that there’s much point as we found that they just brand non-French speakers as being lazy and lacking in enthousiasm when they can’t answer question papers in French and hand back a blank answer sheet at the end of the day. So, if you’re unlucky enough to be directed to CIPPA in an area with few non-French living there, you may as well give up any hope of your child receiving an education in France.

Arnold

The rolling green fields that you see as the plane comes in to land are the first indication that this isn’t the Spain of the costas.

The coastline is quite different from that of the southern costas. Whereas Marbella is nothing like the small port that it grew out of, the port of A Coruna is still very much the centre of activities of the town. Yes, developments have more or less swamped the small old town but they are developments for a thriving town and not the wall to wall hotels and apartments of one of the costa ports.

Towns like Santiago do get their fair share of tourists but even there the tourists are confined to quite small sections of the town. Move outside those and you’ll find a real town.

So, no, this isn’t the tourist Spain that you probably already know. It’s an altogether different place.

It’s different in other respects too. For one thing, this is one of the areas of Spain that was never conquered by the Arabs so along with the other northern coastal provinces is one of those that has always been Spain.

The impact of that is most evident in the culture of the area. It has a very celtic undertone to it all with bagpipes (albeit without tartan designs) being almost as commonplace as they are in Edinburgh. In fact, in many respects Santiago feels like a smaller and warmer version of Edinburgh. Strangely though, the local language (Gallego/Gallician) isn’t a celtic based one.

Would you like to go there though? If you’re just aiming to lay on the beach and get a tan, probably not as all that green scenery is indicative of a good deal of rainfall. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a part of Spain with more culture than you’ll find in Marbella and less people than you find in Seville then it’s a good choice.

If I’ve convinced you then there are a growing number of transport options available to you with flights to Santiago and A Coruna in Galicia and others further east in Asturias plus the port of Santander just a few hours drive further on. These are all bookable via the links at the right. There aren’t massive quantities of tourist accommodation but you’ll find sufficient if you book ahead.

Arnold

Is the Camino de Santiago a real pilgrimage these days? I had the chance to visit the city numerous times over the course of last week and the area in and around the cathedral was constantly thronged with people and even more so on Sunday.

Does that mean that they are real’ pilgrims though? Well, I suspect that the majority are, at least in part, for when we went outside the central part of the old town we found virtually no tourists at all. In fact in the new town I don’t think that there were any. That in itself is quite unusual as you would normally see some tourist overspill’ into the non-touristy sections of any town.

In tourist terms, there seems to be next to nothing touristy’ about the place on the whole. Yes, it certainly has the ancient building around the centre, but it doesn’t have the tourist shops in anything like the numbers that you’d expect given the number of visitors which implies that a fair number are pilgrims rather than tourists. It certainly does have loads of restaurants but even pilgrims have to eat so that’s not something that says tourist’. And at night, it is very lively with street theatre all around the central section and spilling out into the park but, again, even pilgrims do things at night.

However, I wouldn’t say that all of the pilgrims are quite in the mould of pilgrims of old. The pilgrim who looked haggard from his/her walk along the camino was very rare and most arrived in pretty good shape with modern day backpacks in place of the cloth bag or whatever passed for the equivalent in days of old. Considerable numbers come on bicycles too as evidenced by the number of bikes being packed in the airport. Actually the airport is something of an indication of pilgrimage activity with a massive list of destinations for such a small airport.

One rather major thing that makes life as a pilgrim somewhat easier these days is that you now only have to walk 100km to get your Compostela (200km on a bicycle) which seems like nothing in comparison to those who walked goodness knows how many miles down France and across Spain to get it not so long ago. Let’s face it: 100km is nothing. Even I would consider doing that!

Overall, I’d say that there is, if not a majority, then a sizeable minority of proper’ pilgrims. It’s just that these days, the route isn’t nearly so hard going as it was in olden days. Things have changed considerably when you see credit card’ listed as one of the essential items to take on your pilgrimage.

Arnold

Happy Halloween!

October was relatively quiet on the hotel front ’til this weekend which is a holiday in both France & Spain so we were completely full from Friday to Sunday night.

I’ve been tidying up the various websites that we run and improving their search rankings. The combination of improvements on the main hotel page (www.mascamps.com) has given us a 10 fold increase in the number of hits so far. The equivalent changes are in the works for www.ourinns.org which is already moving up the rankings and we’re making about $50 a month now on the advertising on it and the related www.chambre-dhote.org (in French) and the self-catering equivalent, www.ourgites.org .

Separately from those developments, I thought I’d see if we could more directly make a few bob on the transport arrangements people make and registered www.perpignanflightsandcarhire.com which is starting to get a sensible search engine ranking though it’s got a long way to go. If you’re booking any travel yourself, you’ll find the cheapest car hire in the Perpignan area (no, reallY: I checked them all) and, I think, in Europe, worldwide flights on discount and normal airlines, the Heathrow & Stansted express tickets and even ferries. We’ve already made about half the start-up costs of this in commissions which is pretty good going I think.

More as somewhere to hang our affiliate links than anything else at present, we’ve also got www.personallychosen.com which has quite an assortment of things on it. All the above travel things but also some financial links and even La Senza. In due course, we’re planning to use it to sell some of the photos that we’ve taken for the website as prints and for a few other items that people have asked us about. Basically, it’s intended to be our main non-mascamps website. If you buy any stuff online, let me know where from and I’ll see if we can get a link for it (if you ask nicely, I will probably split the commission with you).

Started experimenting again with e-bay which is a dead cheap way to advertise. Costs just 15p for 10 days which has picked up around 40 views on average although no direct sales. We’re not that bothered about the direct sales this tiME: last year we had one, slightly lossmaking, direct sale but pulled in getting on for EUR 1000 in indirect bookings over the following 9 months attracted by our ebay ads.