Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

That’s the question we’re asking everyone that comes here at the moment.

A few weeks ago, Poland unexpectedly moved into the starting grid when a Polish family assured us that they do a “proper” Christmas with Christmas trees and carols.

The Belgium family with us tonight have moved that country up a few notches though. Belgium is a slightly peculiar amalgam of France and Holland and therefore takes traditions from both sides. Net effect? They do Christmas in the way us northern Europeans/Anglosaxons expect and also do New Year as the French do.

Germany is still in the running though we’ve not had any Germans staying for a while so we’ve had to start researching the options ourselves.

How to get there is the next issue to think about. Pricing-wise there’d be little in it between driving to Belgium or southern Germany as compared to flying there but either would take us around 12 hours of driving ie two days and probably around EUR 100 each for petrol and tolls.

We’re just beginning to get our heads above water and wondering how we did (no time for that in mid-Summer!).

June was down a little as could be expected as I was off in Belfast for almost all of it which meant that we needed to leave our availability a little bit more loose than we would do normally ie we couldn’t list more rooms than we actually have as we normally do over the Summer. If you’re doing that, you really need to be on top of the bookings as they come in and close down availability on systems as you fill up.

July was also down a little as I wasn’t back ’til the end of the first week so same problem as June. Also we had the first “visa booking” of the year: 20 days in a row and cancelled just a few days in advance. As a consequence of that, we’ve tightened up considerably on potential “visa bookings”. When we get one, we give them two options: 1) pay the full balance and we help you get the visa or 2) we cancel the booking and inform the French embassy. We’re currently sitting with two of these; we fully expect the South African to cancel in that she’s made no acknowledgement of any of our e-mails. Hard to say about the guy from Barbados as he has been very keen to pay the balance.

We’d fewer Visa pour l’Image bookings than expected but then we were quite full over that week with other people so didn’t really have the availability for any more people.

So far, it’s very hard to say how the rest of the year will turn out. We’ve nothing for November or December which isn’t unusual but the bookings for October are also fairly low for this time of year.

One of the visible signs of China opening up a little bit is that there are a growing number of expats living there now.

Feve is an American living who is living in Chengdu and is searching for Chengdu, China  Blogs with a view to establishing a little network of them. I think it might take a “while” though as there’s only the one listed on the expat list over at Ministry of Propaganda and it’s been running for quite a while.

Other welcome signs of the opening up are that we’ve even picked up a listing for apartments in Shanghai.

Perhaps I should be cheeky enough and ask him to include me on his blogroll or cheekier still and ask for a little article on Chengdu for our Whole Earth Guide?

Anyway, Feve’s blog looks like it will be quite an interesting one to follow as they settle into life in China.

One of the stranger aspects of us living here is the different way that James & John refer to things.

As we’re in France, they aren’t picking up english from kids at school as they’d normally do but rather picking it up from home and the TV. This means that it’s possible for us to pick out where they’ve learnt a word. So, by and large, they “speak cooking” with an Australian accent and they “speak computer” with a Belfast accent.

It’s also interesting that whilst both James & John refer to “Granda” and “Nanny here”, James who used to be looked after by my parents has “Granda’s Nanny”, John who was born here has “Nanny at the airport” as that’s usually the last place that he sees her.

We think that it was because Wendy was looking after James a lot more when he was younger than I was that he has developed a largely Australian accent but with us both being around much more equally since John was born he has a much more pronounced Belfast accent. You’d have thought that since James has been here over 60% of his life now that his accent would have become more balanced but it hasn’t done, or at least not yet so I guess that it’s the first couple of years that are the most important in terms of accent

This is how the Canigou mountain is supposed to look from around late October through to around April ie lots of snow all over it.

I’d planned to take a photo of it with the flowering fruit trees in the foreground and snow covered mountain in the background for over a year now. Quite hard to do actually as there are usually only a few weeks in which you can take it each year and, of course, you can’t really depend on the weather being perfect for your photos.

In fact, it wasn’t possible to take this year simply because it hasn’t been snow covered since March last year. Ever since then, it’s been pretty much constantly t-shirt weather where we are and the montain has only been mainly snow covered for stretches of a few days at a time over the whole of that period.

Funnily enough, whilst it’s been t-shirt weather all that time, now that we’re heading into Summer, we’re getting the winds that we normally associate with February (when we didn’t get them) along with the rain and generally dull conditions that are more a Winter-time thing here.

Is the freakish weather an aspect of global warming? It’s much too early to say that of course but one thing that people forget is that a “global warming” doesn’t necessarily mean that everywhere gets warmer and in fact many places would experience unusual weather conditions due to the changing weather patterns that a global warming would bring.