Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Boris over at France This Way writing about the upcoming French elections reminds me that I’m registered to vote here and perhaps I should find out some more about the people who I might be asked to vote for.

Although registered to vote here, I can only vote in the local and European elections, not the national ones that Boris talks about. Still, it’s interesting to read his take on the policies being proposed by the leading candidates.

Sarkozy definitely sounds like the candidate that France needs. Unfortunately, going by past performance he would more than likely back down from his policies in the face of certain public demonstrations against reductions in benefits. Does that mean that France needs Royal with her policies of increasing benefits and just borrowing more and more to pay for it? Boris suggests that getting him elected and driving France to the abyss would get someone strong enough to pull France out of the hole next time around but I don’t think it would: France would just go sailing over the abyss with spiralling unemployment as it became too expensive to employ people and too difficult to entice people to work anyway when the benefits were so high.

I for one would be quite happy to remain unemployed until retirement age if I was getting paid 90% of what I previously earned. After all, that would free me up from the expenses of going to work each day and would almost certainly mean that I’d get more net “pay” than I was before. Why would anyone be daft enough to look for work under those circumstances?

In fact, the only fly in the ointment in this scenario is that France quite clearly doesn’t have enough money to pay for the pensions that it’s contracted to pay for. At present, there doesn’t appear to be any option other than “pay as you go” schemes in France. These are wonderful inventions which mean that as soon as the scheme is introduced all those presently retired get a full pension which is paid for by those currently working. Unfortunately, since they aren’t funded the whole system depends on having a reasonable number of people working for each person retired.

When old age pensions were first introduced in the UK way back in 1908 for over 70s, the average life expectancy was 50 ie most people died before they received their pension. Now though, with life expectancy over 70, most people do receive their pension. So whilst in 1908 it was no problem paying the pensions in that most people didn’t live long enough to get them, now we find taxes increasing more and more to cover pension payments and yet still there is no “money in the pot” to pay for them.

So what will happen in France? I think that regardless of who is elected, social contributions and benefits will remain high because no French polician is prepared to stand up against the certain protests against reducing benefits. So, the country will have to borrow more. That’s not a sustainable strategy and sooner or later the lenders will call a halt. When they do, it will more than likely be catastrophic for France with widespread and substantial cuts in benefits and taxes called for accompanied by privatisation of just about everything I suspect.

I’m sure that there are lots of opinions on this one, but for me the most useful item of luggage that I have at the moment is something that I received as a Christmas present many years ago: a set of luggage scales.

Having these means that I’m never one of those people standing at the Ryanair checkin desk arguing that there’s no difference to the plane if there’s 9kg in carryon and 16kg in checked luggage or 10kg in carryon and 15kg in checked because I have already moved that 1kg from checked to carryon before I get to the desk. In fact with these scales we were able to manage 85kg and no excess fees on a recent trip (2 adults, 2 children can carry up to 100kg on Ryanair, not counting the pram). Without them, we’d have been sure to be arguing that we should be able to share the checked luggage allowance.

You might think that you will be able to check the weight using one of the unused checkin desks. However, in newer desks the scales are switched off when they aren’t being used and, of course, the staff won’t let you weigh luggage in advance at a desk with no queue as that will clearly reduce the income received through excess weight charges.

It’s definitely worth purchasing a set if you’ve not got them already as they’ll almost certainly save their cost on your first trip. Now, all you have to do is to hunt them out as I’ve not seen them for sale for quite a while.

Of course, their disappearance coinciding with the arrival of more aggressive excess charging is just a co-incidence. Isn’t it?  

Once you have your website properly set up on the Internet and listed in the search engines, you can expect to start receiving scam bookings. In fact, if you aren’t receiving them it’s an indication that you haven’t got your site listed properly.There are many variations on the scam theme these days but they have a number of characteristics in common, namely that the spelling & grammar are bad, the e-mail address is one of the free yahoo or hotmail ones and that the booking is for an usually large number of rooms. However, we’ve also received genuine bookings that meet all three criteria so sometimes you need to check a little further before you reject such a booking.Other common themes are that the main source of them is Nigeria, they’re usually from a “Christian organisation” and that they want you to bill them extra and buy mobile phones or rent cars with the excess. Sometimes, they will even quote a credit card number which works but you’ll find that in due course the card turns out to be stolen and the bank take the money charged off you.

Whilst old-timers at the holiday rental business will tell you that they can spot these straight away, when I ran a genuine example past them they rejected that too because it was for 10 rooms, it was from janine79@yahoo.com and the grammar was bad yet we banked a fair amount of money from this one last year. It did take a couple of e-mails and a search for the acting company they quoted to convince me that it was real though.

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.

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.