Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
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Our plans for the coming Winter
September 27th, 2006 | 
Author: The transition from “Summer Mode” when you’re completely full pretty much all the time, to “Winter Mode” when there’s almost always a room or two free happens very suddenly.
It’s important to keep on top of that transition as you can easily stock up on, say, butter only to find that you’re still sitting with the same box of butter a month later and have to throw it out when it reaches the expiry date. Non-perishables aren’t so bad really but we only finished off the soap we bought in mid-August last year almost exactly a year later.
Most noticeable perhaps are the French. We don’t get that many arriving ’til around July 15th when all of a sudden we’re pretty much full of them. They stop just as suddenly too around the Saturday nearest August 20th. Last year we turned away 12 separate couples on Saturday August 21st yet it was six weeks after that before we had any more French staying with us!
Just cutting out the almost daily restocking trips from the Summer frees up a substantial amount of time for us. No more do we spend over 7 hours a week just driving the sheets back and forth to the laundry, and that’s before you even consider that we don’t need to make up the rooms and tables every day. This year we’re actually fairly full for September with more in than we had July last year. However, we can get away with not “working” the rooms too hard and the longer stays typical of the Autumn make life considerably easier.
So what do we do with all this “spare time”?
Well, first off we need to catch up with administration that just doesn’t get done over the Summer. Then there’s the small matter of my upcoming Spanish exam which is coming up in less than 2 weeks. The combined effect of the Spanish plus the admin backlog means that we don’t really have free time ’til about mid-October.
At that point, we need to get going on running up our to-do list for the coming year as it’s very easy to find yourself in March with nothing done. We’ve not yet sat down and written it out in detail but broad objectives at the moment are:
– maintenance of the house side of things;
– review of the hotel rooms to see what needs doing;
– refresh of the hotel website (a never ending task);
– complete overhaul of the pyreneesthemes.com site: we started regrouping that last year but it needs to be organised more logically;
– integration of the villarenters.com and sales properties with ourgites.org and ourholidayrentalhomes.com;
– spot of marketing of the ourinns sites;
– tidy up of the foreignperspectives.com site.
Not to mention finishing off the Spanish books (though, surprisingly, I will be pretty close to doing that before the exam for a change). I’m also hoping to organise a residential for myself in Santiago next July. Next year will probably be different as I hope to be starting the English course in October which, hopefully, will be the final one of my BA (Hons) Modern Languages.
As well as the work-related things, we’re also hoping to get away for at least one short-break and hopefully more than that.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.A year in the vineyards: from first green shoots through harvest and back again
When we arrived here, I thought that it would be a nice idea to take a photograph of a single grape bush each week throughout the year. Well, I finally got around to starting on that project last February and the photos you see alongside this article depict the changing aspects of that particular plant.The thing that most struck us about this region during our first Winter was just how stark the landscape is during the Winter months. The top photo is how the landscapes looks from around December when the plants are prunned to about mid-April when the first shoots of green appear again.
From then, things really happen quite quickly here with the first appearance of the baby grapes in early May until the grapes are pretty much fully formed about mid-June. During this time, the farmers are busy in the fields getting their plants attached to the strings holding them up (the plants in this field are quite old so aren’t tied up).
Once into June, things generally slow down. The plants have all been sprayed and it’s the time for the work inside the winery to get underway in preparation for the harvest. Although you don’t see so much activity in the fields, things are far from quiet inside the various wineries.
In our area, the harvest gets underway towards the end of August (the date varies depending on the weather) and it’s pretty much over by mid-September. As you can see, the plants deteriorate pretty quickly after the harvest but the surroundings remain green well into November. In fact, garden plants and the like don’t start growing ’til it cools down a little so the burnt appearance of gardens is replaced by greenery (except in those gardens maintained by very keen gardeners).
Things change pretty slowly in the wine business with the local vines being replaced over a cycle of 40 years which means that you get about 36 years worth of wine from each plant as it takes four years before the first grapes appear. The bulk of grapes are still harvested by hand though this year European money has obviously arrived in big dollops as there are an awful lot of brand new grape picking machines. That does seem a little bit counterproductive in that those machines are generally used for the grapes producing lower quality wine which is the bulk of what makes up the growing lake of unsellable wine in Europe and, of course, doesn’t really help the unemployment statistics either.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
I’m not going back to school!
As expected, James would rather have stayed in the original class. Every day, of the week he wanted to go to school. In fact he could hardly wait to get there, at least until last Thursday when they moved him to the class with the 2 and 3 year olds.
Now he doesn’t want to go at all and every day he comes out crying which is no good. Nursery school is supposed to be a fun place to be, not somewhere you hate to go.
Why the change in him? Well, lots of reasons but mainly down to two: 1) all the activities revolve around those for 2/3 year olds and 2) they’ve sat him with an older mentally handicapped child who absolutely terrifies him.
We were expecting the first aspect to cause problems. After all, the toys and activities are, understandly, targetted at a much younger age group so few of them interest him and, more to the point, those of the original class were really attractive to him. Not only that, but whereas the kids in the first class were talking to him all day (and he was starting to understand what was said), the younger kids are only just learning to speak so the only person that talks to him now is the teacher. Consequently, we think that it will take him much, much longer to learn French in the new class. My guess is that it will be years rather than the months that it should have been.
The second aspect is typically French. James can’t speak French, the other child can’t speak, so they lump them together. In effect, it’s the nursery school version of CIPPA (see First day at school in France).
So how come they were expecting James to be speaking his first French words within 2 or 3 weeks? Well, it seems that all their previous experience of non-French speaking kids has been with Spanish (and, possibly, Catalan) speakers. Spanish is very similar to French and therefore it’s relatively easy for a Spanish speaking child to pick up French in a few weeks. English is a totally different language. It will probably take a few months before James starts coming out with the odd French word or phrase.
Anyway, we’re taking our own advice and going to the school on Monday to have him moved back into the proper class. If they won’t do that (and we don’t expect that they will), we’re changing schools as he’s definitely not going back to that class anymore. However, as Wendy points out, now that they’ve labelled him as as a problem, it’ll be harder to get him into another school and perhaps impossible.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Do the French actually believe that European law doesn’t apply in France?
Since we’ve applied for the European Residence Permit over two years ago and have yet to receive it, despite there being a legal obligation on the French authorities to provide it within 90 days, Wendy’s proposed that we use the Winter months to call their bluff.
To date, they have been coming out with phrases along the lines of “European law doesn’t apply in France” and “we don’t issue European Residence Permits” and consistently insisting on us providing the documentation required for them to issue a normal residence permit.
Now this causes a few little problems in that we’re not really here all that long and don’t have a number of key items that would be required to actually qualify for a normal residence permit. So for instance, we couldn’t provide proof that we had adequate resources in 2004, and Wendy still can’t provide proof of residence.
Anyway, as we’re usually not too busy over the Winter, Wendy suggested that we play along with them and see what they do when they conclude that she doesn’t qualify for a normal residence permit. As far as we’re aware, they should give her 90 days to leave the country (“or else”) although as we’ve been here over two years already they might reduce that somewhat. At any rate, we’re definitely going to ignore whatever time limit they might place on her stay here so I can’t see how they can avoid issuing a deportation order.
However, this will pose some difficulties for them in that she’s the parent of two European children who are, of course, here quite legally. Under European law, the Human Rights Convention, Rights of the Child, etc., they can’t legally separate a child from its parents, although perhaps they will argue they’re here legally under European law which doesn’t apply in France…. However, one of the children is French and I imagine that even French law would have something to say about deporting the parent of a 2 year old French child.
Since we’ve been here we’ve been approached by three different TV production units about filming us for one reason or another so when the deportation order arrives Wendy’s planning on calling them along with Australian TV, the local papers, etc. so I’m sure it would be “interesting” to see someone turning up and having to openly state for the news that European law didn’t apply in France and, no, they didn’t care about any rights that a 2 year old might have to be with his mother.
Where would they deport her to is also an interesting question. Should it be Turkey? After all, that was the last country which she was in legally, even if it was on holiday. What about the UK? Well, that’s a problem because as soon as she is pushed off the plane, she can quite legally come straight back to France. Australia? Well, it’s anyones’ guess.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.How many Inland Revenues are there?
The transition year from the tax system of one country to another can cause a number of peculiarities in payment of tax and social security as you’d expect.
For a start, the UK tax year runs from April to March whereas the French one is from January to December and both systems operate on the basis that you’re taxed by tax year. That’s relatively easy to resolve in practice as each country seems to apportion the tax according to when you made the move. What’s much more complex is the social security and healthcare arrangements.
We told the Inland Revenue in March 2004 that we were moving to France in April of that year. In fact, we told them twice in March as we wanted to register as overseas landlords (we’re renting out our UK property). Then we told them twice more in April that we had moved and indeed started getting letters directly to our French address. Snag is, that they continued to send letters to our UK address, my parents address and even my work address!
As you can imagine, we were quite busy for the first few months so it was June before we thought we’d have another go and told them yet again that we were here, twice more in fact. Finally on the seventh attempt they decided that we owed them over £500 as we’d not told them that we’d moved!
How come?
Well, the seven times that we told them we moved break down as follows:
1. in March and April 2004 we told our own Inland Revenue tax office;
2. in March and April 2004 we told the Inland Revenue “landlord abroad” people;
3. in June we told the Inland Revenue Child Benefit people; and
4. in June and July we told the Inland Revenue Tax Credit people.
In fact, we originally thought that telling just our own tax office was enough in that they use the same reference number for us as all the other Inland Revenue offices. So it should, but the problem is that the other offices were just lumped into Inland Revenue piecemeal within the last few years and integration between them is virtually zero at the moment. Even so, you’d think that telling our own offce twice was enough but in fact they still send letters to me at our previous address, my former work address and here, seemingly at random and it’s been over two years now since we made the move.
After yet another “pay up or else” notice in 2005, we wrote them a letter running through the sheer number of times we’d told them (and legally, we only needed to tell them once!). That at least resulted, eventually, in an apology and confirmation that we don’t owe them anything.
And yet, within the last week Wendy received another “pay up or else” letter. Funnilly enough the very same envelope contained a letter saying that she didn’t owe anything. Both signed by the same person!
Still, at least they’ve worked out that she’s living here. Where they sent my copy of the same letter (they always come in pairs) is anyones’ guess.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
