Foreign Perspectives

Most booking sites send contact details for the guests when the booking is received but this one doesn’t and in fact all we get is an arrival date and a name.

When this couple arrived they started by complaining that I didn’t know the flight arrival times to Girona airport. Actually, we do. They’re from about 7am to midnight every day and we even check actual arrival times for guests as there have been considerable delays of late. Still, they didn’t accept my explanation that we’d not been told of their arrival time so added that to the complaint letter. We’re still at a bit of a loss as to how anyone would have told us though as they booked the flight separately from the accommodation so the place they booked us through didn’t know when they were arriving either.

But then it gets a bit surreal. They’d asked me after checking in about eating that night and I’d said that they’d have needed to eat in Spain as all French restaurants stop serving around 8.30pm and after that it’s McDonalds or nothing. Quite a big part of their complaint was that I didn’t give them any information about eating out that night. Of course, that’s because they couldn’t eat out that night as it was about 9.30pm by the time they arrived. However, as they’d not adjusted their watches they figured that it was only a little after 8pm.

It’s even worse than that though as they somehow managed to stay most of a week in France without adjusting their watches so had quite a run of difficulties over that time, most of which they seemed to be blaming on us. When they came down at 11am for breakfast, it had been cleared away (that being 10am for them, of course), when they went for lunch at 2pm (1pm for them), the restaurants were closed, etc. Actually, they STILL haven’t realised that they were running an hour behind the rest of France despite having to run for the plane as they arrived just as the checkin for their flight closed.

Slightly more comical was their complaint about the antiquated hairdryer being a bit smelly. In fact, it was the room heater that they were using and the smell was the burning of their own hair.

So when you get off a flight, do check what the local time is.

Obviously the bulk of those are in the Summer but you often get a sunny day in the middle of February. The difference from more northerly countries is that when it’s sunny here, it’s warm. So, even in February you can often get days when it’s t-shirt weather and I normally expect to be wearing shorts from April to October.

Oddly though the overall pattern of weather here is very similar to Northern Ireland. As you may know, for technical reasons, we watch BBC for the news and, of course, usually catch the weather forecast too. Now, you’d think that it would be very confusing to watch the NI weather forecast whilst living in the south of France but in practice it isn’t usually. You need to add around 10 degrees to the temperature from April to October and, if it’s cloudy, take off perhaps 10 degrees in February but, otherwise the weather is broadly similar.

How come? Well, we’re in a valley surrounded by mountains with the Pyrenees about an hour to the west and the Med about 30 minutes to the east so the overall geography is quite similar to that of Belfast which is in a valley surrounded by mountains (OK, big hills) and close to the sea.

Where you do get a significant difference is in places more than about an hours drive from the sea. Friends of ours who live near Mirepoix get quite serious Winter weather from around November to March for instance. In fact, that distance from the coast is one aspect that fells many a brit moving here. They assume that moving south means moving into warmer weather. It does, but only in the Summer and even then if you’re well inland you can expect very hot Summer weather but equally you can also expect very cold Winters too. We recently had one Welsh couple staying who were looking around here and around Mirepoix for a house to retire to but were obviously just assuming that being so far south, it wouldn’t really matter exactly where they chose to live as far as the weather went.

However, during the last year we happened to get an Auchan loyalty card and about a week ago received the French equivalent of a pre-approved credit card application from them. It said on the letter that all we needed to do to collect the card was to bring along the letter with the attached sample card to Auchan with proof of ID and bank details. Frankly, we didn’t believe that it would be that simple. Besides this being the land of documentation mountains, we had previously tried to open a savings account with Auchan and couldn’t provide them with enough documentation so we figured that there was no way they’d actually issue us with a credit card.

Anyway, as the offer expires in a week or so, yesterday we went to Auchan (similar to a really big Tesco) out of curiosity.

They took the letter, asked us how long we’d been living here, how long we’d been working here and in under 20 minutes we walked away with a credit card with a EUR 7500 limit on it!

Given the lack of credit referencing facilities in France, this seems incredibly stupid of them. After all, the only information that they could check was my passport, address (from the loyalty card letter), and bank details. They didn’t even ask anything about our income or even proof that we were working here for that matter. Also odd is that whilst we use Carrefour every week and have had their loyalty card for well over two years they haven’t come out with any invitation for their card yet we’ve had the Auchan loyalty card for under a year and only go there maybe once a month.

As it’s a French card, the facilities that it has are quite different from those on offer elsewhere in the world. We kicked off with a 10% discount voucher for our first trolleyload put through the checkout plus a EUR 15 gift card so we’re already ahead. As it’s an Auchan card, it also comes with a 10% discount on any Auchan products bought on Tuesdays. Naturally, it comes with a charge: EUR 8 per year from next year which is about typical for store cards issued here. Other odd features are that after 3 months we can get a EUR 300 bank transfer from the card to our bank account and after 6 months we can use it in the ATMs in Post Offices here. Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be a cash advance fee for that though obviously there are interest charges.

However, by far the biggest advantage of the card is that we can now use the checkouts reserved for Auchan cardholders. Thanks to the loyalty that the French have to their own banks, these particular checkouts rarely have any queue at all.

Our next challenge is to get it upgraded to a proper Visa/Mastercard.

Even people who’ve been living abroad for decades and plan to live out their days here still consider “home” as being where-ever they came from.

Is that realistic though? After all, someone who’d moved to France even as recently as 10 years ago would find difficulty in discussing a number of topics with the people “back home”. Even aside from the changes in the political landscape over that time, there would be sigificant changes in the road layouts and even new words that they wouldn’t know.

Take Belfast as an example. In just three years there has been massive construction in the city centre and in another year or so the centre will look very different than it did when I left. The road layout hasn’t changed much but there’s a lot of work ongoing with various roads and it won’t be long before it does change a lot. Even the aiport has changed its name and the signs say George Best Airport rather than Belfast City Airport.

So how long before “home” isn’t home? I don’t know that there’s a set time but after as little as four or five years, it would certainly take a period of settling in to move “back home”.

James went on his first school excursion last Friday.

Not a massive one, of course, since he’s in the nursery school. As we’re in a wine growing area it was to a vineyard where they gathered some grapes and went through the whole process of wine production (except the fermentation, naturally). Thoroughly enjoyed by all and each child was sent home with a bottle of the grape juice that was produced on the day.

One difference from the equivalent schools in the UK is that small excursions such as this one seem to be very common in the schools here with an average of around one a month throughout the year. As in most things in France, they usually ask for a “contribution” towards the cost of these but aren’t terribly insistent on actually getting the money.

As we’re in a country area, this excusion even qualified as news and the photo on the left is from the Independant which managed to run up a 1/4 page article on it in todays paper.