Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘France’ Category

That probably seems like an odd question at first glance. How can a country with a fairly major economy be called backward?

Oh, I agree that it has such things as new technology, consumer rights, labour legislation and the like. Unfortunately the belief that anything outside France doesn’t really matter is quite widespread and this negates a large part of those aspects of an advanced economy.

Consider new technology. Yes, France has internet access across most of the country. However, few people use it. Take for example our experiences of the Summer of 2005. Up until then, no French person had every booked online with us but over a six week period during that Summer something like 80% of the French bookings were made online. That’s not a bad percentage as obviously not everyone will book online. Interestingly though, for nearly all of that 80% their booking with us was the first thing that they had ever bought online. They’d never booked a hotel, never reserved a flight, hadn’t even bought a book on Amazon before. This was quite a representative group too which made it even more unusual. So, yes, France is very much a backward nation in terms of internet use in comparison to the rest of the western world.

What about consumer rights? In any supermarket in the UK, you can take back a faulty product and have your money refunded. Try doing that in France sometime. The attitude in the shops seems to be an amalgam of the very worst of practices from decades ago elsewhere. Refuse to pay for a service not delivered? The first reaction is to take you to court because you have to pay for it anyway. Think the bill from your insurance company is too high this year and want to change to another one? Sorry, you had to cancel the insurance two months before we told you what it would cost (no, really, that’s true!). It’s very much a backward country in this area.

Perhaps you think that France was way ahead of the game in introducing chip & PIN technology for its debit cards? It was, 10 years ago. Snag is that as with other things they only considered France so the technology they used couldn’t be rolled out elsewhere. Net effect? France has had to change all it’s card machines to cope with the international chip & PIN standard. Result of this? Chaos. It made life so complicated that all the shops in one local tourist village have stopped accepting all cards.

Note that I said “debit cards” in that paragraph. That’s because, even now, France doesn’t have credit cards in the sense of the term as used elsewhere. Overdrafts don’t exist either. In fact, on the whole France is one of the most backward nations in terms of financial products in the western world.

Labour legislation is one area where France will argue that it’s more advanced than anyone. The problem is that the laws governing employment are so strict that the unemployment level is much higher than it needs to be. Small companies just can’t afford to employ people in the hope that the business will follow: they need to be sure that the business is there because sacking employees is such a long and costly affair.

So, in many respects, France is quite a backward looking country.

The world as seen by photojournalists is a very depressing place. Going by going by the photographs on show for Visa pour L’Image you’d think that half the world was at war, the other half was in the midst of revolutions and all children were malnourised.

Of course, that’s only natural. There’s not nearly so much interest in peaceful places and well-fed children from the point of view of photojournalism.

As usual, the evening show was fantastic. Over the first six days of the festival they go through two months of the year in photos, have several awards, and run a sequence of portfolios on a theme. Last night’s theme was revolution which covered the past revolutions from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Columbia and gave an excellent account of each in pictures (by and large the photos are allowed to stand on their own with no commentary). Separately from those they run about half a dozen separate portfolios on various themes from a review of the work of Joe Rosenthal (who took the famous photo of the marines putting up a flag on a hill in the Pacific) to one on the plight of child rape victims in South Africa (who are as young as THREE).

That’s the world as seen through the lenses of the photojournalists who were exhibiting their work over the past week in Perpignan.

Usually, we’re fairly full with journalists and photographers at this time of year but only had a few this year. Those that have attended before have commented about the lower numbers of people around the festival and even a cursory look at the numbers in the streets shows that there are a good deal fewer people around this year. On the whole, that’s not so much an indication that the festival is standing to wind down into obscurity but rather that there’s quite simply too much going on elsewhere in the world at the moment.

So if you want to see fantastic photographs, come to Perpignan before September 17th but be warned that, whilst brilliant, the vast majority of the images present a very depressing view of the world that we live in.

When the panic button was pressed in the UK in August, the effects were seen here the next day, but did it have any lasting effect?

The small shop in our local airport doesn’t sell much wine or honey these days as it mainly sold those whilst people were wandering around after they’d checked their luggage. The wineries are none too pleased as there was a considerable amount of wine taken home as hand-luggage before the scare. A pilot who was staying with us recently thought that he’d be able to get his little case of wine onboard by showing his pilots license ’til I reminded him that the guys that flew the planes into the twin towers also had a pilots license.

I was expecting at least some increased level of security on my flight from Barcelona to Santiago but if anything the security was much lower than I’d been expecting. Thanks to the wonders of online check-in I was never even asked if I’d any sharp objects in my luggage, if I’d packed it myself, etc. In fact, the only contact that I had with anyone prior to boarding the plane was when someone had a fairly cursory glance at my passport just before I walked out onto the tarmac.

What about the increased security in the UK airports though? Delays in flight arrivals are much more common as the increased security level means that minor discrepancies result in flights being held until the source is identified. Earlier in the week one of the flights was an hour late because someone had dropped their boarding card for instance. Is that crazy? No, because the effect of the error was that it looked like someone who should have been on board the flight actually wasn’t.

What doesn’t seem so sensible is the very arbitrary reduction in the maximum size of carryon luggage. Is it really a co-incidence that the size corresponds to that of a laptop bag? I doubt that very much. The other aspect is that it now takes much longer to collect luggage from flights as almost everyone has checked baggage these days (quite a nice little earner for the likes of Ryanair with their charge for checked luggage).

I also can’t see that the security staff will maintain their vigilance in picking out potential terrorists. In todays world what they will more than likely do is to stop and question anyone who looks Muslim. OK, I will grant that this tactic will presumably pick out a higher proportion of potential terrorists than just picking out people at random in that the threat is, in practical terms, originating from the Muslim world. However, it’s also going to alienate Muslims in general and it may well sway the views of some middle of the road Muslims towards the anti-west mind-set which isn’t in anyone’s interest.

To indicate how ridiculous this kind of method of picking out potential terrorists can be, consider the flights from Belfast to London 10 years ago. They were all met by a couple of officers from the Metropolitan police. The ONLY people that they stopped to question were men walking by themselves. I used to travel back and forth from Belfast to London quite frequently so was able to experiment with this. If I was travelling on my own, all that I needed to do to avoid being stopped was to walk alongside a woman. Any woman: I didn’t need to speak to her, or do anything other than walk alongside her. I wonder how long it will be before the security people start picking out their subjects for questioning on the basis of some equally silly thinking to “single guy alone = terrorists”?

Arnold

Wow, it’s been a long time since the last issue!

We’ve continued at about twice the level of occupancy as last year which is throwing up some shortcomings in the calculations as to how many sheets and towels we need to have. Well, mainly the problem is that we’ve been pretty much 100% full most weekends but with a different bunch of people on Saturday night than Friday night; we reckon that we need around 50% more sheets & towels than we actually have to properly cover it.

Surprisingly we’ve been on expedia for getting on for two months now and not got a single booking from them. Just as well really as there’s an awful lot of admin in keeping on top of all the bookings when we’re close to 100% occupancy seeing as we list something like 120% of our rooms. We’ve continued to get a reasonable number of bookings from our original reservation system listing of last July and are getting most of the new ones from a couple of places that looked like they’d be minor fill-in sites.

Just over 7000km on the car so far.

Some **** pinched our trailer last month. If nothing else, it pushed us into buying the new one that we were needing and it’s heaps better than the last one. Wendy reckons that there’s a fair to middling chance that we’ll see someone driving around with the old trailer at some stage as it had UK plates so they’re probably thinking that we were just tourists.

Just starting to recover from our wedding booking yesterday. We’ve an absolute mountain of food leftover and will probably have to do one of our “bin runs” today to get rid of some of it as even the restaurant size bins aren’t up to taking it all. Everything went really well though the 4am finish was a teensy bit late. After a very late breakfast we managed to get rid of the last of the overnighters around noon and only have two rooms occupied tonight. That could well change rapidly as we had to turn away 6 or 7 people who turned up last night.

We got an “interesting” call from the mairie on Thursday relating information which the prefecture (county council) had related to them…

One: I need a Titre de Séjour (work permit).

Two: Wendy will be getting deported in January unless she provides them with a long stay visa because otherwise she is here illegally.

As you may have gathered from “one”, the prefecture are over 20 years out of date with European law. Anyway, I asked how to apply for it. They want passport, proof of address, proof of business registration and proof of income. That also shows that they are a good 10 years out of date with French law: it’s illegal for them to require me to provide proof of income (just as well really as I can’t get any of the documents that they were looking for). They’re also a good while out of date with their own procedures as the week before they sent me a document saying that Titres de Séjour are no longer issued for European citizens as from last November. We’ll be off to the mairie tomorrow with our little printout from the European Commission (yet again) pointing all this out to them.

They’re none too familiar with the visa rules either. The French foreign ministry say that we never needed a visa for Wendy as she’s related to a European citizen (ie James) and can stay as long as she likes without a visa. No, it doesn’t matter that James is only two because they don’t ask the age of the European citizen on their forms.

Yet another one of those times when we need to sit down and consider the plus points of them knowing diddly about foreigners living here.

Weather-wise, I’ve had to wear the long trousers two days in a row now. Only for the mornings and evenings though as the “shorts weather” kicks in around 10am.

We’ve got a tentative booking for 22 adults, 3 kids and 4 babies for the December 31st and January 1st to include all meals. Our prices mustn’t be too far off as they’ve given us a big list of names and the rooms that they need. It’ll be ALL of the rooms, including three that we don’t normally count. I think we’ll need a holiday afterwards to recover! They’re more into the new year thing here than Christmas so we’ve not had any enquiries re Christmas, though that may change as we’re hoping to run a Christmas short break throughout December with a traditional British Christmas dinner/lunch (so, if you’re still fighting over the location of the Christmas lunch, you could always stir Mas Camps into the pot!).

Arnold