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January in the south of France: house hunting season in France
January 14th, 2007 | 
Author: At the start of the month it’s the French that generally fill the hotels up with their reveillon celebrations. Prices for these can reach as high as EUR 80 for very modest affairs which is mainly down to the French not trusting places with lower prices to do a réveillon meal.The following week, it’s the turn of the Spanish with their Day of the Kings holiday, the equivalent of Christmas for everyone else. In Spain, there are celebrations all over the country and on the day itself (January 6th) Spain is closed so there is quite an influx of Spanish shoppers in France which reverses the normal traffic.
And then usually it’s all quiet until March which makes this period one of the best for house hunters in France.
House hunters in France have been rather thin on the ground over the last year but the numbers seem to be going up with a vengeance as we move into 2007 for a combination of reasons.
Adding to the existing four daily flights from Paris to Perpignan by AirFrance and the Ryanair flight from Stansted, over the last year both FlyBE and BMIBaby have started flying from Birmingham, Manchester and Southampton daily which has obviously increased the number of prospective house hunters considerably and indeed one Cornish couple have just left us after an initial scouting trip and they expect to be back later on in the year for a full scale house hunting visit. Not only that but the Paris to Barcelona highway had the final bottleneck eliminated with the completion of the bridge at Millau just over a year ago and work is progressing quickly on the improvements to the train lines to allow full speed TGV access to Perpignan. So it’s considerably more accessible than it has been but if you’re considering a house hunting trip, do it soon as the prices, whilst still fairly low, are starting to catch up with other more accessible parts of southern France.
Aside from the cheap flights and accommodation at this time of year for house hunters it’s almost perfect because the villages and towns are at their normal level of activity. In many cases, people buy property in coastal resorts or even some cute inland villages having only seen them in the Summer and find that what seemed like a perfect location is almost completely dead even just a little out of season never mind in the Autumn or Winter. Not a problem if you’re only looking for a Summer house in France but many people buy places with a view to retiring here in due course.
So check out the house hunting in January: definitely amongst the best times of the year to see the place as it really is most of the year.
This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Visiting France in the Winter
Most people have their holiday in France during the Summer but in many ways that’s one of the worst times to come.For a start, France largely closes down in August so you can often find places closed. Those that are open are very crowded as the majority of the French take their holidays from mid-July to the penultimate week in August so you’ll often find hotels full during that period and, of course, the prices are at their peak too.
The Winter in France is quite different. Prices are lower and most places are open so you won’t have any problem getting somewhere to stay and, naturally, the flight prices are a good deal lower. One thing that does close is the hotels, usually from October to March but there remains a lot of availability as the number of tourists drops substantially. One that doesn’t is the Auberge Mas Camps which is open all year and has an ideal location between the mountains and the sea.
Isn’t it cold? In the central, northern and mountain areas, yes it is. In the south it’s cold in the evenings but it’s frequently t-shirt weather during the day and indeed I’m writing this in a t-shirt whilst thinking about getting the shorts out, right in the middle of January! Don’t go by what the locals are wearing as you often see them wearing heavy Winter clothing when the temperatures are in the high 20s.
You’ll also find that the villages and towns are a good deal more French in the Winter too. The absence of tourists makes quite a difference and, especially if you’re considering a purchase here, it’s definitely worth a visit over the Winter period.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.French laundry service
We realised quite quickly in our first Summer here was that we couldn’t cope with doing the laundry once we’d more than 2 or 3 rooms occupied, a problem made worse by the relatively high proportion of overnighters that we had that first year.
The normal landries couldn’t cope with the volume that we needed and were quite expensive so we started looking for an industrial laundry or rather an Laverie Industriel which seemed likely to be the proper phrase for such a thing in that the little laundries were called laveries. We looked, and looked and looked without success. That didn’t really surprise us as the organisation of the French phone book is unbelieveably bad and the yellow pages can only be used to look up the phone numbers of places when you know which town or village they’re in. So we struggled on for a bit and the backlog of ironing built up.
Eventually, one of the local hotel owners called round to say “hi” and we found out where the laundry was. It’s not called a laverie industriel though, it’s called a blanchisserie as you can see from their truck.
One of the things that the laundry deliveries makes quite obvious is that France basically shuts down over the Winter. That changes the running order for laundry volume considerably as we don’t close therefore our little trolley is filled to the top unlike those of the larger hotels which, as you can see, are only about half full.
Anyway, be aware that even if you know the French word for a small version of something, it doesn’t always follow that you can work out the name for the larger version of the same thing.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Boxing Day sales in France
Actually, there aren’t any Boxing Day sales in France.
In common with most things in France, the dead hand of government is evident here and shops are only allowed to have sales on set periods each year so the “Boxing Day sales” can’t start until January 10th and will end on February 17th (up to the 20th in some Departments). It is, of course, typically French to have overlly strict government regulation where much less is required and, of course, to ignore everything outside France. Amazon France seems to get away with ignoring the limitations on sale dates although I imagine that’s only because the French regulators haven’t gotten around to looking at the Internet site yet.
Unfortunately, that date means that each year the shops locally lose a considerable amount of business as many Spanish come here for their Dia de los tres Reyes (day of the three kings) on January 6th. In Spain, January 5th is effective Christmas Eve and the children receive their presents on the 6th (though globalisation means that they generally get presents on Christmas Day too these days).
One of the things that we did ourselves, in common with a considerable number of French who live around here, was to check out the pre-Christmas offers in Spain. Among several things that we bought there was the lovely little Nikon S10 (the updated version of the S4) for EUR 299 vs the £405 (about EUR 600) that Jessops in Belfast were asking for the outdated version. Of course, that means that we paid the slightly lower Spanish taxes rather than the French ones and naturally such practices mean that the French customs people create a massive backlog of cars at the border point with a view to illegally attempting to recover the French tax from people. In fact, the French government seem to be the only one on the continent that’s ignorant of the fact that no additional tax is payable on personal imports from another European country.
So, sorry if you were looking forward to some Boxing Day sales in France but at least you’ve not long to wait now.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Christmas decorations and the Christmas spirit in France
It’s not the things that they do, it’s the things that they don’t do that makes France a little peculiar.
For instance, if you go to most Christian countries in the world in the run-up to Christmas you’ll see little nativity scenes in the streets and shopping centres. Not so in France. Here the decorations are devoid of any religious symbolism. In fact, it seems to be entirely aimed at helping the shops sell more. OK, there’s a whole lot of marketing going on in other countries at this time too and perhaps the Christian message doesn’t get such a high profile as it should but at least in the other countries you do get reminders of the meaning of Christmas through the decorations in the shops and the nativity scenes put on by everyone.
Here in Catalonia that seems particularly odd because just across the border in the Spanish Catalunya all those symbols are in evidence everywhere as you can see from this nativity scene in one of the shopping centres.
That absence makes for a certain lack of Christmas spirit too. In other countries, the post office work flat out right up to midnight on Christmas Eve and don’t leave anything in the sorting centres if they can possibly avoid it. Here, they couldn’t care less and Christmas presents often aren’t delivered until a week or more after Christmas Day. As always, France get these things the wrong way around: in Spain we were given a calendar to say thank-you for choosing to eat in the Dong Xing restaurant in Girona yet in France the postal workers are quite insistent on you buying their calendars for a service which they clearly don’t follow through with (consequently Wendy’s decided that she will be equally insistent on not buying it next year).
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
