Foreign Perspectives

The “Disney World effect” isn’t necessarily down to Disney World but rather a consequence of how the Americans see “abroad” through the eyes of the Disney parks, films, and occasional travel programmes (not forgetting that with only two weeks vacation time, the number of travel shows on American TV is correspondingly less than it is in Europe). Think of how a European would see America if their only experience was through films: everyone must eat McDonalds, you’re bound to get mugged and/or killed,…. Of course, we know that America isn’t really like that because we’ve been there or we know people who have been there and mainly they’ll have been there for a month long holiday, or indeed several of them.

So, just as in the Disney World version of France, everyone speaks english and accepts dollars. Except, of course, they don’t. Granted, I’m sure that there are very few Americans who arrive in France and expect everyone to accept dollars, but we’ve come across a number who were taken in by the American Express Travellers Check Card and had considerably difficulty in getting money whilst here. In America, just about everyone accepts Amex, which definitely isn’t the case around Europe. In fact, we’ve come across a number of Americans who were quite surprised to find that their credit and debit cards would work abroad and thought that they’d to get a special international use one.

Naturally, the two-week holiday time has a really major affect on how they go on vacation. For a start, all their holidays are effectively what would be called short-breaks in Europe and there’s a much greater concentration on packaged holidays which are in turn mainly a series of city-breaks. It’s therefore quite rare to see any Americans outside the cities and equally rare to see any travelling around outside an organised tour (DIY tours naturally take a little longer). This is another aspect of the Disney World effect where it’s possible to visit Europe in a day: it ain’t realistically possible to visit Europe in less than a month but you can visit individual countries inside the two-week period.

Then there are a whole bunch of assumptions that aren’t so obviously wrong if you’ve not travelled abroad before (and, for the most part, Americans don’t get further than Canada or Mexico). We beefed up our France FAQ in an attempt to address this but I’m sure that many things still need to be added. For instance, in the UK (which isn’t just England) and Ireland, they drive on the left, European electricity is 220V (not 110V) and uses a variety of plugs, American standard phone plugs don’t fit any European phone sockets,… One that we’d not thought about before yesterday was that air conditioning isn’t standard in hotels even in the south of France and even in those hotels that do have it, it’s usually not switched on outside the Summer period.

Apologies to those Americans who are well-travelled but the majority aren’t.

For the most part they don’t, of course. A few weeks ago we had Halloween here. For a start, it’s a public holiday in France (November 1st is All Saints Day) and they haven’t gotten the hang of Trick or Treat and instead wander round the streets demanding bon-bons (sweets) from the locals.

Obviously they don’t mark November 5th as being anything special but the next special day was Remembrance Day which “obviously” is an international thing, isn’t it?

Well, sort-of. Yet again it is a public holiday here but they don’t seem to have the minutes silence at 11am. Neither do they have poppies which I’d always assumed were the standard symbol around Europe, if not the world although Wendy tells me that it’s a sprig of rosemary in Australia. I’ve not seen the equivalent of either in France though they do take the day quite seriously with small ceremonies in every village in France as you can see.

The other thing that we found, which is not advertised anywhere outside the Port Aventura park, is that there is very, very little for children under 1.2m high even though they charge almost full price for admission (EUR 35 for adults, EUR 28 for 4 to 11 year olds at the time of writing; under 4 are free). In fact, the height limitations had no overall consistency with rides wanting anything from 1m, 1.1m, 1.2m and 1.3m plus others with age limitations (usually 5+) and others with both. We found that something like 90% of the rides required a height of 1.2m so if your child is over 4 but not yet 1.2m then it’s probably not worth going. Most of the small-child-friendly rides seem to be in the “Wild West” area of the park which tends to be the last area that you reach if you follow the main route round yet there is no indication of that.

We were expecting to be in the Port Aventura park until well into the evening, yet despite advertising night admission in a number of places we found that the park closed very abruptly at 7pm. In fact, it started closing up considerably before that with various shops and the like finishing up more like 6pm and by 6.30pm the security people were noticeably sweeping people towards the entrance. At the time we were there, sunset was around 7pm or so and the mosquitoes were out in force by then. Perhaps you think that they can’t do anything about that? Well, Disney World is built right in the middle of a swamp which ordinarily would mean millions of mosquitoes yet there are none so it is definitely possible to do something. As it was, we are covered in bites.

Anyway, if you’re going to Port Aventura, March to June or September to October should be fine and leave before the mosquitoes arrive around dusk.

The effect of this is that there are many more people coming here with kids and, for the most part, they haven’t considered what to do about the languages that their children will speak and particularly about how their English should or could be developed.

That wedding was interesting as we saw a fair cross-section of children too with most of those having lived here from about 3 to 7 years with ages from 2 to about 20. The effect of living here was very noticeable in how they spoke English. For example, a 17 year old who has been here for about 5 years spoke English well but with perhaps 10-20% of his words spoken with a French accent. A 13 year old who had been here around the same time didn’t speak English nearly so well and it was easier to speak to her in French. The worst was a 10 year old who could barely speak English.

Some would say that wasn’t a bad thing. After all, the children are living in France so they should be speaking French, shouldn’t they? Of course, they should be speaking French but the point is that they should be developing their English too. To give your child the chance to be bilingual is a wonderful thing but the vast majority of people living here seem to be throwing that opportunity away by accident or design.

How did all this come about? Well, the standard advice for people moving here is to get their French up to speed as soon as possible. The way to do that is to immerse yourself in the language so you should have French TV, read French papers, speak French as much as possible and continue with your French lessons. If you do that, you should be fairly fluent quite quickly and if you keep it up you’ll continue to improve your French over time.

The snag is that it’s a total disaster for your kids.

Children pick up quite a bit of vocabulary from watching TV programmes. If you only have French TV, then they’ll not pick up the majority of “kiddies English” that they need to speak to other English speaking kids. Likewise for childrens’ magazines of course. What about the likes of story books? Stick to reading the French ones and they’ll never learn the nursery rhymes etc. and naturallly their English vocabulary will have even more gaps. That’s even before you consider that, unless you send them to a bilingual school, they’ll only learn the French words for the various school subjects and, of course, won’t learn about British history. Actually, learning history from a French aspect might mess them up even more eg they’ll be taught that Nelson was the enemy.

The effect is much more pronounced with younger children and the parents of one ten year old that we know are finding it more and more difficult to communicate with her. They’ve only been here five years yet are now at the point where her English isn’t really good enough to speak to them and their French isn’t good enough to speak to her. That’s how bad it can get.

So what should you do? If you want your children to be completely bilingual it’s not an easy task but there are a number of relatively easy things that you can do which will help. Only use English at home, have UK TV and read to them from English books (you can order these from amazon.co.uk). Going a bit further, you can get subscriptions to English magazines for them. To go further, you need to send them to a bilingual school (I doubt that it would be viable to teach them the various subjects in English yourself).

Barcelona extends for quite a bit and it’s very easy to get lost in the city. Net effect is that, despite numerous visits, our navigation within the city is dreadful so we were very surprised when we managed to arrive in the Rambla area with no wrong turns along the way.

We started off with lunch in El Corte Ingles (a Spanish version of Marks & Spencer). The view from their top-floor restaurant is spectacular as you can see. Unfortunately the prices for the less than brilliant food is equally spectacular. The portions are very large though.

Our next stop was the Rambla, of which more in a later posting.

One thing that I was particularly looking for was a large but carryable Spanish/English dictionary. The snag is that Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia and so a lot of the books shops are Catalan, so lots of Catalan/English and Catalan/Spanish dictionaries but it was quite a while before we found a bookshop with Spanish books. Although, you’d think that the selection of Spanish/English dictionaries would be as large in Spain as it is in the UK, in fact it’s much smaller and the dictionaries are, on the whole, more expensive for comparable quality. The sole exception to this, at least in the bookshop that I looked in, was the Collins dictionary which is pretty much the same price (allowing for the difference in currency) and even adds a version of the dictionary on CD which isn’t available in the version of the book on sale in the UK. They change the name of the dictionary so the full Collins dictionary is called Universal in Spain, the Concise edition is called Master but otherwise appears to be identical.

Normally in Spain, car park prices are pretty low but that’s definitely not the case in central Barcelona where the prices are comparable to those in London so do check the prices if you’re planning on parking all day.

Barcelona is spread out quite a bit with a number of separate centres, but if you’re thinking of a short break to Barcelona, you’d not go far wrong basing yourself in the Rambla area.