Foreign Perspectives

As usual, when we want to get away early the last guests didn’t check out until the very last minute so we didn’t set off for Sitges ’til noon. That worked out pretty well as with a break for lunch at the nice little café on the border we pulled into the hotel around 4pm.

Sitges is a very lively resort in the Summer months but is a good deal quieter once you get into Autumn. Although the majority of the shops were still open, the town had a feeling of closing down for the Winter about it with a number of the more upmarket shops already closed up and the much lower number of tourists limited the extent of the promenading pretty much exclusively to the central section of the beachfront.

I was quite disappointed in the old town as it’s almost entirely taken over by various government offices and has a very “restored” feeling about it.

There’s a fantastic Australian-owned restaurant called the Beach House which Wendy wanted to try out but I guess it may be one of those that closes up for the Winter as we couldn’t find it.

As we went a little bit out of season, the selection of accommodation was massive of course. We ended up staying in a very nice four star aparthotel which is normally EUR 400 odd yet only cost us EUR 70.

So, quite a nice town to walk round, but you’d need to go closer to the main holiday season to make the most of it I think.

On the other hand, there are many like us who have a French car, pay UK tax, etc. but who would still probably consider home as being somewhere in the UK.

Even the authorities seem a little confused by the question. Almost three years after moving here, the French have continued to send tax bills to our former home in the UK whilst the same office simultaneously sends other tax bills to us here. The UK tax people are even worse if that’s possible with Inland Revenue regularly sending mail to here, our old house in the UK, my former employers in the UK and even my parents house sometimes! Where they consider is home for me is anyones guess.

My driving license is expiring shortly and I thought that perhaps I’d have to swap it for a French one because the UK form states quite clearly on the front page that you can’t get a UK driving license unless you are resident in the UK. However, they go on to define in detail what they mean by someone being resident in the UK and I meet all their requirements!

In fact in most cases it is still much easier for me to prove that I live in the UK than to prove that I live in France, to the extent that not only have we been able to get credit cards but even a mortgage! Interestingly, despite telling everyone official that we live in France, we have yet to receive any request to pay the Taxe d’Habitation so it would seem that officially we don’t really live in France after all.

So it would appear that, officially at least, “home” for us is actually still the UK.

PS We’re off to Spain for a short break this afternoon so no more FPs ’til at least Wednesday.

Or rather, it SHOULD be a commercial loan.

The problem is that for it to be a commercial loan rather than a personal mortgage, the business would have needed to be created no later than the day that I signed to buy the place. After all, if the business didn’t exist before then, it wouldn’t be possible to make the loan to it, would it?

Seems obvious, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t obvious to either our former accountants nor the bank. Net effect being that the accountants didn’t register the business ’til about two months after we’d bought the hotel and therefore the loan is a personal one and we can’t count the loan repayments as business expenses.

Actually, we can but only if I rent the hotel to the business so I’ve started billing myself rent each month.

This is a bit of a nuisance as I need to write out a cheque from the business account, deposit that, wait a week for it to clear then write out a cheque to the business account. So, I thought I’d ask the bank if we could set up a standing order to the personal account and move the direct debit for the loan to the personal account.

As it’s France, that requires a meeting with our counsellor so three weeks went by as I was off in the UK and he was on holiday.

Nope. He won’t do it. He insists that it’s a commercial loan and that can’t be paid from a personal account. The only way he’ll do that is if I set up a company to run the hotel and do it that way. Unfortunately, that’s rather expensive and besides it won’t work so I’ll just have to continue with the cheques each month.

Of course, the reason that he insists it’s a commercial loan is that, if it is a personal loan (and it is) then he and everyone in the bank associated with granting it will be suspended from work by the Banque de France for providing an illegal personal loan. So, for once, we understand his reasons (even if he won’t state them).

So, if you are getting a loan to buy a business here, make sure that your accountant has actually set up the company before the day you sign to accept the loan.

Naturally, they’re all in French so when I was over in the UK recently, I bought a heap of books for him to balance the French with the English and we’ve been reading to him from each of them pretty much every night for the last month or so. All those little books seem very light but buying 20+ of them does make for a seriously heavy case. Still, I have enough to keep him going for the next 2 or 3 months.

The strange thing is that although I’ve degree level French and the books are for up to 5 year olds, I don’t understand all of the words. I guess that’s a side-effect of me learning French mainly as an adult and kids use a slightly different vocabulary. Certainly I noticed that a few years ago when I was able to chat to Wendy’s French cousins but found it really hard to understand the kids (of around 9 or 10). It is odd though when you can understand quite complex vocabulary and grammar yet can’t understand what should be much simpler language spoken by children.

One other thing that we notice each Thursday is that James seems to understand French quite well now when the librarian speaks to him. He doesn’t say a whole lot in French (just a few isolated words) but I’m sure that’ll come in another month or two.

PS… if any of you have books suitable for 2 to 5 year olds that you don’t need anymore, I’d be more than willing to take them off your hands. Don’t worry, you don’t need to post them to France as I can either get my parents to collect them or pick them up myself next time I’m over.

The problem living here is that you can drive to an enormous number of places within a day or so.

I thought of Geneva first but I think it would be a little cold this time of year and it’s a little far to go for a short break I think (about 6 or 8 hours drive).

Northern Italy would also be nice and has the advantage that we could drive a little further south until it got warm enough for us but it too is around 8 hours drive.

I’d quite like to see more of northern Spain but to get beyond the Basque Country (which is very industrialised), it’s over 8 hours drive. Also the weather is pretty similar to here and we’re looking for somewhere a little warmer.

So, it’s looking like it’ll be in the direction of Barcelona. Not the city itself though as that’s a pain to park in and we’ve seen a lot of it over the last couple of years. Sitges (a little south of Barcelona) sounds interesting and I’ve seen it on the videos for the Spanish course. Again, the advantage is that we can go further south ’til we get the temperature we’re looking for. We might even manage a visit to Port Adventura whilst we’re there.