Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

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

Last week was seriously exhausting!

I’m glad that I arrived back in Belfast the day before the exam. No way was I awake at exam time on Wednesday!

You’d think that we’d be all organised for the exams as that was the third one. Nope. Well, we were all organised but it all fell apart on the day.

Jackie: worth reading for an OU newbie…. The OU are VERY structured in everything. So, when it comes to organising the oral they do it in a very structured way. You get four passages in French a month or so before the big day and on the day itself they give you one of those to present. The selection is supposed to be random but, as noted, the OU are very structured. Sooo, what they do is give the examiner a pack of the four articles and instruct them to hand them out in a clockwise manner so everyone knows (if they think about it) that the first article goes to the person sitting on the left of the examiner, second to the person to the left of the first etc. Anyway, that means that you can basically select the article that you’re doing when you walk into the room. You can even select the group you’re in if you sign in for the exam together and we managed to do that the first year: it worked brilliantly too. Failed miserably to organise that last year so we’d big plans for this but, of course, we all ended up in different groups as we didn’t walk into the building together. Oh well: Jackie can learn from our mistakes. Incidently, don’t forget to tell me your new e-mail Jackie!

Walking out of the signing up room, I joked to one of our group that we may as well get up and walk out if the exam was on the last book (which nobody could understand seeing as it was all in weird French accents). Naturally, the question was on the last book :(( Net effect was that a considerable number of people didn’t even know where to begin. One very, very good student (nope, not me) only wrote 150 words, another didn’t write anything for 90 minutes (and the exam is only two and a half hours). Who knows what the results will be like?

Anyway, Friday and Saturday were shopping days which resulted in an enormous heap of stuff to bring over. So much in fact that a slight bit of underhand repacking was required after checking in. So if any of you are going by Jet2, it’s possible to get away with 20kg checked luggage, 10kg legit handluggage and another 10kg slightly illegit handluggage. I’d recommend a wheeled carryon bag: 20kg is a LOT to carryon!

In said handluggage is the breezeblock Spanish dictionary (yes, Jackie, you should get one of those) for the level 1 course and the German dictionary & grammar for the beginners German. No, I’m not daft enough to do both in the one year but I’m not currently totally decided which of the two courses I should go for. From a practical point of view, I think Spanish is the way to go as I reckon I could get to fluency with that reasonably quickly and also we get quite a reasonable number of Spaniards staying. On the other hand, since we don’t get many Germans staying at the moment you could argue that I should do German so that I could increase our marketing in German (one of our booking sites has the page in German but we’ve not had any bookings from Germans via that site).

What’s missing from the luggage is the four boxes of soap that I bought in Makro (the Perpignan Makro doesn’t have great soap and doesn’t have it very often either). If any of you are coming over, we’d be grateful if you could bring one or two boxes with you.

Bookings-wise, we are getting quite a lot of bookings for the second half of October (usually we only get bookings a few days to a week ahead). We’ve also received our second enquiry re December. This one is a biggie: it would completely fill the building for three days. That’s actually slightly overfull as we’d need to move out of a couple of rooms that we’re currently using to store some things. It’s including all meals too so we’d have some serious cash to start off the new year if we can pull it off.

We’ve also had our fourth South African booking. It looks like he’ll not be able to get here either but he’s really determined and has paid the full balance up front as supposedly that’s required to get the visa. Can’t see him getting it in time though as he’s due here on Saturday and only got to the French embassy on Monday morning.

Got our first “rates” bill this morning: EUR 1250 which ain’t bad considering the scale of this place. Have to fork out EUR 800 for our new sheets and towels too so it’s not a good week expenses-wise. Still, I should be getting the £1.80 for the travelling expenses to the exam from the Civil Service soon to put towards it. Yeah, dopey amount to claim I know and it’s the first time I’ve ever claimed for the exam trip, but I need it to indicate to the Inland Revenue that you guys are still paying me which will affect their decision re my Crown Servant status which in turn affects John’s nationality amonst other things.

Weather: it’s almost the same as Belfast again. I’m still in t-shirt, shorts and sandals but I had to put socks on this morning.

Arnold