Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Mas Camps News’ Category

Bonjour mes amis:

Last time you saw the extensive July 14th celebrations in Estagel. This pic is of the parade of the “confreries” (wine lodges) of Languedoc-Rousillon today (Saturday). As you can see, wine is a whole lot more important in these parts than revolution! Quite a colourful parade which has had the side effect of filling up Mas Camps with people.

We were starting to wonder why we were getting so many bookings as the first we heard of the thing was Thursday. Yup, there’s us being the only accomodation of any consequence in Maury and they forget to tell us about one of the major events! That’s pretty typical of here as they’re awful at tourist promotion in general: virtually all of the cars parked in the town today were French, yet 60% of the tourists aren’t French but then they only advertise it in French, don’t have a website and don’t distribute their brochures that widely.

Actually on the website thing, I’m thinking of running up something to cover each of the local wine producers in a bit more detail than is currently on my little guide. I already get hits for the couple of domaines that I mention (none of them seem to run to websites or even to brochures in anything but French even though the bulk of the wine is sold to Belgium (OK, they speak French), Denmark and Holland (who generally prefer speaking English)). Nope, I’m not planning on charging them: it’s just that it’s in my own interest to attract more folk to the area and if they’re coming to do a tasting trip locally (quite a common reason for people to come) it should be useful to have my website associated with the various wine producers. Longer term, I’m also hoping to organise such trips as a package deal.

Someone else is buying a property in Maury and is staying with us for three or four days in August. We’re starting to discover more and more English in the area and sold a couple of bottles of wine to one of them the other day. It’s not, yet, a form of English colony though lately the local shops have started to develop little “English products” sections. It’s quite good business for us as people buying property tend to stay for longer than others and those that have settled in tend to be keen on our type of restaurant (haven’t managed, so far, to get big numbers of French weaned off their favourite: “burgers and chips”).

Oh, that’s me and James towards the end of a very hot day. I look much better in the mornings before it gets too hot!

And finally, for now, I’d be keen to get some feedback on mark #1 of my online shop (which needs lots of development!). It’s at Personally Chosen . The links on it are “live” but don’t be going as far as entering your credit card information just yet as I’ve not worked out how to transport the wine from me to customers.

Bonsoir encore:

I’ve missed the 12th but it’s the 14th today so Estagel will be coming alive with parades, riots, etc. shortly. Well, a parade and more than likely everyone will be too pissed to riot as there’s free plonk once the parade is over.

Had our first bunch of total **** arrive last week. Got a call from England early in the week to reserve rooms for two families who were driving down to a villa in Spain for a couple of weeks. We’re around the half-way mark between Calais and Alicante so we’ve had a few similar groups before. Anyway, these **** booked rooms, evening meals and breakfasts for eight: with such relatively large numbers, you need to buy a fair bit extra of the fresh food, of course. They were stopping off around Tours which is something like seven hours non-stop drive to here and, as they were intending to set off around 0830, we figured that it would be at least 7pm before they turned up: well, you’ve gotta have some rest stops, don’t you? Not these ****. Nope, they turned up around 5pm (ie pretty knackered due to no stopping). They left again at 5.20. The **** had decided that they may as well drive on to Alicante so our bin had a big heap of stuff added to it right away.

Anyway, net effect is that we decided that it’s time we started taking deposits from people so there’s now a little button on the website to let folk pay me money as of yesterday on the english page. Haven’t worked out how to do it in French yet.

Actually, they are the only English folk that we’ve had stopping (OK, only for 20 mins). Our marketing is bound to be better in English than it is in French, yet something like 2/3rds of the people staying so far have been French (sadly, they’ve only spent about 1/2 of the total money: have to see about increasing their expenditure).

Techie question time again: Remember the ADSL wireless connection? Well, it turns out that there were three problems with it. For a start, it’s pretty hot here and the gear was running somewhat higher than the recommended operating temperature: adding a fan has cooled everything down nicely. Second, the wireless link was hanging after an hour or so: applying the Netgear patch has sorted that one. However, it now has a peculiar problem: it tries to dial all the time but only connects when I leave the normal phone off the hook (just discovered that last night). This seems to be 100% consistent. Is there anything I can do, or is it a problem for France Telecom?

Weddings are hard work!

We were pretty much completely full last Friday and Saturday with a wedding party. Not really all that profitable as the previous owner had went and negotiated a rate about 25% below our high season rate and, of course, they all eat out. Somehow, we managed to get almost all of the rooms reset by Sunday lunchtime which was just as well as a bunch of folk stopped that night… we made almost as much with the four Danes as we did for the whole wedding party (and with a lot less hassle too).

It was actually raining today. Thought I’d say that, just to cheer you lot up. Of course, it’s sunny as I write this and seriously warm too.

Techy question: now that the ADSL connection appears to have been sorted out, I’m using that a whole more of the time. I have a France Telecom ADSL modem connected to my trusty Netgear wireless router and I access this from the Toshiba Tecra, wireless. However, after about an hour of surfing or whatever the wireless link goes down. It starts working again (for a shorter period usually) if I switch the router off and on again. Is it just the router overheating or something? It’s usually around the 30C mark here. Would just firing up a baby fan for the router sort it out?

Nearly forgot… it looks like we’ll be installing airconditioning much sooner than expected. Seems that there’s a scam (sorry, scheme) that lets you install it at a monthly cost around the same as the heating would normally cost you and the French government send you a cheque for 15% of the total amount in February of the year following installation. Doesn’t appear to be a downside. It’s one of those heatpump type thingy’s (ie it works like a really big fridge).

In case you’ve missed it, William G is on his way to becoming a French resident. I was supposed to meet him in his new house last Thursday but with the wedding and a couple of additional last minute arrivals I just couldn’t make it (hence lack of several cases of wine, David). Anyway, the whole family are heading over on July 14th. Could the last person to leave IT please switch off the servers?…

Hi folks,

Here’s what we’re about to say in Chez Nous for next year:

Town/Village Mas Camps, Maury

Type of Accomodation B&B rooms for 2-4; apartment for 2 to 6.

Mas Camps offers you an escape from the hustle and bustle of city life in a selection of wine-themed rooms all with views over the surrounding mountains and vineyards. Twenty minutes from Perpignan with regular FlyBE and Ryanair flights from London, Birmingham and Southampton (with airport transfers if required); 90 minutes from Carcassonne and Girona. We are also a popular stopover to/from Spain. Satellite TV on request. Sorry, no pets.

B&B continental (‚€6) or English breakfast (‚€10); evening meals also available.

One bedroom Apartment within the mas has two double beds (an additional twin room can be included if required). Satellite TV.

For further details

Contact Arnold or Wendy

Telephone UK: 0871 919 6551; France: 04 68 29 10 77

e-mail cheznous@mascamps.com

web www.mascamps.com

Rental charges

October-March April-June July-September

B&B £28/ ‚€43 £33/‚€46 £38/‚€53

Appt £250/‚€350 £280/‚€390 £320/‚€450

Comments welcome; we need to send this off in the next day or two so you’d need to get your feedback in quickly.

Just a short note this time as we have, yet again, run into the sand with the French bureaucracy.

We thought we’d have a go at getting a social security number, child benefit and register with the health service last week.

Of course, as is always the case, the French equivalent of the DHSS is the civil service at its worst. Well, actually it wasn’t nearly so bad expected and, on the whole, fairly reasonable considering French bureaucracy in general. Anyway, courtesy of our visit to the social security folk we now have a list of documents to acquire (several of which don’t exist in the UK, of course). The UK child benefit people have been very decent to keep paying for James as indeed have the child tax people (in spite of them having been told that we’re off here). Actually, I suspect that one consequence of the career break status (ie I am still employed by NIO) means that I’m still entitled to them both. However, since the French pay more, I think I’ll have to see about getting the UK payments stopped so I can get the French ones started.

Optimistically, we went round to the health service place right afterwards. Somewhat inconveniently, it only opens in the morning which makes it rather difficult for us to get there and we’ve not managed it just yet. They’re the guys who give you a social security number and fork out for doctors bills (which, as you’d expect, are mounting up). Anyway, we’re going to give that another go next week.

Separately from that, we’re upping the ante with the advertising which if nothing else is increasing the number of hits on the website. We’ve a slight problem with the advertising as whilst, in practice, we’re a hotel restaurant, legally we’re a chambres d’hote with a restaurant. Net effect of this (and to increase the number of hits) we normally advertise in English as a hotel and in French as a chambres d’hote (in practical terms, we get almost exclusively French people via the “chambre d’hote” pages and everyone else via the “hotel” pages). However, since I came across a bunch of “bed & breakfast” sites we’re now also advertised as a bed & breakfast (eg allbedandbreakfast.com). Due to the incredibly hot weather last year there’s something of a shortage of cash amongst the locals this year but we’re planning on running an advert for the restaurant in the local paper to see how that goes. Funnily enough, the French, in spite of their gastronomic reputation, eat, almost exclusively, beef burgers with chips (so much for Wendy’s flashy dishes!).

The ADSL modem turned up last week and didn’t work. Well, of course, you’ve to send a copy of your bank details first (the RIB): just typing the whole heap in online ain’t good enough. Anyway, after the dial-up dropped down to 9.6k (which definitely isn’t usable for online banking as it times out all the time) I gave the modem another go and hey presto: I’m sitting out in the sun typing this letter to you guys courtesy of the Mas Camps wireless network. Haven’t quite sussed out how to offer it to the guests but that’s a challenge for next week. One things for sure: it beats surfing in a cloudy Belfast anyday!

Oh, nearly forgot: there’s a cheapy holiday to the Spanish coast 90 mins south of us on Teletext. My Aunt & Uncle are using that to pay us a visit next month (it’s direct from Belfast).