Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Mas Camps News’ Category

You know the way that the birds all circle round before they head south for the Winter? Well, we are south and they’re still circling round and in really serious numbers. Maybe they’re intending to go a bit further south now!

We’ve got snow!! For the first time, it is definitely colder here than it is in Belfast.

As of this evening, you can now do guaranteed reservations through our own website. We’re running it through hostelworld who are the folk behind the Ryanair and FlyBE reservation systems among others. At the moment, we’re treating it as an experiment but I think that in due course it will pull in a lot more reservations through our own website than we would have had: it’s certainly a lot simpler for people to get a confirmed reservation there and then than it is to go through the whole rigmarole of e-mailing us to check availability.

We’re off to a hotel trade show tomorrow in Montpellier for a few days. If nothing else, it’ll give us a chance to wander round with an “Auberge Mas Camps” badge!

Dug out a translation someone did of part of our little brochure a while back and now we have the main pages in SIX languages. Impressive, or what?

Well, the list of flags sure looks impressive to me. Sadly, three of the languages are fairly basic (German, Italian and the new one, Catalan) but we actually get hits on them. All being well, the google link on each will produce a few more cents income (from a standing start less than a week ago, we’re up all of 40c so far).

We’re all catching the cold off James now :((

John has an absolute mountain of prescriptions to get over the bronchitis. Back in the UK, you’d be talking a cough bottle. Here, we kick off with physiotherapy to loosen up the stuff in his lungs (he definitely didn’t like that), a couple of bottles of medicine and a steam thingy. It’s not really speeding it up as compared to the cough bottle approach though.

Remember those TVs that we bought in Spain back in late December? Well, contrary to what it said on the in-store sign and indeed the menu system on the TVs themselves, they don’t support SECAM which is the TV standard used in France. Anyway, that meant a trip back to Media Markt (a German outfit) in Girona to get a refund. Apart from the massive queue at the refund counter (largely taken up with returning the same make of TV as we’d bought), it was a doddle. I even got to try out my Spanish.

Girona is close enough to Barcelona that we just kept going and did this weeks shopping in Badalona (a suburb of Barcelona). It’s a bit rundown in comparison to Baricentro where we went last time so we’ll hardly be back. Mataro seems a much nicer looking place and is even closer to Girona (and easier to get to). So why don’t we do our shopping in Girona itself? Well, they haven’t a terribly good selection of shops (at least we haven’t found any). We’d also like to get a bit more familiar with Barcelona.

I thought that it was time I upped the ante with the web design software as I was running off the end of Frontpage Expess. I’d heard good things about Dreamweaver so that was first port of call. But then I saw the price: £370!! That seemed a bit much seeing as Frontpage weighs in at £140 but it gets better as my student status results in a price for Frontpage of £40 which is a bit of a bargain. Anyway, I spent the last few days getting it into Frontpage format and the latest version is getting uploaded as I write this.

Whilst that mini-update was in progress, I realised that I could add a few more languages by sprucing up the mini-descriptions on the Ryanair site (themselves courtesy of a friend of a friend who translated the mini-English version into German and Italian for me). Anyway, we now have a very impressive series of little flags on the pages: German, English, French, Spanish and Italian. Sadly, just on the main hotel page and the transport pages but they’re the important ones. Incidently, re the other languages, French was a total waste of time as French people seem to search in English. I’ll probably get the regional guide up to date in French but I’m not too bothered about that now. Even though the translation is dreadful, we actually get quite a few hits on the Spanish site and the other day it was the top ranked Spanish language site on Pyrenees Orientale tourism!

Don’t know how useful the German version is/will be but we do get a fair number from the Italian listing on Ryanair so perhaps plonking that on our own website will get a few more euros in the bank. So far, we’ve not had any German Ryanair folk but then 2004 year was a bit of an off year for German tourism.

Oh, yeah, the weird French couple. They are our main regular guests, arriving in our third week in April and having been here several times since. Wendy was sure that they were going to skip without paying originally! We get about EUR 150 from them every time but they’re a bit of a nuisance as they carry a mountain of stuff, completely rearrange the room and always want filtered coffee first thing in the morning.

Have to see about getting a few more telly’s now. The plan is that initially we’ll run with five. One room is already wired up for French TV and the room just next to it will be very easy to wire up in a similar way so we’re intending that that will be the French side of the building. We’re hoping to roll out UK TV for the three rooms on the other side of the building but we’ll need to get a bigger satellite dish first as the signal strength just isn’t up to running more than one TV at the moment (I’m toying with the idea of trying out a signal booster first).

Hope ‘yall had a good Christmas and New Year.

The French family started arriving at 3pm on the 31st (well, two hours late isn’t bad for France, is it?) and it was all go from then ’til 1pm today. We didn’t get to bed ’til about 2.30am and had to get up again at 6.30am to get the breakfast out. Saturday night wasn’t so bad as we had a think and put the tea & coffee out in the lobby which gave us a chance to clear the restaurant a bit earlier and get to bed at 12.30 and we’d not to get up ’til 7.30 as we only had a couple of people taking breakfast and the rest hanging around for the brunch at 11.

Of course, it was all go during the day too. Saturday seemed to be one continuous meal from 9am through to midnight. The breakfast dragged out ’til almost noon with the stragglers from the night before. That in turn delayed lunch from the planned 12.30 to more like 2.30pm. French lunches are, of course, pretty drawn out affairs at the best of times and when you’ve no where to go afterwards it’s even worse. Anyway, we ended up doing the high tea (with genuine freshly cooked scones) a little after 6pm instead of 4.30. And, naturally, the dinner didn’t have a hope of starting at our hoped for 7pm, kicking off at more like 8.30pm.

The amount of food they got through was phenomenal. As, of course, are the scaps. We completely filled our restaurant size bin by lunchtime on Saturday so it’ll be topped up again after they empty it in the morning. We’ll be tossing out something like a dozen full baguettes (French bread to us foreigners). Not to mention half a crate of clementines (baby oranges), much the same amount of grapes, a mini mountain of stawberries,… You just don’t appreciate how much is left over after a meal ’til you’re clearing up after 23 of them! You also don’t fully appreciate just how big this place is ’til you spend two days walking back and forth between the two kitchens, the restaurant….

Amazingly, we only had one problem the whole time! Seems that the water heating system doesn’t work anything like I assumed that it did. On Saturday evening, we thought that it was an off-peak thing but it seems not as the water is now boiling. We still don’t know how it really works as it shouldn’t be warm yet if it’s an offpeak system. Still, we now know that we may hit a problem if we’ve 23 people in but that it’s OK with about 15 in (we’d about that many in the summer). I’m also quite amazed that a fuse didn’t blow with all the electric going full blast (every room in the place was like a sauna when we went in to clean them this afternoon). Well, actually a fuse did blow but it wasn’t ours as the neighbours power was off too.

Way back in October when we accepted the booking, we figured that we’d take the rest of this week off to recover but it hasn’t worked out like that. We already had a booking for four Australians for tomorrow but on Saturday night we took a three day booking for some Germans and this morning we picked up a reservation for this evening from one of the booking systems we’re on. So we don’t even get one night off :(( or should that be :)) It must be the start of the new year booking season as we’ve also got a reservation for a few days in March from another system. Oh, almost forgot… one system even managed to let through a booking with a duff credit card number for nine days starting last Thursday (don’t know what we’d have done if the credit card number was valid as we’d used every single room in the place for the family booking). Anyway, this coming week is looking fairly full with the French this evening, Australians tomorrow, Germans for Tuesday and Wednesday, some Spanish from Thursday to Sunday and it’s still the weekend (most folk book during working hours… just as well their companies don’t forbid such things in their IT security policies, eh?).

Hope ‘yall had a good Christmas and New Year.

The French family started arriving at 3pm on the 31st (well, two hours late isn’t bad for France, is it?) and it was all go from then ’til 1pm today. We didn’t get to bed ’til about 2.30am and had to get up again at 6.30am to get the breakfast out. Saturday night wasn’t so bad as we had a think and put the tea & coffee out in the lobby which gave us a chance to clear the restaurant a bit earlier and get to bed at 12.30 and we’d not to get up ’til 7.30 as we only had a couple of people taking breakfast and the rest hanging around for the brunch at 11.

Of course, it was all go during the day too. Saturday seemed to be one continuous meal from 9am through to midnight. The breakfast dragged out ’til almost noon with the stragglers from the night before. That in turn delayed lunch from the planned 12.30 to more like 2.30pm. French lunches are, of course, pretty drawn out affairs at the best of times and when you’ve no where to go afterwards it’s even worse. Anyway, we ended up doing the high tea (with genuine freshly cooked scones) a little after 6pm instead of 4.30. And, naturally, the dinner didn’t have a hope of starting at our hoped for 7pm, kicking off at more like 8.30pm.

The amount of food they got through was phenomenal. As, of course, are the scaps. We completely filled our restaurant size bin by lunchtime on Saturday so it’ll be topped up again after they empty it in the morning. We’ll be tossing out something like a dozen full baguettes (French bread to us foreigners). Not to mention half a crate of clementines (baby oranges), much the same amount of grapes, a mini mountain of stawberries,… You just don’t appreciate how much is left over after a meal ’til you’re clearing up after 23 of them! You also don’t fully appreciate just how big this place is ’til you spend two days walking back and forth between the two kitchens, the restaurant….

Amazingly, we only had one problem the whole time! Seems that the water heating system doesn’t work anything like I assumed that it did. On Saturday evening, we thought that it was an off-peak thing but it seems not as the water is now boiling. We still don’t know how it really works as it shouldn’t be warm yet if it’s an offpeak system. Still, we now know that we may hit a problem if we’ve 23 people in but that it’s OK with about 15 in (we’d about that many in the summer). I’m also quite amazed that a fuse didn’t blow with all the electric going full blast (every room in the place was like a sauna when we went in to clean them this afternoon). Well, actually a fuse did blow but it wasn’t ours as the neighbours power was off too.

Way back in October when we accepted the booking, we figured that we’d take the rest of this week off to recover but it hasn’t worked out like that. We already had a booking for four Australians for tomorrow but on Saturday night we took a three day booking for some Germans and this morning we picked up a reservation for this evening from one of the booking systems we’re on. So we don’t even get one night off :(( or should that be :)) It must be the start of the new year booking season as we’ve also got a reservation for a few days in March from another system. Oh, almost forgot… one system even managed to let through a booking with a duff credit card number for nine days starting last Thursday (don’t know what we’d have done if the credit card number was valid as we’d used every single room in the place for the family booking). Anyway, this coming week is looking fairly full with the French this evening, Australians tomorrow, Germans for Tuesday and Wednesday, some Spanish from Thursday to Sunday and it’s still the weekend (most folk book during working hours… just as well their companies don’t forbid such things in their IT security policies, eh?).