Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

Whilst it’s peculiar to think of the difficulties faced when immigrating to the UK, that’s a situation that we will be finding ourselves in within the not too distant future so we’re considering some of the logistics.

Even for “native” English speaking children it’s not as easy to do as you might expect.

Why? Well, in our experience most people returning to the UK are doing so after they’ve been abroad at least two years and normally it’s more than five years. For simplicity, let’s take the case of a five year stay abroad of a British child who then returns to the UK schooling system.

If they were just born when the family emmigrated, then the child would be about five and therefore be starting primary school. You might think that would be fine but if they’ve been playing with non-English speaking children for those five years it’s not quite so simple. For one thing they won’t know the english words for all the toys nor the name of the TV shows. That’s even if they speak english at all of course because some emmigrants try to immerse their family in the local culture and language. However, this is by far the simplest point.

What about, say a six year old, moving back at age 11. They will find it fairly difficult as they’ll have picked up a lot of the foreign language in school and will need to learn the english words for all those terms. In fact, it’s generally the case that kids of that background can only speak english to their parents and other english speakers find them virtually impossible to communicate with in english so you can imagine the problems they’ll have in their initial period in an english speaking school.

The worst ages come later though. Someone trying to start A-levels who’d been abroad since they were 11 would have severe problems. They’d not know any of the specialised vocabulary in english for the various subjects that they’d studied. In fact, they’d almost certainly have to go to english classes before trying to get into a school. These problems are magnified a little more if they’re trying to get into a British university but haven’t gone through British A-levels.

So if you are planning on returning to the UK after a stay abroad of more than a few years, don’t just assume that your kids are english speaking because, in most cases, they are far from fluent in english and certainly very far from fluent in academic english.

It’s taken over a year but, at last, James has finally come out with a spontaneous word in French!

‘Twas a really ordinary event in that we asked him where we’d parked the car and he said “la”. Still, it’s a start.

So, if you’re moving to France, don’t rely on the TV families moving and assume that yours will be completely fluent in three months. Some might be, but it can take a lot longer than that as we’re finging out.

After spending all that time looking around, we think it’s going to be a whole lot simpler and cheaper to go somewhere by car.

So, we’re restarting our search for a holiday destination yet again.

We don’t want to drive for days on end from here which limits us to a range of around six hours driving time or thereabouts. Thanks to the previous searching, we’ve ruled out the original northern locations and are instead looking south which simplifies the search process considerably.

All being well, we’re hoping to actually book somewhere today although we were also hoping to book somewhere last week too so you never know.

We’ve almost given up hope of getting flights to match the apartments/villas that we can find in Majorca.

For one thing, a lot of the self-catering places have specific days for checking in which means that the flight prices on those days are much higher than they are for the rest of the week. The effect of that is that we can’t run with a place that requires us to checkin on a specific day as we can’t afford the flights to get to it.

Then there’s the ongoing hassle of very little in the way of online booking for these places so we’ve to send off a heap of enquiries and wait ’til each place gets back to us which is a real pain.

On the plus side, at least the car hire is pretty cheap so we can add that on. Or can we? Given that it’s a peak holiday season I’m none too sure that we’ll be able to get a car which would, of course, affect the locations that would be viable for us for the villa.

Despite spending almost two days solid looking for a place for us to go for Christmas, we’re still looking.

Having said that, we’ve narrowed the search down considerably. For one thing, thanks to a spate of rather chilly weather here, we’re thinking that perhaps trawling round the German Christmas markets in the biting cold wasn’t such a good idea after all and perhaps somewhere rather warmer would be the way to go.

So, where? In principle, the Canary islands are the place to go for certain warm weather but they’re way too expensive at this time of year so we’re looking at Ibiza and Majorca at the moment with a side-bet on Alicante and Valencia.

At the moment, the problem is that it’s not nearly so easy to find apartments as it is to find hotels online. One major pain is that most apartment/villa bookings are “on request” which means that we’re sitting waiting for replies re availability and prices from several places.