Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

One of the more peculiar aspects of life here is that we are sick at almost exactly the same time every year.

Why that is, I don’t know but it’s been happening for four years now. Each June, we’re sick within a few days of the same time the year before, likewise each September.

In some ways, we can understand June. They’re spraying the fields at exactly the same time each June so we pretty much take it for granted that something in those sprays is causing it.

September is different though in that it’s in the midst of the grape harvest so there isn’t any spraying going on.

Weird, huh?

If you cast your mind back to 2004, we had an appointment for the medical visit for the residence card for Wendy just before Christmas. After sitting for around two hours we told them that we couldn’t wait any longer as we’d guests coming. They said they’d make another appointment for us.

We just received a phone call saying that the appointment is for September 29th. Yes, almost three years later!

Still, at least they’re making up for it now as it’s an all day affair rather than the brief visit that it was supposed to be last time.

The first reaction was “I don’t wanna go to the dentist again” but he’s settled down now that he knows the tooth fairy is on her way.

Don’t you think that first teeth are terribly tiny when they come out? They don’t look quite so small when they’re in the mouth but are ever so small when they come out in your hand.

Anyway, first of many to drop out…

The one item that has arrived with a vengeance on the Christmas list for this year is the PSP.

Yeah, I know, we’re probably way behind the times with that one. However, it’s really caught the eye of both James (5) and John (3). Despite it being notionally “too old” for John, he really loves to play with the one that he has on loan at the moment so it’ll not be too easy to prise it out of his hands later.

Anyway, must see about finding a sensible way to acquire one plus a few games for it.

We’re in the usual lull in activity for us that lasts from the last week in August ’til the first week in September so we’ve been using the time to start thinking about some holidays for us.

As I’m currently building up the articles on Whole Earth Guide I want to try and get to somewhere that we’ve not been or at least which we’ve not fully explored.

As James has started school again we’ve basically two slots per week if we want a day away ie Tuesday and Friday/Saturday night though as we normally get a fair number of bookings over the weekend ’til we’re well outside the tourist season, we’ve really only got Tuesday at the moment.

Anyway, the overnight time limitation means that we can go at most three or four hours distance from the house at the moment so we were thinking Nimes and Valencia. Supposedly Nimes is just over two hours from us but Wendy doesn’t believe that. Valencia is definitely more than four hours so we’ll likely need to leave that ’til later on in the year which is OK as it’s warm there for most of the year.

So, short term, it’ll likely be Nimes which we’ve wanted to see for quite a while now.