Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

After much consideration of the flights from Girona (or is it Gerona?) and Barcelona, it looks like Berlin has won for October.

All being well, we’ll be heading off towards the end of October for three or four days. I thought that the hotel prices would blow Berlin out of the water but there are lots of good quality accommodation at quite reasonable prices. Haven’t totally settled on a hotel/apartment but we’re aiming for somewhere in the Mitte area (ie central Berlin) which appears to offer the chance to walk around all the major sights over the course of a few days.

We’re planning on booking that sometime in the next few days once we nail down the accommodation. Flights look deadon as they leave Barcelona in the afternoon and get back in the evening.

We’re hoping to buy a property in Spain at some point so have been hunting around for the best bank account as stage one in that process.

It turns out that the best short-term option for us is the Halifax because it offers completely free transfers of money from the UK which will be handy right now as it seems to be the cheapest way to get large chunks of cash from sterling into euros (the Nationwide is just as cheap but only practical for fairly small amounts).

Anyway, we couldn’t get down over the Summer and the first window of opportunity for us was yesterday as we’d nobody staying last night so we went off after the people from the night before had checked out. That looked like being quite a good time as the branch in Barcelona is open until 3pm so we were expecting to arrive around 2pm or so.

Those of you who’ve been reading this will know that we are rubbish at finding our way around Barcelona but unusually we managed to go more or less straight to the Halifax and walked in just a little after 2pm.

As it’s the holiday season, there was only the one guy there with a small queue of people in front of him so we’d to wait maybe 20 mins.

And, guess what? He couldn’t open it because they can’t take cash after 2pm and the only way to fund the account initially is with cash. No, he couldn’t take a card number and do a cash advance. No, he couldn’t open the account and give us the account number to let us transfer the opening balance. No, he couldn’t open it the next day and tell us the account number.

So, despite what the Halifax in the UK said, the simplest way for us to open the account looks like being to open it via Halifax in the UK.

As the next time slot for us is going to be in October we’re going to use the time to look into the options of Barclays and Citibank which both have loads of branches all over Spain and one of which is likely to be our long term banking solution for Spain. Halifax is certainly very convenient for bank transfers but they have very few branches and so probably aren’t a viable day to day bank for anyone living in Spain (unless you’re living close to one of their branches of course).

Thanks to dreadful flight times, I decided to stay a day in Manchester on the way back here.

Manchester aiport is a brilliant place for flight connections as all three terminals are within the one complex which includes access to the city via bus and train services too. The airport is so close to the city that you’ll often find it takes you longer to walk to the bus/train station than it does to get into the city itself. That closeness makes the price quite low too so it’s under a fiver for the return trip.

We were lucky enough to have timed our trip to coincide with the Manchester Pride events which, as you can see, include a very colourful parade through the streets. As usual with parades, the traffic before and afterwards is something of a nightmare but the small size of the city meant that we could easily walk back to the train station.

Also very pleasant is the free bus services which cover the Manchester city centre area.

We’ve just added Manchester to our Whole Earth Guide where you’ll find more information on the attractions of the city.

For the first time in several years, I managed to fly out of Perpignan airport straight to Belfast.

It was my first time on BMIBaby, the discount airline arm of British Midland.

As discount airlines go, they seem to have gotten several things completely wrong but hopefully they will continue in the same vein for quite some time.

For a start, they allow 20kg in checked luggage although they did get it right by charging to have the bag checked in. They didn’t even have a weight limit on carryon luggage (although there is the usual size limit).

Then they went on to be friendly and even displaying a caring attitude towards the passengers. You just can’t legitimately call yourself a discount airline and do stuff like that.

But they didn’t stop there. Those with small children (and they sensibly limit to those up to around 6 years of age) get priority in boarding. They even try to allocate a window seat as the little guys usually like to see what’s going on. Yeah, seat allocations!

Finally, you can even get airmiles on the flights (well, BMI’s version).

We’d a notionally connecting flight in Manchester but as I wasn’t too sure how long it was between flights, I booked a slightly later one. Had I been a bit sharper in getting off the previous flight I think they’d even have let me go on the earlier one but I just missed it. 

Overall, as you can probably gather, I was very impressed with them. Aside from the lack of a weight limit on carryon luggage, none of the little things which they do really cost them any money but together they add up to making the flight a much more pleasant experience.

No, I think BMIBaby will definitely have to try harder or their “discount airline” label will just have to be taken off them.

In case anyone from BMIBaby reads this… a big thanks to Sue on the 1030 flight from Perpignan to Manchester on Thursday!

By far the vast majority of our guests enjoy staying here but in the French holiday season we always get a few who go out of their way to find fault and always save up those faults to report them to us in the morning.

They’re always French because that’s how the French seem to go about demanding a reduction in the bill as they don’t believe that they should pay the extra required in the summer.

It’s easy to pick these ones out as they barely speak to you as you’re checking them in and showing them to the room. Whilst the French almost always take breakfast, these ones don’t as that’s another thing which makes the room too expensive.

Then, in the morning, they pick on one or two things which weren’t 100% right for them, demand a reduction and then threaten to report you to all and sundry. It’s always in that sequence too: they demand the reduction THEN they say they’ll report you to all in sundry ie it’s very much blackmail.

Thankfully they’re few and far between but we just received a particularly obnoxious variety of the species a few days ago. He actually found one thing that really was wrong with the room although as it was something which could be fixed in under 5 seconds he clearly couldn’t tell us about it when he arrived or he’d not have anything to complain about so instead he let a dripping cistern keep him awake all night.

He had a particularly interesting line of argument with the cistern. Seemingly he thought that a dripping cistern was enough to have the Prefecture close us down. That certainly would have an interesting effect if they did that because they’d need to close down just about every hotel in the world if that was enough reason to close a place.

As usual, he was rude and offensive, becoming more and more so as he realised that we weren’t going to give him a reduction in the price and he even continued in this vein as he left with assorted rude and offensive gestures as he left (narrowly missing a tree as he was steering with one hand).

Oh well, at least the summer season is pretty much over so that should be the last such example of the species we get until next year.