Foreign Perspectives

That applies to pretty much everything in fact. In a French supermarket, you get French cheese. In a UK supermarket you get UK cheese, Swiss cheese, German cheese and, of course, French cheese. Whereas even the largest French supermarket has only a tiny “ethnic” foods section, a typical UK supermarket doesn’t have an ethnic section at all because the food in the aisles is from everywhere. There are hardly any Australians living in Belfast yet it’s possible to buy Vegemite in Tesco; in France you’d need a really major supermarket to stock it.

Some would say: why shouldn’t it be French food in France? Well, obviously you would expect to have more French food in France than anything else but in every other country in the world you seem to get a reasonable representation of a selection of other cultures. The closed mentality in France makes that the rare exceptions to the “France only” rule very pale in comparison to the equivalent elsewhere.

As Ryanair consider anyone over 2 years old as an adult, we’ve managed to amass a potential 100kg luggage allowance between the four of us. Not that we could actually carry quite that much! However, what we’ve been doing over the last few weeks is to use my parents house as a delivery point for Amazon and Ebay purchases to save on postage so it must be something like Santa’s grotto by now!

Wendy’s planning on taking over an empty suitcase to bring at least some of that stuff back but that’s not even counting the stuff we’ll probably pick up whilst we’re there.

We’re still looking for books & magazines for the little guys, so if you’ve anything suitable around the 2 to 6 age range, let me know as we should be able to pick it up while we’re there. Wendy wouldn’t say no to girly magazines either…. Heat, Cosmo, Hello, etc.

What’s in Port Aventura though? It’s divided into four themed areas: Polynesia, China, Mexico and the Wild West. Both China and the Wild West areas had quite a strong sense of theming but it seemed a little superficial in the other two. The Polynesian show was the only major one that we saw (as noted, there was little information about show times so we may have missed heaps of them) and was reasonable although as I’ve been to Polynesia I might be a little harsh in my criticism of this one. None of the rides in the Polynesian area take small kids.

To my mind, Port Aventura’s Wild West area was by far the best with a very high density of small rides and activities plus a few larger rides at the edges. However, if you’re wanting the more adventurous rides, head for Mexico or perhaps Polynesia instead.

There’s the usual train running around Port Aventura but with only two stops which are poorly marked on the maps, we were pretty much leaving the park before we found one of them (in the Wild West). The boat between the entrance area (just before you go into the themed areas of the park) and China was easier to find but we were told that we couldn’t go on it from China as we had a pram. As it turned out, this was nonsense as we were able to go in the other direction but is an example of the much lower level of custmer service as compared to a true American park.

Pay attention to the prices in the Port Aventura shops too. We found that some things were going through the till at twice the prices marked.

Anyway, overall, Port Aventura is a nice enough park but avoid it if you have any kids under 1.2m high and keep an eye on the prices.

Rallying is pretty tiring, at least for us! Just one of the guests turned up in the afternoon and the rest arrived after midnight. Usually a late arrival means a late departure but as the next stage was due to start around 8.45am, the rally officials who checked-in around 1.30am had to leave around 7am.

The Fenouilledes car rally is a little odd in that the main roads aren’t closed so we often saw slow moving vans being followed by a posse of rally cars. The net effect of that was that as the normal road traffic reduces drastically after about 7pm, the night speeds of the cars were considerably higher.

Whereas they arrive at Mas Camps via a relatively small backroad on Saturday, the Sunday route takes them down the long straight directly in front of us as you can see so it’s not quite so easy to take a decent photo.

With the late night last night we’re glad that there’s nobody staying this evening so we can take it a little easier to recover.