Foreign Perspectives

As usual with French events, all the publicity is in French and there’s little distribution of it outside the local area so it’s a great opportunity to see a good rally without the usual crowds.

This year the route of the Fenouilledes Car Rally starts on Saturday in Ille-sur-Tete, heads up into the mountains through Belesta and Pezilla where they loop round through Rasigueres, Panezes and Latour de France finally turning at Estagel and heading back over the hill to Millas and then towards Ille-sur-Tete. The Sunday route is similar but goes through Ansignan after Pezilla, descending into Maury before once again crossing the hill at Estagel towards Millas and finishing at Ille-sur-Tete. There’s a map of the route Fenouilledes Car Rally Map 2006 and some photos of the key points on the route at Key Points on Fenouilledes Car Rally 2006 with complete details of the stages at Stage Details for Fenouilledes Car Rally 2006 and the participants at Participants in Fenouilledes Car Rally 2006.

By co-incidence, Auberge Mas Camps is in one of the better places to watch the race and have been fully booked by the rally organisers, ASA-Roussillon.

All being well, I’ll get some decent photos for a later posting.

During the day there isn’t a great deal to see in the Rambla itself as it’s basically just a long wide street with an assortment of small kiosks selling newspapers and some souvenirs at one end and on-street restaurants at the other end. In amongst this you’ll find a series of the street-theatre statues of varying degrees of interest. At the moment, the two most interesting are the two skeletal cyclists but the mix varies throughout the year.

More interesting during the day is the market just off the Rambla itself where you’ll find just about everything on sale. The entrance to the market is about half-way down the Rambla.

The Rambla itself is mainly a mix of newsagents, touristy places and lots of petshops. If you’re looking for proper shops the street immediately to the left and parallel to the Rambla has quite a selection of boutiques and El Corte Ingles is just across the road from the entrance to the Rambla (it’s like a Spanish Marks & Spencer).

The area really livens up in the evening when you can sit in one of the street restaurants and watch the world go by.

Take care with your possessions in this area as it’s a major magnet for pickpockets.

The “Disney World effect” isn’t necessarily down to Disney World but rather a consequence of how the Americans see “abroad” through the eyes of the Disney parks, films, and occasional travel programmes (not forgetting that with only two weeks vacation time, the number of travel shows on American TV is correspondingly less than it is in Europe). Think of how a European would see America if their only experience was through films: everyone must eat McDonalds, you’re bound to get mugged and/or killed,…. Of course, we know that America isn’t really like that because we’ve been there or we know people who have been there and mainly they’ll have been there for a month long holiday, or indeed several of them.

So, just as in the Disney World version of France, everyone speaks english and accepts dollars. Except, of course, they don’t. Granted, I’m sure that there are very few Americans who arrive in France and expect everyone to accept dollars, but we’ve come across a number who were taken in by the American Express Travellers Check Card and had considerably difficulty in getting money whilst here. In America, just about everyone accepts Amex, which definitely isn’t the case around Europe. In fact, we’ve come across a number of Americans who were quite surprised to find that their credit and debit cards would work abroad and thought that they’d to get a special international use one.

Naturally, the two-week holiday time has a really major affect on how they go on vacation. For a start, all their holidays are effectively what would be called short-breaks in Europe and there’s a much greater concentration on packaged holidays which are in turn mainly a series of city-breaks. It’s therefore quite rare to see any Americans outside the cities and equally rare to see any travelling around outside an organised tour (DIY tours naturally take a little longer). This is another aspect of the Disney World effect where it’s possible to visit Europe in a day: it ain’t realistically possible to visit Europe in less than a month but you can visit individual countries inside the two-week period.

Then there are a whole bunch of assumptions that aren’t so obviously wrong if you’ve not travelled abroad before (and, for the most part, Americans don’t get further than Canada or Mexico). We beefed up our France FAQ in an attempt to address this but I’m sure that many things still need to be added. For instance, in the UK (which isn’t just England) and Ireland, they drive on the left, European electricity is 220V (not 110V) and uses a variety of plugs, American standard phone plugs don’t fit any European phone sockets,… One that we’d not thought about before yesterday was that air conditioning isn’t standard in hotels even in the south of France and even in those hotels that do have it, it’s usually not switched on outside the Summer period.

Apologies to those Americans who are well-travelled but the majority aren’t.

For the most part they don’t, of course. A few weeks ago we had Halloween here. For a start, it’s a public holiday in France (November 1st is All Saints Day) and they haven’t gotten the hang of Trick or Treat and instead wander round the streets demanding bon-bons (sweets) from the locals.

Obviously they don’t mark November 5th as being anything special but the next special day was Remembrance Day which “obviously” is an international thing, isn’t it?

Well, sort-of. Yet again it is a public holiday here but they don’t seem to have the minutes silence at 11am. Neither do they have poppies which I’d always assumed were the standard symbol around Europe, if not the world although Wendy tells me that it’s a sprig of rosemary in Australia. I’ve not seen the equivalent of either in France though they do take the day quite seriously with small ceremonies in every village in France as you can see.

Barcelona extends for quite a bit and it’s very easy to get lost in the city. Net effect is that, despite numerous visits, our navigation within the city is dreadful so we were very surprised when we managed to arrive in the Rambla area with no wrong turns along the way.

We started off with lunch in El Corte Ingles (a Spanish version of Marks & Spencer). The view from their top-floor restaurant is spectacular as you can see. Unfortunately the prices for the less than brilliant food is equally spectacular. The portions are very large though.

Our next stop was the Rambla, of which more in a later posting.

One thing that I was particularly looking for was a large but carryable Spanish/English dictionary. The snag is that Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia and so a lot of the books shops are Catalan, so lots of Catalan/English and Catalan/Spanish dictionaries but it was quite a while before we found a bookshop with Spanish books. Although, you’d think that the selection of Spanish/English dictionaries would be as large in Spain as it is in the UK, in fact it’s much smaller and the dictionaries are, on the whole, more expensive for comparable quality. The sole exception to this, at least in the bookshop that I looked in, was the Collins dictionary which is pretty much the same price (allowing for the difference in currency) and even adds a version of the dictionary on CD which isn’t available in the version of the book on sale in the UK. They change the name of the dictionary so the full Collins dictionary is called Universal in Spain, the Concise edition is called Master but otherwise appears to be identical.

Normally in Spain, car park prices are pretty low but that’s definitely not the case in central Barcelona where the prices are comparable to those in London so do check the prices if you’re planning on parking all day.

Barcelona is spread out quite a bit with a number of separate centres, but if you’re thinking of a short break to Barcelona, you’d not go far wrong basing yourself in the Rambla area.