Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

From this side of the Atlantic, America is largely seen as a hotel type holiday destination but, of course, the whole range of accommodation options are available. There is one difference though… the quality of accommodation is much higher than you’ll be used to.

Take for example the self-catering accommodation options (vacation rental in American). Las Vegas is one place where you’d definitely be thinking hotels but you can rent a quite spectacular penthouse apartment (condo in American) right in the centre.

More typically villa type places include Lake Tahoe where you can choose from a whole range of luxurious villas in a spectacular location and the more central Palm Springs area.

How much for all this? Well, a typical villa runs from around $1500 to $2000 per week (£750 to £1000) which is more expensive than the average in Europe but then what you’re getting for the money is a whole lot more than is generally available.

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.

ADA have been after me for quite a while now to add their logo to my sites, so here it is.

As you know, we’ve been renting a far from them since our own was wrecked by a tractor way back at the end of May. In that we’re quite a good customer for them you’d think that we would be due some brownie points for that, wouldn’t you?

Well, we’ve been renting the car for so long that they need it back as they’ve to return it to the leasing company and we agreed to make the changeover today.

We’d arranged to change it over at the airport as the town centre location is a bit of a nightmare to get in and out of plus it doesn’t have terribly long working hours.

Anyway, we dropped James off at school and off we went to the airport.

First off, we were going to have to pay for all the damage to the car. Kind of peculiar seeing as it was already damaged when we picked it up, eh?

Next he said he had a little two seater car for us. Yes, a car smaller than we had ordered and useless to us as we need at least a four seater. So, whereas other car hire firms would have been upgrading our car after such a long rental, ADA were going to make quite a downgrade.

Finally, he said he’d to do an authorisation on our card for another EUR 600. Now, that wouldn’t matter too much with a UK credit card but a French debit card it does. In particular it means that EUR 1200 would have been blocked in our account and in fact we’d not have been able to extend the car rental next week as planned.

Nope, he couldn’t do anything about any of that.

So, we’re sans-voiture. We’re also down EUR 70 as we needed to get a taxi to the school to collect James.

Next time, if there is one, I’ll tell them to collect the car if they want it because we certainly aren’t going to be helpful to them when there is zero service in response.

Being born at the end of August wasn’t great timing when we were in the accommodation business so, as usual, John’s birthday yesterday was quite hectic and not helped at all by being the first day back to school for James.

School days here have very awkward times if you’re working and need to travel around. Anyway, after dropping off James at 9am, it was off to pick up some presents for John (so far the favourite is a toss-up between the bike and a train set) by which time it was time to race back for James at noon. We dropped him off at 2pm and then it was off again to see about getting a birthday cake which at least let us get back for James at a relatively leisurely pace.

For the evening, the highlight was the meal at the pirate restaurant which was a big hit with the kids as you can see.

Anyway, tomorrow it’s back to the slog of catching up with the admin that just didn’t get done over the Summer…

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).