Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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.

Whilst yesterday we rebooked a room within 10 minutes of putting it onto the system, tomorrow that won’t happen no matter how low we price the rooms because the French will have all gone home.

The fact that they all go home at the same time creates chaos on all of the roads in France. Whilst we notice the French retreat from Spain, of course they are doing exactly the same thing all over Europe so that the roads in all directions are packed with cars and drivers who have been on the road far too long.

It kicks off from before dawn and will run well into the early hours of Sunday morning. It’s one of the days of the year when we get requests for breakfast at 6am (nope, it’s 8am at the very earliest) as the French usually take to the roads around dawn. Others go to the opposite end of the day and we’ve one family who are planning on setting out later this evening with the hope that the traffic will have tailed off by then (it won’t).

Definitely not a day when you would want to be on the road in France!

As ‘yall know, Wendy and me have been plugging away with paid posts over the last month or so.

One thing that we hadn’t expected was that by taking it a little bit more seriously, we’d be rapidly closing on the top 10 earners on PPP quite so quickly. Due to the delay in payment (you’re paid 30 days after your post is approved), it’ll actually be another month or so before get into that list but ’tis encouraging that we can get there so quickly.

Actually, all being well, we’ll not only be in that list but moving up it next month as we should be bringing online another blog by then.

As you know, I’m in the process of building up a sort-of technology blog over at An Age of Magic. It takes about three months before you can make money on these things so it’ll be a month or so before I’m ready to start raking in the cash from it and retire on the proceeds. Well, maybe a “bit” more than a month before I can retire on it 🙂

Anyway, I’ve been putting on vaguely techie type postings as you can see. Techie with a slightly different slant on the technology.

What’s really interesting is the kind of searches people have been using to arrive on the site…. “walk on water with magic”… “travel in time”… “move things with magic”. Also interesting are the results that I get when I use Digg and similar social bookmarking sites on individual posts: some of them do incredibly well considering the content that’s on the site.

Now, the bigger question is whether I’ll be able to make money it….

We’re about set to choose our next car and aren’t too sure what to get at the moment.

In theory, we’d like to get another Suzuki Alto as it was a brilliant little car with getting on for 70 mpg but they don’t make them anymore so that’s not an option. So, we looked at the next model up which is the Wagon R but I’m not too keen on that one. Their Ignis is a baby 4×4 which looks interesting and would let us go up to the ski resorts this winter plus we’d not need to use the tailer all the time as we did with the Alto. On the diesel model the mpg isn’t too bad either at around the 50mpg mark.

We were also looking at the Chevrolet Matiz but it seems a bit tiny and I suspect that when they say it’s a five seater they mean three kids in the back rather than three adults. Still in the running, but we’d need the trailer all the time with it and, until very recently, the Matiz range didn’t have type approval for trailers so we might not be able to get a tow bar fitted.

We’re still looking though… ideas welcome… ideally what we need is a four door, five seater car with a large luggage capacity and very economical on the petrol/diesel. Preferably 4wd but not necessarily so. Oh, and cheapish but reliable.