Foreign Perspectives

The banking scene in France is completely different from that in the UK. Whereas there are the “big four” in the UK, France doesn’t really have any truly big banks and the majority of French “banks” are what would be considered relatively small regional building societies in the UK. As with small building societies, the range of products is quite limited.

Next week we’ll begin with what you might think is the simplest part of this topic: UK banking & finance.

Belfast isn’t really that easy to get to from here so I usually end up flying into Dublin which has considerably more choice in terms of discount flights and seems to have lower departure taxes as well which drops the prices a little bit more. The only problem is the bus up which isn’t nearly as reliable as it used to be and on Fridays it’s quite common to have to wait for as much as three hours just to get a bus with any free seats. Of course, for me, Friday is often the day with the cheapest flights as most people are leaving Ireland for France/Spain on a long weekend therefore the flights from France/Spain that day are usually a good deal cheaper than for other days. Not that the airport seems any quieter on other days: that photo was taken on a Monday evening which was a pretty busy time as you can see.

Locally, we have a choice of four main airports though the closest (Perpignan) isn’t much use for me as it only flies to England so I’d need to get a connecting flight which makes it both too complicated and, usually, too expensive. Whilst Toulouse has, for me, the image of a large international airport it’s not really much better for me as it would also require connecting flights. That leaves me with Carcassonne and Girona which generally have one flight each per day to Dublin, usually, at a reasonable price. What complicates my life at this point is that the Carcassonne flight to Dublin is at a civilised time but the one back is generally at 9am which would require an overnight in Dublin coming back and therefore makes it too expensive. The Girona flight times are pretty much at the other end of the day with the flight to Dublin arriving around 11pm most of the time (though the schedule changes now and again and it sometimes arrives in the afternoon) and coming back around 9pm. So, generally, I end up flying out of Carcassonne and back to Girona.

What surprises me is that there still isn’t a website that lets you say something like “I’d like to fly out of an airport near A around X and back to an airport near B around Y”. At the moment, SkyScanner is the closest to that in letting you see the lowest flights between two particular airports but doesn’t let you say you’d like to fly from somewhere within X miles of a given town and return to an airport a similar distance from that town.

Although you might save a few pounds on the flight prices by varying the dates of your travel, don’t forget the swinging penalty charges applied if you’re just a few kilos overweight with your luggage. At the moment, you’ve a charge per bag of EUR 12 (return) if you declare the bag online, EUR 20 (return) if you don’t but just one kilo over the 15kg per person for checked luggage and you’re looking at EUR 8 per kilo. I’m not sure if it’s commonplace but none of our carryon baggage has been weighed on any recent trips so if you think you’re a little over on the checked luggage, it might be worth trying to squeeze the heavy items into your carryon baggage.

As soon as the temperature drops below around 30c over here, all the locals don their Winter coats. Not just any old Winter coat either for the coats on sale in the local shops seem more suited to Arctic conditions than the, usually, very mild Winters that we get here. Although it’s been warm enough for us to be running around in t-shirts almost all the time since March 2006 (yes, all year), the local population has been wearing their heavy coats since late September.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference that we’ve seen though is when our son was born here at the end of August. As you can imagine, it was pretty hot then (high 30s) and the maternity ward was even warmer than that. Now, I know that the rule is to wrap up babies after they’re born but with those kind of temperatures, we just put a nappy on him and nothing else. Yet, every time the nurses came into the room they insisted in wrapping him in three layers of clothing. Net effect? Well, if we’d stayed any longer he’d have been dehydrated as the sweat was just pouring out of him with all that clothing and he clearly wasn’t comfortable.

He’s still considerably behind in his vaccinations too because anytime that we’ve taken him along between roughly March and October they announce that he’s got a fever and can’t get the vaccination. Even outside that time, it’s often warm enough for him to “have a fever” so we’re lucky if we manage one vaccination per year.

So, whilst the icecream vans appear in Northern Ireland in March at perhaps 15c, you’d be unlikely to find anything similar below 25c over here.