Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

I’m sure that there are lots of opinions on this one, but for me the most useful item of luggage that I have at the moment is something that I received as a Christmas present many years ago: a set of luggage scales.

Having these means that I’m never one of those people standing at the Ryanair checkin desk arguing that there’s no difference to the plane if there’s 9kg in carryon and 16kg in checked luggage or 10kg in carryon and 15kg in checked because I have already moved that 1kg from checked to carryon before I get to the desk. In fact with these scales we were able to manage 85kg and no excess fees on a recent trip (2 adults, 2 children can carry up to 100kg on Ryanair, not counting the pram). Without them, we’d have been sure to be arguing that we should be able to share the checked luggage allowance.

You might think that you will be able to check the weight using one of the unused checkin desks. However, in newer desks the scales are switched off when they aren’t being used and, of course, the staff won’t let you weigh luggage in advance at a desk with no queue as that will clearly reduce the income received through excess weight charges.

It’s definitely worth purchasing a set if you’ve not got them already as they’ll almost certainly save their cost on your first trip. Now, all you have to do is to hunt them out as I’ve not seen them for sale for quite a while.

Of course, their disappearance coinciding with the arrival of more aggressive excess charging is just a co-incidence. Isn’t it?  

Once you have your website properly set up on the Internet and listed in the search engines, you can expect to start receiving scam bookings. In fact, if you aren’t receiving them it’s an indication that you haven’t got your site listed properly.There are many variations on the scam theme these days but they have a number of characteristics in common, namely that the spelling & grammar are bad, the e-mail address is one of the free yahoo or hotmail ones and that the booking is for an usually large number of rooms. However, we’ve also received genuine bookings that meet all three criteria so sometimes you need to check a little further before you reject such a booking.Other common themes are that the main source of them is Nigeria, they’re usually from a “Christian organisation” and that they want you to bill them extra and buy mobile phones or rent cars with the excess. Sometimes, they will even quote a credit card number which works but you’ll find that in due course the card turns out to be stolen and the bank take the money charged off you.

Whilst old-timers at the holiday rental business will tell you that they can spot these straight away, when I ran a genuine example past them they rejected that too because it was for 10 rooms, it was from janine79@yahoo.com and the grammar was bad yet we banked a fair amount of money from this one last year. It did take a couple of e-mails and a search for the acting company they quoted to convince me that it was real though.

Many people have the view that the south of France is simply somewhere that you go to get a suntan on the beach but there are many other activities here throughout the year.

Whilst many fishermen will call it a day once it gets into October or perhaps November in the UK, in the south of France it’s quite a different picture during the year. This photo was taken in the middle of February with temperatures getting on for 20c which is only disguised by the local habit of wearing Winter clothes when it drops below 30c; those of you from the UK would still be in t-shirts.

It’s a similar story with many of the activities that are considered mainly Summer time persuits in the more northernly areas of Europe. In fact, it’s often too warm to continue with many “Summer” activities when the Summer weather kicks in here. For instance, if your interests are in rambling and cycling then it’s not viable to do those in June or July. This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.

Frenchless in France raised the issue of how ethical it really was for Switzerland to be neutral during the war.

I’ve always thought of it being a noble thing to be neutral but as she pointed out there is another side to that neutrality. Swizerland turned away many refugees that could have escaped persecution under the Nazi regime. Yes, there were many Swiss who did help a great many refugees but as a nation they rejected all of them. Aside from that there is the issue as to what would have happened had the war gone Hitler’s way. Would that neutrality have been respected had Switzerland found itself surrounded by Nazi occupied countries? I think not.

This is one of the most complex areas of our guide as there are so many factors involved including your nationality, marital status, employment status for you, your spouse and your children.

If the simple case described in this section doesn’t cover you, it’s best to start looking into the matter as soon as you can as it can take ages to resolve immigration issues. Broadly speaking there are two basic types of immigration to France: where you are a European and where you aren’t. There’s a third variant where you are a European and your spouse isn’t which we’ll cover separately. Some defniitions are useful at this point:

A “visa” is a permit to enter a country and is usually obtained from the French embassy in your country of residence. There aren’t any French embassies in France itself of course and in some circumstances you may need to point this out to various people in the course of applying for your residence permit. A European Family Permit is a special type of visa issued to spouses and family members of European citizens who are not themselves Europeans.

France is in what’s called the “Schengen Area” which is a group of countries which grant a single visa to enter all of them. So, if you have a Shengen Visa for, say, Belgium then you don’t need an additional visa to enter France because both France and Belgium are in the Schengen Area.

A “residence permit” (“Carte de Séjour) is a document permitting you to live in a country. In some cases this permit may also give you permission to work in that country but you may need a “work permit” to do that.

A “work permit” gives you permission to work in a country. It may be incorporated into your “residence permit”.

Europe has two basic classes of countries: those which are established and those which are subject to transitional arrangements. Established countries are, generally, those which have been in the European Union for four years or more. Newer countries are subject to transitional arrangements in some circumstances, notably in terms of requirements regarding residence permits.

Anyway, next week we’ll be covering the case where you and your family are Europeans.