Foreign Perspectives

The really odd thing is that both America and France tend to think in similar ways ie Americans consider only America when they do stuff and likewise France only considers France when they do stuff. So, for example, almost all Internet directories have a “regional” heading to hold everything not in America and in France you still get chip readers only accepting French cards. Likewise both countries pass laws that they consider to have worldwide applicability eg look at the global hassles we now have from American passport requirements and the nonsense of France banning junk e-mail.

Well, almost. You didn’t expect it to be so simple as that, did you?

There are various regional languages in France from Breton in Brittany to Catalan in Catalonia. For the most part, these languages are barely paid lip service by the French authorities. For example, the capital of the Pyrenees-Orientale departments bills itself as “Perpignan le Catalán” yet in reality the Catalan language is only represented by the bilingual signs outside villages in Catalonia and the odd article in the magazines distributed by the Conseil Regionale. This lack of support for the language is effectively killing the language in France so, for example, our neighbour’s father speaks Catalán as a native tongue, he speaks it as a second language and his children don’t speak it at all.

Things are very different just over the border where more and more of the signs have dropped bilingualism and are only in Catalán. Even the brochures in the shops are almost exclusively Catalán only. In fact, Catalán is pushed so much that in a recent shopping trip to Girona one or two of the shop assistants all but refused to serve us when we asked for some things in Spanish.

I think it’s sad that the children can’t speak to their grandparents in their native language in France but Spain has definitely taken it too far and I feel sure that it will end up as being very devisive.

This series is available in reference form on our Living in France pages.

Whatever way they get there, sooner or later you start to see adverts on the sites. Do they make money though?

Our own relatively low-key efforts have made us around $10 and I suspect that’s a reasonably typical income for most blogs. After all, few will get the high level of traffic that’s required to pull in the advertising income but then that’s the case for a lot of ordinary websites.

On the other hand, if the blog attracts a particular audience things can change. For instance, you’ll see a fairly small advert on the relatively high profile site Petite Anglaise for clothing which I suspect works quite well as it fits in very well with the overall theme of the blog. Others make the blog one of the main planks of their Internet promotion such as Europe A La Carte. We sometimes seem to have the market cornered on French toilets and French septic tanks, neither of which are in our main line of business but both have attracted people to the blog and have moved us significantly up the blog rankings as a result.

As personal blogs meld into business ones, there’s money to be made through mentioning your business in the blog. I don’t think you can realistically do this by “in your face” advertising and so we’ve adopted a very low-key approach through telling people what it’s like here at various times of year and via our series on buying a house in France. However, whilst both may attract people to the region, they might not stay with us.

What about the “in your face” approach though? Would that work? Actually, I suspect that it would work in that google shoots blog postings right into the top 10 within a day or two. Snag is that they don’t stay there for long. For instance, we were briefly the world expert on French septic tanks when we posted on that topic and by mentioning French septic tanks several times in this piece should be the top site once again, if only for a few days. It’s even possible to stay in the top 10 if you choose your key words properly. For instance, the top entry for google on “French military victories” has remained there for several years and indeed we still get a regular trickle of hits on our septic tank page.

Where this “in your face” approach falls down is that it’s a one-shot deal and doesn’t use the power of blogs which is to attract a regular readership.

That certainly makes it handy to see them, but it’s almost certainly not the best choice for you. Most people who look for property in France are looking for somewhere in the country so staying in a town-centre hotel won’t give you any opportunity to experience the kind of life that you are considering.

Not only that, but the hotel will almost certainly be French run whereas if you choose somewhere that’s run by someone who has made the move from the UK themselves you can ask them about it and avoid the “everything is wonderful” type of answer that you’ll get from all the estate agents. Such people will have looked at the area with “your eyes” so to speak and be able to point out pros and cons about the various parts of their region throughout the year.

If you’re considering the south of France not call in with us at Mas Camps? We live in one of the most beautiful but lesser known (hence cheaper) regions just west of Perpignan.