Foreign Perspectives

As usual, when we want to get away early the last guests didn’t check out until the very last minute so we didn’t set off for Sitges ’til noon. That worked out pretty well as with a break for lunch at the nice little café on the border we pulled into the hotel around 4pm.

Sitges is a very lively resort in the Summer months but is a good deal quieter once you get into Autumn. Although the majority of the shops were still open, the town had a feeling of closing down for the Winter about it with a number of the more upmarket shops already closed up and the much lower number of tourists limited the extent of the promenading pretty much exclusively to the central section of the beachfront.

I was quite disappointed in the old town as it’s almost entirely taken over by various government offices and has a very “restored” feeling about it.

There’s a fantastic Australian-owned restaurant called the Beach House which Wendy wanted to try out but I guess it may be one of those that closes up for the Winter as we couldn’t find it.

As we went a little bit out of season, the selection of accommodation was massive of course. We ended up staying in a very nice four star aparthotel which is normally EUR 400 odd yet only cost us EUR 70.

So, quite a nice town to walk round, but you’d need to go closer to the main holiday season to make the most of it I think.

On the other hand, there are many like us who have a French car, pay UK tax, etc. but who would still probably consider home as being somewhere in the UK.

Even the authorities seem a little confused by the question. Almost three years after moving here, the French have continued to send tax bills to our former home in the UK whilst the same office simultaneously sends other tax bills to us here. The UK tax people are even worse if that’s possible with Inland Revenue regularly sending mail to here, our old house in the UK, my former employers in the UK and even my parents house sometimes! Where they consider is home for me is anyones guess.

My driving license is expiring shortly and I thought that perhaps I’d have to swap it for a French one because the UK form states quite clearly on the front page that you can’t get a UK driving license unless you are resident in the UK. However, they go on to define in detail what they mean by someone being resident in the UK and I meet all their requirements!

In fact in most cases it is still much easier for me to prove that I live in the UK than to prove that I live in France, to the extent that not only have we been able to get credit cards but even a mortgage! Interestingly, despite telling everyone official that we live in France, we have yet to receive any request to pay the Taxe d’Habitation so it would seem that officially we don’t really live in France after all.

So it would appear that, officially at least, “home” for us is actually still the UK.

PS We’re off to Spain for a short break this afternoon so no more FPs ’til at least Wednesday.

The problem living here is that you can drive to an enormous number of places within a day or so.

I thought of Geneva first but I think it would be a little cold this time of year and it’s a little far to go for a short break I think (about 6 or 8 hours drive).

Northern Italy would also be nice and has the advantage that we could drive a little further south until it got warm enough for us but it too is around 8 hours drive.

I’d quite like to see more of northern Spain but to get beyond the Basque Country (which is very industrialised), it’s over 8 hours drive. Also the weather is pretty similar to here and we’re looking for somewhere a little warmer.

So, it’s looking like it’ll be in the direction of Barcelona. Not the city itself though as that’s a pain to park in and we’ve seen a lot of it over the last couple of years. Sitges (a little south of Barcelona) sounds interesting and I’ve seen it on the videos for the Spanish course. Again, the advantage is that we can go further south ’til we get the temperature we’re looking for. We might even manage a visit to Port Adventura whilst we’re there.

Most booking sites send contact details for the guests when the booking is received but this one doesn’t and in fact all we get is an arrival date and a name.

When this couple arrived they started by complaining that I didn’t know the flight arrival times to Girona airport. Actually, we do. They’re from about 7am to midnight every day and we even check actual arrival times for guests as there have been considerable delays of late. Still, they didn’t accept my explanation that we’d not been told of their arrival time so added that to the complaint letter. We’re still at a bit of a loss as to how anyone would have told us though as they booked the flight separately from the accommodation so the place they booked us through didn’t know when they were arriving either.

But then it gets a bit surreal. They’d asked me after checking in about eating that night and I’d said that they’d have needed to eat in Spain as all French restaurants stop serving around 8.30pm and after that it’s McDonalds or nothing. Quite a big part of their complaint was that I didn’t give them any information about eating out that night. Of course, that’s because they couldn’t eat out that night as it was about 9.30pm by the time they arrived. However, as they’d not adjusted their watches they figured that it was only a little after 8pm.

It’s even worse than that though as they somehow managed to stay most of a week in France without adjusting their watches so had quite a run of difficulties over that time, most of which they seemed to be blaming on us. When they came down at 11am for breakfast, it had been cleared away (that being 10am for them, of course), when they went for lunch at 2pm (1pm for them), the restaurants were closed, etc. Actually, they STILL haven’t realised that they were running an hour behind the rest of France despite having to run for the plane as they arrived just as the checkin for their flight closed.

Slightly more comical was their complaint about the antiquated hairdryer being a bit smelly. In fact, it was the room heater that they were using and the smell was the burning of their own hair.

So when you get off a flight, do check what the local time is.

However, during the last year we happened to get an Auchan loyalty card and about a week ago received the French equivalent of a pre-approved credit card application from them. It said on the letter that all we needed to do to collect the card was to bring along the letter with the attached sample card to Auchan with proof of ID and bank details. Frankly, we didn’t believe that it would be that simple. Besides this being the land of documentation mountains, we had previously tried to open a savings account with Auchan and couldn’t provide them with enough documentation so we figured that there was no way they’d actually issue us with a credit card.

Anyway, as the offer expires in a week or so, yesterday we went to Auchan (similar to a really big Tesco) out of curiosity.

They took the letter, asked us how long we’d been living here, how long we’d been working here and in under 20 minutes we walked away with a credit card with a EUR 7500 limit on it!

Given the lack of credit referencing facilities in France, this seems incredibly stupid of them. After all, the only information that they could check was my passport, address (from the loyalty card letter), and bank details. They didn’t even ask anything about our income or even proof that we were working here for that matter. Also odd is that whilst we use Carrefour every week and have had their loyalty card for well over two years they haven’t come out with any invitation for their card yet we’ve had the Auchan loyalty card for under a year and only go there maybe once a month.

As it’s a French card, the facilities that it has are quite different from those on offer elsewhere in the world. We kicked off with a 10% discount voucher for our first trolleyload put through the checkout plus a EUR 15 gift card so we’re already ahead. As it’s an Auchan card, it also comes with a 10% discount on any Auchan products bought on Tuesdays. Naturally, it comes with a charge: EUR 8 per year from next year which is about typical for store cards issued here. Other odd features are that after 3 months we can get a EUR 300 bank transfer from the card to our bank account and after 6 months we can use it in the ATMs in Post Offices here. Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be a cash advance fee for that though obviously there are interest charges.

However, by far the biggest advantage of the card is that we can now use the checkouts reserved for Auchan cardholders. Thanks to the loyalty that the French have to their own banks, these particular checkouts rarely have any queue at all.

Our next challenge is to get it upgraded to a proper Visa/Mastercard.