Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Remember a few weeks back that I said that I’d plonked all these little e-mails onto a blog (now living at Foreign Perspectives)? Well, I was looking at the stats this evening and I’ve managed to pick up 1000 readers since then!!

Fame at last. Wendy reckons we should go for the “fortune” and try to make some money out of it.

Our basic game plan is to refresh/update every room in the hotel over a five year cycle. The accountants amongst you will equate this to writing off the room contents over five years but for sheer simplicity and to avoid a big bill what we’re actually going to do is to update two rooms each year.

Step one is to get two new beds so last week we set off to find 1) a really nice bed for our “honeymoon suite” and 2) a good but much cheaper bed for one of our ordinary rooms which is in dire need of replacement. What we’ll actually do is to move the existing “honeymoon” bed to one of the outside rooms (and dump the one it currently has) then replace an OK bed in one of our non-ensuite rooms, moving that bed into the naff non-ensuite room.

French beds are sold differently which makes price comparison rather difficult. Generally the “bed” on sale is actually only the headboard and frame. To that you need to add a base and a mattress. Net effect is that a bed we really liked for the honeymoon suite was prices at EUR 319 but ended up as more like EUR 700. The cheap bed started off at EUR 116 and ended up as more like EUR 500. We’re still shopping around as I’d like a cheapo bed for more like EUR 300 and the honeymoon for more like EUR 500.

The English folk staying last week were our first to be here when we needed the heat on in the dining room. Sounded like a simple task but we still haven’t worked out why the radiators in the dining room aren’t working. They’re working everywhere else so we reckon there’s a valve somewhere that we’ve not turned on but so far we’ve not found it. anyway, in the meantime we thought we’d get a superser type thing. Turns out that they’re not that common here so we ended up heading off to the other side of Perpignan and all we now need to get is the gas bottle. Picked up a leaf vacuum thingy too as we’re up to our knees in the things at the moment.

At last, we are able to accept American Express cards. We sent the initial e-mail to them in June or July and they called us a couple of weeks ago. In the meantime we’d asked the bank to sort it but that was a couple of months ago so I guess that’s not happening anytime soon which is just as well as we got an offer from Amex themselves to set it up free (vs 50‚€ for the bank) and 3‚€ a month vs 5‚€ for the bank. Still nothing back from Diners Club though but I guess we’ll need to give them a couple of months.

I’ve knocked together mark #1 of our Living in France page, so comments/critique on https://www.foreignperspectives.com/livinginfrance . As you’ll see, there are a number of areas that need filled in.

A first… it’s warmer in Belfast than it is here!!

A good time to get going on the backlog of administration that built up over the summer. Once we hit the start of July nothing got done that didn’t have to get done right away, net effect of which is that I’ve just completed the accounts for June and am about half way through the July accounts. All being well, I’ll have caught up with things in a week or two.

We have our first ebay client with us at the moment. Didn’t make too much on the room charge but they had a meal last night which has brought the income from them well up. We haven’t really sussed out the ebay sales yet but are optimistic that we’ll do OK with it once we get a good formula sorted. So far the score is: first attempt at full price, lots of interest, two pathetic bids, no sale; second attempt around half price with breakfast included, less interest (further into October explains that I think), one sale (that’s the guys that are here now); third attempt also around half price but ex-breakfast, some interest but no sale yet (the listing is still current); fourth attempt with no accommodation charge (yes, John, FREE!!) but compulsory meal purchases, quite a lot of early interest (also a current listing).

Anyway, must head off as we need to get some more serious clothing… the t-shirt and shorts aren’t really up to the current weather.

Simple really. Just about every single “moving to France/Spain/wherever” TV programme has three things in common: 1) they don’t speak the language and 2) they meet the mayor on the first day and 3) they never ever have any problems with the French administration (or indeed, seem to do any!).

Well, I’m fluent and Wendy’s not too bad at the French either so that blows us out for a start (it doesn’t make for quite so good TV if the protaganists can understand each other).

Although we own the only sizeable accommodation in the area (the next down from us has one apartment in total), we’ve yet to see the mayor. Bit odd as one of his priorties is to attract more tourists to the area and where are they going to stay when they get here?

And, as you know, we’ve had a considerable amount of involvement with the French administration over the last lot of months.

Oh, speaking of administration, we’ve actually got our drinks license now. Seems that we didn’t have to wait for the notaries to get their act together and find the relevant documents: all we had to do was to go along to the mairie and say that we’d like to transfer the license. Well, not quite all: it is France, after all. Nearly though, for the only thing we’d to do extra was to go along to the customs & excise people (although that did take three weeks as they are only in residence in Rivesaltes one afternoon a week and had moved anyway) and hand over the form that the mairie had given us: no additional documentation!! I for one was totally staggered to find that we didn’t need anything else. Supposedly the local gendarme should have done an investigation of us first but that’s the mairie’s responsibility and I think we’ve raised so many “issues” with them already that they weren’t going to rock the boat.

Anyway, moving here is quite different when you don’t have a TV crew in tow.

We’ve been building up our winter to-do list over the last couple of weeks and are gradually working our way through it though there are more things getting added on than taken off at the moment.

One thing that’s now gone is our dutyfree shopping trip. We did the trial run on Friday only to find that the various groups of DOE equivalents are digging up large stretches of the road and, seemingly, all of Andorra’s capital. Net effect is that it took us more than twice the time to get there and that’s even with us taking the two tunnel shortcuts. We definitely want to do some kind of Christmas/December event but it’s back to the drawing board at the moment. We’ve left the listing on our own site at www.mascamps.com/packages/en.htm for the moment but there’s just too much driving time at the moment.

More from the end of year booking too. They’ve discussed it all amongst themselves and the net effect is that the offering on December 31st will be a whole lot easier for us to do although we’re still quite concerned about the lack of time to clear up before the breakfast the next morning.

To cheer you all up a bit, we’ve actually had to put on the long trousers, proper shoes and a jumper today. Mainly due to the wind though as without it, we’re still in t-shirt weather which is some going this far into November.

At the third attempt, we managed to sell a two night break on ebay. Just £35 including breakfast which is less than we’d like but since it’s more than zero we’re still ahead. We’ve added another version for £29 without breakfast so we’ll see how that goes. What we’d really like to do is to add multiple rooms but our rating on ebay isn’t high enough to do that yet (and probably won’t be for several months at this rate). Still, in principle a reasonable way to shift rooms out of season.

We had a bit of a rush of blood to the head yesterday and thought that we’d run up our first little tour with activitybreaks.com . It’s a dutyfree Christmas shopping trip with two nights here and a day in Andorra for shopping, all for the bargain price of EUR 356 for two. There is a LOT of information that you need to enter onto their site for a tour so after we’d finished we thought it looked a little light and we’re off to Andorra later this week to do a trial run and research some options whilst we’re there. We also need something for the final day as finishing it after breakfast makes it look rather empty. At the moment, we’re thinking of adding either a mini-version of our proposed wine tour (ie just the one vineyard) or possibly a tour of Perpignan (there’s a Catalan Christmas festival on in December). Any thoughts folks?

Remember the prefecture saying that we can’t have a Carte de Séjour without a long stay visa? Well, ignoring the problem seems to have made that requirement go away as we got a letter from the office of migration (OMI) this morning saying that Wendy can have her CDS on payment of the fiscal stamp of ‚€220. They also made an appointment for her to have a medical test next week. Unfortunately, both of those requirements breach European law so we’ve a letter off to tell them that. Still, at least them accepting that she’s entitled to a CDS is a step forward.