Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

As of today (Monday) we are listed on both the Ryanair and FlyBE sites as THE CHEAPEST accommodation in Perpignan. In fact our “from” price is just over half of the next cheapest accommodation!

Bonjour mes amis:

Last time you saw the extensive July 14th celebrations in Estagel. This pic is of the parade of the “confreries” (wine lodges) of Languedoc-Rousillon today (Saturday). As you can see, wine is a whole lot more important in these parts than revolution! Quite a colourful parade which has had the side effect of filling up Mas Camps with people.

We were starting to wonder why we were getting so many bookings as the first we heard of the thing was Thursday. Yup, there’s us being the only accomodation of any consequence in Maury and they forget to tell us about one of the major events! That’s pretty typical of here as they’re awful at tourist promotion in general: virtually all of the cars parked in the town today were French, yet 60% of the tourists aren’t French but then they only advertise it in French, don’t have a website and don’t distribute their brochures that widely.

Actually on the website thing, I’m thinking of running up something to cover each of the local wine producers in a bit more detail than is currently on my little guide. I already get hits for the couple of domaines that I mention (none of them seem to run to websites or even to brochures in anything but French even though the bulk of the wine is sold to Belgium (OK, they speak French), Denmark and Holland (who generally prefer speaking English)). Nope, I’m not planning on charging them: it’s just that it’s in my own interest to attract more folk to the area and if they’re coming to do a tasting trip locally (quite a common reason for people to come) it should be useful to have my website associated with the various wine producers. Longer term, I’m also hoping to organise such trips as a package deal.

Someone else is buying a property in Maury and is staying with us for three or four days in August. We’re starting to discover more and more English in the area and sold a couple of bottles of wine to one of them the other day. It’s not, yet, a form of English colony though lately the local shops have started to develop little “English products” sections. It’s quite good business for us as people buying property tend to stay for longer than others and those that have settled in tend to be keen on our type of restaurant (haven’t managed, so far, to get big numbers of French weaned off their favourite: “burgers and chips”).

Oh, that’s me and James towards the end of a very hot day. I look much better in the mornings before it gets too hot!

And finally, for now, I’d be keen to get some feedback on mark #1 of my online shop (which needs lots of development!). It’s at Personally Chosen . The links on it are “live” but don’t be going as far as entering your credit card information just yet as I’ve not worked out how to transport the wine from me to customers.

Everyone’s seen the Bastille Day parade in Paris but you can say that you’ve seen the Estagel parade.

Yes, folks, that is the entire parade from the guy at the front with the wreath, the mayor with his little sash and the military might of Estagel (both policemen and the fire engines in the background).

Bonsoir encore:

I’ve missed the 12th but it’s the 14th today so Estagel will be coming alive with parades, riots, etc. shortly. Well, a parade and more than likely everyone will be too pissed to riot as there’s free plonk once the parade is over.

Had our first bunch of total **** arrive last week. Got a call from England early in the week to reserve rooms for two families who were driving down to a villa in Spain for a couple of weeks. We’re around the half-way mark between Calais and Alicante so we’ve had a few similar groups before. Anyway, these **** booked rooms, evening meals and breakfasts for eight: with such relatively large numbers, you need to buy a fair bit extra of the fresh food, of course. They were stopping off around Tours which is something like seven hours non-stop drive to here and, as they were intending to set off around 0830, we figured that it would be at least 7pm before they turned up: well, you’ve gotta have some rest stops, don’t you? Not these ****. Nope, they turned up around 5pm (ie pretty knackered due to no stopping). They left again at 5.20. The **** had decided that they may as well drive on to Alicante so our bin had a big heap of stuff added to it right away.

Anyway, net effect is that we decided that it’s time we started taking deposits from people so there’s now a little button on the website to let folk pay me money as of yesterday on the english page. Haven’t worked out how to do it in French yet.

Actually, they are the only English folk that we’ve had stopping (OK, only for 20 mins). Our marketing is bound to be better in English than it is in French, yet something like 2/3rds of the people staying so far have been French (sadly, they’ve only spent about 1/2 of the total money: have to see about increasing their expenditure).

Techie question time again: Remember the ADSL wireless connection? Well, it turns out that there were three problems with it. For a start, it’s pretty hot here and the gear was running somewhat higher than the recommended operating temperature: adding a fan has cooled everything down nicely. Second, the wireless link was hanging after an hour or so: applying the Netgear patch has sorted that one. However, it now has a peculiar problem: it tries to dial all the time but only connects when I leave the normal phone off the hook (just discovered that last night). This seems to be 100% consistent. Is there anything I can do, or is it a problem for France Telecom?

Weddings are hard work!

We were pretty much completely full last Friday and Saturday with a wedding party. Not really all that profitable as the previous owner had went and negotiated a rate about 25% below our high season rate and, of course, they all eat out. Somehow, we managed to get almost all of the rooms reset by Sunday lunchtime which was just as well as a bunch of folk stopped that night… we made almost as much with the four Danes as we did for the whole wedding party (and with a lot less hassle too).

It was actually raining today. Thought I’d say that, just to cheer you lot up. Of course, it’s sunny as I write this and seriously warm too.

Techy question: now that the ADSL connection appears to have been sorted out, I’m using that a whole more of the time. I have a France Telecom ADSL modem connected to my trusty Netgear wireless router and I access this from the Toshiba Tecra, wireless. However, after about an hour of surfing or whatever the wireless link goes down. It starts working again (for a shorter period usually) if I switch the router off and on again. Is it just the router overheating or something? It’s usually around the 30C mark here. Would just firing up a baby fan for the router sort it out?

Nearly forgot… it looks like we’ll be installing airconditioning much sooner than expected. Seems that there’s a scam (sorry, scheme) that lets you install it at a monthly cost around the same as the heating would normally cost you and the French government send you a cheque for 15% of the total amount in February of the year following installation. Doesn’t appear to be a downside. It’s one of those heatpump type thingy’s (ie it works like a really big fridge).

In case you’ve missed it, William G is on his way to becoming a French resident. I was supposed to meet him in his new house last Thursday but with the wedding and a couple of additional last minute arrivals I just couldn’t make it (hence lack of several cases of wine, David). Anyway, the whole family are heading over on July 14th. Could the last person to leave IT please switch off the servers?…