Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

When we started running the place here, we were surprised to find that quite a lot of people will get into their car in Amsterdam at 4am and drive to the south of France, arriving around 8pm.

Funnily enough, they’re still fairly sane when they get here.

The English on the other hand are rarely totally sane by the time they get here although they’ve “only” driven from Calais.

Why? Well, basically because the Dutch are used to driving much longer distances. In the UK, two hours is quite a long drive yet we’ll drive to Barcelona just to do some shopping which is a four hour round trip.

However, we’ve just had what’s probably our record breaking trip from an English family who, quite surprisingly, arrived in good spirits even though they’d driven around 13 hours from Calais (much longer than normal due to the heavy traffic at the weekend) and were just heading off for another 15 hours or so to get to the south of Spain. I praise them because they managed to stay sane after all that driving over just two days yet wonder about the sanity of spending something like EUR 100 on tolls, another EUR 100 on petrol, another EUR 100 on hotels and nearly three days of their lives when they could have flown there considerably cheaper.

In the days of Franco, the various local languages in Spain were, by and large, suppressed. The overall effect of that was that they were on the way to dying out.

However, since the early 1980s single language schools in the local language have sprung up in all areas of Spain where there is a local language. That’s particularly important in the Basque region as their language is so different from all others that it’s said to be virtually impossible to learn unless you learn it as a child.

But there’s a downside to all this promotion of local languages and that’s that it’s beginning to cut those taught in them from the rest of the world. This morning we had one of an increasing number of Spanish guests who couldn’t really speak any language other than Catalan. We could barely communicate with them at all because they couldn’t speak more than a few words of English, French or Spanish.

Now, I can understand that in some areas they would prefer not to be taught in Spanish but they really need to learn one world language or many people will find themselves virtually cut off from the world. Remember that these are local languages: if you only speak a local language you’re going to have trouble outside that region.

When a bank holiday weekend falls in the middle of your vacation then you need to check out what facilities are going to be available.

For example, we’ve a group coming tonight who are relying on public transport. Their train gets in around 10.30pm by which time there’s a good chance that the taxis will have made a start on their own vacation. Even if they don’t, then they’re going to be with us all day on the 14th with no transport at all because everything from buses to taxis knocks off for the entire day locally.

Many shops close too. In fact, just about all of them except for the large supermarkets. Still, at least that means that you can get food on the holiday although from the queues at the checkout on Saturday you’d think that the shops were going to be closed for a week or more.

Even some tourist attractions close on public holidays which would be a peculiar thing for them to do but then this is France so it shouldn’t surprise you too much that tourist attractions close on public holidays.

We’ve had two separate groups booking with us recently who seemed to be experiencing senile dementia at a very early age indeed: their 20s!

The first group was Australian so Wendy was quite keen on having them here as she always likes to chat to Australian guests when she gets the chance. We did wonder about them a little early on though as they clearly wanted to be staying at a place on the beach yet had booked our place which is in the countryside although some people do that in the peak season as we’re cheaper. Not only that but although we offer pickups they turned up in a taxi (usually around three or four times the rate we charge). Although they were only here a couple of days they managed to go downhill from there ending up by booking a meal with us for 7.30 and not bothering to sit down to eat it. “More money than sense” is a phrase that definitely applies to them!

The second group was from the UK and couldn’t work out how to get here despite being told in the automatic confirmation that they received when they booked and again on the confirmation e-mail that they received from me the next day. What confused them was that there were no buses to our place at 7pm despite it saying on both e-mails that the last bus is at 6pm. Now, I know that most people don’t read the complete confirmation e-mails but this information was in the second paragraph!

They’re just the first of many similar guests that we expect to receive (or not as in the case of the second group) over the next month or so.

For reasons which all my regular reasons will know I’ve been following the progress of British nationality legislation over the last few years.

Quick summary to bring ‘yall up to speed…. Pre-1982 children born in the UK took their nationality from their father. However, from that point children took nationality from their mother and could only take their nationality from their father if he was married to their mother. This was recognised as being discriminatory and in 2002 a new law was passed which removed that condition (ie that the father needed to be married) but that particular section wasn’t implemented until 2006.

How could they do that anyway? After all, the sex discrimination legislation forbids discrimination like that, doesn’t it? Yes, but there’s an exemption for public bodies which, of course, includes the people who handle UK nationality. However, COUNCIL DIRECTIVE 2004/113/EC of 13 December 2004 removed that exemption as of April 6th 2008 when it was implemented in UK law.

Interestingly though, the nationality people are STILL saying that children born pre-2006 can only get nationality from their father if he was married to their mother.

What’ll be interesting is their response to my recent application for James’ passport which quotes the various laws above and points out that they are breaking the law. (The EU law directs national governments to abolish any laws, regulations and administrative provisions contrary to the principle of equal treatment).