Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Immigration’ Category

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?

We’ve sort of settled into a routine now: early morning, get breakfast stuff; mid-morning work on the French degree; 11-ish to 1.30-ish have lunch; afternoons: alternate between admin/tidying up and battling with French bureaucracy.

In the evenings we were hoping to be flogging meals to the locals but money’s a bit thin on the ground ’til after the harvest in September so we’re in the process of attempting to widen out our definition of “local” which hopefully will bear fruit in due course.

On the French bureaucracy front, we finally managed to acquire our “KBIS” (ie business registration number) a few weeks ago. For some reason, which totally escapes me, the accountant reckoned that there was no great rush on that as it was “in the works”: so, even though I’d specifically asked for him to get it way back in February, he didn’t get off his bum ’til late April and toward the end of May we received said document (which he said in February only took 3 days to get) with a start date for the business of May 1st (which will probably cause problems in due course). Over here, you basically can’t do anything without it. To give you an idea of the implications some things that you can’t do are: have a business account (so I couldn’t cash cheques made out to Mas Camps); accept credit cards (nearly had to turn away a couple of people over that); get a social security number (can’t claim Wendy’s medical bills without that); get a card for the local cash & carry (nearly ran out of several items for the hotel over that one)… the list is endless. As I say, it escapes me why he thought there was no rush on it.

Oh, and one other “small” item: you can’t have a business phone line. Thanks to the wonders of the timing of French bureaucracy, now that I have the KBIS and have paid the two months overdue bill (of course, without the KBIS they wouldn’t take the money from me), they have cut me off for not paying it. Which is why it’ll be a while before this reaches you (I’m guessing at minimum a week but it could be more).

He’s also of the opinion that I don’t need the TVA number (Value Added Tax number) ’til the end of the year. This one isn’t quite so serious though it has cost me several hundred pounds so far as it means that I can’t claim any UK VAT that I pay (which mounts up quite quickly when you count the computer I’m typing this on, a load of pillows and stuff arriving late June, all the UK adverts plus a bunch of other stuff we’ve bought in Spain).

Needless to say, we’ve been actively looking for a new accountant for the last month or so.

I can see why Roger’s friend said that people have gone bust waiting for French bureaucracy!!

We’ve now had three folk applying for a job here. However, I’ve looked at some of the bureaucratic loops that need to be gone though to employ someone here and I figure that it ain’t worth the hassle unless you’re employing at least 2 or 3 (which we couldn’t justify just yet). Also had a painter call while I was out: Wendy said that he went completely round the building and had a job getting rid of him; got a call later that evening to say he’d be prepared to do it for FF50,000 (they still count in francs here) ie about £5,000 which is a whole lot of money for painting (well, it’s a whole lot of building too I suppose).

The website is coming along nicely and the regional guide page seems to feature quite highly in the Pyrenees Orientale tourism searches, in both the French & English versions. I’m currently concentrating on that as the hotel gets quite a few hits via the regional guide. Also have to see about developing the sales side: so far only one flight booked, and a couple of books & a DVD sold but that’s not too bad seeing as I didn’t really do much in that line with the site. As you know, we recently came across a little brochure on the early history (ie Roman & Templar eras) of Mas Camps so I added the first version of that onto the site the other day and I’ve added a bit of that to the main hotel page too. The general aim is do an update of the main pages every two or three weeks but in practice it’s been nearly every week for the regional page since we got here as I’ve been adding photos of the local attractions and souping up the descriptions of them (which, in turn, is upping the number of hits). Laughably, thanks to John’s assistance, I now feature as the top site when you look for “pyrenees motorbike tours” (though, so far, we’ve not had any “greasy bikers” staying)! Actually, with that spurring me on, I’m hoping to target more directly wine enthousiasts, walkers/ramblers and cyclists so if any of you have suggestions of what kind of things I’d need to write in those areas, let me know. And, no Brian, I’ve not forgotten about the golf courses: just haven’t been around the areas where they would likely to be recently.

Anyway, tasks for the rest of this week are to erect the next couple of signs, hopefully Thursday and Friday evening (it’s way too hot now to do serious work before about 7pm here: I managed to put myself out of commission with a touch of heatstroke for the last couple of days trying to), see about getting James a Carnet de Santé (health book), acquire a social security number (which is required by quite a backlog of forms that I’ve built up) and, of course, see if we can’t do something about the phone.

We’re hoping to place our first advert for the restaurant in the local paper within the next week or so which at least only needs to be in French. It’s getting to be something of a nuisance to have to write everything in both french & english: the website in particular is quite a chunk of paper if you print it out and it all needs written twice.

We were up at the mairie again on Thursday (we seem to be going there every week or two for something or other). They’ve not heard anything about Wendy’s european residence permit: we suspect that, as was the case in NI, it’s very rare (she had the only one issued in NI as far as we can tell). Our big bins are still on order (we’re running with household size wheelie bins at the moment which fill up surprisingly quickly when we’ve restaurant customers). From before the time of the previous owner we’ve been in the Fenouilledes area accomodation list but we should be appearing under the restaurant heading as well soon. Snag is, that the Fenouilledes area is in the wrong direction: by the time people get to their touristy sights, they’ve already passed us by and ideally we’d like to be in the Agly tourist area list instead (ideally, in both, of course). We had one go with the Agly people a few weeks back but have since discovered that their “welcome to Agly” sign is on our land so we’ll be returning to them in due course to have them either remove the sign or add us to their lists.

The ADSL modem has turned up but, of course, it won’t work without the phone line working so that’ll be a while. When we do get it going it will be a major, major speed improvement. At best I can get 30k here and most of the time it’s more like 12k (I even got down as low as 9k once) which is seriously slow: even retrieving the email takes ages and you can’t really open more than one window at a time (downloads are a total nonrunner).

Techies: does anyone know how I can use a GPRS mobile with infrared as my “modem” for surfing etc.? It’s coming up “no dial tone” when I connect to it via the infrared and try to use it as an ordinary modem. It’s using a French Orange Mobicarte (pay as you go) but I bought the phone separately, so perhaps I need to set something up on the GPRS end? (everything else seems fine though)

Hi folks,

It’s been relatively quiet in recent weeks so we’ve been using the time to try and get some French admin done.

We didn’t get too far with our first attempt at the mairie to get Wendy a residence permit. They called the prefecture who started talking visas. However, if you cast your mind back a ways you may recall that in the end I did manage to get a residence permit for Wendy via the European legislation. Sooo, we asked for that at the prefecture and they promptly sent us back to the mairie as the prefecture only does visas and you get residence permits from the mairie. Anyway, the mairie let us fill in all the forms this time. And then sent the form off to the prefecture. No, I don’t know why we couldn’t fill in the forms at the prefecture when we were there. Well, I suppose I do: it’s France.

We asked about school for James while we were there. Everyone says that kids can start at 2. Not in Maury, it’s 3 so he’s got off for another year (he was 2 on April 29th). It’s also about 5 miles up the road vs the nearest school in Estagel (different mairie so we were told we couldn’t go there or at minimum needed the Mayor’s permission to do so as he’d have to pay the Estagel mairie for James’ schooling). However, a few days later our neighbour, who’s a teacher) told us that as we live in a “mas” we can go to whatever school we like so James may well be starting this September. Actually, probably not as I think it’s probably better to let his english get established properly.

The “mas” issue is interesting. We also decided to get going on visiting the equivalent of the local tourist boards and getting ourselves listed. First stop was Estagel ‘cos it’s closest. They said “no dice” as we’re not in the Estagel area. We started wondering about the reason for the “mas” issue. Essentially it’s because, at least in our own case, Mas Camps is a place, not just a house. There’s another reason in the case of ourselves as I found out the other day: we are in the area of both Estagel and Maury. In fact, the “welcome to Estagel” sign is actually on the bit of my land over the road (the road marks the boundary between Maury and Estagel). Sooo, it’s off to Estagel to give them two options: 1) add me to their lists or 2) remove the sign.

Still haven’t got my “KBIS” (business registration) which means a trip to my (soon to be former, if he doesn’t get the finger out) accountant tomorrow.

Have to see about the drinks license again one of these days as we’ve been flogging it in the restaurant.

Oh, the restaurant… we decided to open it properly as from this Monday so we’ve been distributing leaflets round Estagel (hence earlier visit to their tourism office). The slight complication is that we didn’t want to overdo it so didn’t go overboard on the marketing. Anyway, that’s worked out OK as we had our first couple of customers this evening and didn’t totally make a mess of it. That’s our menu attached: sorry for the awful French – I’m really bad in French in two things: numbers and food!

The website hits are mounting up nicely and I’ve one of the top Pyrenees-Oriental websites (well above the official tourist board anyway) so we’ve been out and about taking pics for the regional guide part of the site (which gets about 50% of the total hits). For the sporty amongst you, that’s the first of the seasons bike races which, as you can see, goes right past our front door!