Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

It’s been almost two years since we’ve had a trailer on the car but with the move date approaching fast it was time to get a tow bar on the car and darned expensive it is too. That’s, of course, the problem with trailers: not only are you out EUR 1000 or more on the trailer itself but you’ve also got to pencil in another EUR 500 for a tow bar.

Separately from that we’ve made a start on the packing and trying to work out just how much will actually fit into the trailer. At the moment, it seems like quite a lot but, as always, no matter the amount of space that you have available, it’s never quite enough as there are always last minute things that you’d not thought of and then there are those things that fall into the “wouldn’t it be nice if we could take that?” category which expand to fill any space available, no matter how large it might have appeared initially.

What’s a really plus point this time around is that we’ve loads of rooms available and have the luxury of being able to accumulate all the stuff in one room in a rough trailer-shaped pile so, in theory, it should be fairly simple to relocate said pile into the trailer. Not only that, we can park the trailer in our courtyard so can pack it over a few days and just hook it up the night before we head off.

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.

Whilst we all love our vacation time, we all assume that places that thrive on tourist business will be open during the holidays.

That’s not always the case in France where many attractions are closed today because it’s Labour Day (May 1st). Although many people will be eating out today, a number of restaurants choose this time of year to close thus losing considerable business of course.

Even when they’re not on holiday many restaurants stick to the 12 to 2pm lunchtime and we know of one local touristy village which gets tour buses every day from 9am to 7pm yet the restaurant only serves food from 12 to 1.30pm.

It’s obviously impossible to name a single bank which you can choose simply because no single bank operates in every country of the world.

There are some general pointers as to how to go about choosing your bank though.

One school of thought is that you should choose the local bank with the most branches in the area which you’re moving to. That’s a reasonable approach in that for most countries there’s a charge to use ATMs that aren’t owned by your own bank so it may save you on ATM withdrawal fees. However, be wary of local banks that don’t operate internationally on a widespread basis or that don’t attract many foreign customers as you can come unstuck very easily through not having local banking practices explained to you. This even applies in many cases where banks operate English speaking branches: they might well speak English but often banking terms don’t translate well.

The other school of thought is that you should choose a bank based in your own country but with branches in your new country. This can work well in that the banking staff should be more familiar with the banking practices that you’re used to and sometimes offer good deals on money transfers to/from your home country. So, for example, if you’re American then the best choice is usually Citibank as that operates as a local bank in many countries yet retains an American feel in every location in which it operates and offers good deals on transfers between Citibank accounts in other countries. However, if you’re British, you might think that HSBC would be the way to go yet because it bills itself as “the world’s local bank” it tends to follow local banking practices more than British ones although it does offer transfers to your HSBC accounts in other countries.

Don’t forget that you don’t need to choose a single bank. One combination that works very well is a local bank with low charges and lots of branches combined with an international bank to handle your global transfers.

It looks like that for a second year running winter has pretty much passed us by.

The trees are already showing signs of greenery and many of the fruit trees are already flowering. Good for us, of course, but it looks like the local ski resorts have had another pretty poor year as there wasn’t a whole lot of snow on the mountain just behind us which is usually completely covered from November through to April.

Just as well we didn’t restock on the heating oil!