Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

Probably one of the most neglected aspects of immigration or indeed moving in general is labelling your stuff and yet it can be a major pain if you don’t do it sensibly upfront as most of us don’t quite manage to unpack everything after we’ve moved. Yeah, perhaps we should clear out some more first but realistically who does that?

Unless you’re moving to an identical house then there’s not much point in trying to label things going by the room they’re going to finish up in as chances are they’ll end up somewhere else. Aside from that, you’re more likely to remember packing the stuff in a particular room before you move than “remember” where it’s going to end up.

Ideally you’d do a proper inventory before you start the packing so you could create a nifty database to tell you where everything is packed but that’s hardly viable for most of us. Therefore the best option is probably a middle ground ie try to pack the boxes in a reasonably logical manner and keep a little book recording any additional information that you can.

Believe me, that’ll save you endless head-scratching at the other end!

James started in the local nursery school in September last year as the only non-French child.

When you look at any of the “moving to France” TV series, no matter what the age, the kids are put into the local school and are fluent in about three months. Over a year down the line, James uses single french words now and again but never a complete phrase. How come?

Ironically, I think it’s an aspect of them being helpful from the start in putting him in a class with the teacher who speaks a little english (they’ve even moved her up to the next class with him). The effect of that was that the children started speaking english which, of course, meant that he didn’t need to speak any french, so he didn’t.

Unfortunately, that’s going to mean that next year they will surely refuse him entry to the primary school and instead will insist that he goes to the CIPPA class in Perpignan. That’s simply not viable as you could hardly expect a six year old to negotiate two buses plus cross a very busy road by himself and besides it’s a class for 16 to 18 year olds who already speak french.

All this, of course, creates something of a problem for us as from September next year.

The whole idea behind the common market, or European Union as we call it these days, was that borders between the countries participating would gradually cease to exist and, for the most part, that has been gradually happening over the last 20 or 30 years. How come then there’s almost always a queue at the border crossing between Spain and France then?

I used to think that it was just a case of “jobs for the boys” until I saw a number of cars and caravans being pretty much taken apart by the customs guys. Presumably they’re enforcing some import control then? Perhaps, but then anything that you can legally buy in Spain can be legally taken to France.

Whatever they’re doing it certainly causes major problems in the Summer when the queues of cars can reach right back to the toll booth (abour 6 kilometres!) and the hill leading up to the customs post is littered with cars that have overheated and had to pull in off the road.

We received an interesting e-mail from one of the European offices looking after consumer affairs last night.

They’re writing on behalf of a Spanish couple who booked with us last July but who didn’t turn up.

Ordinarly, that would mean we’d have billed them as a no-show but at the time the booking system had a technical problem so we weren’t receiving their reservation e-mails and therefore didn’t know that they were coming. Anyway, net effect was that we didn’t charge them although under the terms of the reservation system we were entitled to.

They’ve gone to this European office with their booking confirmation that has a note of the two nights booked and EUR 98 charge. Except, that it isn’t a change: it’s just a note of what they would have to pay.

The Spanish guy in the European office doesn’t understand that at all. They quoted their credit card number and they’ve a statement with EUR 98 on it, they didn’t get their accommodation (because they went to the wrong place) but he believes that they’ve paid it as do they.

Usually the Spanish are much more Internet-savvy than the French but in this area they’re just as far behind in that they assume that they’ve paid when they quote a credit card number yet it’s only used for a guarantee.

I suspect that it’ll run for a bit as he sent another e-mail this morning threatening to translate everything and sent it to the French consumer protection authorities to demand the refund of this EUR 98 which they’ve not paid.

With the rapid rise of the Catalán language just over the border in Spain the problems in communication with those coming north have been magnified considerably.

Starting earlier this year we began to receive guests from “Spain” who could barely speak French or English and simply refused to speak Spanish. Since we don’t speak Catalán we’re increasingly finding ourselves pretty much resorting to sign language with some of them.

Aside from anything else, that makes sending out of our acknowledgement e-mail something of a problem. The majority of those coming from south of the border are from Barcelona and that’s a very cosmopolitan city with Spanish from all over the country and indeed Latin America living there but obviously with a large Catalán component. The only language that we know they all speak is Spanish yet sending out an acknowledgement e-mail in Spanish will clearly insult the Cataláns.

The net effect is that we’re considering calling it a day with e-mails to Spain yet that causes complications for them and in fact we’ve already received a complaint from one Catalán couple (in English, as they won’t write in Spanish and nobody outside Spain can understand Catalán) because they say we were closed the night they’d booked. In fact, because they’d refused to read the directions e-mailed to them in Spanish, they were banging on the door of our neighbour’s house and he was off on holiday.