Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

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.

We’ve got our Danish group back again this evening.

It’s an interesting aspect of the development of our bookings that we are starting to get picked out by tour groups this year. This’ll be the fifth time that the Danish tour leader will have been here on one of her New Age tours taking in this region. It seems to be quite a popular area for that type of tour, this particular one having a Mary Magdelene theme.

Anyway, that’ll keep us pretty busy this evening as they want meals through to lunchtime tomorrow.

Most of the time we just take it for granted that American is pretty much the same as English and at least that we know the differences (color not colour, check not cheque, etc.) but some differences in interpretation can cause problems.

The main problem we have is with our pickup and dropoff service. This is a service that we offer for the likes of walkers who frequently arrive at the airport or rail station without cars but who’d like to start their walking in our area (it’s very popular for that).

Most of the time our guests are couples and we’ve only once had a family arrive wanting a pickup. Therefore we don’t need to get a minibus or similar and can easily do the pickups and dropoffs in our car, sometimes with the aid of the trailer for the luggage.

Critically, from the American perspective, it isn’t a “shuttle service” and we never use that phrase in any of our marketing because we’re just not setup to offer such a thing. Yet, consistently, the Americans read “pickup/dropoff service” as “shuttle service” and thereby have an expectation of its capability that we just aren’t equipped to fulfil.

For instance, a few weeks ago, despite several e-mail exchanges a large group arrived wanting to book the shuttle bus for the nine of them. Earlier, we had one couple who wanted to catch the shuttle to and from the city every day and, were none too pleased when we weren’t able to collect them from the town a couple of times during their stay.

One thing that we hadn’t allowed for was that French style barbeques aim to cook the food French style ie very much undercooked from our point of view.

However, we sort-of assumed that they’d fire up the BBQ in the normal manner with food sizzling on the spit and so on. As usual, we assumed wrong and in fact at tonights BBQ they only had the temperature high enough to merely warm the food rather than actually cook it which, of course, means that we couldn’t cook it as thoroughly as we’d be happy with.

Sit down BBQ meals seem a little odd too.

Oh well, another custom that the French have sort-of taken up.

Whilst we had loads of housebuyers staying with us in 2004 and 2005, 2006 saw none of them at all.

Who knows why? The UK interest rates weren’t much higher than they were the year before nor did there seem to be a big difference in the UK house prices.

It’s the same this year too ie no big difference. Yet, we’re just into the main house-hunting season (usually October to March) and already we’ve had three separate house-buying families call in with us. Whether this is the sign of a major buying spree is a good question but at least it’s a sign of the start of a movement in the French market.