Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

Ordinarily, we can see Queribus no problem but for the last few days it’s been almost entirely shrouded in mist.

That’s messed up the walking season somewhat to put it mildly. Typically, walkers start with us and set off for Carcassonne which takes them about five days and goes pretty much directly there, over hill and dale. Ordinarily, I quite envy them as it’s a lovely walk (though, so far, I’ve been too lazy to do it) but it’s a different matter in this kind of weather. Cold and miserable is nice now and again but they’ll be lucky to even get up to Queribus the way it is at the moment.

We’ve even got snow on Canigou which ain’t a good sign this early on: usually it doesn’t even have a dusting for another month or so.

One of the problems with working in the tourist industry is that you’re really busy right through the main holiday season and therefore need to take your own holidays out of season.

That tends to rule out some types of holiday. For instance, many beach destinations are out as they’ll be closed down for the season by the time we’d be able to go. The weather isn’t so dependable out of the holiday season either so we need to take more care about the type of destination we consider.

At the moment, we’re looking into two quite different holidays for ourselves.

The first will probably be late October/early November and for that we’re aiming to do a mini-citybreak. Flight prices drop dramatically by then so we’ve quite a wide choice in principle though as it’s just a short break we don’t want to pay a fortune for the hotels at the other end (which ruled out Venice: the prices were unbelieveable) and also it’s a lot cheaper if you don’t need to get a hotel at the airport so that knocks out flights leaving early in the morning.

The second is Christmas which may surprise you. In fact, we are usually empty over the Christmas period as the locals don’t “do” Christmas. Anyway, the net effect of that is that we have a window of around 7-10 days and we’re hoping to go somewhere “Christmasy” for it. Options for that one include Brussels (surprisingly cheap on the hotel front as the bureaucrats have, of course, left for their own holidays) and southern Germany. In principle, we’d have liked to do Edinburgh or London but the flight prices knocked both of them out of the running.

After that? Well, we’ll be full in early January but would like to get away somewhere warm sometime in the late January to early March period to break up the Winter for us.

Just as suddenly as it arrive, the grape harvest is over and with it the bands of grape pickers are gone from the villages and their little clusters of caravans and vans.

This year the difference wasn’t quite so marked as just about all the wine growers bought the grape picking machines last year so they don’t need anything like the number of pickers that they did in years gone by and therefore the little campsites were much smaller.

With the arrival of assorted Eastern Block countries into Europe this year, the mix of pickers changed quite substantially as indeed has the face of the workforce elsewhere in Europe over the last year or so.

Since we use two bakers, we get two bills, of course.

However, as we use one of the bakers mainly for the weekend and the other mainly for during the week, you’d think that the bills would be substantially different. Funnily enough, there’s actually very little difference in them which is quite peculiar.

The reason why they’re fairly similar is that we’ve been getting growing numbers of Spanish staying during the week whilst the weekend is normally reserved for the British. The Spanish rarely take breakfast but the British nearly always do, so the weekend bill generally ends up higher than the mid-week one.

How come the Spanish don’t take breakfast though? Well, they’ve become used to the normal level of French breakfasts and it just ain’t enough for them so they eat elsewhere for breakfast for the most part although any that have seen the breakfast we put out have often wandered in and started eating which is something of a complication for us as we only get the croissants etc. if the people have ordered breakfast the night before.

We had quite an interesting family staying with us for a few days.

The older parents wanted to move to France and therefore everyone was over on a scouting trip for about a week. Now, that’s a sensible thing as they wanted somewhere that their grandchildren (thankfully not also in tow) would like and a trip together gives everyone a chance to throw in their 2 cents.

However, the downside of this type of group is that it’s difficult to reach an agreement which everyone can live with.

The parents (in their 70s) wanted to buy somewhere small that they could look after easily enough. The grown-up children were more interested in spending a bit more and getting somewhere as an investment.

It is actually possible to get a solution for such a seemingly divergent set of criteria but what’s required is that everyone sit down together and state what they really want rather than leaving a whole lot unsaid as seems to have been the case with this particular group. With such a meeting, it’s usually possible to come up with a specification containing the essentials and the desireables which can then be used to aid an estate agent in finding your ideal property.

Even if you don’t have a disparate group, it’s useful to draw up a specification like that as you’ll be much more likely to find your ideal property than if you don’t have that.