Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

Once you have your website properly set up on the Internet and listed in the search engines, you can expect to start receiving scam bookings. In fact, if you aren’t receiving them it’s an indication that you haven’t got your site listed properly.There are many variations on the scam theme these days but they have a number of characteristics in common, namely that the spelling & grammar are bad, the e-mail address is one of the free yahoo or hotmail ones and that the booking is for an usually large number of rooms. However, we’ve also received genuine bookings that meet all three criteria so sometimes you need to check a little further before you reject such a booking.Other common themes are that the main source of them is Nigeria, they’re usually from a “Christian organisation” and that they want you to bill them extra and buy mobile phones or rent cars with the excess. Sometimes, they will even quote a credit card number which works but you’ll find that in due course the card turns out to be stolen and the bank take the money charged off you.

Whilst old-timers at the holiday rental business will tell you that they can spot these straight away, when I ran a genuine example past them they rejected that too because it was for 10 rooms, it was from janine79@yahoo.com and the grammar was bad yet we banked a fair amount of money from this one last year. It did take a couple of e-mails and a search for the acting company they quoted to convince me that it was real though.

Frenchless in France raised the issue of how ethical it really was for Switzerland to be neutral during the war.

I’ve always thought of it being a noble thing to be neutral but as she pointed out there is another side to that neutrality. Swizerland turned away many refugees that could have escaped persecution under the Nazi regime. Yes, there were many Swiss who did help a great many refugees but as a nation they rejected all of them. Aside from that there is the issue as to what would have happened had the war gone Hitler’s way. Would that neutrality have been respected had Switzerland found itself surrounded by Nazi occupied countries? I think not.

This is one of the most complex areas of our guide as there are so many factors involved including your nationality, marital status, employment status for you, your spouse and your children.

If the simple case described in this section doesn’t cover you, it’s best to start looking into the matter as soon as you can as it can take ages to resolve immigration issues. Broadly speaking there are two basic types of immigration to France: where you are a European and where you aren’t. There’s a third variant where you are a European and your spouse isn’t which we’ll cover separately. Some defniitions are useful at this point:

A “visa” is a permit to enter a country and is usually obtained from the French embassy in your country of residence. There aren’t any French embassies in France itself of course and in some circumstances you may need to point this out to various people in the course of applying for your residence permit. A European Family Permit is a special type of visa issued to spouses and family members of European citizens who are not themselves Europeans.

France is in what’s called the “Schengen Area” which is a group of countries which grant a single visa to enter all of them. So, if you have a Shengen Visa for, say, Belgium then you don’t need an additional visa to enter France because both France and Belgium are in the Schengen Area.

A “residence permit” (“Carte de Séjour) is a document permitting you to live in a country. In some cases this permit may also give you permission to work in that country but you may need a “work permit” to do that.

A “work permit” gives you permission to work in a country. It may be incorporated into your “residence permit”.

Europe has two basic classes of countries: those which are established and those which are subject to transitional arrangements. Established countries are, generally, those which have been in the European Union for four years or more. Newer countries are subject to transitional arrangements in some circumstances, notably in terms of requirements regarding residence permits.

Anyway, next week we’ll be covering the case where you and your family are Europeans.

If you go by the signs, they are open from as early as 8am to as late as 11pm or so. However, if you try to order a meal it’s a very different story. The most common times are from about 11am to 10pm but in practice almost all such restaurants only serve food from noon to 1.30pm and from about 7.30pm to 9pm. Even the French fast-food chain Quick only serves its full menu a little bit outside the noon to 2pm period so you can’t even have a burger at 3pm if you wanted one unless you go to McDonalds.We still get caught out by those hours. A coffee-shop (salon du thé) opened recently in Estagel and we’ve been meaning to try it out for ages. We were running a little behind schedule on Sunday so thought that it would be a good time to get a sandwich or something from them as they had a sign saying that they opened from noon ’til 10pm. What happened when we turned up at 3pm? The waitress came out and said that they weren’t serving meals until the evening. The funny thing is that we were their only customers that day so the five staff will once again be sitting almost all day doing nothing. In fact, we’ve only ever seen the staff inside so perhaps we were their first ever customers.Perhaps we’ll be more lucky with the kebab shop but somehow I can’t see it.

Almost the first thing that people do once they move to France is to look for something else to do. Many people come over with the thought that the income from a few gites will support them into their old age but, sadly, it’s not quite so simple as that. Self-catering just doesn’t seem to be capable of providing enough money to fully support a family and B&B can’t be totally relied on either.So, people branch out. Many of the gite people find that there’s quite a bit of spare time during the week and often start doing odd-jobs for other expats around the area. Others find the allure of the computer a great attraction and once they’ve polished up their website for the nth time they start considering other internet ventures.