Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

These days when people buy a holiday accommodation property one of the first things that they think of is their website. That’s no bad thing although many people think that their website is all the marketing that they need. Still, it’s a start.

However, where a lot of people go wrong is that once they’ve produced their website, they think that’s it. It’s not as if it needs maintenance like the building obviously does, is it?

Well, yes, it does need maintenance. Oh, it will continue to work for many years but it’ll get more and more dated as time goes on which is never good. If you don’t think that’s true, pick any website that’s been around for a while and look at what it was like even 5 years ago never mind 10 using the Way Back Machine [www.archive.org]. I think you’ll find that any successful website has changed substantially over that period of time.

I’ll touch on the various aspects of our 2007 update over the coming months but one aspect that is critical is the photography. Some people consider that they should get a professional photographer in to take their photos and that will get you the best photos of your place on the day they come to take them. The key point there is that they are the best photos “on the day”; why settle for that if you’re living there and can wait until the light is perfect, there are no clouds in the sky, etc.? Saying that you don’t have a suitable camera is no excuse as good digital cameras are available from £100 these days whereas a professional photographer could charge you anything up to £500. More importantly than the money saved is that if you are taking the photos, you can update them for no extra cost and it’s not long before you need to update them by the time you consider that you’ve repainted a room, bought a new chair, even added a plant it doesn’t take long before the photo of a room becomes completely out of date.

Anyway, we’ve started updating our property photos yet again and have moved to a new viewpoint for this year. The top photo is the one we’ve been using for about 18 months or so, the lower one is close to what we’re going to run with for the coming year (I forgot to get all the shutters open this morning, so have to retake it tomorrow morning).

The place seems quite different in the second photo, doesn’t it? Yet virtually nothing has changed on the outside of the building (we’ve been concentrating on the inside).

Arnold

If you’ve been watching the “moving to France” TV series that seem to be on almost non-stop these days, you’d think that there would be no problem in getting kids into school here. After all, the kids just seem to go to the local school and if they don’t speak French, it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Perhaps you’re thinking that the presence of a TV crew eases the process considerably and I’ve no doubt that it does. However, we’ve friends and aquaintances in other regions of France and they’ve never had a problem in getting their children enrolled in school regardless of age or ability in French.

Things are different in the Pyrenees Orientale though.

If your child isn’t a fluent French speaker by the time they hit 16, then they will not be educated by any school in the state education system within the Pyrenees Orientale. What happens at that age is that you are passed onto Inspection Academic who in turn pass you on to the College Albert Camus and specifically the CIPPA class so that you can learn French and thereby get into an appropriate lycee (for age 17-18). There is only one problem with that scenario: Madame Benzine runs CIPPA as a remedial class for children from French speaking countries and just treats any non-French speakers as an inconvenience to be gotten rid of as soon as possible. The net effect of that is that if your child has no other option than CIPPA (and they won’t be given any other option if they reach 16 and don’t speak French fluently here), then that’s the end of their education.

Surely, not? Don’t children have some right to education up to 18? I thought so, but apparently the French locally read the fact that schooling is optional after age 16 as meaning that they don’t need to provide it and in particular don’t need to provide any means to teach you French after age 16. Having said that, everyone in the administrative side of education seems to think that CIPPA does actually teach French (and perhaps it is supposed to) but Madame Benzine chooses to ignore that and seems to go out of her way to encourage non-French speakers to leave the class as soon as possible. “You missed a class because your car was being repaired and the bus drivers were on strike? You should have walked in”. “How? It’s over 30km: it would have taken five or six hours”. “I gave him a question sheet every morning and he didn’t answer any of the questions on it. He has no motivation.” Emmm, he can’t read French and couldn’t understand the questions. “It’s mathematics: of course he could understand it:. He’s just lazy. ” Actually, no, because the questions are entirely in French. That’s the kind of person running CIPPA in Perpignan.

It’s not much easier from age 11 to 16 either, as all colleges that don’t have to take your child, quite simply won’t take them if they don’t speak fluent French (and I do stress “fluent”: they won’t accept anything less). Instead, they will direct you toward the Inspection Academic in Perpignan who in turn will pass directly to the CIPPA class. If your child is in that age range, you can get them accepted into the college designated for your commune but even then it’s not always easy but never accept the CIPPA option if your child is in that age range.

What about primary school then? That’s a little easier than the college as they are attached to the various mairies therefore the one associated with your commune will have to take your children from age 6 to 11. However, those not attached to your commune will usually refuse to accept your child unless they happen to be fluent French speakers. Would you be happy with your 11 year old having to get up around 6am to catch the first bus into town, then changing buses in the centre of town to get to a remedial class in a country where they don’t speak the language? That’s the option you’ll be given if you don’t push the matter with your own mairie.

We have, surprisingly, managed nursery school with, so far, no problems. However, we fully expect that James will encounter problems getting into primary school in this area. Even now, the local doctor couldn’t understand why he couldn’t speak French. Why would he? If we spoke French to him he’d just end up with a dreadful French accent not to mention bad grammar and vocabulary. Oh, and he’d not learn to speak English.

The strange thing is that the French always talk about integrating immigrants into French society. I don’t know about elsewhere, but in the Pyrenees Orientale, it’s definitely all talk because there’s certainly no support given to you if your children don’t speak fluent French.

The other strange thing is that the teachers (except Madame Benzine) all seem to be quite supportive of the kids and fully expect that children of all ages will pick up the language fairly quickly. The problem seems to be that the administrators simply won’t let them try and without the approval of an administrator you just can’t get into a school.

Arnold

A week ago we thought that the coming week would be relatively quiet as the bookings were quite patchy but we received quite a flood of bookings during the week and are just about completely full now. We had three new bookings this morning before the breakfasts were over!

That seems to be typical over most of France at the moment going by the enquiries flowing through Chambre d’Hote and Our Gites in recent weeks, some of which have the whiff of panic about them. However, there are some regions with accommodation availability at the moment if you look outside the normal places around France. They aren’t dumps either – friends of ours still have availability in their absolutely beautiful chambre d’hote in Burgundy.

As usual, next week will probably be quite different as the French will be finishing off their holidays next Saturday night leaving French accommodation available for everyone else for the first time since around mid-July. Thus, chaos can be expected on the roads up to the end of next weekend. That’s worrying me a bit as I have to catch a plane to Santiago from Barcelona next Friday.

Must head on – yet another night of mainly overnighters has left us with five rooms to makeup for this evening. Thankfully most of the bookings for the coming week are for several days.

Arnold

The August 15th holiday in France produces one of the highest levels of traffic in the country, topped only by the first weekend in August. All across the country today (the closest weekend to the 15th) tempers are getting frayed and cars getting shunted with the time taken to travel from A to B increased massively regardless of whether A or B are 15 kilometres or 1500 kilometres apart. Even turning into our driveway can often take 5 minutes!

To give you an idea of how much traffic this represents, they have a little sign going onto the motorway at Perpignan which lists the traffic conditions under four headings. The top two options are the only ones used on this particular weekend: the photo is what they consider to be “difficult” conditions (ie the traffic is still moving most of the time, but at something like 20km/h) with the next one up being “blocked”.

It’s not just the traffic of course but all the trappings of tourism that experience “difficult” conditions today. Naturally, everyone knows that it will be a nightmare to travel this weekend so they try to get going on the Friday or even the Thursday thus spreading the chaos over an even longer period. As the 15th falls on a Tuesday this year, there’s a fair to middling chance that next weekend will be just as bad. Just this morning the new owner of the hotel in the next village came round to ask if he could borrow some sheets as he’d completely ran out due to the very high number of overnighters that this spreading creates and we’re round to the laundry several times a week now with very full loads of sheets & towels.

Using a foreign credit card anywhere in France over the last 18 months or so has been even more of a nightmare than usual. Why? Well, 2004/2005 was when just about all the countries in Europe decided to move to the EMV standard with their cards ie to add a chip and require people to use a PIN when buying things; this was also the period that France decided to upgrade their card processing machines to accept foreign chip cards.

Net effect: chaos in the shops. Whilst in years gone by it was a nuisance if your card didn’t have a chip, over that period it was a nuisance if it did as the shop assistants hadn’t a clue what to do with foreign chip cards with many being refused. The reason for that was simple – the banks gave no training whatsoever when they upgraded the software on the card machines. Also, as things were in transition elsewhere there were three different types of foreign cards with chips: those with a chip but no PIN, chip with a signature and then proper chip & PIN cards. Worse even as there are two types of chip & PIN cards: those that require you to select a language first and those that go straight to English.

We found that in some shops you just couldn’t use some foreign cards. What happened was that if you had a chip card requiring you to select the language, a message came up on the shop assistants terminal saying “wait” whilst on the keypad it said “select language” so they wouldn’t give you the keypad and then said that the card wasn’t working.

But we now seem to be almost into the promised land…. Carrefour’s petrol station in Perpignan now accepts foreign chip cards. So, at least foreigners can buy petrol on Sundays once more, after a gap of around 10 years.

Arnold