Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

Hope ‘yall had a good Christmas and New Year.

The French family started arriving at 3pm on the 31st (well, two hours late isn’t bad for France, is it?) and it was all go from then ’til 1pm today. We didn’t get to bed ’til about 2.30am and had to get up again at 6.30am to get the breakfast out. Saturday night wasn’t so bad as we had a think and put the tea & coffee out in the lobby which gave us a chance to clear the restaurant a bit earlier and get to bed at 12.30 and we’d not to get up ’til 7.30 as we only had a couple of people taking breakfast and the rest hanging around for the brunch at 11.

Of course, it was all go during the day too. Saturday seemed to be one continuous meal from 9am through to midnight. The breakfast dragged out ’til almost noon with the stragglers from the night before. That in turn delayed lunch from the planned 12.30 to more like 2.30pm. French lunches are, of course, pretty drawn out affairs at the best of times and when you’ve no where to go afterwards it’s even worse. Anyway, we ended up doing the high tea (with genuine freshly cooked scones) a little after 6pm instead of 4.30. And, naturally, the dinner didn’t have a hope of starting at our hoped for 7pm, kicking off at more like 8.30pm.

The amount of food they got through was phenomenal. As, of course, are the scaps. We completely filled our restaurant size bin by lunchtime on Saturday so it’ll be topped up again after they empty it in the morning. We’ll be tossing out something like a dozen full baguettes (French bread to us foreigners). Not to mention half a crate of clementines (baby oranges), much the same amount of grapes, a mini mountain of stawberries,… You just don’t appreciate how much is left over after a meal ’til you’re clearing up after 23 of them! You also don’t fully appreciate just how big this place is ’til you spend two days walking back and forth between the two kitchens, the restaurant….

Amazingly, we only had one problem the whole time! Seems that the water heating system doesn’t work anything like I assumed that it did. On Saturday evening, we thought that it was an off-peak thing but it seems not as the water is now boiling. We still don’t know how it really works as it shouldn’t be warm yet if it’s an offpeak system. Still, we now know that we may hit a problem if we’ve 23 people in but that it’s OK with about 15 in (we’d about that many in the summer). I’m also quite amazed that a fuse didn’t blow with all the electric going full blast (every room in the place was like a sauna when we went in to clean them this afternoon). Well, actually a fuse did blow but it wasn’t ours as the neighbours power was off too.

Way back in October when we accepted the booking, we figured that we’d take the rest of this week off to recover but it hasn’t worked out like that. We already had a booking for four Australians for tomorrow but on Saturday night we took a three day booking for some Germans and this morning we picked up a reservation for this evening from one of the booking systems we’re on. So we don’t even get one night off :(( or should that be :)) It must be the start of the new year booking season as we’ve also got a reservation for a few days in March from another system. Oh, almost forgot… one system even managed to let through a booking with a duff credit card number for nine days starting last Thursday (don’t know what we’d have done if the credit card number was valid as we’d used every single room in the place for the family booking). Anyway, this coming week is looking fairly full with the French this evening, Australians tomorrow, Germans for Tuesday and Wednesday, some Spanish from Thursday to Sunday and it’s still the weekend (most folk book during working hours… just as well their companies don’t forbid such things in their IT security policies, eh?).

The other week, it was the septic tank causing us problems, now it’s the turn of the well….

We own two water sources: a spring which was used up to two owners ago and a well which the last guy switched over to. It saves us having to pay the equivalent of the water rates but it’s not “free” as we need to maintain the pumping equipment etc. Normally, it’s fine apart from very busy days in the summer and also in september when the winery are using lots and lots of water; at those times, all that needs doing is to make sure the storage tank is full in the morning which we do by flicking the pump off and on (don’t know why, but it switches off after a while and before the tank is full).

Anyway, things were going fine ’til 2 or 3 days ago when every night we ran completely out of water (the first time ever!) and had to do the flicking thing. That time actually co-incided with the arrival of the grand-daughter of the guy who owned the place two owners ago (she’s the last person living who supposedly knows how the system works!). We thought that perhaps we’d turned a tap that she pointed out as we were walking round but we think we’ve undid all that we did then and still no water: it looks like we’ve emptied the well!

We’re in the process of getting ourselves onto our first American site: www.ownerdirect.com . Hopefully, it’s not typical of the American sites as they wanted so much information entered that it took hours to type it all in and we’ve still a couple of detailed things to do like measuring up the rooms. It’s another one of those guaranteed reservation places too so we’ll have to add it to our list of places for the January update (at the moment, we’ve listed more rooms in total than we actually have which is OK for the winter but, all being well, wouldn’t be OK for the summer so the plan is to sit down in January and make sure that the total is no more than our actual number of rooms).

While we were looking round for our 1-800 number, we found out that you can call American 800 numbers from abroad if you replace the 800 by 880 eg you can call us from outside the US by dialling 00 1 880 571 6392.

As we’re in “winter mode” at the moment, we’ve been plugging away with the backlog of administration that built up over the summer (we gotta be a bit more organised about it next year!). All being well, we will be up to date with the accounts by next week which is just as well as we got a tax return yesterday that needs completed by January 1st.

On other fronts, we’re getting moving on the fosse septique on a more laid back but still brisk pace. The mairie reckon (as we did) that it would be best to have the initial survey done in conjunction with our neighbours which will mean a) it’s cheaper and b) will be done quicker as they’re already in the system. We’ll talk to them about it tomorrow (I think it’s started to sink in with them that they don’t have enough land for it to be workable).

Separately, we have contacted the local fosse guy and buildersabroad who should be coming up with a quote in due course (we need the survey done first). But it’s looking like a completion date of the new fosse around March which is awfully close to the start of the tourist season.

The Hilton has one, the Waldorf has one and now Mas Camps has one. Yes, folks we have joined the bigtime with our very own toll free number, 1-800-571-6392 . Well, as of sometime tomorrow anyway.

More anon.

We’re starting to make a bit of progress with the backlog of administration and it’s looking like in another week or so we’ll be up to date.

Yesterday was “toilet day”. We have a growing collection of toilets that aren’t operational for a variety of reasons so we thought that we’d blitz them. Net effect is that the two at the back of the dining room are ready to go though we need to put a new seat on one of them, the room 10 cistern is filling up normally, and the two outside toilets just need a bit of cleaning to get them going. The only serious one now is the one in the lobby which is still blocked up after the latest stupid guest flushed something down it and clogged it up (no, not that!).

We reckon that we need a new car for next year as the RAV4 isn’t really up to carrying the people and stuff. Sooo, we’ve started thinking about what we need and have come up with the following little list of essentials:
– 4wd, because we hope to do tours into the ski areas in due course;
– 6 or 7 seater, because we’re starting to do a lot more airport shuttle runs than expected and also because we want to do little tours;
– diesel, because it’s costing us a fortune in petrol.

We’d like automatic too ‘cos Wendy can’t drive manuals and ‘cos I’m to lazy to drive them.

I was thinking that a long wheelbase Landrover would do the biz but I gather that they’re awful to drive so that’s put me off them. In the frame for consideration at the moment are the Mitsubishi Shogun (called Montero here) and the Nissan Patrol.

Does anybody have any thoughts on those (or indeed other cars we should be looking at)?

Dunno what happened, but we’re up to over 120 readers a day of Mas Camps News!!

Our basic game plan is to refresh/update every room in the hotel over a five year cycle. The accountants amongst you will equate this to writing off the room contents over five years but for sheer simplicity and to avoid a big bill what we’re actually going to do is to update two rooms each year.

Step one is to get two new beds so last week we set off to find 1) a really nice bed for our “honeymoon suite” and 2) a good but much cheaper bed for one of our ordinary rooms which is in dire need of replacement. What we’ll actually do is to move the existing “honeymoon” bed to one of the outside rooms (and dump the one it currently has) then replace an OK bed in one of our non-ensuite rooms, moving that bed into the naff non-ensuite room.

French beds are sold differently which makes price comparison rather difficult. Generally the “bed” on sale is actually only the headboard and frame. To that you need to add a base and a mattress. Net effect is that a bed we really liked for the honeymoon suite was prices at EUR 319 but ended up as more like EUR 700. The cheap bed started off at EUR 116 and ended up as more like EUR 500. We’re still shopping around as I’d like a cheapo bed for more like EUR 300 and the honeymoon for more like EUR 500.

The English folk staying last week were our first to be here when we needed the heat on in the dining room. Sounded like a simple task but we still haven’t worked out why the radiators in the dining room aren’t working. They’re working everywhere else so we reckon there’s a valve somewhere that we’ve not turned on but so far we’ve not found it. anyway, in the meantime we thought we’d get a superser type thing. Turns out that they’re not that common here so we ended up heading off to the other side of Perpignan and all we now need to get is the gas bottle. Picked up a leaf vacuum thingy too as we’re up to our knees in the things at the moment.

At last, we are able to accept American Express cards. We sent the initial e-mail to them in June or July and they called us a couple of weeks ago. In the meantime we’d asked the bank to sort it but that was a couple of months ago so I guess that’s not happening anytime soon which is just as well as we got an offer from Amex themselves to set it up free (vs 50‚€ for the bank) and 3‚€ a month vs 5‚€ for the bank. Still nothing back from Diners Club though but I guess we’ll need to give them a couple of months.

I’ve knocked together mark #1 of our Living in France page, so comments/critique on https://www.foreignperspectives.com/livinginfrance . As you’ll see, there are a number of areas that need filled in.