Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

Now that I’ve started thinking about going down the pill route to jump start the transition to a trimmer me, I’m all confused!

OK, so fat burners are presumably about speeding up the use of fat within your body. Easy, though sometimes with side-effects, of course, as obviously it’s not, yet, quite that easy.

Metabolism enhancers are there to turn up the knob on your body so to speak. Thus they’re very similar in effect to fat burners though I suspect that they’d be more likely to make you a bit hyperactive if you overdid it.

But, what do you make of the likes of Orovo? It’s billed as a super supplement and contains a whole bunch of natural but somewhat offbeat ingredients. To be quite honest with stuff like alfalfa and wheatgrass it sounds very new-age to me which isn’t really my problem: it’s just that I don’t know where it would fit in my diet regime.

Whilst we expected to have admin hassles when we moved to France in that we didn’t understand all the intricacies of the French health, social security and tax administration, it’s not necessarily so easy to both get out of the French system and into the UK one.

On the health side, it’s very easy to get into the UK system. Essentially all we need to do is go back to our previous GP and fill in a form for everybody and we’re in. We’ve already done a “temporary resident” form when we’ve been over on extended trips to the UK so it doesn’t seem difficult and since it’s not an insurance based system there’s no possibility of any debate over pre-existing conditions as happened in France to begin with. However, I’m not so sure that getting out of the French system will be so easy: after all, almost five years down the line they still haven’t got our bills correct!

Social security requires co-operation with the French authorities. We need a form from the benefit office in France to say that they’ve stopped paying us child benefit as the UK won’t start paying it ’til they get that. That’s not really a big problem though as the French seem to pay more than the UK do ie no big deal if they delay sending the letter. Getting out of the contributions side of things should be easier (can’t see it somehow) and getting into the UK National Insurance system is automatic once I start getting money from there.

Which leaves the tax system. After almost five years they have only just started to post the tax letters to us here so I suspect that it will take quite some time for them to correct their information. The UK system is simple: start work and you’re in the tax system.

That just leaves the small matter of the overpayments of social security and taxes that we’ve made over the years. Two years after making the first claim we’ve still not received anything from them so I think it’ll be some years before they pay up.

Although we set off for France with the intention of spending the rest of our lives here, in practice I left on a career break which left open the chance of me returning to work at any time up to five years from my departure from work way back on February 20th 2004.

Whilst at the time we thought of it as essentially free unemployment insurance, as y’all know we’re currently in the process of returning and with the global economy being in the current mess that notional “free insurance” has turned out to be quite valuable to us now. Not only do I have a guaranteed job waiting for me, but it’s a nice safe one at that and seems a good place to be sitting to ride out the coming recession/depression for the next year or two.

Although obviously not everyone will have the opportunity to leave on a career break, it’s definitely worth taking that route just in case things don’t work out. If they do work out then there’s no downside as you don’t have to return from a career break but on t’other hand if they don’t or your plans change as ours did…

It’s been almost two years since we’ve had a trailer on the car but with the move date approaching fast it was time to get a tow bar on the car and darned expensive it is too. That’s, of course, the problem with trailers: not only are you out EUR 1000 or more on the trailer itself but you’ve also got to pencil in another EUR 500 for a tow bar.

Separately from that we’ve made a start on the packing and trying to work out just how much will actually fit into the trailer. At the moment, it seems like quite a lot but, as always, no matter the amount of space that you have available, it’s never quite enough as there are always last minute things that you’d not thought of and then there are those things that fall into the “wouldn’t it be nice if we could take that?” category which expand to fill any space available, no matter how large it might have appeared initially.

What’s a really plus point this time around is that we’ve loads of rooms available and have the luxury of being able to accumulate all the stuff in one room in a rough trailer-shaped pile so, in theory, it should be fairly simple to relocate said pile into the trailer. Not only that, we can park the trailer in our courtyard so can pack it over a few days and just hook it up the night before we head off.

In the days of Franco, the various local languages in Spain were, by and large, suppressed. The overall effect of that was that they were on the way to dying out.

However, since the early 1980s single language schools in the local language have sprung up in all areas of Spain where there is a local language. That’s particularly important in the Basque region as their language is so different from all others that it’s said to be virtually impossible to learn unless you learn it as a child.

But there’s a downside to all this promotion of local languages and that’s that it’s beginning to cut those taught in them from the rest of the world. This morning we had one of an increasing number of Spanish guests who couldn’t really speak any language other than Catalan. We could barely communicate with them at all because they couldn’t speak more than a few words of English, French or Spanish.

Now, I can understand that in some areas they would prefer not to be taught in Spanish but they really need to learn one world language or many people will find themselves virtually cut off from the world. Remember that these are local languages: if you only speak a local language you’re going to have trouble outside that region.