Foreign Perspectives

We have now bitten the bullet and told France Telecom what to do with their payphone. This being France, it will, of course, most likely be several weeks if not months before they come and take the thing away. We haven’t really worked out what alternative we’ll run with as to buy something similar seems to be several hundred euros which also seems a bit much in that we could almost certainly run with just buying a prepaid mobile and lending it to people as required (el cheapo mobiles here run to around the 100 euro mark). The only snag with the mobile option is that it won’t work inside the building due to the thickness of the walls.

Remember those pillows that we got two weeks ago? Well, the very first people to use them have went and nicked three of them. If we’d worked out how to do the French equivalent of “customer not present” transactions they’d be getting billed 10 euros a go as it’s going to cost us a fortune to replace them (unless another one of you guys fancies moving over to France!).

William, his wife, Tanya & Stuart from Dundonald House finally reached us yesterday evening and immediately hit a problem: their NI purchased tent pegs weren’t up to the rock-like soil that you get here when you don’t water it. Net effect is that the whole lot of them plus the kids piled into our gite for the night. We’re getting a bit full but could have kept them ’til getting on for the end of the week. Sadly, the grandfather of William’s wife died during the night so they’d to book a flight for her and race up to Paris to put her on it tomorrow. Something of a trek for it’s about 10 hours drive to Paris from here and they were just after a similar drive from William’s house which is several hours south of Paris.

We’ve got our first couple of cancellations, mostly from the Ryanair site. It’s cost some of them a fortune as all the upfront booking fees and deposit are kept by the booking company: getting on for fifty euros in one case. We’re also picking up “proper” Ryanair people now with our first reservation for October (for a full week too!) which is when I reckon the cheapo flights would still be available.

We’re officially in the French health system at last and are now the proud owners of two attestations and one carte vitale.

As of this Monday (the 9th) we should be listed on venere.com as a hotel. We’ve heard lots of good things about them. One of the hotels we were looking into last year use them and managed to increase their occupancy by getting on for 50% as a result. As you know, we’re doing pretty well with the Web Reservations International place (they’re behind the Ryanair site and a considerable number of others such as cheapflights.co.uk and lonelyplanet.com). We think that the venere people will be more likely to go for the dearer rooms so there shouldn’t be much of an overlap in the bookings from them and webres, except for the gite which is currently our only four person “room” (though we’re looking into converting two rooms into a four person suite later this year).

We’ve been hosting yet another bunch of people who are buying places over here. So far we’ve had one Dublin family (twice!) who’ve bought a place in Estagel, a Liverpool family (second visit later this week) who’ve bought a house in Maury, a English family looking for a gite/chambre d’hote business (coming back next week) and now an American looking to set up a training centre (but who has already bought a house in Montner). Those three villages are the three closest to us so we’re surrounded now!

Seems that we should have been billing the webres people once we hit noon on the day of the booking so we’ve to call at the bank to see how to go about doing “customer not present” transactions: two reasons for finding out how to do that now.

Oh, and we’ve now got proper hotel-sized bins. On the map at last!