Foreign Perspectives

Hi folks,

It’s been relatively quiet in recent weeks so we’ve been using the time to try and get some French admin done.

We didn’t get too far with our first attempt at the mairie to get Wendy a residence permit. They called the prefecture who started talking visas. However, if you cast your mind back a ways you may recall that in the end I did manage to get a residence permit for Wendy via the European legislation. Sooo, we asked for that at the prefecture and they promptly sent us back to the mairie as the prefecture only does visas and you get residence permits from the mairie. Anyway, the mairie let us fill in all the forms this time. And then sent the form off to the prefecture. No, I don’t know why we couldn’t fill in the forms at the prefecture when we were there. Well, I suppose I do: it’s France.

We asked about school for James while we were there. Everyone says that kids can start at 2. Not in Maury, it’s 3 so he’s got off for another year (he was 2 on April 29th). It’s also about 5 miles up the road vs the nearest school in Estagel (different mairie so we were told we couldn’t go there or at minimum needed the Mayor’s permission to do so as he’d have to pay the Estagel mairie for James’ schooling). However, a few days later our neighbour, who’s a teacher) told us that as we live in a “mas” we can go to whatever school we like so James may well be starting this September. Actually, probably not as I think it’s probably better to let his english get established properly.

The “mas” issue is interesting. We also decided to get going on visiting the equivalent of the local tourist boards and getting ourselves listed. First stop was Estagel ‘cos it’s closest. They said “no dice” as we’re not in the Estagel area. We started wondering about the reason for the “mas” issue. Essentially it’s because, at least in our own case, Mas Camps is a place, not just a house. There’s another reason in the case of ourselves as I found out the other day: we are in the area of both Estagel and Maury. In fact, the “welcome to Estagel” sign is actually on the bit of my land over the road (the road marks the boundary between Maury and Estagel). Sooo, it’s off to Estagel to give them two options: 1) add me to their lists or 2) remove the sign.

Still haven’t got my “KBIS” (business registration) which means a trip to my (soon to be former, if he doesn’t get the finger out) accountant tomorrow.

Have to see about the drinks license again one of these days as we’ve been flogging it in the restaurant.

Oh, the restaurant… we decided to open it properly as from this Monday so we’ve been distributing leaflets round Estagel (hence earlier visit to their tourism office). The slight complication is that we didn’t want to overdo it so didn’t go overboard on the marketing. Anyway, that’s worked out OK as we had our first couple of customers this evening and didn’t totally make a mess of it. That’s our menu attached: sorry for the awful French – I’m really bad in French in two things: numbers and food!

The website hits are mounting up nicely and I’ve one of the top Pyrenees-Oriental websites (well above the official tourist board anyway) so we’ve been out and about taking pics for the regional guide part of the site (which gets about 50% of the total hits). For the sporty amongst you, that’s the first of the seasons bike races which, as you can see, goes right past our front door!