Foreign Perspectives

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.