Foreign Perspectives

We’re all catching the cold off James now :((

John has an absolute mountain of prescriptions to get over the bronchitis. Back in the UK, you’d be talking a cough bottle. Here, we kick off with physiotherapy to loosen up the stuff in his lungs (he definitely didn’t like that), a couple of bottles of medicine and a steam thingy. It’s not really speeding it up as compared to the cough bottle approach though.

Remember those TVs that we bought in Spain back in late December? Well, contrary to what it said on the in-store sign and indeed the menu system on the TVs themselves, they don’t support SECAM which is the TV standard used in France. Anyway, that meant a trip back to Media Markt (a German outfit) in Girona to get a refund. Apart from the massive queue at the refund counter (largely taken up with returning the same make of TV as we’d bought), it was a doddle. I even got to try out my Spanish.

Girona is close enough to Barcelona that we just kept going and did this weeks shopping in Badalona (a suburb of Barcelona). It’s a bit rundown in comparison to Baricentro where we went last time so we’ll hardly be back. Mataro seems a much nicer looking place and is even closer to Girona (and easier to get to). So why don’t we do our shopping in Girona itself? Well, they haven’t a terribly good selection of shops (at least we haven’t found any). We’d also like to get a bit more familiar with Barcelona.

I thought that it was time I upped the ante with the web design software as I was running off the end of Frontpage Expess. I’d heard good things about Dreamweaver so that was first port of call. But then I saw the price: £370!! That seemed a bit much seeing as Frontpage weighs in at £140 but it gets better as my student status results in a price for Frontpage of £40 which is a bit of a bargain. Anyway, I spent the last few days getting it into Frontpage format and the latest version is getting uploaded as I write this.

Whilst that mini-update was in progress, I realised that I could add a few more languages by sprucing up the mini-descriptions on the Ryanair site (themselves courtesy of a friend of a friend who translated the mini-English version into German and Italian for me). Anyway, we now have a very impressive series of little flags on the pages: German, English, French, Spanish and Italian. Sadly, just on the main hotel page and the transport pages but they’re the important ones. Incidently, re the other languages, French was a total waste of time as French people seem to search in English. I’ll probably get the regional guide up to date in French but I’m not too bothered about that now. Even though the translation is dreadful, we actually get quite a few hits on the Spanish site and the other day it was the top ranked Spanish language site on Pyrenees Orientale tourism!

Don’t know how useful the German version is/will be but we do get a fair number from the Italian listing on Ryanair so perhaps plonking that on our own website will get a few more euros in the bank. So far, we’ve not had any German Ryanair folk but then 2004 year was a bit of an off year for German tourism.

Oh, yeah, the weird French couple. They are our main regular guests, arriving in our third week in April and having been here several times since. Wendy was sure that they were going to skip without paying originally! We get about EUR 150 from them every time but they’re a bit of a nuisance as they carry a mountain of stuff, completely rearrange the room and always want filtered coffee first thing in the morning.

Have to see about getting a few more telly’s now. The plan is that initially we’ll run with five. One room is already wired up for French TV and the room just next to it will be very easy to wire up in a similar way so we’re intending that that will be the French side of the building. We’re hoping to roll out UK TV for the three rooms on the other side of the building but we’ll need to get a bigger satellite dish first as the signal strength just isn’t up to running more than one TV at the moment (I’m toying with the idea of trying out a signal booster first).