Foreign Perspectives

If nothing else, creating the blog version of this little newsletter has upped the number of readers somewhat. We had a couple of hundred folk looking at it in the couple of days after I put it on.

We had an English couple with us all week as part of a mini-package with breakfast, lunch, evening meals and transfers just about every day which is certainly a lot more profitable than people just staying the night but definitely creates a whole lot more work. The days just disappeared on us and we hardly got anything done.

As a result of them, it took us three goes to make it to a meeting with the bank manager. Still, at least he’s now got a chunk of stuff that needs doing for us. We still can’t accept Amex or Diners Club (“deeners cloob” here) as the applications haven’t been processed yet which isn’t really surprising as banks here are incredibly slow. They’re also about 30 years behind the times in most respects. As a small example of this, Credit Agricole updated their computer system a few months ago and just decided to start charging all their customers EUR 5 per month just for having an account simply because the new computer system would let them do that. That’s in addition to the EUR 40 that they already charged for a debit card on the accounts. So now we’ve to pay EUR 100 just to have an ordinary account. Another example of backwardness is that they’ve just started to issue credit cards (yes, really: 30 years after the rest of the world!). Naturally, they come with a charge (EUR 30 or so), penal interest (17% which is pretty high considering that Eurozone rates are somewhat lower than the UK) and a MAXIMUM limit of EUR 8000 (about £5000) which is lower than the minimum limits on some UK cards: I don’t think he believed me when I said that some UK cards have maximums up to £50,000 on ordinary cards (and those kind of limits are definitely achieveable too whereas the EUR 8000 max of Credit Agricole is rather difficult to achieve). Oh, and the “overdraft limit” is only applicable during the month ie you need to clear your overdraft each month so it’s really just to cover bills arriving before your salary.

We’re intending to update two rooms each year so that we don’t end up having to replace the stuff in all the rooms in a few years time (ie we’ll update the whole hotel every five years or so). Normally we’d have done that in the new year but the big end of year booking is forcing us to bring that forward a few months so we were off bedroom shopping during the week. Anyway, first to get the refresh is our proposed “honeymoon suite” which will have a really nice set of furniture before Christmas and we’re also replacing one knackered bed in a room which we’ve yet to use but expect to be using regularly next year as it’ll be our only non-ensuite room when we create the little suite by adding a connecting door between the other non-ensuite room and one of our double rooms. We weren’t even going to bother offering the non-ensuite rooms but they’re very popular with the people booking through the Ryanair/FlyBE system.

Nothing doing with the vaccinations. We went along to the clinic but they decided that both James & John were running a temperature and therefore couldn’t be given the vaccines so it’s back in early December to try again. The reason that they were pretty warm (as were me & Wendy) is that it was 29C that day. They don’t allow for people not being used to the high temperatures here. When John was born they insisted on putting three layers of clothes on him (including one rug type effort) plus blankets on top. I’m sure you’ve heard that babies can’t sweat. Normally that’s true but they put so much on him that the sweat was dripping off him!

We’ve one of those google alerts set up to keep an eye on the bridge developments so we can see that it’s being quite widely reported in the UK. I think the folk in Millau are incredibly optimistic when they think that people will come to their town to see the bridge. A fantastic feat of engineering, maybe. Worth a special trip to see, no. At the very least they’re going to see a heap of their shops closing over the next few years.

It’s a public holiday here tomorrow (Monday) so we’re intending to head off to Spain for the day to stock up on a few things. The English family ate their way through a lot of beans on toast. You might think that’s a cheap meal. Not here: beans are really expensive. So, we’re going to try and get a box of tins of beans in Spain (they aren’t quite at UK prices but are definitely a lot cheaper than in France). Also, Wendy has fallen in love with “sillic bang” which cleans up chrome like new and has made quite an improvement in the appearance of our bathroom fittings.