Foreign Perspectives

One of the big surprises in many ways is just how fast formerly eastern block countries are moving into the first world.

For example, not so many years ago the thought of a  luxury golf property in Bulgaria would have been laughed at. No longer though for the likes of Tharacian Cliffs, starting from scratch, seems likely to become one of the top golf courses in the world according to Gary Player.

The reason is simple of course: they’re able to start from a blank sheet and have lots of cheap land and labour to construct the courses. For the rest of us there are increasing numbers of cheap flights available to get us to the area.

Overall, a win-win situation for everyone apparently.

The take from our recent break-in must have been quite a disappointment to the burglars and particularly those that bought from them.

Notionally the most valuable item on the list was a 28″ TV. A good result normally I suppose except that it was a British TV and won’t receive any French TV channels so it’s pretty useless to them.

Next up was a 1999 portable. British keyboard so not too useful but in 1999 it came with 4GB disk and there are a lot of web pages that it can’t open these days.

Then there was the British toolbox which is filled with imperial size spanners which aren’t too useful here in France.

Overall they seemed to have amassed a whole collection of stuff that’s little or no use to anyone in France. For instance, in addition to the above they managed to take a portable DVD player but without the charger that it needs.

So we’ve lost a bunch of things that were of some use to us and they’ve gained effectively a bunch of useless junk

The Egg Money card used to be one of the handiest cards that I had, despite the dopey hamster adverts.

You could use it as a savings account as it paid 4% (up until a few months ago) when you’d overpaid and indeed they encouraged you to do this. The original plan behind the card was that you’d use it essentially as a current account and therefore the credit limit was really an overdraft limit. Not only that but they paid 1% cash back on everything that you bought and even more if you bought from a small range of shops. Finally, because it was intended as a current account replacement, you could withdraw cash at no charge.

However, this year Citibank killed all that stone dead.

The 1% rebate remains, but now there’s no interest paid if you’re in credit, the limits remain pitifully small and it’s now 3% to lift cash. So it’s become an also-ran credit card. Sad to see such an innovative product killed but it’s worse that that as the security methods of Citibank are used too. Thus if you try to spend more than £200 or so in a single transaction the shop needs to call up for an authorisation number and if you use it more than twice in a single shop in a day then it’s blocked.

Unfortunately, it looks like I’m going to have to abandon this card as I had to with a previous Citibank card basically because of Tesco… today’s petrol, then the thank you card for James’ teacher, then the groceries mean it’s blocked, again.

By the time you read this, we should be well on the way to our place in France (scheduled posts are wonderful!) and pretty much totally exhausted.

The plan is that on Saturday morning we’ll have gone from Belfast to Rosslare to catch the LD Lines ferry to Le Havre around 5pm. That’s a relatively easy 4 hours drive though it seems to go on forever as we found out doing the route the other way in January.

It’s an overnight ferry trip which is quite relaxing in comparison to the drive from Stranraer to Dover. Cheaper too when you offset the cost of the cabin against the savings in petrol. Unfortunately, that 5pm-ish departure makes for an arrival around the same time the next day in Le Havre.

Our theory is that we’ll relax on the boat and start driving when we get off. Snag is that at this time of year most of the hotels along our route down France will be full so we probably won’t have any choice but to drive on through the night which isn’t altogether appealing to put it mildly.

Sadly, we’ve just heard the news that some ******** have broken into our house in France and trashed the place.

What seems pretty much a cert is that the things that they took (seemingly less than a dozen things in total although we need to do a full check) will be appearing in one of the vide greniers (car boot sales) over this weekend. Some of their customers will be less than pleased with their purchases as they include, among other things, a TV that can’t receive French TV programmes and a number of region 1 DVDs that won’t play on French DVD players.

It isn’t so much the things that they’ve taken which is annoying though: it’s that they simply trashed most rooms in the house looking for stuff that just wasn’t there. Thanks to the high prevalence of the black economy in France, most French households are likely to have quite a pile of cash stashed away but us foreigners just don’t work like that so their cash take amounted to a few euros at best.

In other countries there’d be an insurance claim, of course, but in France the insurance only pays out when you have the original receipts and, for the most part, people don’t have them so you end up paying a whole lot for insurance that realistically you will never be able to claim on.

Anyway, it looks like our notional holiday will be taken up with cleaning up the mess that they’ve left behind and wasting time with the insurance company.