Foreign Perspectives

Our car was totalled way back on May 23rd when a plonker in a tractor drove right into the side of it and we’ve been trying to collect on the insurance from GAN ever since.

The reason for a lot of the delay is that the “expert” appointed by the insurance company never gets back to us in response to our queries. We bought the car for around 9000 in July 2005 and their offer in June 2007 was 3800. Now, I’ll grant you that we had a lot of use out of it running up over 70,000 km but it was running fine and we’d no intention of replacing.

In fact, the “expert” is quoting the commercial value for the car whereas, of course, the value that’s relevant is the retail value ie what it would cost to replace with a similar car (ie same age and so on).

Oh, and there’s the matter of the car rental bill that we have for getting on for four months rental.

Probably one of the most neglected aspects of immigration or indeed moving in general is labelling your stuff and yet it can be a major pain if you don’t do it sensibly upfront as most of us don’t quite manage to unpack everything after we’ve moved. Yeah, perhaps we should clear out some more first but realistically who does that?

Unless you’re moving to an identical house then there’s not much point in trying to label things going by the room they’re going to finish up in as chances are they’ll end up somewhere else. Aside from that, you’re more likely to remember packing the stuff in a particular room before you move than “remember” where it’s going to end up.

Ideally you’d do a proper inventory before you start the packing so you could create a nifty database to tell you where everything is packed but that’s hardly viable for most of us. Therefore the best option is probably a middle ground ie try to pack the boxes in a reasonably logical manner and keep a little book recording any additional information that you can.

Believe me, that’ll save you endless head-scratching at the other end!

We’re now at the point where we have cut down the various options to two, namely Aarhus in Denmark and Baden-Baden in Germany.

Which will it be?

Baden-Baden is in the Black Forest and is a spa resort town. Other than the spa there’ll be the famous German Christmas markets of course but there doesn’t seem a whole lot else in the town. That doesn’t really matter though as we’re only going for a few days.

Aarhus is the second city in Denmark. It looks like it has a few things to do in the city centre, notably an Olde Denmark area which looks quite interesting plus there’s a theme park in the area too. Downside is that the days will be pretty short up there at that time of year and, of course, it’ll be darned cold.

Both are in the running at the moment but we’ll need to be quick before the flight prices go up much more and we’ve to sort out a hotel too.

James started in the local nursery school in September last year as the only non-French child.

When you look at any of the “moving to France” TV series, no matter what the age, the kids are put into the local school and are fluent in about three months. Over a year down the line, James uses single french words now and again but never a complete phrase. How come?

Ironically, I think it’s an aspect of them being helpful from the start in putting him in a class with the teacher who speaks a little english (they’ve even moved her up to the next class with him). The effect of that was that the children started speaking english which, of course, meant that he didn’t need to speak any french, so he didn’t.

Unfortunately, that’s going to mean that next year they will surely refuse him entry to the primary school and instead will insist that he goes to the CIPPA class in Perpignan. That’s simply not viable as you could hardly expect a six year old to negotiate two buses plus cross a very busy road by himself and besides it’s a class for 16 to 18 year olds who already speak french.

All this, of course, creates something of a problem for us as from September next year.

When Wendy started off her blog we just used the domain wendyreid.org for it as we already had that registered.

That was back in February but by the Summer she was well into writing paid posts and it seemed like a good idea to a) be using a dotcom domain and b) using one that was related to the blog content too.

Why the dotcom? That’s because a number of the paid post opportunities specify that you have a dotcom and therefore moving to one would increase the number available to her. Also, and related to that, for reasons that are far from clear a dotcom is better than a dotorg in terms of search engine positioning (which is why we’re also in the process of moving Our Inns to Inns4U).

Having the blog name related to the content is just a sensible thing anyway but it also helps for those paid posting sites where the advertiser chooses the blog.

Anyway, we registered Cultured Views and aliased it with the existing wendyreid.org domain so you can access the content by using either domain. Then we started telling the various sites that she’s signed up with.

No problem ’til we did PayPerPost. When we did that, the number of available opportunities dropped like a stone. Although nothing had really changed about the blog, they took the current pagerank of the new domain and used that to filter the opportunities. Naturally, that was PR0 therefore there were next to none available. So we asked them to change it back ’til we managed to transfer the pagerank over.

Ironically, just about the same time as the pagerank transferred over, somebody else in ppp noticed that the blog didn’t match the domain and changed it back. Well, tried to because they didn’t do it properly and Wendy’s not been able to post anything with them for days.

Finally, they replied to her support ticket and the guy said he’d changed everything including the URLs quoted in the past…. to culturedreviews.com. So she still can’t post anything! Perhaps they’ll get it 100% this time around.