Foreign Perspectives

We’ve noticed a distinct hardening of the attitude of the Catalans in Spain over the last couple of years which has been gaining momentum of late.

Two years ago, any time there were brochures in shops and whatnot, they were always in Catalan and Spanish. 18 months ago that stopped and since then they have only been in Catalan.

18 months ago, we could speak to the shopkeepers in Spanish. Since about 12 months ago, they have refused to serve us in Spanish.

A year ago, we could speak to all our Spanish guests in Spanish. For the last 6 months or so they have refused to speak to us in Spanish. This is particularly crazy as few of them speak French well and many don’t speak English well either. Twice recently we have virtually had to resort to sign language although both they and we speak Spanish! The latest booking was quite comical in many ways as I can understand Catalan reasonably well but can’t speak it: the potential guest could speak neither French nor English yet refused to acknowledge my replies in Spanish which she could understand very well.

Wendy tells me that recent developments indicate that already demonstrations have taken place in Catalonia. Can violent ones be far off?

It took a while but now that James has stopped saying that “Daddy’s doing his French” and gotten the hang of “Daddy’s doing his Spanish”, it’ll soon be time for him to be saying “Daddy’s doing his English”.

This time next, all being well, I’ll have just completed my Modern Languages Degree and so ’tis time to think of what to do next…

A very long time ago, I’d a choice between doing a Computer Science degree and a Chemistry one and chose the computer route seeing as it was easier and the pay was better. So, I thought I’d have a go at the other route and not too long after Easter next year I’m planning on enrolling for the first course of said chemistry degree which looks pretty interesting and should keep me out of trouble for the next six or seven years.

On the other hand the physics degree looks quite interesting too although it sounds a whole lot harder at this point. Still, both French and Spanish sounded impossible to me seven years ago so who knows?

The Open University tutorials are always on Saturdays so you sort-of get into the way of assuming that all their activities are on Saturdays. Well, they usually are but the exams aren’t and it certainly throws me for one.

This year was particularly confusing in that the exam was in Dublin for the first time rather than in Belfast so the local Dublin hotels did rather well out of that. How come we didn’t get paid £70 each because the exam was in Dublin though? After all, they’d have charged us £70 each if it was us that asked for it to be in Dublin (ie abroad).

Hmmm, wonder if they’d pay up if we all asked?

Blogs from accommodation providers are fascinating things to read.

In the blogging world, they quite simply can’t use “in your face” marketing and therefore usually end up producing blogs that people want to read. Obviously they are broadly in the area of “accommodation news” but that remit is stretched very widely!

For instance, there’s the story on the air conditioned bus stop in Dubai.  OK, it’s there because these guys have accommodation listings there but it’s interesting anyway, isn’t it?

Or, what about the top destinations for uni grads? This gives a very nice top 4 list of locations. Interestingly, this reflects the fact that the producers of this particular blog are from Australia in that “uni” is Ozzie for university and, of course, the graduation time elsewhere isn’t the same (school/university years run February to December there rather than September to June elsewhere).

Most of the time we just take it for granted that American is pretty much the same as English and at least that we know the differences (color not colour, check not cheque, etc.) but some differences in interpretation can cause problems.

The main problem we have is with our pickup and dropoff service. This is a service that we offer for the likes of walkers who frequently arrive at the airport or rail station without cars but who’d like to start their walking in our area (it’s very popular for that).

Most of the time our guests are couples and we’ve only once had a family arrive wanting a pickup. Therefore we don’t need to get a minibus or similar and can easily do the pickups and dropoffs in our car, sometimes with the aid of the trailer for the luggage.

Critically, from the American perspective, it isn’t a “shuttle service” and we never use that phrase in any of our marketing because we’re just not setup to offer such a thing. Yet, consistently, the Americans read “pickup/dropoff service” as “shuttle service” and thereby have an expectation of its capability that we just aren’t equipped to fulfil.

For instance, a few weeks ago, despite several e-mail exchanges a large group arrived wanting to book the shuttle bus for the nine of them. Earlier, we had one couple who wanted to catch the shuttle to and from the city every day and, were none too pleased when we weren’t able to collect them from the town a couple of times during their stay.