Foreign Perspectives

We’re at one of the crossroads of Europe so find that people are stopping here enroute for another major tourist site somewhere in Europe.

It’s very common for people to be coming from Paris enroute to somewhere in the Valencia or Alicante area as we’re pretty much at the half-way point and quite convenient for the motorway exit.

Going the other way, it’s almost always Avignon that people are heading for. OK, Avignon is nice but there seems to be more to see in Nimes, there’s the Pont du Gard, Arles and, for the nature lovers, the Camarge, all around two to three hours drive from here. And those are just the highlights because there are lots of other places to see in that area.

So why’s it always Avignon that they go to?

Simple. It’s got the biggest “name”. It’s why people go to Paris or to Rome or London. They usually start off with places that they’ve heard other people talk about or have seen in films or on TV.

Those coming the longest distances are the worst for this. Both Australians and Americans will almost always start with the “big sights” and, in many cases, only ever go to those “big sights” and thereby miss out on the real culture of the countries that they visit. Visiting in this way means that they are constantly surrounded by their fellow tourists hitting the “big sights”.

I’m not saying that they shouldn’t visit the big sights, but that needs to be balanced by visits to other places around the country. It’s much better to spend a few hours going round a small museum exhibiting a broad range of art than try to get round the Louvre over a day and thereby find that you get to the point of thinking “oh hum, another Matisse”. For that matter, probably the best place to see as Monet did doesn’t have any of his paintings at all!

If it’s not sunny, that’s the most common question that we get asked.

It’s also the hardest one to answer.

For instance, right now the weather forecast is saying that it’s sunny when it most definitely isn’t. How come it’s so wrong? Simple really: we’re mid-way between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean and the weather station is on the coast.

So, once you get out of the main Summer season, it’s quite common for the weather here to be very different from that on the coast. That’s not to say that we get cold weather as such because ordinarily it’s t-shirt weather for 10 or 11 months per year. However, it may be cloudy here when it’s not on the coast. And if it’s cloudy here, it’s probably pretty chilly in the mountains.

You don’t need to go as far as the mountains for it to be chilly though. The Winter usually starts on the western side of the village of St Paul de Fenouillet. Rather strangely, it can be t-shirt weather on the eastern (and higher!) side of the village and snowing on the western side at the same time.

Google certainly seems to think so as they’ve been trying out photos placed beside the normal type of adsense ads that you see here in addition to the increasing numbers of photo and even video adverts that you’ll have seen on various sites you’ve looked at over the last year or more.

So advertisers like to see photos in their paid posts too. We’ve been really bad at doing that but as the average payout for our posts increases, you’ll gradually see us adding more of them as we move into the Winter.

Once we get the computer upgraded, we’re toying with the idea of taking on some video posts as well, though the payment will need to be somewhat higher for those as they sound like they’d be quite time consuming to do.

Let’s face it, many people just aren’t at their best in the mornings. How come then that when someone has the idea of having a meeting over a meal to launch some new initiative that it’s pretty much always a breakfast meeting that’s organised?

The latest initiative to reduce unemployment locally is a breakfast get together between the employers and the potential employees in the town to the west of us.

OK, I can’t see the French going for a business meeting over lunch and people usually want to get home at the end of the day, but a breakfast meeting isn’t overlly realistic. For one thing, it’s a town in the country and therefore the public transport to and from it is far from good. How are these potential employees going to get to the meeting when the time current proposed is before the buses actually start?

Although it’s outside the main holiday season, we’re still fairly full but not quite in the same pattern as is usual for this time of year.

We generally get quite a respectable level of occupancy during September but ordinarily it’s a pattern of lots in the first week followed by a reasonably even spread over the rest of the month. In common with the changing pattern of bookings this year, September is also quite different.

So, this month we haven’t got the usual even spread but instead have a series of clumps of bookings. For instance, we were almost completely full on Sunday night (an odd night to be full) yet Monday night saw just one couple in residence.

As usual, we’ve no idea of what the rest of the year will turn out to be like as people are continuing with their trend of making reservations just a week or two in advance.