Foreign Perspectives

After much consideration of the flights from Girona (or is it Gerona?) and Barcelona, it looks like Berlin has won for October.

All being well, we’ll be heading off towards the end of October for three or four days. I thought that the hotel prices would blow Berlin out of the water but there are lots of good quality accommodation at quite reasonable prices. Haven’t totally settled on a hotel/apartment but we’re aiming for somewhere in the Mitte area (ie central Berlin) which appears to offer the chance to walk around all the major sights over the course of a few days.

We’re planning on booking that sometime in the next few days once we nail down the accommodation. Flights look deadon as they leave Barcelona in the afternoon and get back in the evening.

ADA have been after me for quite a while now to add their logo to my sites, so here it is.

As you know, we’ve been renting a far from them since our own was wrecked by a tractor way back at the end of May. In that we’re quite a good customer for them you’d think that we would be due some brownie points for that, wouldn’t you?

Well, we’ve been renting the car for so long that they need it back as they’ve to return it to the leasing company and we agreed to make the changeover today.

We’d arranged to change it over at the airport as the town centre location is a bit of a nightmare to get in and out of plus it doesn’t have terribly long working hours.

Anyway, we dropped James off at school and off we went to the airport.

First off, we were going to have to pay for all the damage to the car. Kind of peculiar seeing as it was already damaged when we picked it up, eh?

Next he said he had a little two seater car for us. Yes, a car smaller than we had ordered and useless to us as we need at least a four seater. So, whereas other car hire firms would have been upgrading our car after such a long rental, ADA were going to make quite a downgrade.

Finally, he said he’d to do an authorisation on our card for another EUR 600. Now, that wouldn’t matter too much with a UK credit card but a French debit card it does. In particular it means that EUR 1200 would have been blocked in our account and in fact we’d not have been able to extend the car rental next week as planned.

Nope, he couldn’t do anything about any of that.

So, we’re sans-voiture. We’re also down EUR 70 as we needed to get a taxi to the school to collect James.

Next time, if there is one, I’ll tell them to collect the car if they want it because we certainly aren’t going to be helpful to them when there is zero service in response.

Being born at the end of August wasn’t great timing when we were in the accommodation business so, as usual, John’s birthday yesterday was quite hectic and not helped at all by being the first day back to school for James.

School days here have very awkward times if you’re working and need to travel around. Anyway, after dropping off James at 9am, it was off to pick up some presents for John (so far the favourite is a toss-up between the bike and a train set) by which time it was time to race back for James at noon. We dropped him off at 2pm and then it was off again to see about getting a birthday cake which at least let us get back for James at a relatively leisurely pace.

For the evening, the highlight was the meal at the pirate restaurant which was a big hit with the kids as you can see.

Anyway, tomorrow it’s back to the slog of catching up with the admin that just didn’t get done over the Summer…

Since we’d to go back to the Halifax in Spain, we thought that we’d stay in a hotel in Barcelona rather than doing a round trip of about six hours driving.

Good idea in principle as the hotel would have cost around the same as the petrol and tolls and we’d have had a full day in Barcelona too which would have been nice.

However, we didn’t allow for the combination of somewhat elevated prices (despite the hotel being almost empty) and the very poor signposting in the city. Anyway, we tried the Ibis which used to be around EUR 60 but is now EUR 90 so we thought we’d try the Campanile near Baricentro instead.

We’ve been planning on staying in that Campanile for ages as it’s just beside a shopping centre which needs a full day to do it properly plus the Campanile are brilliant for families. Not so this one. Despite their child policy allowing children under 12 to stay free, they said that they’d only rooms for two and we’d have to take an extra one for the kids. Actually, now that we’ve looked at their website in fact they DO have rooms for three. They were available too as the carpark was virtually empty but that in itself is no real surprise as it took us nearly an hour of driving past the place on the motorways which surround it before we happened across the single (unmarked) exit required to get into the hotel.

They must make a fortune on no-shows! If I could buy a small house in that estate I’d be tempted to list it as a 300 bedroom hotel on the basis that virtually nobody is able to get to it.

We’re hoping to buy a property in Spain at some point so have been hunting around for the best bank account as stage one in that process.

It turns out that the best short-term option for us is the Halifax because it offers completely free transfers of money from the UK which will be handy right now as it seems to be the cheapest way to get large chunks of cash from sterling into euros (the Nationwide is just as cheap but only practical for fairly small amounts).

Anyway, we couldn’t get down over the Summer and the first window of opportunity for us was yesterday as we’d nobody staying last night so we went off after the people from the night before had checked out. That looked like being quite a good time as the branch in Barcelona is open until 3pm so we were expecting to arrive around 2pm or so.

Those of you who’ve been reading this will know that we are rubbish at finding our way around Barcelona but unusually we managed to go more or less straight to the Halifax and walked in just a little after 2pm.

As it’s the holiday season, there was only the one guy there with a small queue of people in front of him so we’d to wait maybe 20 mins.

And, guess what? He couldn’t open it because they can’t take cash after 2pm and the only way to fund the account initially is with cash. No, he couldn’t take a card number and do a cash advance. No, he couldn’t open the account and give us the account number to let us transfer the opening balance. No, he couldn’t open it the next day and tell us the account number.

So, despite what the Halifax in the UK said, the simplest way for us to open the account looks like being to open it via Halifax in the UK.

As the next time slot for us is going to be in October we’re going to use the time to look into the options of Barclays and Citibank which both have loads of branches all over Spain and one of which is likely to be our long term banking solution for Spain. Halifax is certainly very convenient for bank transfers but they have very few branches and so probably aren’t a viable day to day bank for anyone living in Spain (unless you’re living close to one of their branches of course).