Foreign Perspectives

By far the vast majority of our guests enjoy staying here but in the French holiday season we always get a few who go out of their way to find fault and always save up those faults to report them to us in the morning.

They’re always French because that’s how the French seem to go about demanding a reduction in the bill as they don’t believe that they should pay the extra required in the summer.

It’s easy to pick these ones out as they barely speak to you as you’re checking them in and showing them to the room. Whilst the French almost always take breakfast, these ones don’t as that’s another thing which makes the room too expensive.

Then, in the morning, they pick on one or two things which weren’t 100% right for them, demand a reduction and then threaten to report you to all and sundry. It’s always in that sequence too: they demand the reduction THEN they say they’ll report you to all in sundry ie it’s very much blackmail.

Thankfully they’re few and far between but we just received a particularly obnoxious variety of the species a few days ago. He actually found one thing that really was wrong with the room although as it was something which could be fixed in under 5 seconds he clearly couldn’t tell us about it when he arrived or he’d not have anything to complain about so instead he let a dripping cistern keep him awake all night.

He had a particularly interesting line of argument with the cistern. Seemingly he thought that a dripping cistern was enough to have the Prefecture close us down. That certainly would have an interesting effect if they did that because they’d need to close down just about every hotel in the world if that was enough reason to close a place.

As usual, he was rude and offensive, becoming more and more so as he realised that we weren’t going to give him a reduction in the price and he even continued in this vein as he left with assorted rude and offensive gestures as he left (narrowly missing a tree as he was steering with one hand).

Oh well, at least the summer season is pretty much over so that should be the last such example of the species we get until next year.

Whilst in our first year, we had quite a number of driveby bookings, over the last two years we’ve had virtually none.

Until recently that is. Why, I don’t know, but the number of driveby bookings has started to rise quite sharply. Separately, but probably related to that, we’ve started to get a rapidly rising number of almost last minute bookings via various websites (recently they turned up within 10 minutes of booking online so they must have booked whilst driving!).

Such has been the drop in drivebys that we’ve pretty much gotten out of the way of them and ended up with quite a rush last night when a group of six German musicians turned up looking for rooms.

One of the visible signs of China opening up a little bit is that there are a growing number of expats living there now.

Feve is an American living who is living in Chengdu and is searching for Chengdu, China  Blogs with a view to establishing a little network of them. I think it might take a “while” though as there’s only the one listed on the expat list over at Ministry of Propaganda and it’s been running for quite a while.

Other welcome signs of the opening up are that we’ve even picked up a listing for apartments in Shanghai.

Perhaps I should be cheeky enough and ask him to include me on his blogroll or cheekier still and ask for a little article on Chengdu for our Whole Earth Guide?

Anyway, Feve’s blog looks like it will be quite an interesting one to follow as they settle into life in China.

One confusing thing this year is that we’re still pretty full this week and even had to close down availability for a couple of days already. Ordinarily, when the French have gone home from their holidays last Saturday, there’s a week of a lull in activity before the Visa pour L’Image photojournalism festival starts but for the next couple of days we’re pretty much full.

Even odder is that it’s during a time when the weather is just dreadful which generally keeps down the numbers of guests staying with us.

What is a major nuisance is that they’re all booking just a couple of days at most in advance. That has the effect that we don’t know if there’ll be a lull at all because we could easily find that the end of the week we’re full.

Still, it helps the bank balance no end!

One of the long term aims I have is to be able to sell photos from our little collection of sites as we tend to build up quite a collection of photos in the course of developing the likes of our Pyrenees Guide and, on a grander scale, our Whole Earth Guide.

For the guides themselves, the little Nikon Coolpix 3700 was more than enough. Whilst 3mp mightn’t sound much these days, you don’t need anything like that for the internet and in fact even the largest images on the websites is under 1mp. Even those 300,000 pixel cheapo cameras have much more resolution than is required for internet use.

However, it’s quite a different matter when you want to sell the photos as prints or whatever.

So, we had a bit of an upgrade last year to the 6mp Nikon S10 which is an excellent little camera and one of the few which offer x10 zoom on a compact digital camera. It’s certainly improved the photos that we’ve taken since getting it quite substantially, it’s still limiting us in terms of potential future sales of the images we take.

Anyway, ’twas time to really up the ante and so as of next week we’ll be starting to use our brand new Nikon D40x which takes us up to 10mp and will give us a whole lot more flexibility. In fact, the resolution increase is much more than it seems as there are all kinds of settings on the camera should let us produce prints up to poster size.

Now “all” we need to do is to wait for the perfect lighting for the photos…. the weather at the moment is more like the depths of Winter than mid-Summer!