Foreign Perspectives

For a start, the actual holiday is November 1st (All Saints Day) when just about everything in France closes, much to the surprise of foreigners who are more used to Halloween being just for the kids and being the day before.

Secondly, it’s not really a French traditional holiday and they haven’t quite got the hang of it yet. Imported from America (no doubt to the disgust of a number of the French), there are numerous outfits for the kids and, of course, the usual Halloween goodies seen elsewhere. On the other hand, they may well have the outfits and troup round the houses but haven’t worked out a proper translation of “trick or treat” and therefore just go round the streets calling out for “bon bons” (sweets). The householders, for the most part haven’t got the hang of it either so the vast majority of houses remain closed and it’s noticeable that the groups of kids are very selective in the houses that they call on.

Anyway, if you’re on holiday here around Halloween, don’t forget to buy your petrol etc. on the 31st of October and wonder at the spread of an American holiday to France.

Things were working out quite well with them but the girl that had been specifically recommended to us left the accountancy firm late last year. As she spoke quite fluent English and knew how accountancy worked in the UK, the firm had used her to attract a lot of English speaking clients.

Unfortunately, when she left they found themselves with a whole lot of English speaking clients of which the majority don’t have good enough French to be able to use a normal French accountant. They in turn don’t speak good enough English to be able to deal with them properly either. Net effect? Well it seems that they decided not to bother doing anything with the clients that she had brought to the firm.

We only found this out last week after we received what is now a growing pile of penalty notices from various organisations due to our books not being done and called them to see why these were arriving.

Anyway, after being told that “this firm is in a bad way”, we’re now looking for yet another accountant.

As with leaving the last accountants, it should be “interesting” to leave this lot. We already have penalty charges which exceed the bill that they sent us recently so I’ll be forwarding a bill to them.

As usual, when we want to get away early the last guests didn’t check out until the very last minute so we didn’t set off for Sitges ’til noon. That worked out pretty well as with a break for lunch at the nice little café on the border we pulled into the hotel around 4pm.

Sitges is a very lively resort in the Summer months but is a good deal quieter once you get into Autumn. Although the majority of the shops were still open, the town had a feeling of closing down for the Winter about it with a number of the more upmarket shops already closed up and the much lower number of tourists limited the extent of the promenading pretty much exclusively to the central section of the beachfront.

I was quite disappointed in the old town as it’s almost entirely taken over by various government offices and has a very “restored” feeling about it.

There’s a fantastic Australian-owned restaurant called the Beach House which Wendy wanted to try out but I guess it may be one of those that closes up for the Winter as we couldn’t find it.

As we went a little bit out of season, the selection of accommodation was massive of course. We ended up staying in a very nice four star aparthotel which is normally EUR 400 odd yet only cost us EUR 70.

So, quite a nice town to walk round, but you’d need to go closer to the main holiday season to make the most of it I think.

With them, you need to attach each course you do to a qualification so I attached the French to their general degree and also to the French Diploma.

Of course, although I was fluent enough by the end of the first course, momentum tends to get you to sign up for the next course in the sequence and by December 2004 I found myself the proud owner of a Diploma in French. I still get it out now and again in case it was all a dream!

Well, by that point we’d been picking up a growing number of Spanish guests so I figured that I should do a little Spanish to help me speak to them and to improve what was a dreadful Spanish translation of the website. Yet again, momentum carried me on a bit and, all being well, next year I’ll have a Spanish Diploma.

Remember that general degree that I was attaching all the courses to? Well, the French and Spanish diplomas added together are enough to get it!

Of course, now that I’ve reached that point, I’ve started thinking about the degree itself and it seems that by doing just one more course I can get BA Hons Modern Languages.

The other thing that I’ve noticed is that there’s a whole raft of degree titles that I could get by doing just one or two more courses…. A friend who did the French with me is close to having options such as BA Hons Humanities, BA Hons European Studies, BA Hons Humanities and European Studies,…..

In fact, the very first OU course that I did wasn’t the French but a small astronomy course. That course wouldn’t count towards the language degree of course so would be left over after I pick up the degree which may create a little bit of momentum to use that as the start of a future BSc degree….