Foreign Perspectives

If you were thinking of going somewhere for a dirty weekend, where would it be?

The French are, of course, totally open about such things and commonly arrive at their accommodation with their mistress for an afternoon and leave the pillows in “interesting” positions.

In France, your first thought would probably be Paris and who am I to argue if you’re thinking romantic night-time cruises on the Seine? However, for an actual dirty weekend, Mas Camps near Perpignan seems to be gradually moving up in the stakes. Already it’s been referred to in Cosmopolitan by one couple who stayed a whole week and didn’t leave the room.

Anyway, for your next dirty weekend, why not try Mas Camps. Simple direct flights from London Stansted, Birmingham, Southhampton and Manchester with a pickup service taking you straight to your room.

Arnold

We made it to the bull run in Millas, or rather the bull stroll. The large scale fencing to keep the tourists safe seemed way out of proportion to the danger involved in this very tame version of Pamploma.

Today is the last of the Millas fair with the celebrations running well into the night, although at a fairly sedate pace in comparison to the equivalent events in Spain. I guess the French have been suppressing the Catalan culture for so long now that everything has declined in comparison to the original Spanish version.

Being the last day, the crowds had grown considerably from yesterday, mainly I suspect people wanting to see the bull running and the bullfight that follows a few hours later.

One odd feature of Millas is the fountain just off the main square. The locals believe that it has magical powers to cure and therefore you see a continual stream of people stopping by with anything from a small bottle to a van load of crates of bottles to fill up from the fountain. Don’t know about the magical powers but the water tastes nice and is cool even on the hottest day.

Must head on… it’ll be a busy day tomorrow as we’ve yet another almost complete changeover of rooms to do not to mention having to take the resulting mountain of sheets off to the laundry, install a new toilet (more on that soon) and the usual assortment of daily tasks.

Arnold

Got a phone call early this morning in slightly dodgy French from a Spaniard in Barcelona saying that they’d like a double room for this evening. No problem really, as the French had all left this morning and we’d only a few people in this evening. They even got someone to call back in slightly less dodgy French to confirm that the reservation had been made and that they’d be here around 4pm.

Bit of an awkward time really as they were to be running the bulls through the streets of Millas around then and we’ve been meaning to go to see that for the last two years. Still, it wouldn’t take long to get them checked in and the bulls were sure to be late anyway (well, it is France after all!).

4pm arrived and we saw a whole lot of cars parked across the road from us. Nothing really unusual in that; a lot of people stop there to check the map or whatever. However, a whole lot of people headed over. It wasn’t one double room they wanted: it was NINE!! We gotta get another floor added to this place someday to cope with such things. Couldn’t keep all of them ourselves but we were able to put enough of them up at the auberge round the corner to satisfy everyone.

The ongoing saga of the residence permit continues…

A little over a week ago we called in to the mairie to see what they’d received from the prefecture. Well, it was a document listing a whole heap of documents that they required me & Wendy to provide before they would give us the residence permit. It was illegal under European law for them to ask for every single one of the documents that they wanted! No surprise there really as they’d previously told us that European law doesn’t apply in France.

Anyway, we pointed that out to the poor girl at the mairie who, once again, called the prefecture for us and pointed out that we had applied for a European residence permit, not an “ordinary” one and that they were breaking the law by asking us to provide them with those documents. We also said that we wanted an appointment with them to sort this out properly; Muriel was to call us back the next day. That was a week ago.

In the meantime, we thought we’d drop the SOLVIT people a line to see what they could do. August isn’t a great time to do anything in France as most places are closed but we received our first reply from them today so, who knows, perhaps we’ll get the permits this month after all.

Seems like ages since the last Mas Camps News!

What’s been happening?

Well, we had our first holiday since we got here. More on that if you read the blog entries from April. Although we just went to Turkey to see the solar eclipse, we’d like to go back as the trip was far too short. Might even drive it next time as we had some Turkish guests a month or so back who did exactly that. However, they recommend taking the ferry from Italy to Greece rather than driving through Croatia etc. as they reckon that route is a bit dangerous.

The pattern of reservations has been quite different from last year. Very, very little in February and March but once we hit Easter, the occupancy was way up. Almost triple the number of people this June as we had last year. July was slightly higher but completely with “ordinary” guests as we didn’t have the equivalent of the two massive bookings we had last year. Different from last year too is that September already has a fair number of bookings.

And we’ve launched a few more websites. With the quiet period in February, I was able to move Our Inns and Our Gites into PHP and MySQL which has reduced considerably the amount of effort required to put properties online. Not only that but I’ve taken the opportunity to add a number of enhancements and permit people to add a whole lot more information.

Once all the information was in the database (major nightmare!), I made a start on the much more commercially targetted Our Holiday Rental Homes and Our Bed and Breakfasts. Can’t really see them doing well in the search engines this holiday season but the older sites are doing very well. Both Chambre-d’Hote and Our Gites (listing B&B and self-catering properties in France respectively) regularly appear in the top 10 on google searches.

Last, but not least, I thought that I’d move the blog into my own domain. Still haven’t sussed out the full route, but expect to see it arriving at Foreign Perspectives shortly.