Foreign Perspectives

A first… it’s warmer in Belfast than it is here!!

A good time to get going on the backlog of administration that built up over the summer. Once we hit the start of July nothing got done that didn’t have to get done right away, net effect of which is that I’ve just completed the accounts for June and am about half way through the July accounts. All being well, I’ll have caught up with things in a week or two.

We have our first ebay client with us at the moment. Didn’t make too much on the room charge but they had a meal last night which has brought the income from them well up. We haven’t really sussed out the ebay sales yet but are optimistic that we’ll do OK with it once we get a good formula sorted. So far the score is: first attempt at full price, lots of interest, two pathetic bids, no sale; second attempt around half price with breakfast included, less interest (further into October explains that I think), one sale (that’s the guys that are here now); third attempt also around half price but ex-breakfast, some interest but no sale yet (the listing is still current); fourth attempt with no accommodation charge (yes, John, FREE!!) but compulsory meal purchases, quite a lot of early interest (also a current listing).

Anyway, must head off as we need to get some more serious clothing… the t-shirt and shorts aren’t really up to the current weather.

Simple really. Just about every single “moving to France/Spain/wherever” TV programme has three things in common: 1) they don’t speak the language and 2) they meet the mayor on the first day and 3) they never ever have any problems with the French administration (or indeed, seem to do any!).

Well, I’m fluent and Wendy’s not too bad at the French either so that blows us out for a start (it doesn’t make for quite so good TV if the protaganists can understand each other).

Although we own the only sizeable accommodation in the area (the next down from us has one apartment in total), we’ve yet to see the mayor. Bit odd as one of his priorties is to attract more tourists to the area and where are they going to stay when they get here?

And, as you know, we’ve had a considerable amount of involvement with the French administration over the last lot of months.

Oh, speaking of administration, we’ve actually got our drinks license now. Seems that we didn’t have to wait for the notaries to get their act together and find the relevant documents: all we had to do was to go along to the mairie and say that we’d like to transfer the license. Well, not quite all: it is France, after all. Nearly though, for the only thing we’d to do extra was to go along to the customs & excise people (although that did take three weeks as they are only in residence in Rivesaltes one afternoon a week and had moved anyway) and hand over the form that the mairie had given us: no additional documentation!! I for one was totally staggered to find that we didn’t need anything else. Supposedly the local gendarme should have done an investigation of us first but that’s the mairie’s responsibility and I think we’ve raised so many “issues” with them already that they weren’t going to rock the boat.

Anyway, moving here is quite different when you don’t have a TV crew in tow.

We’ve been building up our winter to-do list over the last couple of weeks and are gradually working our way through it though there are more things getting added on than taken off at the moment.

One thing that’s now gone is our dutyfree shopping trip. We did the trial run on Friday only to find that the various groups of DOE equivalents are digging up large stretches of the road and, seemingly, all of Andorra’s capital. Net effect is that it took us more than twice the time to get there and that’s even with us taking the two tunnel shortcuts. We definitely want to do some kind of Christmas/December event but it’s back to the drawing board at the moment. We’ve left the listing on our own site at www.mascamps.com/packages/en.htm for the moment but there’s just too much driving time at the moment.

More from the end of year booking too. They’ve discussed it all amongst themselves and the net effect is that the offering on December 31st will be a whole lot easier for us to do although we’re still quite concerned about the lack of time to clear up before the breakfast the next morning.

To cheer you all up a bit, we’ve actually had to put on the long trousers, proper shoes and a jumper today. Mainly due to the wind though as without it, we’re still in t-shirt weather which is some going this far into November.

At the third attempt, we managed to sell a two night break on ebay. Just £35 including breakfast which is less than we’d like but since it’s more than zero we’re still ahead. We’ve added another version for £29 without breakfast so we’ll see how that goes. What we’d really like to do is to add multiple rooms but our rating on ebay isn’t high enough to do that yet (and probably won’t be for several months at this rate). Still, in principle a reasonable way to shift rooms out of season.

We had a bit of a rush of blood to the head yesterday and thought that we’d run up our first little tour with activitybreaks.com . It’s a dutyfree Christmas shopping trip with two nights here and a day in Andorra for shopping, all for the bargain price of EUR 356 for two. There is a LOT of information that you need to enter onto their site for a tour so after we’d finished we thought it looked a little light and we’re off to Andorra later this week to do a trial run and research some options whilst we’re there. We also need something for the final day as finishing it after breakfast makes it look rather empty. At the moment, we’re thinking of adding either a mini-version of our proposed wine tour (ie just the one vineyard) or possibly a tour of Perpignan (there’s a Catalan Christmas festival on in December). Any thoughts folks?

Remember the prefecture saying that we can’t have a Carte de Séjour without a long stay visa? Well, ignoring the problem seems to have made that requirement go away as we got a letter from the office of migration (OMI) this morning saying that Wendy can have her CDS on payment of the fiscal stamp of ‚€220. They also made an appointment for her to have a medical test next week. Unfortunately, both of those requirements breach European law so we’ve a letter off to tell them that. Still, at least them accepting that she’s entitled to a CDS is a step forward.

If nothing else, creating the blog version of this little newsletter has upped the number of readers somewhat. We had a couple of hundred folk looking at it in the couple of days after I put it on.

We had an English couple with us all week as part of a mini-package with breakfast, lunch, evening meals and transfers just about every day which is certainly a lot more profitable than people just staying the night but definitely creates a whole lot more work. The days just disappeared on us and we hardly got anything done.

As a result of them, it took us three goes to make it to a meeting with the bank manager. Still, at least he’s now got a chunk of stuff that needs doing for us. We still can’t accept Amex or Diners Club (“deeners cloob” here) as the applications haven’t been processed yet which isn’t really surprising as banks here are incredibly slow. They’re also about 30 years behind the times in most respects. As a small example of this, Credit Agricole updated their computer system a few months ago and just decided to start charging all their customers EUR 5 per month just for having an account simply because the new computer system would let them do that. That’s in addition to the EUR 40 that they already charged for a debit card on the accounts. So now we’ve to pay EUR 100 just to have an ordinary account. Another example of backwardness is that they’ve just started to issue credit cards (yes, really: 30 years after the rest of the world!). Naturally, they come with a charge (EUR 30 or so), penal interest (17% which is pretty high considering that Eurozone rates are somewhat lower than the UK) and a MAXIMUM limit of EUR 8000 (about £5000) which is lower than the minimum limits on some UK cards: I don’t think he believed me when I said that some UK cards have maximums up to £50,000 on ordinary cards (and those kind of limits are definitely achieveable too whereas the EUR 8000 max of Credit Agricole is rather difficult to achieve). Oh, and the “overdraft limit” is only applicable during the month ie you need to clear your overdraft each month so it’s really just to cover bills arriving before your salary.

We’re intending to update two rooms each year so that we don’t end up having to replace the stuff in all the rooms in a few years time (ie we’ll update the whole hotel every five years or so). Normally we’d have done that in the new year but the big end of year booking is forcing us to bring that forward a few months so we were off bedroom shopping during the week. Anyway, first to get the refresh is our proposed “honeymoon suite” which will have a really nice set of furniture before Christmas and we’re also replacing one knackered bed in a room which we’ve yet to use but expect to be using regularly next year as it’ll be our only non-ensuite room when we create the little suite by adding a connecting door between the other non-ensuite room and one of our double rooms. We weren’t even going to bother offering the non-ensuite rooms but they’re very popular with the people booking through the Ryanair/FlyBE system.

Nothing doing with the vaccinations. We went along to the clinic but they decided that both James & John were running a temperature and therefore couldn’t be given the vaccines so it’s back in early December to try again. The reason that they were pretty warm (as were me & Wendy) is that it was 29C that day. They don’t allow for people not being used to the high temperatures here. When John was born they insisted on putting three layers of clothes on him (including one rug type effort) plus blankets on top. I’m sure you’ve heard that babies can’t sweat. Normally that’s true but they put so much on him that the sweat was dripping off him!

We’ve one of those google alerts set up to keep an eye on the bridge developments so we can see that it’s being quite widely reported in the UK. I think the folk in Millau are incredibly optimistic when they think that people will come to their town to see the bridge. A fantastic feat of engineering, maybe. Worth a special trip to see, no. At the very least they’re going to see a heap of their shops closing over the next few years.

It’s a public holiday here tomorrow (Monday) so we’re intending to head off to Spain for the day to stock up on a few things. The English family ate their way through a lot of beans on toast. You might think that’s a cheap meal. Not here: beans are really expensive. So, we’re going to try and get a box of tins of beans in Spain (they aren’t quite at UK prices but are definitely a lot cheaper than in France). Also, Wendy has fallen in love with “sillic bang” which cleans up chrome like new and has made quite an improvement in the appearance of our bathroom fittings.

You’ll probably be quite amazed to find us listed as number four at Take a Break Nudist Retreats ! Haven’t pulled in any punters from that site just yet though.

We have just been accepted by the Ryanair activity breaks site so are busy working on some packages to put onto it. Most likely the first will be a Christmas short break, so if the in-fighting re the location of the Christmas do is still ongoing, you may as well plonk Mas Camps into the fray! Any suggestions folks?

Some folk were asking about an archive of these little mails. How does something like Mas Camps News grab you? I haven’t added them all yet but should get up to date later this week.

We’ve been busy sorting out our “to do” list for the period up to next summer (so it’s a biggie!). We’ve now got more than enough on it to keep us out of trouble for quite a while but at least it’s giving us a chance to see that things are moving ahead.

One thing that’s really going to feature bigtime in the activities for the next couple of months is a massive booking by a French family. They’ve booked the entire building for the evening of the 31st December through to lunchtime on the 2nd with all meals. We’ve not nailed down the final menu but have just received a EUR 600 deposit cheque so I guess we better get going on the planning. They’re even using a couple of rooms that we never planned on using so we need to tidy those up a bit.

James & John are getting their first French injections tomorrow afternoon. No problems with MMR vs separate injections over here: you just ask for them and they give you the prescription to get them. You’ve to pay for the vaccines that you get in the chemist but £15 for three is something of a bargain as compared to £80 for just the measles one in the UK. Those with kids who are interested in the three vaccine option could probably manage to do it on holiday over here for much the same price (the NHS would refund the 70% that normal French health plans refund; you can claim the refund here or, more easily if you’ve not got a French bank account, when you get back home). There’s no waiting time either: in the UK we were on the measles list for about six months; here we just popped into the chemist and could have even had the injection the same day if we’d organised the appointment that way.

We’ve not forgotten about the deportation issue but there haven’t been any developments on that front lately.

I see that “the bridge” is being opened by Chirac on December 17th. It’s part of the Paris-Barcelona highway but unfortunately they’ve not even started on the bit between Beziers and Perpignan so effectively the traffic jam will move from Millau (and boy is it dreadful there!) to around Beziers. Still, at least the roads around Beziers are considerably better than the awful mess through Millau.