Owner: Foreign Perspectives URL:http://www.foreignperspectives.com Join Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 05:10:05 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: News and editorial on life from the south of France, a regular series on how to move here and some random musings too. Site statistics:Click here
Hotel and accommodation review sites 2007-02-25 11:32:40 The issue of sites posting guest review
s of accommodation has been picked up by Karen over at Europe A La Carte.
Most of the debate to date is on the issue of hotel owners posting bogus and glowing reviews on the likes of Trip Advisor but I suspect that they are few and far between. Looking at it from the other side of the fence so to speak, there are equally problems of negative comments by guests who have never even stayed or who, when something goes wrong, blame everything on the hotel.
Consider a few of the examples that we have seen over the last year.
1. “…in the middle of nowhere…” . It’s certainly quite true that the hotel was in the countryside and not in the city. The guests in question hadn’t even bothered to read the first line of the description which quite clearly states that yet they blamed the hotel for not being in the city-centre location that they really wanted.
2. “…the hairdryer in the room had quite a smell when us Read more:Hotel
Getting cheaper flights on Ryanair 2007-02-24 12:31:17 We’re just getting organised for a trip to Belfast next week and have been pricing the flights
on Skyscanner as that’s a much, much easier way to pick out the cheap flights compared to trying to do it directly on the Ryanair
site.
As usual, it’s cheaper and more convenient for us to fly out of Carcassonne and back to Girona. Most people wouldn’t think of doing that as the historic assumption has always been that return flights are cheaper. That was certainly true in the days before discount airlines but although discount airlines will normally let you book a return ticket, in practice their flights are actually priced as one-way.
So, in our case, if you were flying from Dublin to the Pyrenees, the cheapest thing to do is usually to fly from Dublin to Girona and then fly back to Dublin from Carcassonne. The one complication in this scenario if you’re coming here is that international dropoffs of cars can be expensive so you need to price in that aspect of y
How safe is it to quote your bank account details to strangers? 2007-02-22 21:41:47 Many of the B&B and particularly gite owners accept payments by bank transfer to their account. What amazes me is that they never consider that it’s something of a risk to give your bank accountdetails
to a complete stranger and even more so when it’s a series of complete strangers.
If you think about this for a while you’ll realise that your bank account details are printed on your cheques but that’s not quite the same as you give cheques to people or organisations that you know. There is a safe way to do this though. Just quote a savings account number and, if you’re really paranoid about it, open a savings account in a bank that you don’t normally deal with.
Every time that I raise this issue, someone quotes their bank manager as having said that it’s perfectly safe to hand out your details in this way and that it’s impossible to take money out using only those details. Haven’t these people even heard of direct debits? Afte
Language and culture: are they inextricably interlinked? 2007-02-21 18:03:19 I participated in quite an extended debate on an excellent English language website written by a French expat living in America recently.Along the way a number of issues were raised which I never really thought a great deal about before and it was interesting to see a French view expressed on many of them.
One in particular was their view that you just couldn’t separate language from culture
. From a French perspective the two are indivisible: you can’t have French culture without it being in the French language.
In the English speaking world the two are quite separate. India clearly isn’t an Anglo-saxon culture yet they speak English and even Hong-Kong remained very much a Chinese culture even when it was a British colony. Yet, the French would seemingly argue that both India and Hong-Kong are Anglo-Saxon.
Even the French world has examples of the separation these days. France24 put out a full English-language news service yet it is still quite clearly a French channe
Buying a house in France: part 8: visas & immigration: European citizens in established European countries intending to work 2007-02-20 17:58:07 We introduced the various terms involved in the area of visas, residence permits and immigration in our last entry. Now it’s time to take you through the simplest of these.The simplest case of immigration to France
is where you are a citizen of one of the established European
countries and are coming to France to work as either an employee or for yourself. Established European countries are those that have been in the European Union for more than four years; if it’s been in the union for less than four years then transitional arrangements may apply.
This section also applies to you if you are French and if you have dual/multiple nationalities so long as one of those nationalities is European.
If this applies to you and all your family, then you just need to come to France and there are no documentation requirements at all beyond those which a French citizen would need to meet. In practical terms, the French must treat you as though you were French and had always been French Read more:Buying
Marketing our blog 2007-02-19 22:41:47 Initially we just included our blog on the marketing lists for our other sites but quite quickly found out that a lot of places list blogs in a peculiar way or don’t list them at all so we’ve been looking around for other ways to get our blog known.The business of blogging is relatively new and so a lot of places aren’t quite sure what to do with them. Many site directories are set up on the basis that the sites on them are fairly static but that’s one thing that’s definitely not the case with active blogs. They also have the characteristic of being local news in many cases and whilst I’m sure it’ll be quite a while before we get mentioned on a news bulletin we are actually listed on one service which in turn feeds into Reuters, USA Today and FoxNews.
Each time a new entry is added various services such as Feedburner, Technorati and more specialised services like PingOMatic inform all the other news-type services that you’ve done that. Read more:Marketing
French policies on taxes and benefits proposed for the 2007 election 2007-02-19 11:07:24 Boris over at France This Way writing about the upcoming French
elections reminds me that I’m registered to vote here and perhaps I should find out some more about the people who I might be asked to vote for.
Although registered to vote here, I can only vote in the local and European elections, not the national ones that Boris talks about. Still, it’s interesting to read his take on the policies being proposed
by the leading candidates.
Sarkozy definitely sounds like the candidate that France needs. Unfortunately, going by past performance he would more than likely back down from his policies in the face of certain public demonstrations against reductions in benefits. Does that mean that France needs Royal with her policies of increasing benefits and just borrowing more and more to pay for it? Boris suggests that getting him elected and driving France to the abyss would get someone strong enough to pull France out of the hole next time around but I don’t think it wou
The most useful item of luggage 2007-02-18 17:24:13 I’m sure that there are lots of opinions on this one, but for me the most useful item of luggage that I have at the moment is something that I received as a Christmas present many years ago: a set of luggage scales.
Having these means that I’m never one of those people standing at the Ryanair checkin desk arguing that there’s no difference to the plane if there’s 9kg in carryon and 16kg in checked luggage or 10kg in carryon and 15kg in checked because I have already moved that 1kg from checked to carryon before I get to the desk. In fact with these scales we were able to manage 85kg and no excess fees on a recent trip (2 adults, 2 children can carry up to 100kg on Ryanair, not counting the pram). Without them, we’d have been sure to be arguing that we should be able to share the checked luggage allowance.
You might think that you will be able to check the weight using one of the unused checkin desks. However, in newer desks the scales are switched off whe
Internet booking scams 2007-02-17 14:38:43 Once you have your website properly set up on the Internet
and listed in the search engines, you can expect to start receiving scam bookings. In fact, if you aren’t receiving them it’s an indication that you haven’t got your site listed properly.There are many variations on the scam theme these days but they have a number of characteristics in common, namely that the spelling & grammar are bad, the e-mail address is one of the free yahoo or hotmail ones and that the booking is for an usually large number of rooms. However, we’ve also received genuine bookings that meet all three criteria so sometimes you need to check a little further before you reject such a booking.Other common themes are that the main source of them is Nigeria, they’re usually from a “Christian organisation” and that they want you to bill them extra and buy mobile phones or rent cars with the excess. Sometimes, they will even quote a credit card number which works but y
Did you ever dream of being a real-life James Bond? 2007-02-26 17:43:57 Although MI6 was less than pleased (to put it mildly) when Bond zoomed right past their real-life headquarters on the opening sequence of “The World is Not Enough”, just a few years later and we find MI5, their internal security counterparts, advertising for spies on the Internet and indeed even MI6 now feature a nice photo of said headquarters on their own site. Of course, “we” have agents (or, rather, Mobile Surveillance Officers), it is “they” who have spies.
In days gone by, recruitment was by way of the old boy network. It was more than enough for X to say that you were a “reliable chap” for you to find yourself asked by someone in “the Service” to help your country. Unfortunately, the days when the British Empire was mainly up against the Soviet Union are long since gone and the threat is much more from the likes of Muslim extremists these days. The old boy network certainly never included ethnic minorities and, for tha Read more:James
The blogging bigtime: post number 200! 2007-02-28 18:42:31 It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was writing the first post of this blog to say that we’d gotten the mortgage for our place in France yet that was 199 posts ago, hence this retrospective on life as a blogger since then.
Those of you who have been reading this since the start may remember the days when it was Mas Camps News. At that time, the bulk of the postings were on topics relating to the preparations for our move to France and later on various aspects of settling into life in France. We’re gradually collecting the fruits of our experience of this on our Buying a House in France postings so that others can learn from our mishaps and mistakes.
Eventually we managed to pass the hurdles that the French administration put seemingly at every step of our journey though it wasn’t really as bad as that. In fact, most of the time all we needed was a “roadmap” to guide us as to where to go at each point and hopefully the reference version of our serie
The French Royal election campaign 2007-02-27 16:50:31 In years gone by the French
were one of the most backward nations in the world with their use of the Internet. They stuck resolutely to their France-only Minitel system and, for the most part, refused to have anything to do with the American-dominated Internet.
That situation is changing very quickly. For example, whilst we had our first ever online reservation from a French person just two Summers ago, nowadays they are commonplace. So, it’s not surprising that the election campaign has gone online in an equally big way. Blogs are coming to be an expected part of that with the Royal
campaign blog started early on and campaigning even taking place on SecondLife. Not so long ago, I’d have said that the SecondLife campaign office was totally crazy but apparently the swing against the recent EU referendum was started with the blog from an obscure teacher in Marseille so it would appear possible to swing public opinion in the real world from our vantage point in the virtual one
Spring has sprung in the south of France 2007-03-01 18:59:07 We seemed to go directly from Autumn to Spring
this year in the Pyrenees and the fruit trees have already started to flower as you can see.
Something of a disasterous year for the ski-ing, at least for us, as we’d have needed to go much farther than usual to find snow. Having said that, we’re incredibly lazy with the ski resorts and don’t look for anything much further than 90 minutes or so drive. If we were a bit more keen, we could have ventured further afield and went to one of the higher altitude resorts though going by the snow on Canigou, they had a much shorter than normal season too At the current rate of going, I don’t think we’ll ever finish off the heating oil that we bought two years ago! We’ve not had that much in the way of wind (usually the thing that really chills things down locally).
Even the river running through the village has never filled up this year and we never had to take the long way round to avoid the flooded bridge. The Read more:sprung
, France
Buying a house in France: part 9: visas & immigration: non-European citizens with European spouses intending to work 2007-03-01 13:05:05 We covered the very simplest case last week ie that of European
s from established European countries intending to work. This case is almost as simple but does involve some paperwork.
If your spouse is from a country that’s been in Europe for less than four years then transitional arrangements may apply and will almost certainly be applied if there are any as France
really loves documentation.
As before if you have “sufficient resources” (generally 1000€ a month or more) you are treated as though you were intending to work.
If you are from a country which requires a visa to enter France, then you still need to get it from the country in which you are living. However, they aren’t allowed to charge you for it and they can’t refuse it either. Once you reach France, you should go along to the mayor’s office (mairie) in your commun and apply for a Carte de Séjour Européenne. You’ll need to bring along your passport, that of your European spouse Read more:Buying
, spouses
Is Sarkozy American? 2007-03-05 00:26:20
Ordinarily the ill-will between America and France simply passes us by but with venturing out into blog-land a more than usual of late I’m that little bit more conscious of it from seeing the likes of the ever present anti-American
sentiments of SuperFrenchie (ironically living in America).
That makes it more unusual to read of the thoughts of Nicolas Sarkozy
who is very much pro-America and, in many ways, against seemingly core beliefs of his native France.
He is openly critical of the anti-work ethic of the French and the related anti-capitalism too. For him, the holding back of the entrepreneurs through excessive regulation and taxes has merely served to enpoverish everyone.
On the whole he would seem to be the ideal selection for France but his ideas run so much contrary to the cozy status-quo that I just can’t see him getting elected when there’s the opportunity to elect Royal and get even deeper into that spiralling cycle of increased regulation, benefits and t
A more cosmopolitan Belfast 2007-03-04 13:21:10 Belfast has always had a slightly rural feel about it. The countryside isn’t far from anywhere in the town and you can almost always see the green fields that surround the city. In other ways too it has never been terribly cosmopolitan
with nightlife being relatively quiet for many years.
All that is changing though. For a number of years the nightlife has been getting considerably more lively and the city centre remains busy in the evenings these days with the increasing number of nightclubs and the like opening around the city not to mention the massive increase in city centre apartments that have been constructed over the last ten years or so.
A striking example that I found in my recent trip was the appearance of Anna Lo’s face on an election poster. You’d never have seen her before not because there was discrimination against non-whites here but rather because there weren’t any non-whites. Yet another welcome indication of the settling in of peace.
Are we anti-French? 2007-03-06 10:16:50 The French
author of the, largely, anti-American blog SuperFrenchie called us anti-France in a recent post.
As usual, he takes an aggressive tone but let’s look at what we’ve said here in the past.
We criticised the local education system for choosing not to educate children who don’t speak fluent French at age16 and not providing any means for those children to learn French. Are we right to be critical? Yes. Are we just wanting France to be like the UK? No, because most European countries provide these facilities for immigrants ie we think France should be more European.
We said that the French need to start using toilets. They are the only country I know where you can’t drive for a day without seeing someone peeing beside the road. It gives France a bad image and that’s why we’re critical of this practice.
We’ve been critical of French labour laws because they limit employment for the French. These days service type companies can work nearly
Buying a house in France: part 10: visas & immigration: non-Europeans 2007-03-08 13:26:41 This section very briefly covers the variety of circumstances that may apply and how you might go about moving to France
if they apply to you. There are just too many combinations and special circumstances to adequately cover all of the possibilities so hopefully this will give you a feel for how you might ease your transition to France.
If you are a visa national (ie a citizen of a country requiring a visa to enter France), then your first hurdle is the French embassy in your country of residence. There are many visa categories but the simplest lie in the areas of family reunification or if you already have a job offer in France.
I imagine that for most people the “job offer” option is most likely to apply. Obviously if you already have a job lined up there’s no problem but if you’d like to organise one, see our section on employment coming soon.
Finally, don’t forget that if you have parents or grandparents who are Irish or were born in Ireland pre-1922 Read more:Buying
, Europeans
Chirac: the end of an era 2007-03-11 21:03:45 Chirac has presided over a range of fairly high profile controversies since beginning with his authorisation of the nuclear tests in the Pacific just after his election in 1995. Just two years later he tried to manipulate the electoral process by dissolving the parliament and forcing an election at an opportune time for his own party though, such was the opposition to this action, he ended up weakening his powerbase.
Unexpectedly facing Le Pen in the second round of elections in 2002, he naturally had a landslide victory. The defeat of the European constitution in 2005 was quite a blow both to him and other nations in Europe. As with the nuclear tests in 1995, he typically followed solely the interests of France in opposing the war with Iraq. Also seemingly typical of French politicians, he withdrew the proposed First Employment Contract (Contrat Première Embauche or CPE) in the face of widespread student protests against this move to make it easier to both hire and fire young people. Read more:Chirac
The T list 2007-03-14 09:25:26 The T list contains your favourite travel and tourism blogs. It’s a way of using links to boost smaller blogs and getting more readers. Let me know if you enjoyed any of the blogs listed below.
Instructions
- Write a post.
- Copy/paste the link list from the post you’ve discovered the T-List into it.
- Make sure the links are active and correct.
- If your blog is on the list, remove it’s not a self-promotion post. As Tim Fehlman (Z-List) said : “Don’t worry, because if your name is on mine, it’s on others and will spread.”
- Add your favorite tourism and travel blogs on it.
- Add the url of the blog where you’ve discovered the T-List as well.
- Publish the post.
- People will notice the T-List and continue it.
Here is the list
France This Way
Hotel Blogs
Les Explorers
Chrispitality Media Blog
A Luxury Travel Blog
Travel Rants
Travolution Blog
BootBlog
Erin Julian
My Travel Backpack
Happy Hotelier
Radaron
The Travel PR Blog
Europe A La Carte
Buying a house in France: part 11: housing: what’s available 2007-03-13 21:46:46 France is massive and so is the variety of houses that you can get with everything from small apartments to large castles on the market and locations varying from the city centre of Paris to rural areas with just the odd passing cow for traffic.The first things that you need to decide for yourself when looking for a place in France are what type of property you want and what kind of area you would like that property to be in. These two aspects are closely inter-related in that you won’t be able to buy a chateau in the centre of Paris nor buy a chic apartment in rural Roussillon.The days of run-down barns available
for a few thousand pounds are long since gone and prices these days start at around 50,000€ which will buy you anything from a reasonable townhouse in the country to an apartment on the outskirts of a town. What that price won’t buy you is a chic apartment in the centre of Paris nor will it buy you a massive farmhouse ready to move into.
On the other hand, there Read more:Buying
, France
Foreign Perspectives: As seen on TV 2007-03-15 18:08:18 Recently, France24 asked me (along with, no doubt, thousands of others) to contribute to a blog portraying the upcoming French presidential election as seen from the eyes of commentators overseas and I contributed my piece on Royal which they subsequently published. My article on Chirac even managed to hold its place as lead story on the site throughout March 12th and was picked up on their broadcasts too thus giving me my 2 seconds of fame.
What most impresses me about all this is that, seemingly for the first time, France is asking the rest of the world what they think of the events in France.
Obviously the presidential election is very much an internal matter for France. However, who the French president is matters outside France: how France reacts on the international stage will be very different depending on whether it’s Sarkozy, Royal or Bayrou as president. So it’s important that this election receives the exposure that it deserves worldwide and not just in France.
Read more:Foreign
Happy St Patrick’s Day! 2007-03-16 20:14:30 St Patrick
’s Day is an odd sort of day in Northern Ireland.
For one thing, although St Patrick is celebrated as an Irish saint, he was actually British. Naturally, he was Catholic as there wasn’t anything else in terms of Christian religions in his time.
In years gone by, the combination of those two facts produced a peculiar result in Northern Ireland. Although considered the patron saint of the whole island of Ireland ie of both the Republic of Ireland and of Northern Ireland, in NI at one time he was “taken over” by those that would consider themselves Irish (effectively the Catholic population) and thus the celebrations of his day were largely in “Irish” parts of NI. I get the impression that things are changing and the celebrations are less exclusively Irish these days but I suspect it’ll be several years before St Patrick’s day becomes a completely non-nationalistic event in Northern Ireland.
Perhaps the most appropriate place to ce Read more:Happy
Buying a house in France: part 12: housing: where to look for a house 2007-03-19 08:49:57 The housing sales market has been very slow in France
during 2006 which we’ve noticed through the large drop in house buyers staying with us during the year.However, it does seem to be picking up fast as we’ve had quite a flurry of house hunters staying with us recently and bookings into the new year for house buyers are well up on what they were over the same period last year. That in turn appears to be taking the prices being asked for up too so if you’re planning on buying somewhere over here it might be as well to get moving on that idea sooner rather than later.One of the best ways to get a feel for the market here is via the major property exhibitions in London. The best one is Vive la France which is a combined French property and culture exhibition held each January. If you miss that one, the next best is the French Property Exhibition in early September which is basically Vive la France without the cultural section. There are regional versions of both of thes Read more:Buying
Would you bet on this horse-race? 2007-03-18 09:55:21 The French presidential election is a two stage process which creates almost a horse race approach to the presentation of statistics from the various polls.
Whilst Sarkozy is clearly the front runner and, to a UK audience, “obviously” he will win, that’s not quite so obvious as it might appear. If, as seems likely, the first stage vote doesn’t give Sarkozy over 50% of the vote then the top two polling candidates will proceed to the second stage of the voting.
As we write this, it seems certain that Sarkozy will get through to the second stage and let’s take that as read for the moment to simplify the rest of this discussion.
The second person who gets through is far from a sure thing at this point as the polls are indicating that Royal is sitting on 23% and Bayrou on 21%. Considering how polls work, it’s quite possible that the real position is, say, Royal on 21% and Bayrou on 23%. Yes, the polls indicate a margin of error which would exclude that bu
Will Bayrou shift the French political spectrum? 2007-03-25 15:41:47 Although Bayrou
appears to be in third place, the peculiarities of the two stage electoral process in France mean that he’s the candidate with the greatest potential majority in the second stage, assuming that he gets through the first stage of course. It seems that the candidates in France have had a similar analysis of the voting possibilities to our own and are adjusting their approaches accordingly.
As reported in the Financial Times, this has already had a considerable impact on socialist thinking with an unsigned manifesto in Le Point calling for quite a radical rethinking of socialist policies. In effect, this would represent the realignment of socialism in France that happened with socialism elsewhere in Europe some years ago. Will that realignment happen this time around? I suspect not as there seems very little time before the election now and I can’t really see such a change being one that the electorate would believe.
To an outsider Sarkozy doesn’t seem t Read more:French
, political
Is Belfast anti-European? Exchanging a European driving license in Northern Ireland 2007-03-27 14:28:29 Seeing as SuperFrenchie thinks I’m “just” anti-French, I thought I’d redress the balance a little and point out one area where the UK is anti-European
too.I was in getting my driving license renewed last week which is something of a hit and miss affair as the explanatory leaflet leaves a LOT to be desired in clarity. Even though the thing was in English and, one would assume therefore that I’d understand it, the opening paragraph on what proof of ID was required was totally incomprehensible and appeared to be totally wrong too.
It opens by saying that if you have a colour photograph on your existing driving license then you don’t need to have someone certify your photograph nor to present a passport. Except, that when my father presented his renewal application complete with his old driving license with colour photo, they wouldn’t renew it without his passport.
It then goes on to say that you always need to have your photo certified yet they ha Read more:Northern
, Ireland
Buying a house in France: part 13: housing: the buying process 2007-03-29 10:18:34 In many ways, the house buying process in France
is quite similar to that in the UK but there are important differences.
Once you’ve found a place, the first stage is to sign a Promis d’Achat (promise to buy). If the seller accepts this, then you have your house as they aren’t allowed to even show it to anyone else (ie no gazumping), subject to you following through with the later stages of the purchase, of course. Signing this commits you to buy the place at the agreed price but only commits the seller to sell to you if they accept this contract.
Since it commits you to buying, you MUST add a “subject to mortgage” clause if you plan on getting a mortgage for the purchase. The mortgage clause needs to include the bank that will be giving you the mortgage, the rate and the term of the mortgage so if you are hoping to get a French mortgage you’ll need to see the bank first. If you haven’t done so already, you should open a French bank account at
Buying a house in france: part 14: housing: your house in the UK 2007-04-01 13:52:40 We’re looked at French housing, but what about your house in the UK?
Even if you are absolutely certain that you are going to spend the rest of your life in France, it’s best to retain your house in the UK if you can so that you have a fall-back position in case things don’t work out in France or you change your mind about living here. Not everyone is able to maintain houses in two countries of course and it will probably make finances a little tighter in France than they would otherwise be. However, once you sell your house in the UK you can find it very difficult to get back into the housing market. In our own case, our UK house went up over 40% in less than three years and effectively beyond our reach had we sold it when we moved.
If you are lucky enough to be able to keep it, you should try to rent it out. Not only will this keep the house occupied but it will help pay the mortgage etc. without needing to rely on income from France to pay for the various bills tha Read more:Buying
Recommend Site To A Friend
