Both our daughters would be considered bi-lingual and chatter away or read and write in either French or English with no difficulty – preferring French with each other and English with us old folks who struggle to keep up with their teenage blabberings in French.
Eldest daughter is even doing a literary BAC, which involves reading and reviewing advanced books in either language – Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais is the current French book being studied, for example.
Their English teachers have often had a strange desire to make sure they aren’t top of the class, with even the slightest spelling mistake getting enormous penalties, so ‘I got 12 out of 20 in English because I spelt one word wrong out of 40′ is a reasonably common story. When queried the teachers maintain that they should be marked harder because of their natural advantage.
Way back in the mists of time – well, about four years ago – I was part of a group of holiday rental property owners who created a holiday rentals company and website called Your Holiday Matters.
The goal was simple – to try and ensure a quality holiday experience for those booking a holiday rental property from the site.
This is harder to achieve than you might think, since everyone has different ideas about quality, but the general principle is that the properties listed are owned by ‘owners who care’ – so people staying in them can be confident that the owners really do want them to have a great time and a stress free holiday.
Looking at recent posts on this blog I can see I have been grumbling a bit too much, and not talking about the great reasons for being an expat in France.
So to stop readers thinking I’m a miserable old fool or that France must be a terrible place to live I thought I’d be a bit more upbeat today. It’s not hard to think of great reasons to be cheerful at the moment:
1) the south of France had the longest, best summer I remember (not the hottest ever, but temperatures over about 35 degrees start being a bit too much anyway), which is now being followed by the perfect autumn.
There’s been almost no rain since the end of April. Yesterday was about 22 degrees and sunny, today looks like being the same.
There have been various times in the last couple of years when I’ve complained about customer service in France.
One time it was Europiscine, who fitted a new swimming pool liner for us with an expensive ten year guarantee and then refused to put it right when it immediately developed big wrinkles. Another was Dell, who delivered a computer that just didn’t work from the minute it was taken out of the box – and charged us premium rate phone call charges while the problems were corrected.
So to counterbalance these and to provide evidence that good service is possible in France I thought I’d relate a diferent story. Unfortunately I can’t think of one so I’m going to tell you about my experiences with Trek France instead.
Last year when we closed the (rental) house up for winter I carefully emptied the hot water tank, turned off the electricity, closed the valves on the gas tanks etc so that we were confident that the house could be ignored for a few months. I also left all the taps open so that any water in the pipes would drain away rather than freezing. All very sensible I hope you’ll agree.
What I hadn’t realised is that the main water supply to the house had either not been completely closed or subsequently worked its way open slightly. So for a good deal of that six months there was a continuous slow flow of water running into the bath and out of the drain. Net result, an enormous water bill and a valuable lesson learned.
I’m not an expert on French business structures and setup but I have been through the process of starting and running a SARL for the last 16 months and thought a few comments might be useful to someone.
Bear on mind that you will always need legal advice before choosing a business structure in France, these are just a few of the things I wish I had understood better a couple of years ago – some things I have discovered along the way that might be useful in highlighting some of the issues you need to familiarise yourself, even if not resolving them. Of course your own circumstances and level of income are key to deciding the best structure for your own enterprise.
- A SARL is a limited company, much like a Ltd type company in the UK. It needs to be formed legally, a process that cost us about 2000 euros (not the £50 off-the-shelf’ price you might pay in the UK).
I would like to start today’s blog by mentioning my dreams for world peace, an end to hunger and by suggesting it would be nice to all hold hands and solve problems with global warming. Hopefully these good intentions are sufficient for the Nobel Prize committee to send me a nice medal and, more importantly, one million euros.
Unfortunately I’m not the first to have the idea. Carla Bruni, the multi-talented and very attractive wife of Mr Sarkozy launched her new blog this week – and within minutes it had crashed due to the enormous number of people trying to visit the site. Darn, why does that never happen to me!
Even more annoying the site looks very nice as well, and is largely devoted to charitable cause like tackling illiteracy and SIDA (AIDS), putting the rest of us even more to shame. In my defence I do wonder how much of it she writes herself? How many hours does she spend scratching her head trying to think of interesting things to write about without giving away state secrets or causing embarrassment to important people.
There is an advert running on French televison at the moment that amazes me every time I see it.
One of the leading opticians in France, Afflelou, has a scheme called ‘NextYear’ in which you can order a pair of glasses now and pay for them next year. Not very exciting and nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a fun, feel-good advert that makes you want to join in with the dancing – before rushing off to get a new pair of specs, even if you can see perfectly well without.
In our gites we have the usual challenge when things go wrong – our window of opportunity to put things right only lasts from 10.00 am to 4.00 pm on a Saturday, and only then if the problem is spotted quickly.
Unfortunately people don’t always rush to tell us that the dishwasher is playing up or a table leg is loose, perhaps for fear that we will try and charge them extra for it, or perhaps because they think we already must know and can’t be bothered to put it right. ‘How could they not know that the thermostatic tap sticks at 42 degrees…?
So sometimes it is only later when we learn of the problem. As a result this year I would like to give a special mention to a couple of guests who helped us out, and are especially welcome to come again next year:
In our third (when will it end) look at why you might be behaving illegally or at least be uninsured without knowing it, it’s back to drivers again.
You know already that your car insurance might be invalid if you are driving illegally, and we have already seen that a UK registered car without UK road tax and/or MOT is being driven illegally. So doubtless you have rushed off to start the process of re-registering your car in France.
But what about your driving licence? Still using that UK licence because it seems such a hassle to change it?
One of the big challenges of visiting places and writing about them for possible future visitors is striking a balance - should we be brutally honest if somewhere is, frankly, not all that lovely? What if it was raining when we visited, or we were tired and really it is a very nice place?
Likewise if someone writes an article for us how do we know if they are describing their local town as a visitor would see it, or through rose-tinted spectacles?
Note: this entry is inspired by the ‘weekend of patrimony’ in France (this weekend) when many of the great buildings are opened free to the public.
Our daughter has just started her second year at lycée and one of her subjects is history. Turns out her history teacher is in training to be an architect, so architecture is taking rather more importance that you might expect and a trip to the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao is part of the course.
If you have never seen it, the Bilbao Guggenheim is a very beautiful modern building – but no obvious link with French history springs to mind.
I’m a long way from home travelling around Burgundy at the moment, which presents me with a challenge – whenever I go away, Mrs B and the girls complain that I don’t think of them at all. This is based on the fact I that I never buy them presents from whereever I’ve been.
Earlier in the year I did buy them a nice bit of cheese from a farm in the Auvergne but they forgot that very quickly. There’s gratitude for you. So to make amends, as I was ambling around the village of Chablis, I thought I would buy a posh bottle of the local wine.
OK the girls won’t thank me, but scoring a couple of brownie points with Mrs B can’t do any harm.
Good news for the Greens this week – starting next year France are introducing a Carbon Tax of 17 euros for each tonne of carbon dioxide that gets emitted into the atmosphere.
Well, good news if it has any impact on our behaviour, sorts out the planet, and gives our grandchildren something like a breathable atmosphere and reasonable weather conditions as their inheritance.
If all it does is sweep more money into the state to pay an army of civil servants, which is what I suspect will really happen, then it is less exciting.
Back in April I posted about a problem with house insurance – or rather the startling finding that our (and probably many others) gites were not properly insured. You can read about that at ‘oops I forget to insure my property‘ (as it should have been called).
Now a new and equally startling insurance quirk has been brought to our attention, relating to UK registered cars that are kept and run in France.
People living in France but driving UK registered cars are supposed to get them re-registered in France – but many don’t bother. There are certainly plenty of expats living around here that have been driving UK cars for a long time, presumably to avoid the hassle of re-registration.
Looking at recent posts on this blog I can see I have been grumbling a bit too much, and not talking about the great reasons for being an expat in France.
There have been various times in the last couple of years when I’ve complained about customer service in France.
