weliveinhope
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Posts posted by weliveinhope
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Thanks Richard - we'll be staying in a mobile home in a campsite. We stayed there last year and had no problems but the piece she saw is making my wife nervous.
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My wife was telling me about a report she saw about a spate of attacks and robberies on mobile homes and parked camper vans in the coastal region of South Eastern France.
The attackers - gangs of Albanian kids apparently - spray ether in through the vents of the mobile home/camper van knocking out the occupants before proceeding to break in an empty the place while the occupants sleep on, unaware of what's going on in the same room.
She saw the report on Richard and Judy the other day and it's totally freaked her out in advance of our planned trip to the area in a month's time.
I've been scouring the various online news media and the websites of the Foreign Office, etc looking for articles or warnings and can find nothing.
Does anyone in Languedoc-Rousillon know anything more about it or is it a mountain emerging from a molehill in sensationalist TV style?
Thanks in advance.
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Fair enough and wasn't meaning to suggest you weren't au fait with the situation, I was making a general point about the inclusion of a 'we accept no responsibility for, etc.' in terms and conditions or on signs around the place which some may feel insulates them from compensation claims across the board. The point being that they don't.
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[quote user="Blanche Neige"]
Our Ts and Cs say that we are in no way responsible for accidents that they may have when using our house / property. (can't remember the exact wording)
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Not sure what the legalities are in France but if negligence can be proven by the claimant this type of clause has little effectiveness against being successfully sued. So if your bikes were a bit rickety or ill-maintained (which I'm sure they're not[:D]) and a guest had an accident then they could probably win a compensation claim.
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Jeez the suspense is killing me![:D]
Mind you, even moving house withing your own locality or country is fraught with unexpected developments so presumably ali@ards is fighting her way through the settling in process before arriving back online!
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[quote user="Tony F Dordogne"]
Viv, what significance is him being a team mate of Armstrong?
Are you suggesting that Armstrong was also on drugs?
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Viv wouldn't be the first.
Would you be so surprised if he had been?
David Walsh spent a few years investigating Lance Armstrong and came up with some fairly convincing arguments to suggest that he was doping.
The general belief seems to be that they're all at it, they couldn't endure the physical hammering if the weren't, but some are better at it than others.
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[quote user="KathyC"]
If you're skint you buy bread, cheese and water and have a picnic! [/quote]
True.
In fact on another occasion we survived a couple of days in Galway on a packet of custard creams and a pint of milk.[:D]
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[quote user="KathyC"]
I also think that you would be given pretty short shrift if you were to ask for tap water (and no other drink) in most UK restaurants or pubs. If everyone were to do that, many businesses would not be viable.
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I think if you went into a pub and asked for a glass of water you would be given short shrift but I think that's a different issue. In general drink is the stock in trade of a pub.
If you go into a restaurant in the UK and have a full meal I think it's perfectly acceptable to drink water and I'd be amazed if I was was questioned on that choice by a restauranteur.
The behaviour of the couple in Venice is lousy alright but it's difficult to know the circumstances. They may have been skint.
I remember hitchhiking in Ireland once and my friend and I pooled our money and figured out that we could afford a bowl of soup and a cup of tea in the only place still open at the time of night we arrived there. We were kicked out.[:)]
We were broke and starving. Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances.[blink]
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Hmmm. That's all a bit holier than thou.
I've lived and worked for extended periods in several countries around the world since the mid 1980s and I think it's imperative to try and live the life as it's lived there, I hate the image of the Brit communities on the Costas reading the Mail and never having a word of the language after a decade of living there.
However, in none of these countries (at least one of them with an inflation rate in the hundreds of percent and a hell of a lot poorer and a hell of a lot more difficult to do business than France appears to be) was it considered unusual to receive a glass of water in a restaurant.
Again, is it really too much to ask for a glass of water?
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Glad I'm not the only one who thinks a glass of water isn't too much to ask for in a restaurant.
I know they'd prefer you to boost their income by buying the product with the biggest profit margin but if all you want's a glass of water why should you bow under to the pressure of the proprietor (real or imagined) or convention by buying something else.
In the various parts of France I've been to I've never once felt a whiff of displeasure or unwillingness when asking for water.
Incidentally, I like the practice of getting water in chilled wine bottles[:)]
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[quote user="Owens88"]
Why is it cheeky?
Seems reasonable to me that if you're ordering and paying for a meal that you shouldn't feel under any obligation to buy a drink if all you want is some water.
Well, do you want a clean glass and a clean carafe ? Would a tin mug do the job ? Nothing's free anyway.
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What an odd response.
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[quote user="Liz"]I have also noticed that some people have the carafe of water only, no paying.drinks, which does strike me as a bit cheeky. .
Liz
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Why is it cheeky?
Seems reasonable to me that if you're ordering and paying for a meal that you shouldn't feel under any obligation to buy a drink if all you want is some water.
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It's called a 'pineapple cutter'.[Www]
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[quote user="Chris Head"]
Thanks for the link weliveinhope, I read the spec but don't quite understand what they do. I think they suppress background noise whilst enhancing the quality of the music that reaches you??? If so they sound like a great thing to have.
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That's exactly what they do.
I wear them on the train to work and then walking with the sound of thunderous traffic and can very comfortably hear the music which I simply could not with regular headphones.
Apparently they're recommended for use on planes too but I haven't had the opportunity to try them out yet!
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In addition to the mp3 player you might consider buying separate ambient/background noise reducing headphones.
I bought a pair of Phillips ones on ebay for about £20 and while the have a couple of design flaws as noise reduction goes they work really well.
You can pay a lot more for Bose or Sennheiser models but if you're using them during heavy work you mighn't want to be wearing a couple of hundred quids woth of ear buds!
Here's a link to the ones I got - it's an amazon.com link but you'll probably get them in Europe too.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00061IYJC/104-6662433-5098322?v=glance&n=172282
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Well I suppose this occurs because newer members will be trawling the forum looking for information and may happen across something with which they disagree.
It's important to bear in mind that all of the people with hundreds and thousands of posts were once new members too and that every single new member, despite (or maybe because of) how they begin, has the potential to become an integral part of the forum too.
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Guys, I don't post much on here but I'm a founder member and moderator of a very busy football fan forum and it is my experience there that these things are cyclical.
Every so often, maybe every 6 months or so, we get a bout of complaints about other memebers and recriminations about the staff and we lose a few members and gain some more. Things boil up and the settle down again. What's interesting is that the members that leave generally come back and join in again. Like this one ours is a forum populated mainly by quality posters and it's not always easy to find that on other forums once you've gotten used to it somewhere.
The moderators usually come under scrutiny and we respond as graciously and honestly as we can to the comments and criticism and them we move on.
I think it is crucial, in moderating a forum, to treat every member the same and hence we have suspended or banned long term members as well as new members if they've contravened the rules, or more importantly, the spirit of the site.
Anyway, from the point of view of this mainly 'reading' member, this is a great resource, squabbles happen, move on.
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What a strange quibble.
I wonder if your first post(s), or the first posts of most members for that matter, was full of useful information for the other members or was it,as many first posts inevitably are, seeking information?
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You could also consider a .eu domain which have come onstream fairly recently.
Depending on the nature of your site .info is another useful one.
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The stats about the amount of British people returning home from their dream move to France (and elsewhere) are astounding - something like 30,000 people a year come home? Now some of them will have discovered that they didn't like the French food and too much sun after all but presumably a lot of these return home because of failed businesses.
What always astounds me about the No Going Back subjects (when there was a different one each week) was the percentage of them that moved abroad and had made no effort to learn enough of the language of their adopted homes to even 'get by' and then they wonder why they're finding it difficult to fit in. And then there's the total suspension of the cautious practices most sane people would employ if buying property or starting a business at home. No surveyors report, no research on the resale value, or property price trends. No market research for the new business and the almost total reliance on the British market for their customers and the use of the internet to generate the business.
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There was another doozie on last night.
The lady moved to Spain thinking she might get a job there (didn't think about researching it first), bought a first floor apartment with a garage underneath and being, she claimed, a sucessful property developer in England decided to convert the garage into an apartment to rent out.
She didn't check the market for rentals in the area nor did she check the planning regulations.
There was no market for apartments rentals in tha town, the ceilings in the coverted garage were too low (she thought the builders would've checked that out) and, oh yeah, she couldn't find a job.
So she had no job, had spent 25K on an apartment she couldn't let and even if she could let it was illegal and was now looking to sell for a full 48K more than she paid for the original property. It was valued at just 85K, 5K more than she originally paid for it despite her having spent another 25K on it. All because she did no research before going out and assumed thisngs were different, more lax, in Spain when it came to planning.
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Yeah it was interesting to note that the Portuguese have the same expression as is used here 'ignorance of the law is no defence' or words to that effect.
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All you have to do is watch one of the 'No Going Back' type programmes they have on Channel 4 all the time to realise that some people spend a couple of weeks holiday somewhere and then decide to sell up and move lock, stock and barrel to that place without ever having done a modicum of research and then are bewildered at how things have gone so horribly wrong. They don't seem to take any of the precautions they would take 'at home' when spending vast amounts of money.
There was a couple on one last week that had bought a house somewhere in Portugal. Without obtaining planning permission (they were told by the salesman in each case they didn't need it) they installed a pool and built a big log cabin on their plot only to find out that they did need planning permission and, having fallen out of love with the area after about 6 months. that they couldn't sell the house and land without it. 18 months later they found that they could get retrospective permission for the pool but the 25 grand log cabin had to go because they'd build it on a national park. And they were still whining about the Portuguese and not being able to get help - in effect they wanted to be treated as a special case. The presenter pointed out that if they did the same thing in the Lake District/Snowdonia they'd be given the same treatment.
Mobile Home/Camper Van attacks in the South East?
in South East (Languedoc-Roussillon, Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur)
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That was a really useful link Chas, thanks for that.
Seems to be a definite air of disbelief among some seriously hardened 'motorhomers' in there!