Ok. I think we're far enough down the line now to make this public. I hope. Buying a house in France has been the single most difficult thing we've ever done. But it was definitely definitely absolutely worth it. As of November, this will be ours:
If you're in the Chablais Alps around mid-November, you're invited to the house-warming.
The French are so polite. Here's how a letter from HSBC in France finishes off: Nous vous prions de croire, cher Client, a l'assurance de notre consideration distinguee. As far as i can figure out, this means: We beg you to believe, dear Client, in the assurance of our distinguished esteem.
And you know what. Being polite really isn't so bad.
I have just experienced the worst customer service imaginable. Last year I set up my own domain with SiteGround and thought it was weird that they sent me my password to my account in clear text via email. Anyway, since this password was not used for anything else, I didn't really think much of it.
Very silly of me because two weeks ago someone in South Africa managed to hack my site and send out phishing emails to hundreds of people in South Africa claiming to be Standard Bank. I was notified after about two hours by Standard Bank and immediately shut the site down - or at least I tried to. Then it seems the hackers managed to get the site reactivated by pretending to be me and sending spoofed emails (obviously not from my account) to SiteGround, so opened the site again and allowed the attackers to resume their scam.
After being notified again and sending more CAPS-locked text to SiteGround the site is now permanently dead. However, i neglected to realise that when i set up the email for my domain, that i linked the email address for my new domain to my GMail account and so today i was notified that these scumbag hackers managed to get into my GMail account too.
Now i've changed my passwords so many times, had all my cards cancelled, and spent the last day or so trying to reboot my identity. The worst part is that when i gave Vodacom the IP addresses (the attacks came from the Vodacom ISP) they just didn't care. They told me i would have to complain to SiteGround. SiteGround are the biggest bunch of utter morons to have ever walked the earth and choose to do absolutely nothing to try and trace the originating IP address and customer. They STILL don't think it's a problem to send passwords in the clear. It took be nearly a month to convince them to refund my subscription money.
Anyway, it's deeply disturbing to think that criminals have hacked your email and brings into sharp relief just how much data about YOU is online. In the past two years I've had to fend off attempted hacks against my PayPal account (now closed), by Ebay account (now closed), my GoDaddy account (now closed), and now SiteGround (now closed). I'm now in the process of downloading all my email and removing anything stored on internet servers. This is a huge pain but until ISPs and retailers start to take security seriously, i just cannot trust doing anything on the internet.
Some conclusions: choose your hosts carefully; only shop at reputable retailers; only ever shop with your credit card; don't buy anything expensive; change your online email passwords every 2 months; and don't store any personal information (Address, DOB, Full Name, etc) whatsoever online. Basically, go over to the wall and pull the telephone cable out of your broadband router and go back to that huge dusty Yellow-Pages they keep insisting on delivering.
Chers Lecteurs, j'ai pense c'etait le temps que j'ecrive un blog-post en Francais. Je vous demande pardon si ma grammaire ou mon vocabulaire n'est pas bon ou agreeable a lire. C'est tres difficile emmenager a un nouveau pays ou on peu pas parler le langue du pays. J'ai pris un cours de francais, je parle le francais quand j'ai l'opportunite, et je lis les livres francais tout les jours. C'est encore plus difficile quand on habite une endroit ou le plupart de gens sont anglaise. En ce cas, je peu parler francais seulement avec les proprietaires du restaurants ou les cassiers du magasin ou on n'a pas besoin d'un grand vocabulaire.
C'est assez pour mon premier tente. Si vous etes francais ou parle bien le francais, je vous prie de laisser un comment (remarque? annotation?) avec votre critique si vous voulez.
Si cet blog s'agit faire du ski, c'est impossible a faire un poste sans au moins une photo de ski. C'est ici!
A prochainement.
This weekend Natalie and i, suffering from withdrawal having not skied since May, took ourselves off to Tignes to ski, according to them, the World Capital of Summer Skiing. Since there were only about 10 runs open and i don't actually know of that many other places where you can ski in the Summer i think this similar to the US having a World Series of Baseball.
That aside, i can happily report that it was totally awesome. All those nay-sayers claiming it wasn't worth it were completely wrong. It was absolutely brilliant being at 3500m with an air temperature of about 10 degrees in the brilliant hot sunshine on snow with hardly anyone else around. And the snow really wasn't that bad - I've had slushier, slower snow in the Porte du Soleil in April than we had in August in Tignes.
It took us 3 hours to get there from our front door via the Mont Blanc tunnel and La Thuile and San Bernard in Italy. The way back was via the Col du Cormet which was spectacular but extremely busy with traffic and of course packed with narrow "tornantes" (as hairpin bends are called in Italy) so the return trip took four hours.
You drive right up to the lake at Tignes and then buy your lift pass (35 Euros for the day) and then take the funicular inside the Grand Motte to 3032m where a cable car takes you the rest of the way to 3500m. It was a bit annoying to have to wait around for the funicular which only runs every 30 minutes considering it runs almost all the time in the winter. Anyway, once we got there all that was forgotten as we completed our first downhill pisted run since May. The snow was crispy, quite fast, perfectly pisted and excellent for carving. You can't ski off piste because your on a glacier and you might ski into a crevasse and die. This is a good reason not to bother with it. Other good reasons include really awful off piste snow. And "no", i didn't try it, i could see it was awful.
So it was a day of practicing carving and tight turns. The brilliant thing about Tignes Summer Skiing is that it is all above 3000m so it's always snowy. We considering skiing at Glacier 3000 (in Gstaad near Saas Fee) but i think it it closed. There was no snow at all below 3000m in Tignes so i can understand why Glacier 3000 might be closed.
Anyway so it was totally awesome and i would go again in a flash. I love living in France!
