Archive for December, 2006
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006
This year, Belfast has put on a Christmas market with a continental theme in front of the City Hall. One of the things that we found a little peculiar about it is that it actually has more French stalls than the Christmas markets in Perpignan. Of course, it also has substantial representations from Germany, Italy and even China. That’s something that you don’t get in France. For the most part, it’s either French or it isn’t there.
That applies to pretty much everything in fact. In a French supermarket, you get French cheese. In a UK supermarket you get UK cheese, Swiss cheese, German cheese and, of course, French cheese. Whereas even the largest French supermarket has only a tiny “ethnic” foods section, a typical UK supermarket doesn’t have an ethnic section at all because the food in the aisles is from everywhere. There are hardly any Australians living in Belfast yet it’s possible to buy Vegemite in Tesco; in France you’d need a really major supermarket to stock it.
Some would say: why shouldn’t it be French food in France? Well, obviously you would expect to have more French food in France than anything else but in every other country in the world you seem to get a reasonable representation of a selection of other cultures. The closed mentality in France makes that the rare exceptions to the “France only” rule very pale in comparison to the equivalent elsewhere.
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Saturday, December 23rd, 2006
As you’ll know if you’ve been following our saga, we were off to Belfast to see my Dad on his 80th birthday.
Of course, as we were there pretty close to Christmas it was a good chance to do some Christmas shopping and even more so as we had, in theory, up to 100kg luggage allowance between us.The usual flight delays meant that it was after midnight on the 11th before we reached the Great Southern Hotel at Dublin airport. Definitely an excellent airport hotel for a late night arrival as they have a 24 hour shuttle service (most of the airport shuttles only operate up to about 9pm or so which is far from clear from their websites).
Next morning it was off to Belfast though with an early lunch in the airport as the bus trip takes getting on for three hours. Had it been France, there’d have been no lunch as, aside from the likes of McDonalds, the restaurants just won’t serve you lunch outside noon to 2pm.
Our late arrival meant that we ended up getting Dad’s birthday presents on the morning of his birthday before having a very nice meal in the Jurys Inn in the city centre that evening.
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Wednesday, December 20th, 2006
After using Windows for so long, you get used to having to load new drivers for every new piece of hardware that you pick up but that’s not the case for other operating systems.
For instance, we were heading off to the UK for a while I thought that it would be an idea to get a little modem for my Sharp SL-5500 Zaurus. Anyway, a quite hunt round e-bay turned up maybe a half-dozen compact-flash modems. Would they work though?
A quick search on google revealed next to nothing about connecting such things to the Zaurus. Anyway, I figured that the HP modem would be pretty standard and at £5 wasn’t a massive outlay either.
So, what do you need to do to install it? Nothing, just plug it in and off it goes. That’s how Linux handles such things. So no need for the CD that came with it to add the Windows drivers.
Of course, as we’re in France, it’s not quite so simple to start surfing. We used to use tiscali as a backup dial-up service but they’ve now ditched that so I’d to sign up with freesurf before I could get surfing with the Zaurus.
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