Foreign Perspectives

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Unless you’re very quick, you’ll be able to see the brand new PPP Direct logo on the sidebar of the blog today.

What is it? Well, it’s a way for people to pick a specific blog and get the author to write a post for them. In fact, I wrote the very first of those on Tuesday but I didn’t know it then. What happened was that someone picked out the post which I’d written on Rennes le Chateau and the Da Vinci Code and asked me to put a link to their site on it. This worked perfectly for them in that they’d a large post completely relevant to their product and perfectly for me in that all I needed to do was to add a clickable link into an existing post.

In the past, the way things worked was that bloggers generally picked out offers on the PPP site which were broadly relevant to their own content, wrote a post for that and picked up the payment. The snag is that there aren’t always offers specifically relevant to niche blogs and, even when there are, it’s easy to miss them unless you check the site every day. For instance, you’d have seen something about the Co-Op here today which fitted very neatly into our finance series but all the slots were gone by the time I saw it.

PPP Direct works from the other end by letting advertisers choose a blog or even a post that’s relevant to their product and make them an offer.

The other big plus point is that the commission payments are a whole lot lower this way around.

Why don’t I just use the Wordpress Bankroll plugin? Well, it’s been there for a week or so but the advertiser that sponsored the post this week didn’t use it because they already have an account with another PPP outfit and they don’t need to trust me to actually write something before they pay up so they used PPP instead. So, no, PPP Direct isn’t a completely new facility but it does make it that bit easier to get paid to blog and, I think, it’ll produce sponsored posts genuinely within the normal stream of posts which is good for the advertisers, good for the readers and good for the blogs themselves.

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This is how the Canigou mountain is supposed to look from around late October through to around April ie lots of snow all over it.

I’d planned to take a photo of it with the flowering fruit trees in the foreground and snow covered mountain in the background for over a year now. Quite hard to do actually as there are usually only a few weeks in which you can take it each year and, of course, you can’t really depend on the weather being perfect for your photos.

In fact, it wasn’t possible to take this year simply because it hasn’t been snow covered since March last year. Ever since then, it’s been pretty much constantly t-shirt weather where we are and the montain has only been mainly snow covered for stretches of a few days at a time over the whole of that period.

Funnily enough, whilst it’s been t-shirt weather all that time, now that we’re heading into Summer, we’re getting the winds that we normally associate with February (when we didn’t get them) along with the rain and generally dull conditions that are more a Winter-time thing here.

Is the freakish weather an aspect of global warming? It’s much too early to say that of course but one thing that people forget is that a “global warming” doesn’t necessarily mean that everywhere gets warmer and in fact many places would experience unusual weather conditions due to the changing weather patterns that a global warming would bring.

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The Da Vinci Code books and films has placed a number of sights in the Pyrenees firmly on the tourist circuit.

Of these, by far the easiest to get to is the village of Rennes le Chateau which is about 15 minutes drive from Quillan on the Carcassonne road.

Not so long ago, there was one relatively small car park which would have held at most 20 cars yet when we went recently we found a stream of car park signs starting about a mile before the village. However, the main rush of tourists following the release of the film has now died down so even on a public holiday there weren’t the crowds that these car parks anticipate.

The principal Da Vinci sights are the church and the museum, both open every day but note that the church is only open three hours in the afternoons (free admission). In the church, the statue of the devil is just inside the door on your left. Although the “no flash photography” signs are largely ignored, you’ll find that your photographs turn out much better without it, just be sure to remember to bring along a small tripod to steady your camera. Around the church is the graveyard but the grave of the priest Sauniere isn’t among those and you’ll find his grave within the grounds of the museum.

The museum (admission charge around EUR 5) is right beside the church and is housed in Sauniere’s former house and its grounds. Due to the terrain, these are often buffeted by winds so it’s best to visit on a calm day if you can arrange to do that.

Inside the house the rooms are arranged as a series of themes broadly based on those made famous by the Da Vinci Code book. Two of the rooms are setup as they were in his day and the small chapel is still there, of course. The view from the small castle ramparts is quite spectactular but easily missed as you enter via a conservatory which seems like the end of the tour. Amongst the exhibits are Sauniere’s original headstone (now replaced by a much more modern one) and the pillar in which he found the scrolls.

Stained glass was obviously pretty popular in the village and you’ll find examples of it in the house itself and several others around the town.

There’s a small but well stocked gift shop on the way to the church but don’t miss the larger shop just a few hundred yards further along on the road heading out of the village. The museum has a smaller selection than either of these.

This is part of our Pyrenees Guide.

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