Foreign Perspectives

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Planning for Belfast’s City Hall began, naturally enough, in 1888 when it was awarded the status of city by Queen Victoria (hence the relatively large number of things in the city named after her, of course) with building competed in 1906.

The city centre location makes the grounds a very popular area for lunch in the Summer months and they’re used as the venue for the Christmas markets and various concerts.

Although there are regular free tours of the building during the week, these aren’t terribly well promoted at the moment so many people miss the impressive Victorian architecture, stained glass windows and paintings which are certainly worth the 40 minutes or so that they take.

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One of the stranger aspects of us living here is the different way that James & John refer to things.

As we’re in France, they aren’t picking up english from kids at school as they’d normally do but rather picking it up from home and the TV. This means that it’s possible for us to pick out where they’ve learnt a word. So, by and large, they “speak cooking” with an Australian accent and they “speak computer” with a Belfast accent.

It’s also interesting that whilst both James & John refer to “Granda” and “Nanny here”, James who used to be looked after by my parents has “Granda’s Nanny”, John who was born here has “Nanny at the airport” as that’s usually the last place that he sees her.

We think that it was because Wendy was looking after James a lot more when he was younger than I was that he has developed a largely Australian accent but with us both being around much more equally since John was born he has a much more pronounced Belfast accent. You’d have thought that since James has been here over 60% of his life now that his accent would have become more balanced but it hasn’t done, or at least not yet so I guess that it’s the first couple of years that are the most important in terms of accent

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One of the first shocks that you get when you start your own business is the extra cost of business accounts. Whilst the list of charges for personal accounts is usually fairly short, there seem to be untold numbers of things that banks feel the need to charge you for as a business. 

Now, you would sort-of expect that they would charge you if you’re depositing large amounts of cash in that there’s obviously work involved in handling it. You probably also know that they charge a percentage of your credit card sales too and that there’d be a charge for the credit card terminal too. But setting up the terminal? Providing the software for it? Surely not? 

Well, if you plan on taking everything from your own bank, yes, you probably will be charged for setting up the terminal and you probably will be charged for the software required to run the thing too (anything up to $500). Not only that, but try accepting card payments online and you’re potentially talking another $500 for the software that you’ll need to accept those payments too. 

That’s just for the standard Mastercard and Visa acceptances too. Add American Express or anything else and you add to your costs yet again. Even commonly used things such as the ability to process customer not present transactions is generally seen as another opportunity to charge you. 

What the bank won’t be too upfront about telling you is that you can get a merchant account from a separate organization. There are increasing numbers of these outfits around and the market competition is driving prices down with the likes of First Data providing free setup, free point of sale software and 24/7 service (something that, quite surprisingly, isn’t always provided by the banks) and things that you might expect to be standard but usually are billable such as reprogramming of the terminal.

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