Foreign Perspectives

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The blog has achieved an unexpected level of popularity this year starting with it being featured all day on France24 the day following Chirac’s resignation speech and latterly being taken up by Reuters.

Thanks to our discovery of sponsored posts, we’ve branched out with a few new blogs during the year. Wendy’s now writing both Cultured Views and Mum’s Finance whilst I’ve added An Age of Magic and On a Postcard. Oh, and we have three family history blogs in the stable now for the Douglas, Hamilton and Stewart sides of our families which Wendy is actively researching these days.

On other fronts, the steady expansion of the listings sites continues apace with Inns4U being the latest addition to the stable and the first which includes both B&B and self-catering properties. In a related development we’ve been working on Whole Earth Guide which is our first travel guide site and which’ll be used by the listings site as their main guide to the various regions.

Somehow in all this I managed to pass the final exams for the Spanish segment of my modern languages degree and find myself with only one course to complete the degree.

Meanwhile James has managed to go through about a year and a half at a French school without uttering a single phase in French. That’ll complicate our lives somewhat this coming September as the new school won’t take non-French speakers.

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Christmas shopping is a bit of a nightmare at the best of times but try doing it in a foreign country and it’s that much harder.

For one thing, you need to consider how you’re gonna get all the stuff back home again. Ordinary holidays are bad enough and we had to buy a new case once to get it all back again so Christmas is just that much worse with both extra weight and volume if you’re shopping whilst you’re actually on holiday.

This time around we’d the added complication of needing to get a refund on our credit cards which is generally much more of a hassle when you’re abroad even aside from the double change of currency and the extra delay in getting the refund back to your account.

Fortunately, perhaps, getting secured loans is one option that you can safely forget about if you’re doing your Christmas shopping abroad, at least if you’ve not planned ahead for it.

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Although you can find that it’s arond the 700‚€ a week mark to rent a villa regardless of the season, many Spanish owners offer dramatic reductions in the price for long term rentals over the winter months.

For example, if you take a month long break in southern Spain, you can get quite a substantial villa for around the 600‚€ per month mark. Now, granted that doesn’t include food but it does include heating (which you’ll not need) and for a villa you’re effectively living there rather than in your own home ie you’ll be preparing most of your own meals rather than eating out so the price will be little different for meals in Spain than they would be if you were staying in your own house.

That lack of heating bills can make for quite a substantial saving taking the net cost down from 150‚€ per week to under 100‚€. This means that many pensioners are able to take up the winter in Spain option every year and with the increasing rise in “home working” it’s becoming a viable option for many more of us.

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