Foreign Perspectives

Archive for July, 2009

One of the big surprises in many ways is just how fast formerly eastern block countries are moving into the first world.

For example, not so many years ago the thought of a  luxury golf property in Bulgaria would have been laughed at. No longer though for the likes of Tharacian Cliffs, starting from scratch, seems likely to become one of the top golf courses in the world according to Gary Player.

The reason is simple of course: they’re able to start from a blank sheet and have lots of cheap land and labour to construct the courses. For the rest of us there are increasing numbers of cheap flights available to get us to the area.

Overall, a win-win situation for everyone apparently.

The take from our recent break-in must have been quite a disappointment to the burglars and particularly those that bought from them.

Notionally the most valuable item on the list was a 28″ TV. A good result normally I suppose except that it was a British TV and won’t receive any French TV channels so it’s pretty useless to them.

Next up was a 1999 portable. British keyboard so not too useful but in 1999 it came with 4GB disk and there are a lot of web pages that it can’t open these days.

Then there was the British toolbox which is filled with imperial size spanners which aren’t too useful here in France.

Overall they seemed to have amassed a whole collection of stuff that’s little or no use to anyone in France. For instance, in addition to the above they managed to take a portable DVD player but without the charger that it needs.

So we’ve lost a bunch of things that were of some use to us and they’ve gained effectively a bunch of useless junk

The Egg Money card used to be one of the handiest cards that I had, despite the dopey hamster adverts.

You could use it as a savings account as it paid 4% (up until a few months ago) when you’d overpaid and indeed they encouraged you to do this. The original plan behind the card was that you’d use it essentially as a current account and therefore the credit limit was really an overdraft limit. Not only that but they paid 1% cash back on everything that you bought and even more if you bought from a small range of shops. Finally, because it was intended as a current account replacement, you could withdraw cash at no charge.

However, this year Citibank killed all that stone dead.

The 1% rebate remains, but now there’s no interest paid if you’re in credit, the limits remain pitifully small and it’s now 3% to lift cash. So it’s become an also-ran credit card. Sad to see such an innovative product killed but it’s worse that that as the security methods of Citibank are used too. Thus if you try to spend more than £200 or so in a single transaction the shop needs to call up for an authorisation number and if you use it more than twice in a single shop in a day then it’s blocked.

Unfortunately, it looks like I’m going to have to abandon this card as I had to with a previous Citibank card basically because of Tesco… today’s petrol, then the thank you card for James’ teacher, then the groceries mean it’s blocked, again.