Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

I’ve been accused of using Wendy’s photo a couple of posts ago but, honestly, that’s not Wendy. Well, not unless she’s been doing some modelling work that she’s not been telling me about!

Besides, she’s been way too busy to do such things for quite some time now. As have we all, of course. Not in the Winter months mind you, hence the large number of posts that have been appearing here since the Summer. We’re finding that the paid posting “business” is a really good complement to the hotel as the cycles of each are almost exactly the reverse of the other.

So, whilst we’re not doing a whole lot in the hotel at the moment, we’re sure making up with it on the blog and general website aspects of things!

Normally it gets seriously cold here in February and even then it’s not every day but recently it’s been absolutely freezing for days at a stretch.

It’s actually so cold at the moment that snow has been spotted about 30 minutes along the road to our west which is much earlier than it would normally be there. OK, not a whole lot of snow but even so.

But it’s the wind that’s really getting to us. For several days now it’s been blowing something of a gale. If you were to throw some snow into that equation, we’d be in big trouble I suspect. As it is, it’s darned cold here in the office where I normally type this stuff (no heating as it shouldn’t really be required in here).

I think we’re in for a darned cold Winter!

The vast majority of the online catalogue shopping sites just plonk on one photo of each item of clothing. Even the better ones will only put a couple of photos of each item online.

Tobi is different. In addition to having several views of each item they go a lot further and include a whole series of combinations under The Brand Book which goes a long way to providing you with a consistent look and that’s before you even consider the editorial section which contains a whole mine of information. The blog will keep you up to date with the latest fashion trends too.

Naturally backing all this up is a massive catalogue of all the best clothing. Take for example the Nudie range. There you’ll find all the styles of Nudie jeans. If Nudie isn’t your thing, what about Seven for all Mankind?

Not enough for you? How about an online stylist to help you choose the clothes? That’s on offer too. In fact, I suspect there’s a whole lot more on offer that I’ve not discovered yet because this is a site designed to give you a very complete and enjoyable shopping experience along with providing an excellent range of clothing.

One noticeable difference in the bookings this year is that we’ve had a lot more Americans staying with us.

Americans, in general, only get two weeks vacation time each year which obviously has quite an impact on the type of holiday that they take. For one thing, it’s rare for a working American to take a holiday longer than two weeks and therefore they are, for the most part, channelled into taking package holidays as that’s the only way you can really pack a lot of sightseeing into a short period. Moreover that short period means that they tend to concentrate on the highlights of a country or group of countries (“doing” Europe is quite common) so typically they will consider that they’ve “done” France if they’ve been to Paris.

Therefore, normally, the long-stay Americans are either students on a back-packing type holiday to Europe or retired people. However, it’s been noticeably different this year and we’ve had both more Americans and more varied categories of Americans staying with us. The couple who have just left us today were normal working Americans for instance and moreover they are planning to return as they were both quite taken with the region (and us!).

After spending all that time looking around, we think it’s going to be a whole lot simpler and cheaper to go somewhere by car.

So, we’re restarting our search for a holiday destination yet again.

We don’t want to drive for days on end from here which limits us to a range of around six hours driving time or thereabouts. Thanks to the previous searching, we’ve ruled out the original northern locations and are instead looking south which simplifies the search process considerably.

All being well, we’re hoping to actually book somewhere today although we were also hoping to book somewhere last week too so you never know.