Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

We’re in the market for several new rugs for our place and have been hunting around the carpet shops now and again.

Don’t you find it such a pain to do that? We know more or less what we want but that business of leafing through rugs in the carpet shops is a real pain after a while. You’d think that they’d have some kind of display rack for the things but they never seem to so after you’ve leafed through the first couple of rugs at the top, you can’t lift any more of them.

So to avoid the hassle and to get a proper look at the things, we’ve started looking around the online sites. They’re generally a bit slow to load with all the photos of course but even the slowest of the sites has to be better than leafing through a pile of rugs in a carpet shop.

The range seems much wider than in the shops too. Not only that, but without the space limitation, they can show you whole ranges of rugs that you’d never get to see and in all kinds of different fabrics so, for example, you get silk rugs, wool rugs in traditional styles and, for something different, contemporary designs. You’d need to be in a really major carpet store to get even a fraction of that kind of range.

It goes without saying that the prices on a like for like basis are lower. However, I suspect that you’d end up paying more as chances are you’ll choose a better quality of rug when you can see what’s available. Not only that, but the rug you’ll get will be one that you actually want rather than whatever is available in the shop so overall you’ll come out well ahead of the game.

We’ve almost given up hope of getting flights to match the apartments/villas that we can find in Majorca.

For one thing, a lot of the self-catering places have specific days for checking in which means that the flight prices on those days are much higher than they are for the rest of the week. The effect of that is that we can’t run with a place that requires us to checkin on a specific day as we can’t afford the flights to get to it.

Then there’s the ongoing hassle of very little in the way of online booking for these places so we’ve to send off a heap of enquiries and wait ’til each place gets back to us which is a real pain.

On the plus side, at least the car hire is pretty cheap so we can add that on. Or can we? Given that it’s a peak holiday season I’m none too sure that we’ll be able to get a car which would, of course, affect the locations that would be viable for us for the villa.

Even before Schengen came into force, most of the borders around Europe had very little in the way of immigration control. Bit slow in getting out the passport? You were just waved on.

Yet, that doesn’t happen to some people apparently. One British/Russian couple are stopped at every border post and told that the wife needs to have a Schengen visa. How come?

Simple really. They offer up their passports at every border post and thereby give the border guards something to do. Everyone else just assumes that they’ve the right to go over the border and just keeps going anyway.

We’ve still not ruled out somewhere in the direction of the Alps for our Christmas break as we quite liked the area the other week.

As usual for us, we were looking for last minute Alps hotels which, for the most part, means looking at RatesToGo. Why? Well, that’s one of the sites that specialises in selling the final couple of rooms in the hotels that they list. Courtesy of the way that expenses work in hotels, it’s in their interest to fill those last couple of rooms and often that means that you get a substantial discount on the RatesToGo site vs the rate that you’d get even when booking directly with the hotel.

One minor hassle with the site is that because these are usually the very last rooms available in the hotels listed, you can’t hang around deliberating about your choice of hotel because chances are it’ll be gone if you do. For example, the rather nice Eurogroup Hotel Le Royal Ours Blanc is already gone. That’s a good example though as the site doesn’t just have the dregs of hotels listed: many luxury hotels use it to sell their final rooms too ie the bargains that you see are quite genuine.

Several hours on and we’re still waiting for the replies from the villas in Majorca that we’re hoping to stay in over Christmas.

That’s the one thing that I really hate about booking self-catering places. At least with a hotel you can just click on their site and it’s booked. With self-catering there always seems so much more administration to go through and, for the most part, for no good reason.

Still, at least we have sort-of settled on a place to go (assuming that the flight prices don’t go against us whilst we’re twiddling our thumbs, of course).