Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

We’re now at the point where we have cut down the various options to two, namely Aarhus in Denmark and Baden-Baden in Germany.

Which will it be?

Baden-Baden is in the Black Forest and is a spa resort town. Other than the spa there’ll be the famous German Christmas markets of course but there doesn’t seem a whole lot else in the town. That doesn’t really matter though as we’re only going for a few days.

Aarhus is the second city in Denmark. It looks like it has a few things to do in the city centre, notably an Olde Denmark area which looks quite interesting plus there’s a theme park in the area too. Downside is that the days will be pretty short up there at that time of year and, of course, it’ll be darned cold.

Both are in the running at the moment but we’ll need to be quick before the flight prices go up much more and we’ve to sort out a hotel too.

I’m toying with the idea of doing a degree in english language & literature so I thought I’d have an initial look at some of the books for the first of the literature courses as I’ve already read all but one of the english language books for the degree.

The first of these is Jane Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea which I just finished the other day.

It was written in the 1940’s and it’s set in the Jamaica of 1830 ie just after slavery was abolished and consists essentially of a few incidents that happen to a family in that era from three different viewpoints.

The first thing that’s perhaps most striking to the modern reader is the sheer number of things that are deemed to require footnotes as explanation. Ordinarily that would say to me that this isn’t a book that can stand on its own and indeed it doesn’t because it takes characters from Jane Eyre and develops them more fully. But it isn’t that which hit me. It was that they felt that things such as “mango” needed an explanation yet today they are commonplace items in supermarkets.

It’s also written in quite an antiquated fashion with effectively three “chapters” to the book which itself is quite short (120 odd pages) compared to modern novels. I’m sure that it’s terribly presumptious of me, but I didn’t think that it was terribly well written.

Still, it wasn’t anything like the hard slog that I thought it might have been and I’m well into the next book, Pygmalion, which, so far, isn’t bad either.

The whole idea behind the common market, or European Union as we call it these days, was that borders between the countries participating would gradually cease to exist and, for the most part, that has been gradually happening over the last 20 or 30 years. How come then there’s almost always a queue at the border crossing between Spain and France then?

I used to think that it was just a case of “jobs for the boys” until I saw a number of cars and caravans being pretty much taken apart by the customs guys. Presumably they’re enforcing some import control then? Perhaps, but then anything that you can legally buy in Spain can be legally taken to France.

Whatever they’re doing it certainly causes major problems in the Summer when the queues of cars can reach right back to the toll booth (abour 6 kilometres!) and the hill leading up to the customs post is littered with cars that have overheated and had to pull in off the road.

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I find that normal long haul flights aren’t too bad in that you get on the plane one day and arrive later the same day if you’re going west or perhaps early the next day if you’re going east.

However, if you’re doing the London to Sydney trip in one hit you get on the plane one day and get off it two days later which is more than a little disorienting I think. OK, there’s a break for refueling in that two days but it’s usually at a peculiar time so it may as well be one continuous flight.

Also very weird is the flight from Buenos Aires to Sydney. That crosses the date line so you lose a day along the way. Or, rather, you don’t because what actually happens is that you leave Buenos Aires in the evening, in the middle of the flight the sun comes up and then goes down again a few hours later and finally you arrive in the evening so your “missing day” is actually a few hours long.