Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

We’ve got our Danish group back again this evening.

It’s an interesting aspect of the development of our bookings that we are starting to get picked out by tour groups this year. This’ll be the fifth time that the Danish tour leader will have been here on one of her New Age tours taking in this region. It seems to be quite a popular area for that type of tour, this particular one having a Mary Magdelene theme.

Anyway, that’ll keep us pretty busy this evening as they want meals through to lunchtime tomorrow.

Not really a milestone like 1000 or anything like that but it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was struggling to get into triple figures with the posts and now four figures is a milestone that seems to be looming up very fast indeed.

Of course, it was quite different in the days of the first 100 posts as the blog was primarily a means of letting friends & family know what we were getting up to each week. Just one post a week was a hard enough target to meet sometimes yet several times recently I’ve manage 18 posts in a day!

Starting towards the end of the Summer of 2006 that changed somewhat as we moved to ForeignPerspectives.com and the content became much more general as we moved into the Winter of that year.

The latest change has, of course, been our discovery that people will pay us to write stuff which is what’s really taken the number of posts up, particularly since July of this year.

We’ve our first hotel booked in Geneva and it’s cheap enough though that’s because it’s just outside Geneva and is actually in France. In fact, it’s quite common for expats working in Geneva to live in France simply because it’s so much cheaper.

That’s not an option for our second stop as Interlaken is right in the middle of Switzerland.

What’s particularly surprising to me are the child policies and non-ensuite rooms. Switzerland has the image of being a very child friendly place but many of the Interlaken hotels rule themselves out for us by charging up to SF30 per child whereas elsewhere it’s common for children to be free. Also, shared bathrooms are commonplace whereas elsewhere in the world ensuite rooms are very much the norm.

Still, we’re still looking….

If you’re in the market for a new or refurbished AS/400 system, iSeries or i5 then you need a reliable company to provide it for you.

Whilst it’s easy enough to buy new, if you want a refurbished AS/400 or iSeries machine then it’s vital that you can depend on the company that you source it from. This means that you’ll need a company with experience of refurbishing midrange hardware and that can help you with the small but difficult to solve problems in areas such as device addresses and cabling through to the more complex end of the scale.

We just had one of these days when everything seemed to go just right.

To begin with, we’d some people drop in who might be interested in buying our place. Early days yet I’m sure but at least they seemed to be making all of the right noises.

Then we realised that we were going to have a problem with our Swiss trip this Friday as the car insurance would run out in the middle of it. So we called the previous insurer and they, for once, came up with the goods in terms of the certificate that we needed to hand to the new guys.

Next problem was that the car needed re-registered as that had already run out. Off to the garage and they not only handed us the new papers but had the new license plates on as well within 30 minutes.

Onward to the new insurers with all the paperwork and we didn’t even have to queue!

Finally, we’ve managed to close our place down without somebody booking when we want to be away ourselves.

Oh, and we’ve even got ourselves booked into a lovely place just outside Geneva which we thought would have been gone by now!