Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

We’re hoping to keep our programme of mini-holidays running well into the Winter though obviously we’ll need to be more selective about destinations as the Winter kicks in.

At the moment, we still have Albi and Valencia on our short-list. They’re both within a about three hours drive of here which is a perfect daytrip distance. Uzes also looks interesting and there’s still quite a lot in the Nimes/Avignon/Arles area to be seen including the Camarge, Aigues Mortes (“Dead Eagle” but still a lovely place).

Marseilles isn’t much beyond Arles and indeed we managed to get ourselves onto the road to Marseilles last night by mistake. Is it worth going to though? For one thing, I just can’t understand a Marseilles accent but then we don’t talk to many people whilst we’re on our daytrips so that’s no great problem. It’s also got something of a reputation of being a bad area (yes, the whole city!) which puts me off it somewhat but against that I’ve also heard good things about it too.

Monaco at around five hours is a possibility for a weekend type daytrip though it’ll be a couple of weeks before we get a slot for that. In practice though, there isn’t a whole lot in Monaco.

Also sitting at the five hour mark are the likes of Cannes and St Tropez which would be interesting though I’ve not looked into them much as yet. It was quite interesting for me to be in Cannes a few years ago as apparently I’m the image of Jean Marc, one of the French film stars who had been there for the awards a few weeks earlier. I hadn’t realised that at the time so it was pretty confusing for me when a series of girls tried to pick me up in the street though things went downhill somewhat when an old guy tried to do the same thing!

One thing that I always find fascinating is the differing mix of advertisers on the different paid post websites.

You’d think that they would be broadly similar, but that isn’t the case. On some you’ll get loads of different opportunities available whilst on others there are only ever a handful. In practice, that means that I look most often on the sites with the larger numbers of opportunities as it saves me the hassle of logging in all the time to sites that rarely produce the goods.

The mix is quite different too. As you may have noticed, I take quite a range of topic areas for the paid posts, essentially for two reasons 1) they look interesting and 2) if they pay more I’m gonna consider them. Most of the time, I’m quite lucky and the available posts cover both areas.

Still, ‘yall have gotten quite a mix today with computer games, web hosting, holidays, plastic surgery and car sales! A bumper crop as we were away yesterday and didn’t get any done.

I found this little missive carved on the arena in Arles yesterday.

Whilst today, the worst of the grafitti is scraped on with a penknife, in times gone by it looks like they were at it with a hammer and chisel for quite a while. Who was D Leon that he had the time and the inclination to carve his name so deeply into the rock?

But then, it’s verging on being “historic” by now of course and in another century or two may even be deemed worthy of preservation.

School days are a bit of a nuisance for us to be honest as indeed they must be to most parents.

In our case, four days a week (he gets Wednesday off) we have to take James round to school before 9am, which gives us a few hours to get some stuff done (mostly blogging in the Winter as you may have noticed!), then off to collect him from school at 11.45am ie we’ve all of 2 1/2 hours to ourselves in the morning.

The afternoon isn’t much better, of course. To give us a little more time we usually drop him off at 2pm and head straight on for the shops or whatever though often it’s a bit of a race back to collect him at 5pm.

What we’re trying to do is to make the most of the Wednesdays by heading off somewhere when we collect him on the Tuesday evenings. Our first attempt at that was this week and we’d a very nice day in Arles.

Longer trips are more difficult though. In theory, we should set out on Saturday morning for Geneva but that would get us there in the evening and we’d have to go back on Sunday. Instead, we’re hoping to pick him up at lunchtime and head on then (he’s only at nursery school so it’s not a big deal if he misses an afternoon). That should give us all day Saturday and at least part of Sunday in Switzerland which is a nice little mini-holiday for us.

One of the things that’s been happening over the last few months is that the paid posting sites are demanding better standards of spelling and grammar from the bloggers and promising penalties if they don’t get them.

Recently, the advertisers have added some text to the effect that the blogger should check their spelling and grammar and that those with bad spelling will be rejected. Fair enough, except that almost all of those demanding better spelling have spelling mistakes in their own advert (and, in one case, in their mandatory link text!) and impose bad grammar through their poorly though out link text.

Perhaps laughably, it’s not uncommon to find that the link specified doesn’t actually work which shows how little care is put into the advertising from some places!