Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

One thing that we hadn’t allowed for was that French style barbeques aim to cook the food French style ie very much undercooked from our point of view.

However, we sort-of assumed that they’d fire up the BBQ in the normal manner with food sizzling on the spit and so on. As usual, we assumed wrong and in fact at tonights BBQ they only had the temperature high enough to merely warm the food rather than actually cook it which, of course, means that we couldn’t cook it as thoroughly as we’d be happy with.

Sit down BBQ meals seem a little odd too.

Oh well, another custom that the French have sort-of taken up.

Although I am that little bit happier to be able to hold a photo in my hand rather than have it only as a digital file on disc, obviously it’s a whole lot handier for me to have that image on disc too.

In fact, although I’ve thousands of photographs from my holidays all over the world, you’ll only have seen those that I’ve taken in the digital age which, for me, effectively started just under four years ago properly but there are the camcorder images from back as much as 16 years.

What to do about all those non-digital images though? Well, in the plans is the purchase of a slide scanner which’ll radically increase the number of photos available to me online and make a major difference in the geographic coverage too with photos from Australia, the far east, India and several Pacific islands not forgetting about photos from just about all corners of America and Canada.

Now all I need is for the price of the things to drop down to something sensible.

Some jobs sound really fantastic.

You know the ones: you hear about a friend who lands this great job which has them jetting about all over Europe and it sounds brilliant, doesn’t it?

Except, of course, that it’s incredibly tiring. At one point I had one of these “fantastic jobs” which at one point involved flying to London three times a month. Now, at the beginning, that was brilliant as I could pick up all kinds of things in London that I couldn’t get in the local shops and I could do a bit of sight-seeing as well.

After a month or two of that though you’ve seen all the sights and been to all the shops and then it’s just tiring which is, of course, the problem with jobs that involve a lot of travelling.

It sounded like a good idea at the time that I booked it but flying over to Belfast on Friday (an all day affair due to the connecting flight), then needing to drive down to Dublin on Sunday for my Spanish exam on Monday, back to Belast on the Monday night only to go back to Dublin on the Tuesday for the flight to Girona wasn’t quite such a good move in practice.

The trip worked out fine though it’s pretty much knocked me out today and I’m only starting to recover now!

This is the first of the posts on the new computer which I’ve been setting up today. Just had a pleasant surprise when I checked the mail: for some reason it’s been a very popular time for people to pay me money. I’ve several new premium listings on the directory, a whole raft of paid post money from last month and to top it all, a paid entry for the listings sites.

Perhaps I should go away more often!

Just as we were assuming that we were back down to lower paid opportunities and not a great selection for that matter either, today happened.

Whilst it’s always possible that a particular paid post outlet could have a run of opportunities, today just about all of them seemed to be full of opportunities whereas only a few days ago they seemed to be drying up.

So much did this take us by surprise that we stuffed ourselves with them today and hit a new personal record of postings of 16 posts in a single day!

A pretty unbelieveable number, eh? Still, no more posts from now ’til Wednesday for me ‘cos I’m off to do the final Spanish exam of my Modern Languages degree.