Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

Google certainly seems to think so as they’ve been trying out photos placed beside the normal type of adsense ads that you see here in addition to the increasing numbers of photo and even video adverts that you’ll have seen on various sites you’ve looked at over the last year or more.

So advertisers like to see photos in their paid posts too. We’ve been really bad at doing that but as the average payout for our posts increases, you’ll gradually see us adding more of them as we move into the Winter.

Once we get the computer upgraded, we’re toying with the idea of taking on some video posts as well, though the payment will need to be somewhat higher for those as they sound like they’d be quite time consuming to do.

Let’s face it, many people just aren’t at their best in the mornings. How come then that when someone has the idea of having a meeting over a meal to launch some new initiative that it’s pretty much always a breakfast meeting that’s organised?

The latest initiative to reduce unemployment locally is a breakfast get together between the employers and the potential employees in the town to the west of us.

OK, I can’t see the French going for a business meeting over lunch and people usually want to get home at the end of the day, but a breakfast meeting isn’t overlly realistic. For one thing, it’s a town in the country and therefore the public transport to and from it is far from good. How are these potential employees going to get to the meeting when the time current proposed is before the buses actually start?

Although it’s outside the main holiday season, we’re still fairly full but not quite in the same pattern as is usual for this time of year.

We generally get quite a respectable level of occupancy during September but ordinarily it’s a pattern of lots in the first week followed by a reasonably even spread over the rest of the month. In common with the changing pattern of bookings this year, September is also quite different.

So, this month we haven’t got the usual even spread but instead have a series of clumps of bookings. For instance, we were almost completely full on Sunday night (an odd night to be full) yet Monday night saw just one couple in residence.

As usual, we’ve no idea of what the rest of the year will turn out to be like as people are continuing with their trend of making reservations just a week or two in advance.

That’s what we have to do for the oral part of the exam in, worryingly, about two weeks time. In fact, it’ll all be over this time two weeks from now which is even more worrying!

It’s far from easy coming to something like that even in English but we’ve to do it in Spanish which you’d think would make it even harder to do. In some ways, it does, of course. We obviously don’t have the range of grammar or vocabulary in Spanish that we do in English naturally. However, it’s the sort of thing that we’ve been doing off and on throughout the language courses and from that perspective it makes it that little bit easier.

Not easy, though!

We’ll be given a photo of the painting in the exam and then have 10 minutes to prepare a 3 minute presentation on it and how it fits into the context of the society of the time. As with most things on the Spanish course, it’s designed to make sure that you can’t prepare the whole presentation in advance so that 10 minutes will really need to be used. Any old presentation won’t do either as it needs to be reasonably well structured.

Try doing that in English sometime to see how difficult it can be!

One of the surprising things that I’m finding as I gradually roll out our Whole Earth Guide is that it’s surprisingly difficult to assemble the information for some places that you’d expect to be easy to find travel information about.

Our latest addition is Giverny where Monet lived. That one wasn’t too bad in that the people now running the house have quite a reasonable website but even there the directions are pretty wooly given that, as they say, the majority of people getting there are American who generally need slightly better directions as they don’t travel abroad terribly often. Having said that, the number of escorted tours leaving from Paris might well refect that the Americans are largely using those rather than going to the village under their own steam.

However, I’ve found that it’s quite rare to find a site combining information about the place with information as to how to get to it. Very surprisingly a wonderful place like Cordoba has virtually no tourist information on it at all.