Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

The blog has achieved an unexpected level of popularity this year starting with it being featured all day on France24 the day following Chirac’s resignation speech and latterly being taken up by Reuters.

Thanks to our discovery of sponsored posts, we’ve branched out with a few new blogs during the year. Wendy’s now writing both Cultured Views and Mum’s Finance whilst I’ve added An Age of Magic and On a Postcard. Oh, and we have three family history blogs in the stable now for the Douglas, Hamilton and Stewart sides of our families which Wendy is actively researching these days.

On other fronts, the steady expansion of the listings sites continues apace with Inns4U being the latest addition to the stable and the first which includes both B&B and self-catering properties. In a related development we’ve been working on Whole Earth Guide which is our first travel guide site and which’ll be used by the listings site as their main guide to the various regions.

Somehow in all this I managed to pass the final exams for the Spanish segment of my modern languages degree and find myself with only one course to complete the degree.

Meanwhile James has managed to go through about a year and a half at a French school without uttering a single phase in French. That’ll complicate our lives somewhat this coming September as the new school won’t take non-French speakers.

Although you can find that it’s arond the 700‚€ a week mark to rent a villa regardless of the season, many Spanish owners offer dramatic reductions in the price for long term rentals over the winter months.

For example, if you take a month long break in southern Spain, you can get quite a substantial villa for around the 600‚€ per month mark. Now, granted that doesn’t include food but it does include heating (which you’ll not need) and for a villa you’re effectively living there rather than in your own home ie you’ll be preparing most of your own meals rather than eating out so the price will be little different for meals in Spain than they would be if you were staying in your own house.

That lack of heating bills can make for quite a substantial saving taking the net cost down from 150‚€ per week to under 100‚€. This means that many pensioners are able to take up the winter in Spain option every year and with the increasing rise in “home working” it’s becoming a viable option for many more of us.

One thing that’s very noticeable in Valencia is that everywhere you see employment vacancy signs which implies quite a strong local economy.

As in other places in Spain there’s building work going on just about everywhere but it doesn’t seem so intrusive as it does in some cities (notably Madrid) with many quiet areas around the city. There’s more of a laid-back feel about the city too: everyone is certainly going somewhere yet they’re not going at the hectic pace you often see in Barcelona.

With the building work, there’s certainly money to be made in property speculation of course and the apartment we rented was owned by a relatively young Spaniard.

And the banks? It seemed like almost wall to wall banks in most of the central area of the city. Both more branches and a much wider variety of banks that I’ve seen anywhere outside London. They’re all competing for business too with many offers available on loans, credit cards and so on.

In times gone by TV shows appeared, ran for a season or two and you never saw them again.

It’s different now of course. There are repeats of shows on all the time but, of course, not always of your very favourite show that you’ve not seen for years. Because of that, there’s a small number of specialised DVD sales sites that gather together recordings of the various cult or semi-cult TV shows from the past and provide them at relatively low cost considering the number of hours of programming that some shows run to.

Funnily enough, the further you go back, the longer tend to be the series runs available for shows. So, way back in 1960 One Step Beyond ran for 98 episodes and even Lost in Space runs to 83 whereas Dark Skies only got to 20.

What you’ll not see on these places usually are the mainstream shows as the production companies put out the official DVDs of these themselves. The semi-cult shows that you see from these places are those that just don’t have the following that the production company would need to make it worthwhile rolling out a DVD release.

Buying from a specialised shop often means that you pay a little more for the same product than you would from a supermarket. After all, the supermarket operates on the basis of “pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap” which is an excellent way to go for standard items like beans and whatnot.

However, move into a specialised area like sat nav and you sometimes need that little bit of expertise even when you’re sure that you know what you’re doing.

For example, we bought a TomTom on Christmas Eve in El Corte Ingles. That’s a fairly upmarket department store and therefore there are specialised departments for such things so it’s effectively in-between the supermarkets and the specialised stores. In practice, they were quite happily selling units that had a fault. Fair enough, they obviously can’t go around opening all the boxes and testing them but any that were returned went straight back on the shelf to be sold again. Stupid, eh?

So, we returned that one and bought the next model “up” in a supermarket for ‚€20 more. Unfortunately, although the shop was close to the French border they are piled high with models that can’t be used in both Spain and France as it’s the one model from the range that doesn’t use a memory card (which isn’t obvious as they cover up the relevant information on the box with their security label). So, we’ve to return to Spain this week to see about getting a refund for that too.

Perhaps we’ll get one third time around!