Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

As it’s the start of the B&B/self-catering marketing season, I’ve made a start on trying to drum up some more entries for our various listing sites.

Usually, the rule of thumb is that you get about 1% return on any marketing so, in theory, I need to send out 100 invitations just to get one new entry. That’s certainly been the case with any previous e-mails I’ve sent out but for a variety of reasons the return on this particular e-mail has already passed 3% and there’s probably another week or so before the responses will start to really peter out.

How come? It’s combination of reasons. The listing is free which should improve the response although it hasn’t done so in the past but perhaps the bigger reason is that I gather that a lot of people haven’t had a great year with their properties so they’re probably taking up more marketing opportunities now than they would do otherwise (funnily enough, the sites have been pulling in much more business than expected this year).

Anyway, if you’re looking for a good freebie listing for your B&B/inn or self-catering place you can sign up at Our Inns.

Whilst series that get off in their prime can often stop very abruptly even in the midst of a double episode, long running series tend to wind down more gradually these days with the A-team of writers being replaced by the B-team in often a very noticeable way.

So, it’s nice to see that a long running series like MASH was allowed to make a proper final episode which tied up all the loose ends, going through what each of the characters was going to do afterwards. Most of the time these days there’d be a major league lead-in to spin off series but that didn’t happen here which meant that the couple of spin-offs had to stand on their own (neither did particularly well).

Still, I suppose that MASH was an exception that wouldn’t happen these days. After all, who would let a strong series just stop rather than simply wind down into obscurity?

You’d think that France and Spanish culture in the areas along the common border would be very similar after so many years of that border being open but there are still considerable differences.

For example, as soon as you cross the border, you see girls sitting or standing by the roadside. They’re prostitutes yet you don’t see any by the roadside just over the border in France. OK, that’s probably down to some legal difference, but even so.

What’s not down to a legal difference is that in France the restaurants serve food from noon to 2pm. After that, you’re basically talking the likes of McDonalds if you want to eat. Yet drive a couple of miles south and you’ll find the Spanish will serve food most of the day with no really sharp cut-off times at all. Moreover the portions are considerably larger and the prices considerably lower.

It looks like it’ll be generations before that difference starts to fade rather than the few years that many expected it would be.

I’m reliably informed that the place to go locally to launder some money is a small bank branch in a town just over the border.

Or at least that’s where my informant banks his cash.

The only problem with his choice is that he’s in France and the bank is in Spain. No problem with the currency but what he’s not taken into account is that all European countries have a co-operation agreement in place which means that this bank account will be reported automatically to the French authorities.

I suspect that it will take quite a long time before that attitude of money becoming invisible when you use a bank just over the border changes. It’s been pointless for the Germans to drive over to Luxembourg with a suitcase of cash for quite some time (a very popular pastime apparently).

Anyway, if you’re considering a spot of money laundering, you’ll usually go rather further than just over the border these days.

We thought that we’d have a go at stocking up in one of the border towns near here that used to be a dutyfree town ie one that sold all the dutyfree stuff that you get in the airports and whatnot.

Although “dutyfree” has gone, at least between European countries, none of the supermarkets in that town seems to have moved on at all. They still concentrate almost entirely on what were the former dutyfree items so you get a massive selection of drink, perfumes and tobacco and very little else.

I suspect that they survive on that mixture simply because ot the habit of the locals to shop in the “dutyfree” has carried on long after the dutyfree aspects have gone. If that’s the case, it would seem that the town only has a long slow decline in its future.