Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

There seems to be something of a drift from issuing Visa cards to issuing Mastercards in the UK at the moment thereby reversing the previous trend which was to only issue Visa cards.

Although it doesn’t really matter which you have in the UK, it can matter a lot when you go on holiday and generally it’s best to be carrying both Visa and Mastercard abroad. In that respect the switch of my Halifax Visa card to a Mastercard suits me as that gives me a Mastercard credit card from them and a Visa debit card but others could easily find themselves with a Maestro card and a Mastercard which isn’t a good combination as Maestro isn’t nearly as useful as Visa debit and you’re left with two cards on the same system which isn’t good either.

Not a catastrophe for sure but do make sure that you have both varieties of card handy well in advance of your next holiday.

To complete my Modern Languages degree, I “just” need to do one more course and that one is English which’ll be somewhat odd as all the exams and whatnot that I’ve done over the last six years have been in foreign languages.

It does leave me with one slight problem in that the English course I need to do is half of a Diploma in English Language. It’s not that I have to do the second course due to university regulations or anything but rather that I don’t like to leave an overhang of half a diploma like that.

Therefore, it looks like I’ll be doing a course in English grammar just after the English course that I actually need to do.

After that, it’s a bit up in the air and really far too early to be thinking much about it. Not that it has stopped me thinking about it, of course.

At the moment, I would have two basic ways that I’d consider going after completing the English diploma. The first is that I’d like to do their creative writing course (which, hopefully, would improve the quality of writing here) but that has a pre-requisite Humanities course so it’s a two year deal. Alternatively, I’ve always fancied doing a chemistry degree.

Going down the creative writing route would mean that I’d have 2/3rds of an English degree, the final third consisting of two literature courses. As a bit of preparation for that I’ve just bought all the recommended books for the first of those courses. Just to see what it might be like at this point, and not really committing myself to it. I’ve also bought a couple of books for the chemistry course so there’s quite a bit of reading material lying around at the moment!

One of the things that we considered doing was flying somewhere for the short break that we had last week rather than driving there.

Now, on the face of it, you’d think that with all the cheapo flight offers these days it would bound to be cheaper to fly. After all, you can get to loads of places for £10 including taxes these days.

However, even when you look at flight prices including taxes and so on there are many non-flight charges to take into account. For one thing, if you fly, you need to get to the airport at home and park your car which isn’t cheap (£10 a day at least). Then you need to get to the hotel at the other end which’ll either involve a taxi or car hire. Even on an optimistic view for a family of four that’s £40 for flights, £70 for parking and around £30 for a taxi ie £140 just for transport.

Last, but often not least, taking your own car means lots more space to pack stuff and flexibility in departure time too.

Certainly if you’re travelling any sizeable distance in Europe you’d need to add in the tolls (around £100 for a round-trip across France for example) and probably a similar amount for petrol but if you’re just taking a short break to Brittany or Normandy it’s almost certainly going to be cheaper to take the car.

You’d think that I’m getting paid for writing this stuff, but I’m not; I just think they’re brilliant.

Although the OU has been on the go since the early 1970’s strangely enough there doesn’t appear to be any serious competitor for them in the English-speaking world (there’s a rough equivalent in Spain). On first glance it would appear that there are equivalents in America but when you look in more detail at them you find that they do post graduate stuff or skip out the first year or two of a normal course. Even those that don’t do that only offer a limited range of programmes whereas the OU offers a very complete programme, the only major omission being medicine.

How come it doesn’t have any competitors though?

It’s quite hard to say in that these days Internet delivery of the courses means that a university can be anywhere whereas obviously it was harder to launch on a correspondence basis in the 1970s. Where it did have the advantage is that it had substantial government money behind it in the early days and perhaps that’s not been available elsewhere in the world up to now.

It doesn’t always work as such.

Oh, it’ll tell you where you are alright and point you in a direction that’ll get you where you want to go but the problem is that in some areas of which ours is one, the roads that it sends you down are the windy ones and anyone using it to reach us from the south always adds an hour or two to their journey because of this.

The problem is that once you get dependent on a technology like that you tend not to have a fall-back ie maps in this case. So, we found that our Danish guests didn’t arrive at 7pm but were much closer to 9pm and had been following a very “interesting” route to get to us, despite them having been here before.