Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Blogs from accommodation providers are fascinating things to read.

In the blogging world, they quite simply can’t use “in your face” marketing and therefore usually end up producing blogs that people want to read. Obviously they are broadly in the area of “accommodation news” but that remit is stretched very widely!

For instance, there’s the story on the air conditioned bus stop in Dubai.  OK, it’s there because these guys have accommodation listings there but it’s interesting anyway, isn’t it?

Or, what about the top destinations for uni grads? This gives a very nice top 4 list of locations. Interestingly, this reflects the fact that the producers of this particular blog are from Australia in that “uni” is Ozzie for university and, of course, the graduation time elsewhere isn’t the same (school/university years run February to December there rather than September to June elsewhere).

Most of the time we just take it for granted that American is pretty much the same as English and at least that we know the differences (color not colour, check not cheque, etc.) but some differences in interpretation can cause problems.

The main problem we have is with our pickup and dropoff service. This is a service that we offer for the likes of walkers who frequently arrive at the airport or rail station without cars but who’d like to start their walking in our area (it’s very popular for that).

Most of the time our guests are couples and we’ve only once had a family arrive wanting a pickup. Therefore we don’t need to get a minibus or similar and can easily do the pickups and dropoffs in our car, sometimes with the aid of the trailer for the luggage.

Critically, from the American perspective, it isn’t a “shuttle service” and we never use that phrase in any of our marketing because we’re just not setup to offer such a thing. Yet, consistently, the Americans read “pickup/dropoff service” as “shuttle service” and thereby have an expectation of its capability that we just aren’t equipped to fulfil.

For instance, a few weeks ago, despite several e-mail exchanges a large group arrived wanting to book the shuttle bus for the nine of them. Earlier, we had one couple who wanted to catch the shuttle to and from the city every day and, were none too pleased when we weren’t able to collect them from the town a couple of times during their stay.

I’m just getting settled in with the new laptop (Toshiba A200) which is something of a major upgrade from the last one weighing in at 200GB disc, 2GB RAM and 1.86GHz dual-core (which isn’t the same as Core Duo in case you were wondering).

Unfortunately, Microsoft in their wisdom saw fit to not bother testing Outlook 2003 running under Vista. It worked quite nicely yesterday but has now totally given up on me so I’m in the process of downloading yet another patch in an attempt to sort it out.

Sadly my trusty Norton speed tester dating from way back in 1996 won’t run under Vista so I’ll have to find something similar to carry on my unbroken record from the computer I had way back then. Suffice to say that it’s a LOT faster than the Toshiba A5 that it’s replacing.

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.