Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘America’ Category

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?

The vast majority of the online catalogue shopping sites just plonk on one photo of each item of clothing. Even the better ones will only put a couple of photos of each item online.

Tobi is different. In addition to having several views of each item they go a lot further and include a whole series of combinations under The Brand Book which goes a long way to providing you with a consistent look and that’s before you even consider the editorial section which contains a whole mine of information. The blog will keep you up to date with the latest fashion trends too.

Naturally backing all this up is a massive catalogue of all the best clothing. Take for example the Nudie range. There you’ll find all the styles of Nudie jeans. If Nudie isn’t your thing, what about Seven for all Mankind?

Not enough for you? How about an online stylist to help you choose the clothes? That’s on offer too. In fact, I suspect there’s a whole lot more on offer that I’ve not discovered yet because this is a site designed to give you a very complete and enjoyable shopping experience along with providing an excellent range of clothing.

One noticeable difference in the bookings this year is that we’ve had a lot more Americans staying with us.

Americans, in general, only get two weeks vacation time each year which obviously has quite an impact on the type of holiday that they take. For one thing, it’s rare for a working American to take a holiday longer than two weeks and therefore they are, for the most part, channelled into taking package holidays as that’s the only way you can really pack a lot of sightseeing into a short period. Moreover that short period means that they tend to concentrate on the highlights of a country or group of countries (“doing” Europe is quite common) so typically they will consider that they’ve “done” France if they’ve been to Paris.

Therefore, normally, the long-stay Americans are either students on a back-packing type holiday to Europe or retired people. However, it’s been noticeably different this year and we’ve had both more Americans and more varied categories of Americans staying with us. The couple who have just left us today were normal working Americans for instance and moreover they are planning to return as they were both quite taken with the region (and us!).

Business coaching is one of those things that you may think is a pointless waste of money when you’re just getting going with your business but it can provide you with insights that would ordinarily take you years to learn and cost you dearly with the mistakes that you made along the way learning them.

A business coach can make a whole lot of those expensive mistakes go away and moreover provide you with tips to give you major advantages in the business marketplace too.

 ActionCOACH is a group of people who aim to give you all of those advantages through their “14 Points of Culture” system thereby helping you to become the best person you can be to succeed in your ventures.

Although I’ve been plugging away with a series on living in France and you’d think that it would be something French that would be the most popular post on the blog, in fact it’s a post that is solidly in the expat finance field that is by far the most popular.

It’s, of course, our article on opening a bank account in America as a non-resident. Why? Well, for those that are running a small business on the Internet, the preferred way of getting paid is via PayPal which is brilliant for a small business as you get to accept credit card payments with no hassle at all. However, obviously you need to get the money out of PayPal and into a real bank account at some point and that’s where the problems start.

PayPal is basically an American payment scheme and only lets you transfer money out to a fairly limited number of countries. Crucially, that range of countries excludes quite a lot of Asia who are, of course, one of the most active business communities on the Internet.

If PayPal don’t support bank accounts in your country they give you only one other option: transfer money to an American bank account and so opening a bank account in America has become very popular. Unfortunately, the tightening up of security checks after 9/11 means that it’s quite difficult to open an account there or at least the options have closed up somewhat.

What’s happened then is that there has been a massive growth in websites offering to sell you the information for anything from $5 to $1000. Yes, up to one thousand dollars! Since I don’t charge anything for somewhat better information, the post in question has steadily moved up the rankings in google and indeed the corresponding entry in the expat resources section of the Whole Earth Guide has soared right up to the top of google too.

In fact the post has become so popular that I’ll be rolling out a similar guide for other countries which have been requested (Switzerland is next in line, the Channel Islands after that).