Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

No, not as an asylum seeker!

We’re following European Directive 2004/38/EC which is the directive which gives European citizens and their family members and dependants the right move to any other European country. In general terms to take advantage of this directive you need to be moving your family from one country to another. For example, if you are only British and are living in the UK then you can’t use this directive to get any residence rights for a non-European wife. However, in the special case of those who count as “people of Northern Ireland” it’s possible for a British citizen to exercise these rights by requiring the UK authorities to consider them to be Irish (see the British-Irish agreement).

Who counts as a “family member or dependant”? Basically it’s:

• the European citizen plus their spouse (or registered partner or partner in a durable [2 years or more] relationship) and
• the direct descendants of either one up to 21 (or older if they are dependant on the parent) and
• the dependant direct relatives in the ascending line of either (ie parents, grandparents, etc.) and
• any other dependant relatives or members of the household of the European citizen.

Which essentially translates as anyone who lives in the house of the European citizen in the country from which they are moving, regardless of their nationality (which paraphrases Articles 2 & 3 of the directive).Most people think they must have a visa to move to another country but if you are one of the people covered by the above paragraph then in fact you don’t courtesy of Article 5, paragraph 4 which lets you prove “by other means” that you are covered by this directive. For example, in our own case Wendy has an expired European Residence Permit in her passport thus proving that the directive applies to her so she doesn’t need a visa and neither does she need to go down the “Non-European citizen” queues at immigration control even though she’s Australian.

Now you might think that you’re sure to need a residence permit but even that’s not the case because  Article 25, paragraph 1 also has the option to “prove by other means” entitlement to the rights granted under this directive and specifically forbids possession of a residence permit to be used as a precondition for the exercise of any rights or completion of any administrative formality. Which means that, in practice, you never need to have the residence permit.

But, what rights does this directive actually give? Well, in practical terms it translates as giving anyone covered by the directive almost all the rights that a national of the country would have with limitations only in areas such as national security (eg you probably couldn’t work as a diplomat) and voting (although the European citizen can vote in local and European elections). Thus the authorities are required to treat Wendy as though she were British and had always been British.

That’s the theory, but how does it work out in practice. Well, Wendy doesn’t get any UK stamps in her passport these days and avoids the massive queues at some airports which simplifies our lives no end as we can all go through the “EU Citizen” immigration queues. She already has her National Insurance number from when we were here before but temporary ones are allocated once you start work in the UK if you don’t have one already. One current complication remains in connection with the doctor (and I suspect the dentist) which is that although the doctor’s office don’t have any problem in treating her, the Central Services Agency (CSA) are still asking for copies of her visa and residence permit which, of course, we can’t provide as we have neither and we just found out this morning that because of that they’ve told the doctor to take her off his list. That’s not really a big problem as worst case scenario from the doctor’s office end is that we fill in a temporary resident form every time we go to the doctor. It does have a potentially major upside in that as the CSA are breaking the law we could get quite a sizeable compensation payment…

So, overall, an easy, legal and free way to live & work in the UK.

For me there can only be one place to go and that’s the wide open plains of the American wild west. Yup, the big country.

Motorhomes aren’t things to confine to towns and cities but rather to use on the wide open road and few places get more wide open than the likes of Arizona and Texas. OK, it’s a bit of a struggle for the big beasts to get up some of the hills around the canyons but it’s the modern day covered wagon and the old timers had a bit of a struggle up the very same mountain ranges.

Monument valley is, of course, John Wayne country. That’s the backdrop that you’ll see in countless westerns and even today you can park your rig in one of the remaining indian emcampments. It’s miles from anywhere too so you get to see the stars in the night sky just as the old-time pioneers did.

Move a little further south and you can even tie your “hoss” up right in the centre of Tombstone just a little ways down from the OK Corral. Next morning you can even stroll down the very same wooden sideway that Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Clancys did because that section of Tombstone has been preserved just the way it was in those days.

So where would YOU take your RV?

It’s been a long, long time since I was in New York and so it’s time that I was starting to consider it for a future trip once again.

Funnily enough a flight to New York these days costs much the same as it did when I went the last time way back in the 1980s and, if you’re careful, you can even get it cheaper than it was then! Not only that, but with the dollar being so low (or is it the pound so high?), even the hotels are pretty much at the same prices so overall the holiday would easily come out well below the price from 20 years back.

The city has changed a lot over that time. For one thing the Statue of Liberty isn’t shrouded in scaffolding as it was when I was there, the Twin Towers aren’t there any more and I gather that the city has been cleaned up considerably too thanks to a series of zero tolerance programmes over the intervening years.

Shopping is a “big thing” in any New York trip of course. Sadly, they still don’t actually do breakfast at Tiffany’s but it’s a beautiful store to wander around and whilst there’s an awful lot of stuff there at serious prices there are also many items that you can pick up at very sensible prices. Aside from there, you shouldn’t miss the likes of Macy’s.

Given the prices of both flights and hotels, it’s definitely a great time to be considering a trip to New York.

I came across a rather comprehensive take on how bad things are in the Spanish economy which makes for some interesting, if long, reading.

Spain is one of those places that hasn’t, yet, featured on the news in terms of problems with their banks which is surprising in some ways as it’s not a country that one would ordinarily consider as having strong banks. However, that’s misleading as the countries with the supposedly strong banks have nearly all run into trouble by now but largely because that strength enabled them to start operating on the international stage and thereby pick up problems that they’d not have gotten had they stuck to their domestic market.

Spain is different in that, for the most part, the banks seem to have acted to pull money into the country but that has created something of a problem since, as the article points out, it has created a climate where there’s been a little too much money knocking around. The problem in Spains case is that the developers have used that money to build far too many houses and now find themselves with a rapidly increasing stock of unsold houses.

The solution? Well, the developers would like more money to build even more houses but that glut of houses means that prices are falling rapidly in reality although that doesn’t show up in official statistics as those are based on estimates of the value of the houses rather than what they’re actually selling for. As elsewhere, the list prices of those houses bears little reality to the price at which they are really selling for and therefore it’s very difficult to get a clear picture of what’s really happening. Despite that, it appears that the fall of 50% or so the previous year will be followed by yet more falls to come.

That continued falling of prices spells trouble for the builders. In accounting terms, they’re presently holding them as trading stock but the falls are forcing them to reconsider them as assets for sale. That might satisfy the accountants but unperforming assets are no good to anyone and, of course, they can’t sell them. Nor can they reduce the prices by as much as normal people could because they’d then be into potentially serious losses.

In fact the solution seems to be to let a significant proportion of the developers go bankrupt and reduce building to more normal levels thus letting the stock of unsold homes find buyers. Not an easy solution but then if, as seems likely, we’re heading into a depression rather than a recession then no solution is going to be an easy one… last time around it took WW2 to get us out of it.

Open education is becoming an increasingly popular thing for various universities around the world to produce these days.

The quality of what’s on offer varies enormously of course. Normal redbrick universities will put on anything from small samplers through to pretty much entire courses in the case of Yale. Ironically, the sample from the more open universities is at the other end of the scale with, for example, the Open University offering very small segments of a wide range of courses in contrast to Yales complete versions of a small number of courses.

Why the difference?

For Yale, the course samples on offer are something of an advertisement for the university and creates quite a bit of good PR too as segments of some of the courses currently on offer have been used by a range of educational establishments to liven up their own course presentations. The situation with the Open University is quite different. They’re not so much advertising the university as the courses themselves thus whilst in the Yale selection you’ll find the complete introductory pschology course (which is absolutely fascinating), from the Open University you’ll find just four units from their equivalent course.

The “problem” with all of these offerings is that they’re quite addictive and it’s tempting to seriously consider signing up for the full thing. Now, that “full thing” is $35,000 a year in Yale (that’s for 8 to 10 courses similar to those that you’ll see online ie around $4,000 a course) or around $4.500 for the full credit course in the Open University (assuming that you’re paying the full price, $2,000 if you live in the UK and get the subsidity). Interestingly, it’s actually cheaper to do the course in America which is contrary to what most people would expect.