Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

The staffing levels of post offices often seems to be very much politically led and rather than being subject to whatever local demands would dictate seems merely to reflect that it’s considered as effectively a job creation scheme.

Thus, although the nearest post office to us is on a main road and in quite a large village, it has the same number of staff as the post office in the small very quiet village where our son goes to school. The net effect of us is that what should be a fairly well staffed post office is almost always virtually unuseable. Not only are the queues frequently out the door but they close quite often to catch up with the backlog of work that this generates.

By contrast, the post office in the little village rarely has queues and always leaves us with a good impression. However, a large part of that good impression is no doubt due to that office being effectively well overstaffed for the level of business which it receives.

Whilst I wouldn’t want to deny the small quiet village its own post office, that service should really be part-time with the staff working the rest of the time in the larger one thus improving the service standards considerably for a large number of people.

Up until quite recently your choice was between paying $5 or so a month for a web hosting service or running with one that plastered adverts all over your site.

No longer. Take for instance PinkPaper. You get a quite respectable 300MB webspace (more than enough for many commercial sites and lots more than most individuals need), 10GB/month bandwidth (you’d need a lot of traffic to use that up), five addon domains (more than many paid for services offer) and all the usual stuff like MySQL databases and so on.

If you’re debating whether to go down the freebie blog route with something like blogger.com, this is a much better way to do. Your only cost would be $10/year to register a domain and you’d get a personal POP e-mail mailbox too.

Whilst we all love our vacation time, we all assume that places that thrive on tourist business will be open during the holidays.

That’s not always the case in France where many attractions are closed today because it’s Labour Day (May 1st). Although many people will be eating out today, a number of restaurants choose this time of year to close thus losing considerable business of course.

Even when they’re not on holiday many restaurants stick to the 12 to 2pm lunchtime and we know of one local touristy village which gets tour buses every day from 9am to 7pm yet the restaurant only serves food from 12 to 1.30pm.

Myrtle Beach resort in South Carolina isn’t as well known as some other resorts nearby but don’t let that put you off as it has all the facilities on offer that you could want.

In addition to a wide range of hotel choices and, of course, beach activities there are lots of non-beach based activities in the area too including Myrtle Beach golf, numerous parks, museums and nightlife. This is all in a very compact area so you won’t end up spending hours in the car to get around as you do in some beach resorts which claim to have “everything”: they may well do but usually they’re so spread out that you’re in a completely different resort by the time you get around them all.

Clearly since it’s a beach resort you’re going to get aquariums, water parks and the like but you also get a good selection of non-water based attractions including the Hopsawee Plantation and the Childrens’ Museum. There’s a surprisingly wide range of shows on offer too of which I quite fancy Medieval Times but there are lots of others to cater for all tastes.

If you’re looking for somewhere on the coast but with a good selection of activities outside the beach area then a  Myrtle Beach vacation seems like a good choice.

When it’s a clear plastic bag that’s had a knot tied in it and doesn’t have a ziploc closing mechanism.

That’s the latest nonsense to come from my travels through airport security and one that was particularly crazy. The security staff focused all their attention on that “deficiency” in my packing and managed to miss four separate items that they should have looked at including one that they very definitely should have taken off me.

So what did they miss this time around?

1. A six inch steel pin. That’s definitely on their checklist of items that aren’t allowed through security yet they missed it entirely which is worrying.
2. A rather heavy iced cake. Eh? Well, considering that it was in a sealed transparent plastic container and the icing has the same look and consistency of plastic explosive they should at the very least have rescanned it with the box open.
3. The luggage scales. These look very suspicious on the scanner thanks to the spring mechanism yet they missed them entirely.
4. The resealable plastic bottles in the above plastic bag. No tests were done of the content and they should have been.

At the moment it seems that rather than being aimed at detecting potential terrorists, the security checks are there merely to annoy honest travellers.