Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

Whilst moving from one European country to another is as easy, at least legally, as moving from one American state to another, it’s a whole different matter when you want to emmigrate to a completely different jurisdiction.

Aside from all the normal differences in taxes, social security and health systems that moving countries always entails, you add the complication of needing to apply for a visa, residence and work permits which adds considerably to the time that it requires to make the move as well as increasing uncertainty somewhat.

For example, take the relatively simple case of a British citizen wanting to move to Canada.

Canada is, of course, in the British Commonwealth so, in theory, that should make the move easier. However, even if you have a pretty much perfect points score for the move, it currently takes around four years from initial application through to the point where you have your Canadian visa and can actually move.

That’s a very long time and a great deal can change during it. For example, four years ago I had one son and now I have two. The second one would obviously need to be added to the visa application for a start and there’s the complication that he has even more nationalities than the first little guy.

Such a long lead time seriously complicates matters in other areas. For one thing, you’ll be working in your existing job and not know in advance how long. You may be wanting to move house too over that kind of time. It’s even possible that the visa categories which you’re eligible for could change too if, for example, you had an inheritance you might find that you could apply under one of the investment categories or perhaps you added a qualification (eg I picked up a university French diploma within the last four years which adds significant points to my Canadian application) or skills. The list is endless.

In fact, over that time period your life could change radically so you need to be really set on moving to a particular country if you’re talking of application periods running into years. Yes, of course, you should be that determined but over such a long period many things can crop up to change your mind even if you originally were really set on making that particular move.

And, remember, that’s just for a relatively simple move!

As it’s the third Monday in January today, it’s Martin Luther Day.

Well, more or less, as America is, as we all know, a country that’s built from a whole bunch of separate countries (ie states) and therefore it doesn’t have a standard name in all 50 states and indeed wasn’t a holiday in them all until 2000.

Although it doesn’t really mean anything outside America, it does have a knock-on effect worldwide in that various Internet outfits close down since they’re based in America. In fact, we didn’t even know that it was a holiday ’til we started wondering why there were so few sponsored posts available today.

Not that we’re complaining as it would appear a lot of folk doing sponsored posts have also taken the day off so we’ve picked up several juicy ones whilst they’ve been away.

We’ve been without TV since December 31st when the satellite decided to down tools.

It’s not that we’ve not been trying to get it sorted but, until this evening, all our efforts were in vain. We changed the satellite dish from our trusty 80cm to a 95cm, we changed the LNB to a nice new one instead of our very weather beaten four year old one, we changed the coaxial cable and we even changed the satellite decoder. And nothing.

So we thought we’d go back to first principles late this afternoon. Within 30 minutes of going back to our old dish and old LNB we started picking up TV channels. OK, we’re not getting the right satellite just yet but we should have that sorted in fairly short order tomorrow.

However, we do need to source a new Sky box as the old one ain’t working anymore so, for the moment, we’re limited to non-subscription channels.

By far the most popular post on our Whole Earth Guide is the one detailing how to go about opening a bank account in America.

The reason is simple really: if you run an online business then sooner or later you generally find yourself in need of an American bank account. Unfortunately, the increased security measures in place post 9/11 mean that it’s not quite so easy to open one these days unless, of course, you’re living in America and therefore a considerable number of websites have grown up with the specific aim of selling you the required information.

Our site doesn’t charge for that information and therefore is increasingly popular as it provides exactly the same information that other sites charge anything from $5 to $250 to provide.

However, we’re sorely tempted to start charging for it too given some of the emails we’ve received demanding additional information and wanting to know why it isn’t on the site yet. What we’ll likely do is to charge for the hand-holding level of information or at least offer it for sale as the information on the above page is quite sufficient to allow anyone to open an account in America.

The number of entries from the United Kingdom on our listings sites has been growing quite rapidly over the last few months so it seemed an appropriate time to start work on a country-specific domain to represent them.

Therefore, we’ve just started running with Great British Bed and Breakfasts and Great British Self-Catering which hold all our UK properties.

One big advantage that we’ve already found is that using the new domains means that the statistics are separated out for the UK for the first time. Early days yet, of course, but it looks like the UK sites were getting a lot more traffic than we had thought they were getting which is good going since we hadn’t specifically promoted them.

On the promotion front, now that we have separate domains for the UK we can run promotion exercises on them too which we’d not been able to do before. In theory, that should mean that these new sites will become very significant for us over the course of the coming year or so.