Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

When you run a booking service, you get a strange perspective of the holiday booking habits of people which is generally at odds with what you’d think people would really do.

For instance, our B&B sites pick up a lot of traffic from around April through to August each year and outside that they’ve relatively low numbers of visitors. That’s understandable really as most B&B bookings are for just a few days at a time at most and you wouldn’t expect people to book short term holidays a long time in advance.

It’s quite different for the self-catering sites though. For them the booking season started just before Christmas and we’re getting so much traffic on the sites at the moment that it looks like we’ll need to upgrade the bandwidth next week. In fact, the traffic is pretty much as high as it was in the peak of the summer season!

Although you can find that it’s arond the 700‚€ a week mark to rent a villa regardless of the season, many Spanish owners offer dramatic reductions in the price for long term rentals over the winter months.

For example, if you take a month long break in southern Spain, you can get quite a substantial villa for around the 600‚€ per month mark. Now, granted that doesn’t include food but it does include heating (which you’ll not need) and for a villa you’re effectively living there rather than in your own home ie you’ll be preparing most of your own meals rather than eating out so the price will be little different for meals in Spain than they would be if you were staying in your own house.

That lack of heating bills can make for quite a substantial saving taking the net cost down from 150‚€ per week to under 100‚€. This means that many pensioners are able to take up the winter in Spain option every year and with the increasing rise in “home working” it’s becoming a viable option for many more of us.

One thing that’s very noticeable in Valencia is that everywhere you see employment vacancy signs which implies quite a strong local economy.

As in other places in Spain there’s building work going on just about everywhere but it doesn’t seem so intrusive as it does in some cities (notably Madrid) with many quiet areas around the city. There’s more of a laid-back feel about the city too: everyone is certainly going somewhere yet they’re not going at the hectic pace you often see in Barcelona.

With the building work, there’s certainly money to be made in property speculation of course and the apartment we rented was owned by a relatively young Spaniard.

And the banks? It seemed like almost wall to wall banks in most of the central area of the city. Both more branches and a much wider variety of banks that I’ve seen anywhere outside London. They’re all competing for business too with many offers available on loans, credit cards and so on.

We’re just back from a very packed short Christmas break to Valencia.

What we’d not allowed for was that, of course, Christmas takes out several days from the time available as there’s Christmas Day itself and then there’s the Christmas shopping, etc. Anyway, net effect is that we’ve heaps of stuff to see when we go back there the next time.

The apartment that we stayed in was right in the centre with just a short walk taking us to the massive eight floor Corte Ingles department store and the almost as large shopping centre just behind it. Just beyond that were the arts & sciences museums that you can see in the photo.

By chance the Titanic exhibition was on so we started off with that. It takes a couple of hours to go round and goes into often tedious detail about maybe a couple of dozen of the passengers but skimps on other areas where you might like more detail eg there’s just the one short segment on how come they ran into the iceberg.

Next up was the Museo de la Ciencias (on the right of the photo). It’s one of those hands on interactive museums so sounds pretty good for the kids but in fact there’s very little on offer for children who are younger than mid-teens and even then we found that an awful lot of the exhibits weren’t operational. I suspect that the Hemispheric would be a better bet as it’s based on a series of IMAX shows though whether you’d want to stay there the whole day I don’t know.

We’d also a very brief trip round the old part of the city which we’d liked to have spent a lot more time on and will do next time around.

Definitely a city very suitable for a short-break.

I’ve been going back and forth to Northern Ireland for quite a while now but in the past year it’s started to change quite dramatically.

For instance, the elve taking the money for the Santa photos was Polish and just about all the waiters/waitresses in the hotel were Polish. In fact, Polish workers are seen just about everywhere in Northern Ireland now.

The immigration to Northern Ireland is probably more striking than it is elsewhere in the UK in that there was virtually no immigration to Northern Ireland as recently as three or four years ago. So far, it’s not really changed much about the province but I’m sure that’ll change as the new immigrants settle into live there and start wondering about a few of the peculiar things that go on.