Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

When you look around in a new country you generally bring all your preconceptions as to what a bank is with you.

Typically, the assumption is that a financial organisation is a bank if it issues credit cards, debit cards and cheque books whereas it’s a building society if it largely confines itself to savings accounts and mortgages. Of course, in many countries such distinctions don’t exist 100% of the time and there’s usually something of a graduated scale between building society and bank in most countries these days.

In fact, a more realistic distinction these days is probably based on size (however that might be measured) and perhaps the extent of international activities. So, for example, although most people would call the likes of the Halifax in the UK a building society in fact in both legal and practical terms it has been a bank for many years. For example, it has been issuing cheque books since the 1970s if not before and has had international activities for a substantial time too.

On the other hand, the various Credit Agricoles in France are clearly in the building society camp. Yes, they issue cheque books but their debit cards aren’t run by themselves and their international activities are nil, at least as far as the regional Credit Agricoles go.

Spain by contrast has the fairly substantial La Caixa which is a savings bank in name only although with few international activities up to now.

When we had the first little guy I was the one working as Wendy was at home looking after him but by the time we had the second little guy we were both working from home.

Since Wendy’s from Sydney and I’m from Belfast, that has had an unexpected effect on the accents of the two. James, the oldest, speaks with a mainly Sydney accent but with a Belfast sprinkled in amongst it whilst John speaks largely with a Belfast accent but with Sydney words in it.

Of course, that’s why they refer to your first language as your mother tongue in that, in times gone by, it was always the mother that was around the children the most. That’s obviously still the situation for most people these days but there are a growing number of families where it’s the mother working and the father at home or even both at home.

Obviously it’s not as noticeable when both parents are from the same place but when they’re not it can produce an interesting mix of accents in the speech of the children.

As part of my “thinking about an English literature course” thinking, I’m currently plugging away with reading Father and Son which is an autobiography written around the early 1900s.

To be honest, I thought that I’d hate it from start to finish but I find that I’m getting on for 1/3rd of the way through it now and it’s easy going as far as reading it is concerned. I’ll grant you, that it wouldn’t have been a book that I’d have bought if it weren’t for the course but it isn’t the chore that some of the other books have been to read.  Actually, given the era in which it was written, it’s a surprisingly easy book to read on the whole.

If you’re wanting an easy way into late 19th century English literature, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

We didn’t manage to get out to see the rally on Saturday so we’d quite a trek to get to Ansignan to see it on Sunday morning.

As usual in France, all the promotion of the event is in French so there are relatively few foreigners attending what is quite a good rally. The most complete information on the rally is on the French site here which will have the information on the winners etc. in the not too distant future. One interesting consequence of this limitation in the promotion is that Foreign Perspectives achieves top ranking for searches about the rally.

The area over which the rally takes place comprises quite an intricate set of roads so you need to know the area fairly well or have a very good map to work out how to get to the various vantage points. For example, a journey which normally takes about 30 minutes from here ended up taking nearly 90 minutes due to the various diversions for the rally.

Whilst it’s mainly French teams taking part there’s quite a sizeable representation from Spain too.

Quite an interesting event if you’ve over here at the appropriate time next year (probably November 23rd & 24th 2008). Although it’s usually pretty good weather here, the route goes through several rather windy mountain passes so it can be pretty cold if you’re out of the sun.

The prices of digital cameras have had a gentle drop over the last couple of years mainly because they have added features and resolution as otherwise the price drop would have been quite dramatic.

If you just want a general purpose camera then you can get excellent ones around £100 or so these days. Even £30 gets quite a reasonable camera if you choose carefully.

However, the problem that all of these cameras have is that they are relatively slow in taking a photo. At the £30 level you press the button and it can be half a second or more before the image is fully recorded so photos taken with these cameras will generally look a little wavy unless you hold them very still. You definitely can’t photograph moving objects with them.

Move up to £100 and that half second delay drops significantly. There is a delay whilst the camera stores the image but the image is completely captured in one go so you don’t get the wavy lines. No problem with moving objects anymore. Spending more generally gets more megapixels which will let you print larger images.

However, if you try taking a photo of something like a car race you still have problems because of the delay in the camera capturing the image. There won’t be any wavy lines but chances are the car won’t be in the frame completely. If this type of photography is what you like to do then you will probably need to move towards one of the SLR digital cameras which start around £300 or so. There’s quite an overlap in the price range of top end compact digital cameras and SLRs and the two have similar capabilities but the speed of image capture is considerably different and, of course, the SLR cameras let you change the lens.

Typically around the £100 to £200 mark spent on a compact digital camera will get one that will suit most people. If you’re into sports photography you’ll need to take that up to £300 for a digital SLR.