Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

Whilst the principle of going on holiday over Christmas sounds nice, the reality is often different.

You’ve to content with the traffic jams on the roads in and out of towns for a start which can easily add hours to your travel time before you even get onto the open road.

Then there’s the business of booking travel components.  Whilst there are a lot of people going on holiday around this time, there aren’t nearly the numbers that you get in the summer peaks. However, the winding down of everyone towards their Christmas break means that if there are problems then they aren’t always fixable. For example, you’ll frequently find a discrepancy between the availability as displayed online, in ticket booths and in automated ticket sales machines. Just today the message was “no seats available” in two out of three outlets.

And, of course, there’s the business of closures over the Christmas period. If you’re going to somewhere that you’ve not been to before over this period it’s often far from clear what’ll be open and what’ll be closed.

Don’t let all these complications put you off a Christmas break though. Just make sure that you do your research in advance so you aren’t surprised when something essential for you isn’t operating over Christmas.

It seems like ages since I’ve knocked airport security…

I bought a bunch of electronic gadjets whilst I was over in Belfast so figured that the best plan was to put all of it in a single case on the basis that it was sure to require some additional searching. What I’d not allowed for was that they’d want to search the other case too, hence almost 30 minutes in airport security resulting in me nearly missing the plane.

I should have went earlier I hear you say. Ah, but they wouldn’t let me into the security area any earlier. I went through as soon as I was allowed to as I knew that they need to do some additional searching of the case.

It really is getting qute crazy these days. Everyone is carrying more and more electonic bits & bobs but the airport security people just don’t seem to have moved on in being able to deal with it nor in their training as to what they should really be looking for. Despite the lady and gentleman making a slow and methodical search, they still missed checking two items which they should have checked (and, no, they weren’t small items either).

How come they missed them? Well, both items would have turned up on the scanner but the guy running the scanner doesn’t do the searching and so things are missed when they shouldn’t be.

If you’re travelling over the Christmas period and haven’t booked yet, then don’t hang around when you see a decent price as it’ll not be there for long.

Just about all the discount airlines operate load balancing software which means that as the plane fills up the prices rise automatically. Actually, it’s as the plane appears to be filling up that this happens so you shouldn’t constantly check the prices of a particular flight directly with the airline as this will have the effect of making the price rise.

Hotels aren’t so bad but the cheaper hotels and the cheaper rooms within a particular hotel tend to be booked first so the longer you leave it, the higher the price you’ll have to pay.

Buses usually don’t do this but those aimed at tourists tend to. For example, a route I priced recently has risen from the normal EUR 38 to EUR 134 this morning.

The one area where you’re usually OK is with trains but even if they don’t raise the prices (and many franchised lines will) they’ll fill up over the peak holiday seasons.

If you’re learning Spanish one of the worries that you’ll have is with the wide variety of accents that you’ll come across whilst you’re learning the language. Yet, native speakers can cope with them all so you should aim to do so as well.Fortunately you’ve an equally large range of Spanish schools around the world. For example, Spanish immersion Costa Rica offers a range of courses starting from one week up to six months which will naturally give you a chance to hear the Costa Rican accent.Won’t it be impossible to follow? Well, as it happens I ended up having a south American teacher for the intensive course that I did last year and settled into his accent in under a day so you don’t need to worry about it.

The other big plus point is that you get to pick up some of the local culture too. That’s an important part of learning any language and Spanish is very much an amalgam of cultures from everywhere.

Actually, no, it isn’t.

Obviously you can take it as read that it will be much warmer in the south of France during the Summer than it is in the UK but once you get into the December to February period it’s almost always the reverse situation that applies.

For instance, in the last week I was running around Belfast sweating with the heavy coat that you’d think would be required at this time of year in Northern Ireland yet in fact that coat is the one that you actually need in the south of France at the moment.

So, don’t just make the assumption that if it’s warmer somewhere in the Summer that it will be just as much warmer in the rest of the year because often it isn’t.