Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

I find that normal long haul flights aren’t too bad in that you get on the plane one day and arrive later the same day if you’re going west or perhaps early the next day if you’re going east.

However, if you’re doing the London to Sydney trip in one hit you get on the plane one day and get off it two days later which is more than a little disorienting I think. OK, there’s a break for refueling in that two days but it’s usually at a peculiar time so it may as well be one continuous flight.

Also very weird is the flight from Buenos Aires to Sydney. That crosses the date line so you lose a day along the way. Or, rather, you don’t because what actually happens is that you leave Buenos Aires in the evening, in the middle of the flight the sun comes up and then goes down again a few hours later and finally you arrive in the evening so your “missing day” is actually a few hours long.

Although we’d quite like to go to see the German Christmas markets at some point, it’s obviously going to be pretty cold where-ever we go in Germany.

That being the case, we’re also looking towards the south and Rome sounds like a place that would be pretty much ideal at that time. Christmas clearly would be a “big thing” there of course but there’s always lots to see in Rome at any time of year and it’s going to be quite a bit warmer than Germany too.

I thought that it would have cost a fortune to do Rome at Christmas but I was wrong and flights are available for around £20 a few days ago (they’ve jumped to £50 now) plus hotels in the centre are still quite reasonable.

We’ve also got Switzerland in the frame too though Wendy’s a bit worried about snow on the roads if we were to head into the mountains which you pretty much have to do in Switzerland.

We’ve been hunting around for somewhere to go for Christmas for quite a while now and consequently have been quizzing everyone who’s came about where they lived and what it was like there at Christmas. That included several Germans, of course. However, to be quite honest we thought that they were pulling our legs when they said Dresden and Nuremburg! But then the second lot said Dresden too and we started to wonder: let’s face it, who would visit Dresden seeing as it was pretty much levelled in the war?

In fact, just about all of those perceptions that you have about it are wrong. We’ve certainly been reliably informed that it’s “the” place to go for the German Christmas markets and that it’s one of the livelier cities in Germany these days.

Why not check it out? Air Berlin do direct flights from London Stansted and from loads of other airports all across Europe.

If you’re like me and fancy a holiday overseas every year then you’ve probably considered either timeshare or buying a place for yourself.

The problem with both is that you’re effectively tied to taking a holiday in the same place every year if you do that and if you’ve gone as far as buying a place that involves a good deal of hassle too from paying electric bills for the place to ensuring that it’s not vandalised whilst you’re away from it.

Buena Viva Exeter offers most of the advantages of having your own place but without those downsides. Essentially it operates through you buying a number of points which you can use each year to get a week or more in one of their resorts which are in pretty much all of the popular locations around the world. The system operates in a similar fashion to a lease in that you can use the points every year for the next 40 years.

Choices include a raft of places in Spain in the likes of the Costa del Sol and further afield in Florida and indeed Australia.

There seems to be something of a drift from issuing Visa cards to issuing Mastercards in the UK at the moment thereby reversing the previous trend which was to only issue Visa cards.

Although it doesn’t really matter which you have in the UK, it can matter a lot when you go on holiday and generally it’s best to be carrying both Visa and Mastercard abroad. In that respect the switch of my Halifax Visa card to a Mastercard suits me as that gives me a Mastercard credit card from them and a Visa debit card but others could easily find themselves with a Maestro card and a Mastercard which isn’t a good combination as Maestro isn’t nearly as useful as Visa debit and you’re left with two cards on the same system which isn’t good either.

Not a catastrophe for sure but do make sure that you have both varieties of card handy well in advance of your next holiday.