Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

We’re definitely planning on going somewhere this evening and as we’re going by car it needs to be within around three or perhaps four hours drive of here.

As of this morning, we have three places in the frame:

Valencia, the front runner from yesterday, has now dropped out as it’s supposed to be raining there tomorrow. No big problem though as we had it pencilled in for later in the year when it gets colder here yet is still quite warm there.

Albi, the former haunt of Toulouse-Lautrec and what looks to be quite a charming little village is also out as the weather is looking a little dodgy there too.

Which leaves Arles looking good. The weather forecast is fine for there and there’s quite a lot to see in the general area too. I’m not sure if we’ll have the time to see it but the Camargue nature reserve is supposed to be really good.

OK, I’m not there yet, but at least it seems to be heading in the right direction.

As we’re edging into the Winter here, it becomes more and more appealing. We’ve obviously a lot less to do during the day and, possibly more importantly, I’m not doing the studying as the Spanish course is finished.

So far, it would appear to be quite a good fit with our normal activities as we’re busy in the Summer when there are relatively few paid post opportunities yet don’t have much to do in the Winter when there seem to be a lot more paid opportunities available.

Even aside from the money aspect, I quite like a lot of the paid posts that come along.

For instance, I’ve written a whole stream of them about various holiday destinations and I love writing about stuff like that. I’ve even started up Whole Earth Guide so I can write more of it!

The finance related ones have been fairly thick on the ground here too as I can usually talk the leg off a table when speaking about finance as many people will attest to!

But now and again you get surprises.

For instance, today, PayPerPost just offered a very nice looking African safari post. At least it looked quite nice at first glance. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to go on a safari? Second glance revealed though that they want you to promote a place that guarantees you’ll kill a set number of endangered species.

Now, aside from the moral aspect of that, it’s actually illegal in that PPP is based in America and therefore subject to American laws.

I’m not blaming them on putting it on because I’m sure the whole process is quite automatic and after all it’s Sunday so chances are that they’ve locked the door and left the computers in charge but it just goes to show the range of things that you can get ie you can’t just start typing away with a post before you read what they’re actually wanting you to write about.

Wendy’s very keen on family history but we’ve only just got around to registering a domain for her to put her researches on.

You can look forward to seeing a constant stream of information on the Hamilton’s at Hamilton Family History which is just live as of today though already with its first post.

Over the coming Winter, she’s planning on putting the result of her researches over the years onto the site.

Jame’s bed has finally given up the ghost so we’re hoping to have a look for a new one today.

In France, bedding like all furniture can be very expensive and if you see something at a sensible price, it’s often just poor quality. This, of course, makes the search that much more difficult.

There’s also the not inconsiderable problem of the size of the beds. As anyone who has been on holiday in France will know, the beds are smaller than the norm in other countries. Still, we’ll not need to worry too much about the size of the bed we get for James for a while.

Anyway, I suspect that we’ll need to head off to IKEA at some stage although that brings with it the problem of how to actually get the bed back here.