Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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.

As the number of people writing paid posts goes up, the quality of some of the new writing appears to be going down.

One consequence of this is that a number of the sites offering paid posts have started adding quality markings to bloggers or are in the course of implementing schemes to let them do that. Interestingly though, the quality of spelling and grammar that the advertisers use is also going down. In fact, in most cases those saying that they will reject posts with bad spelling or grammar display the very worst examples of both themselves.

That bad spelling and grammar even extends to the links that you are required to use. In a growing number of cases they don’t work yet we have to use the link as specified or the post gets rejected.

Perhaps the worst source of these is PayPerPost although that’s probably a side-effect of them having so many paid posts on offer.

One we’re about to do has the conflicting requirements that they’ll reject posts with spelling mistakes yet the link that I have to use has a spelling mistake in it which in turn is reflected in their website!

We’ve noticed a distinct hardening of the attitude of the Catalans in Spain over the last couple of years which has been gaining momentum of late.

Two years ago, any time there were brochures in shops and whatnot, they were always in Catalan and Spanish. 18 months ago that stopped and since then they have only been in Catalan.

18 months ago, we could speak to the shopkeepers in Spanish. Since about 12 months ago, they have refused to serve us in Spanish.

A year ago, we could speak to all our Spanish guests in Spanish. For the last 6 months or so they have refused to speak to us in Spanish. This is particularly crazy as few of them speak French well and many don’t speak English well either. Twice recently we have virtually had to resort to sign language although both they and we speak Spanish! The latest booking was quite comical in many ways as I can understand Catalan reasonably well but can’t speak it: the potential guest could speak neither French nor English yet refused to acknowledge my replies in Spanish which she could understand very well.

Wendy tells me that recent developments indicate that already demonstrations have taken place in Catalonia. Can violent ones be far off?

Blogs from accommodation providers are fascinating things to read.

In the blogging world, they quite simply can’t use “in your face” marketing and therefore usually end up producing blogs that people want to read. Obviously they are broadly in the area of “accommodation news” but that remit is stretched very widely!

For instance, there’s the story on the air conditioned bus stop in Dubai.  OK, it’s there because these guys have accommodation listings there but it’s interesting anyway, isn’t it?

Or, what about the top destinations for uni grads? This gives a very nice top 4 list of locations. Interestingly, this reflects the fact that the producers of this particular blog are from Australia in that “uni” is Ozzie for university and, of course, the graduation time elsewhere isn’t the same (school/university years run February to December there rather than September to June elsewhere).