Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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).

Most of the time we just take it for granted that American is pretty much the same as English and at least that we know the differences (color not colour, check not cheque, etc.) but some differences in interpretation can cause problems.

The main problem we have is with our pickup and dropoff service. This is a service that we offer for the likes of walkers who frequently arrive at the airport or rail station without cars but who’d like to start their walking in our area (it’s very popular for that).

Most of the time our guests are couples and we’ve only once had a family arrive wanting a pickup. Therefore we don’t need to get a minibus or similar and can easily do the pickups and dropoffs in our car, sometimes with the aid of the trailer for the luggage.

Critically, from the American perspective, it isn’t a “shuttle service” and we never use that phrase in any of our marketing because we’re just not setup to offer such a thing. Yet, consistently, the Americans read “pickup/dropoff service” as “shuttle service” and thereby have an expectation of its capability that we just aren’t equipped to fulfil.

For instance, a few weeks ago, despite several e-mail exchanges a large group arrived wanting to book the shuttle bus for the nine of them. Earlier, we had one couple who wanted to catch the shuttle to and from the city every day and, were none too pleased when we weren’t able to collect them from the town a couple of times during their stay.

One thing that we hadn’t allowed for was that French style barbeques aim to cook the food French style ie very much undercooked from our point of view.

However, we sort-of assumed that they’d fire up the BBQ in the normal manner with food sizzling on the spit and so on. As usual, we assumed wrong and in fact at tonights BBQ they only had the temperature high enough to merely warm the food rather than actually cook it which, of course, means that we couldn’t cook it as thoroughly as we’d be happy with.

Sit down BBQ meals seem a little odd too.

Oh well, another custom that the French have sort-of taken up.