Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

It’s been a while since I looked at our stats on Feedburner so I was really surprised to see that we’re now sitting at around the 75 mark vs 30 just a few months ago.

Where are they all coming from?

Well, a number of them seem to be various feed aggregator services which have been picking up on a number of my posts in the areas of finance and travel. That in turn is creating a steady stream of new incoming links for the blog. Surprisingly, quite a large chunk are picking up on the sponsored posts which just goes to show that taking sponsored posts is a good thing for a blog (even aside from the money, of course).

Even more surprising though is the rapid rise in incoming links to Whole Earth Guide which is looking like it’ll hit PR3 by Christmas (ie at the next pagerank update).

Having said that, perhaps the most ludicrous figure is the number of incoming links to Crystal Consultancy which despite consisting basically of one page has the largest number of incoming links of any of my sites!

Ordinarily, we can see Queribus no problem but for the last few days it’s been almost entirely shrouded in mist.

That’s messed up the walking season somewhat to put it mildly. Typically, walkers start with us and set off for Carcassonne which takes them about five days and goes pretty much directly there, over hill and dale. Ordinarily, I quite envy them as it’s a lovely walk (though, so far, I’ve been too lazy to do it) but it’s a different matter in this kind of weather. Cold and miserable is nice now and again but they’ll be lucky to even get up to Queribus the way it is at the moment.

We’ve even got snow on Canigou which ain’t a good sign this early on: usually it doesn’t even have a dusting for another month or so.

It looks like Pay Per Post lifted their 2 posts a day limit a little too soon as the number of opportunities on offer and the average payout from those available has dropped like a stone.

A few weeks ago, there would typically have been something like 100 posts available with maybe 1/3rd of those averaging around $7 to $10 or thereabouts. However, today there are still only 28 offers and only six of those are more than $6.

In fact, it’s worse than that as five of the six aren’t really available to me and the seventh is already used up.

So, nice idea to move the posting limit up to 3 per day but they need to pull in more advertisers or the whole lot will be cleared out very quickly indeed.

One of the problems with working in the tourist industry is that you’re really busy right through the main holiday season and therefore need to take your own holidays out of season.

That tends to rule out some types of holiday. For instance, many beach destinations are out as they’ll be closed down for the season by the time we’d be able to go. The weather isn’t so dependable out of the holiday season either so we need to take more care about the type of destination we consider.

At the moment, we’re looking into two quite different holidays for ourselves.

The first will probably be late October/early November and for that we’re aiming to do a mini-citybreak. Flight prices drop dramatically by then so we’ve quite a wide choice in principle though as it’s just a short break we don’t want to pay a fortune for the hotels at the other end (which ruled out Venice: the prices were unbelieveable) and also it’s a lot cheaper if you don’t need to get a hotel at the airport so that knocks out flights leaving early in the morning.

The second is Christmas which may surprise you. In fact, we are usually empty over the Christmas period as the locals don’t “do” Christmas. Anyway, the net effect of that is that we have a window of around 7-10 days and we’re hoping to go somewhere “Christmasy” for it. Options for that one include Brussels (surprisingly cheap on the hotel front as the bureaucrats have, of course, left for their own holidays) and southern Germany. In principle, we’d have liked to do Edinburgh or London but the flight prices knocked both of them out of the running.

After that? Well, we’ll be full in early January but would like to get away somewhere warm sometime in the late January to early March period to break up the Winter for us.

Let’s face us, the vast majority of us know diddly squat about the situation in Burma.

It’s one of those peculiar places in south-east Asia that aren’t on the flight path of the major airlines that we tend to get around on so there aren’t any stopovers there such as are commonplace in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. So, very few of us know anyone who has been there on holiday and therefore we know even less about it than we do about many countries around the world in this day of widespread international travel.

So, in many cases it is a country that simply doesn’t appear on our radar until something really serious happens there.

Sadly, that “something really serious” is happening right now. The government (if such a word can be applied to the people running that country) don’t want us to know about it but thanks to the communications infrastructure in place these days, the only thing that they can do is try to round up those that would write about it from within the country and yet still the news gets out despite their major-league clampdown on freedom of expression. So we have the Burma Blog among many others.

Buddism is one religion that just doesn’t get into any kind of conflict so it must be some measure of how bad it is when even they have been dragged into events taking place in Burma.

Let’s hope that the situation is resolved as quickly and with as little bloodshed as possible.