Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

The funny thing about chickenpox is that once you’re covered in spots, you’re not infectious.

That doesn’t stop people backing away from you though. I well remember the time when I was in the middle of the exams for my MBA and caught it: one big step backwards was taken by everyone once they found out what I’d got!

James wasn’t feeling too well yesterday and he’s still pretty hot at times but he isn’t anything like as lethargic as he was yesterday so I guess that he’s on his way to getting over the disease itself which “just” leaves those darned itchy spots.

We’re looking forward to John getting it, probably sometime next week I expect.

Almost all of the photos on our sites were specially taken for the purpose and a number of them are quite unique. The overall effect of this is that we get quite a lot of hits on our sites arriving because of those images so we thought we’d have a go at selling prints of them a while back but have only gotten around to doing something about it today.

We’ve started with by far the most popular: our photo of the castle in Foix but will be adding the rest as we go along (it’ll probably take a few weeks to get caught up with the backlog). In the meantime, if there’s one that you’d quite like a print of, pop a comment on this post and I’ll put that on by the following day.

In theory, we can produce t-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets etc. using the same images so if you fancy one of those, let me know. Also in the works will be a book form version of our Pyrenees guide but that’s going to take us well into the Winter I expect.

As usual on the first weekend of August, the traffic has been heavy here since shortly after breakfast and it’ll likely stay that way until early tomorrow morning.

How come?

Well, it’s the start of the holiday season in France and a number of other European countries so everyone has jumped in their car this morning and started driving. As you’d expect, by the time they get to the south of France they’re both tired and cranky (a bad combination for a driver, of course) and therefore the number of traffic accidents also leaps this weekend.

It’s best not to attempt to drive anywhere on this particular weekend. Just about every road has traffic way above the capacity which it was designed for and the queues are correspondingly long and wearisome. The queue on the left of the photo is created by having three lanes of traffic at 130km/hr going down to two lanes at 10km/hr at the border which has the overall effect that the queue gets longer and longer as the day goes on (at the time of the photo in the late afternoon, the queue was getting on for 50km!).

You might be thinking that you can avoid the traffic by going on the side-roads. Think again: everyone has already thought of that and the side roads are just as busy. Those using in-car navigation aids will find that the queues on the recommended routes are even worse as a lot of people are using those these days and, of course, they always recommend the same route.

Carrickfergus is on the coast just 20 minutes or so north of Belfast so it’s easy to get to.

The castle is, of course, the main attraction of the town. Whilst it’s open all year with exhibitions depicting the history from the 1100s, it’s best to catch it during one of the Summer celebrations that are held. Allow about an hour to fully cover all the permanent exhibitions.

Strangely enough for such a major construction, much of its history isn’t known to great precision so you’ll find that the outer ward was probably added between 1228 and 1242 rather than having an exact date. In fact the only exact date quoted is that of the landing of King William the third on June 14th 1690 which is commemorated by a small plaque at the end of the pier which you can see in this photograph and also by his statue outside the castle.

Sadly the castle fell into disrepair after this time though it was still being used as a fortress when it was captured for the last time in 1760 by the French. After that it was used as a prison and then an armoury up until 1928 and later as an air-raid shelter in the second world war. As a consequence of this long period of non-castle use, numerous repairs were made after it was handed over as a musuem, some of which were a little overdone giving it an overall artificial feel.

This is part of our series of articles for Northern Ireland Themes.

You may have seen some debate about whether a UK driving license remains legal when you’re actually living overseas.

Mine recently came up for renewal and I thought I’d have to change it for a French one. However, when I read the small print as to how they decide if you’re UK resident or not it turns out that, according to their own definition, I am actually legally UK resident despite having lived in France for three years!

That’s one of the odd things about living here. Even after living here for three years, it is still easier for me to prove that I live in the UK than that I live in France.