Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Aren’t debit cards the same as credit cards? No, they are very different and have different characteristics when you’re trying to use them overseas which aren’t always apparent.

The first key difference is that they are directly linked to your bank account and this makes them a little more risky to take abroad (it’s much safer to take credit cards and a cash card).

Debit cards for international use come in four versions although not all are available in every country. These are Visa, Visa Electon, Mastercard and Maestro.

Cards branded Visa and Mastercard can be used where-ever the equivalent credit card can be used and, aside from the link to your bank account, are processed in the same manner as a credit card (press the “credit” button if prompted on an ATM or till).

Cards branded Visa Electron and Maestro are supposed to be electronic use only which means that you cannot use them in one of the old-style carbon copy type machines. In practical terms, almost all “civilised” countries use online terminals these days but this does not apply everywhere so it’s best to have a credit card as a backup. Maestro is a little more limited in that it can’t be used when you’re not at the point of sale therefore you can’t use it to guarantee hotel reservations. You can’t use either of these cards to hire a car.

Note that acceptance of cards is neither universal nor universally practical. If you are travelling to countries off the tourist routes you can find that cards aren’t accepted or are only accepted in widely dispersed locations. For example, in India I found that using cards simply wasn’t practical. Cards branded Visa Electon and Maestro are much less widely accepted than those branded Mastercard and Visa.

Bank charges on debit cards come in several basic forms. First, they charge transaction fees when you use the card to get cash. Typically these fees are around 2% with a minimum charge of £2/$2 per transaction therefore it’s best to withdraw amounts of £100/$100 to minimise this charge. In most cases, there is no transaction charge when you buy things using the card so it’s better to do that instead of withdrawing cash. Second, they usually apply a foreign currency charge which is typically around 3% (no minimum). And, of course, there may be an annual fee for having the card. Some card issuers charge a transaction fee on overseas purchases too: if this applies to your bank, use a credit card to make purchases instead or if you can’t do that, withdraw cash and use that for purchases.

Despite all that, it’s still usually cheaper to get cash on a card than to buy travellers cheques as your cost will typically be around 5% max compared to the 7% or so for travellers cheques.

Downsides are basically those charges but, if you’re careful, you can minimise them. For those living in the UK, some pre-paid cards eliminate all charges and if you’re in the American military a USAA card works in much the same way as do some American issued CapitalOne cards. If your bank is a member of the Global Alliance (Bank of America, Bank of Nova Scotia, Barclays, BNP, Deutschebank and Westpac) then you can withdraw cash from one of the other member banks ATMs without the transaction charge (you still get charged the foreign exchange fee).

I’m going to work my way through the various ways you can take money abroad over the next few weeks or so in the travel money series. I’ve already covered cash, travellers cheques and credit cards and will be covering cash cards and prepaid cards in future episodes.

It was both windy and raining heavily yesterday which always seems to bring out the worst of fashion, doesn’t it?

Gone are the nice looking clothes and in their place are all kinds of really awful anoraks, wellington boots, and iffy umbrellas. Hairstyles are, of course, are history at least for the day though some seem to take days to recover after a windy day.

Still, on the whole it’s not as if anyone is actually looking at what you’re wearing on a windy day as they’re all racing to get out of the wind and rain.

However, even inside it doesn’t always get much better as even in heated rooms it somehow seems colder when it’s windy outside and, of course, there are all the wet clothes, umbrellas and windswept hair to contend with too.

If you think that you’re just joining the gym to get fit, think again.

For a start there’s a clear pecking order dividing those who run on the running machines from those who walk on them, those who stick to those from those who use the cross-training machines, the divide from those who stick to that group from those that use the strength machines and then there’s the gulf between those who use machines and those who use the free weights. And that’s before you even consider those who only go to the exercise classes.

Then there’s the fashion parade that you get in some gyms. Thankfully there’s not much competition with the men’s fashion but the women certainly make up for any lack of fashion sense in the men with some clearly joining because it’s the fashionable thing to do rather than with any sense of getting fit.

But don’t let all this put you off… it’ll not be long before you find your own niche in the gym whether that be amongst those there to get fit or with the fashionistas.

Aside from technology men are pretty much useless in the shopping stakes but they’re at their lowest point when buying stuff for their significant other to wear.

To begin with it’s lingerie purchases that are almost always an unmitigated disaster. There’s just no way that they are going to get the sizing right as it’s far more complex than anything that they’d buy for themselves. Not only that, but, of course, they’re generally choosing something that is thoroughly impractical, aren’t they?

Even in other clothing though they’re none too good at selecting something that their wife or girlfriend would like to wear or would find all that practical. Even here the basic style choice that they’re generally aiming for is “sexy” whilst the wife/girlfriend is looking for things like “warm”, “comfortable” and “practical”.

To be fair the wife/girlfriend is just as bad at choosing a techy product for their man too 🙂

Although you “know” that Amsterdam has loads of bicycles, you’ll never appreciate just how many are there ’til you see it for yourself. The photo here is just one spot from many cycle parks that are all over the city.

Because of this concentration on cycling, you’ll find that it’s very much a city to explore without your car and doesn’t have anything like the level of pollution that you would normally get in a city of this scale. That’s not to say that you can’t use your car, just that you don’t need to.

Just walking round the city and its many canals is very pleasant and you’ll come across untold numbers of attractions even if you just wander aimlessly. Don’t miss the Anne Frank museum though which is much, much smaller than I had imagined from the books. Although the queue is quite large it moves quickly so the wait usually isn’t that long.

As you’ll know Amsterdam is home to a red light district and, yes, the prostitutes really do use red lights in the windows to indicate that they’re available. It’s not nearly as much “in your face” as you might expect though and certainly during the day feels more like a tourist attraction than a “den of iniquity”.

We found that the best thing to do was to pick out an out of town hotel near the airport and get the train in and that’s what we’ll be doing next time we visit. The hotel we stayed at has an airport shuttle so that followed by a short train journey took us into the city centre very quickly and pleasantly.

This is part of our expanding Whole Earth Guide.