Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

If you’re going a fair distance and will be in a country where you have relatives then chances are that you’ll have to see them.

However, don’t forget that this can substantially distort “your” holiday. For one thing, if you’re going far enough they’ll probably feel obliged to organise lots of stuff for you to see and do whilst you’re there. If they’re cousins who you’ve never seen or perhaps ones who you’ve only seen at home and this is a return visit then you can pretty much forget about going to where you might want to go.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to have them offer to take you around various places but you can sometimes end up getting dragged round all the relatives in the area which can seriously eat up holiday time. If that looks likely to happen you need to be clear on why you’re going to visit them: is it because you’re going to that country anyway and dropping in to say “hi”, or is it specifically to see them? The answer makes an enormous difference. For example, we were going around the world once and planning on dropping in to see one family along the trip but some people over here couldn’t understand why we weren’t spending our entire holiday with them!

With flight prices so high these days it’s always useful to find ways to save money and one of the most effective is to travel “in reverse”.

What’s that mean? Well, the number of people leaving on holiday is usually at its peak on Saturday and similarly at a peak coming back on Friday. So, the thing to do is to travel out on the Friday and back on the Saturday. One family staying with us at the moment managed to save EUR 400 by doing that.

Not only will this save money but you’ll find the journey a lot more pleasant. On flights you’ll not be fighting over seats and on the motorways you’ll not be constantly stuck in traffic.

It’s amazing how the definition of “quite early” varies between the nationalities that pass through our doors over here.

For Belgians “quite early” can mean as early as 3am yet for the French it’s normally no earlier than 7am.

Having said that, we’re getting one of our “afternoon bookings” next week which will be leaving “quite early” which means around 5pm which is pretty handy for us as we get to use the room later the same day. Now, if I could find some legal way to attract a whole lot more such bookings over the summer I’d be doing “quite well” 🙂

One thing that’s slightly peculiar is that almost always when I write something about languages, I get comments on the post.

Why? Basically because there’s something of an underground support group for Esperanto.

Eh? What’s Esperanto? For those that don’t know, way back in the late 1800s there was a feeling worldwide that what was needed was a world language. One that wasn’t tied politically to any particular country (so no vested interests) and could be used around the world.

At the time, such a language didn’t exist so there arose something of a cottage industry in inventing them. Of those produced at the time, Esperanto being by far the best known these days. However, it didn’t stop then and in the early 1900s people proposed even more languages including a simplified version of English.

Although it’s quite a different world these days, the Esperanto community is still developing the language and you can even get free accommodation around the world if you can speak it (it’s reputedly a very easy language to learn). And, they’re very enthusiastic commenters on posts!

When we started running the place here, we were surprised to find that quite a lot of people will get into their car in Amsterdam at 4am and drive to the south of France, arriving around 8pm.

Funnily enough, they’re still fairly sane when they get here.

The English on the other hand are rarely totally sane by the time they get here although they’ve “only” driven from Calais.

Why? Well, basically because the Dutch are used to driving much longer distances. In the UK, two hours is quite a long drive yet we’ll drive to Barcelona just to do some shopping which is a four hour round trip.

However, we’ve just had what’s probably our record breaking trip from an English family who, quite surprisingly, arrived in good spirits even though they’d driven around 13 hours from Calais (much longer than normal due to the heavy traffic at the weekend) and were just heading off for another 15 hours or so to get to the south of Spain. I praise them because they managed to stay sane after all that driving over just two days yet wonder about the sanity of spending something like EUR 100 on tolls, another EUR 100 on petrol, another EUR 100 on hotels and nearly three days of their lives when they could have flown there considerably cheaper.