Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

You’d think that that these days banking practices around Europe would be fairly standard. After all, the banks handle international business every day so they’re in constant contact with their counterparts in other countries.

Of course, it’s one of many areas where European business practices are far from standard.

Take the UK and France for example. Two countries with a very long history of interaction so you’d think that many things would be similar except that they aren’t.

In the UK, credit cards are commonplace and it’s normal, expected even, for people to have several of them. In France, credit cards are a relatively new phenonmen and remain very rare.

In the UK, almost everyone has an overdraft and the banks prefer you to be permanently overdrawn as they collect more fees that way. In France, they’ll close your account if you’re overdrawn more than a couple of months.

In the UK, debit cards don’t have any purchase limit on them. In France, you can’t buy more than 3000‚€ a month usually, which is why you often see people resorting to cheques towards the end of the month.

In the UK, nobody will accept a cheque without a cheque card (a card issued by their bank and guaranteeing the cheque will be paid). In France, almost everyone until recently accepted cheques because if you bounced a cheque you could be banned from having a cheque account at all. That actually worked well until very recently when the economic situation seems to have caused something of a run on dud cheques so the effect is that more and more businesses don’t accept cheques which is sure to cause trouble soon so long as that debit card spending limit remains.

Any one of those differences can easily fell you if you don’t know about it in advance.

One of the problems that you have when travelling these days is that every time you go, the airport security seems tighter than it was the time before.

Twice recently I’ve ended up spending almost 30 minutes in security. That’s not 30 minutes queuing to go through mind you, that’s 30 minutes whilst they go through the case after it’s scanned.

How come? Well, if you’ve more than a couple of electronic items in your case the guy looking at the screen doesn’t know what to make of it all so the assumption is that you’re carrying a bomb. Therefore, they go through all the electronic items and swab them, swab the inside of the case then run a little test on the swab they’ve taken to see if it’s picked up any traces of explosives. Then they scan the whole lot again.

Both times, they’ve not allowed for any extra time to do such a thing so even though I went to security when called (and you can’t usually go earlier than that), I just about made it to the gate before the plane left.

Quite what they’d do if, say, I had heart trouble and was carrying some nitroglycerine I don’t know.

Wendy’s been busy whilst I was away and we now have a whole bunch of new cities represented on Whole Earth Guide.

There’s several in the UK and Ireland, a first in Hungary, the bigger cities in Italy and a few in Switzerland too now.

As usual, we’re aiming these guides as specifically tourist guides primarily for short break holidays and we’re aiming to cover the top tourist cities in Europe before the summer season if we can manage to keep at it.

We’ve been looking around for a new template for this blog but haven’t really seen anything that really catches our eye and is broadly in tune with the themes that we talk about here.

However, there’s loads of people out there who run up custom templates and we’re toying with the idea of getting one done for the site. Well, depending on the charge for it that is as I can certainly live with the free ones if the charge is over the top and if really pushed could run up one ourselves I suppose.

I think we’ll have a look round some more but that custom template is getting to be quite tempting.

Wendy’s been looking through a whole lot of blogs this afternoon and, frankly, the quality of writing that she’s seen has been pretty dismal.

Now, I can accept that many bloggers are just scribbling down their thoughts and, yes, there will be spelling mistakes and no doubt gramatical errors that creep in now and again. Fair enough, but she’s been looking, by and large, at blogs that take sponsored posts and it’s a very poor level of writing from what are professional writers.

Yes, you count as a professional writer if you’re writing sponsored posts. You’re getting paid to write, aren’t you?

I’ll not single out any in particular but some of the writing is so bad that it amazes me that the advertisers actually pay for it. There’s people out there saying things like “i done this” when it should be “I did that” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Frankly, I’d expect better work from a 12 year old. In fact, one of the better written blogs is written by a 14 year old so it’s not impossible to write decent stuff.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to write on high brow topics every post. It’s nothing at all to do with the content. What needs improving in a major way is the spelling and grammar used.

Some of the pay per post outlets are already hinting that quality checks are coming: it’s going to be better to improve your quality of writing before they arrive because many of the bloggers out there are going to find that their blog is totally shunned by advertisers if it’s tagged as being one that consistently falls down on the spelling and grammar.

If you find that your current efforts are the best you can do at the moment and you know they’re not good enough, then do something about it. Take a course to improve your English. If you’re taking sponsored posts it would probably even be a tax deductible expense and, in some countries, you can get free or subsidised courses if your English isn’t good enough.

But make no mistake about it: quality standards will come at some point and it’s better to be prepared for that in advance.