Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

As you know, we’ve been tootling along with over two hundred thousand readers per week, mostly via Reuters.

I’m sure that’s an incredibly misleading statistic but it certainly sounds good. What I didn’t know until now was quite how good it was in comparison to the competition as everyone seems rather cagey with their statistics.

Anyway, I’m dead chuffed to see this morning that I have both this blog and An Age of Magic in the top 100 of the Blogburst network. In fact Magic is doing rather better than this one thanks to an experiment that I tried a few weeks back which I’ll be building on here over the coming months.

Definitely a great start to the year for the blogs!

Last year we had quite a noticeable dip in traffic on the sites from November onwards but this year we’d simply a small dip over part of the Christmas period.

In fact, it would seem that people have been booking much, much earlier for 2008 than they did the previous year. We’ve had pretty much level traffic on the sites from August right through to now with, as I say, a small dip over part of Christmas.

Part of that is probably due to us starting our marketing programme for the sites in November but even so we still had pretty much summer level traffic on the sites before we started which is pretty unusual as the B&B site traffic usually drops like a stone after August and the self-catering traffic drops up to a month earlier than that.

In fact, the traffic is up so much that I suspect that I’m going to have to upgrade the hosting package for the sites as soon as Easter when ordinarily the upgrade that I did in December would have seen me through at least a year.

Although you can find that it’s arond the 700‚€ a week mark to rent a villa regardless of the season, many Spanish owners offer dramatic reductions in the price for long term rentals over the winter months.

For example, if you take a month long break in southern Spain, you can get quite a substantial villa for around the 600‚€ per month mark. Now, granted that doesn’t include food but it does include heating (which you’ll not need) and for a villa you’re effectively living there rather than in your own home ie you’ll be preparing most of your own meals rather than eating out so the price will be little different for meals in Spain than they would be if you were staying in your own house.

That lack of heating bills can make for quite a substantial saving taking the net cost down from 150‚€ per week to under 100‚€. This means that many pensioners are able to take up the winter in Spain option every year and with the increasing rise in “home working” it’s becoming a viable option for many more of us.

One thing that’s very noticeable in Valencia is that everywhere you see employment vacancy signs which implies quite a strong local economy.

As in other places in Spain there’s building work going on just about everywhere but it doesn’t seem so intrusive as it does in some cities (notably Madrid) with many quiet areas around the city. There’s more of a laid-back feel about the city too: everyone is certainly going somewhere yet they’re not going at the hectic pace you often see in Barcelona.

With the building work, there’s certainly money to be made in property speculation of course and the apartment we rented was owned by a relatively young Spaniard.

And the banks? It seemed like almost wall to wall banks in most of the central area of the city. Both more branches and a much wider variety of banks that I’ve seen anywhere outside London. They’re all competing for business too with many offers available on loans, credit cards and so on.

In times gone by TV shows appeared, ran for a season or two and you never saw them again.

It’s different now of course. There are repeats of shows on all the time but, of course, not always of your very favourite show that you’ve not seen for years. Because of that, there’s a small number of specialised DVD sales sites that gather together recordings of the various cult or semi-cult TV shows from the past and provide them at relatively low cost considering the number of hours of programming that some shows run to.

Funnily enough, the further you go back, the longer tend to be the series runs available for shows. So, way back in 1960 One Step Beyond ran for 98 episodes and even Lost in Space runs to 83 whereas Dark Skies only got to 20.

What you’ll not see on these places usually are the mainstream shows as the production companies put out the official DVDs of these themselves. The semi-cult shows that you see from these places are those that just don’t have the following that the production company would need to make it worthwhile rolling out a DVD release.