Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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.

Buying from a specialised shop often means that you pay a little more for the same product than you would from a supermarket. After all, the supermarket operates on the basis of “pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap” which is an excellent way to go for standard items like beans and whatnot.

However, move into a specialised area like sat nav and you sometimes need that little bit of expertise even when you’re sure that you know what you’re doing.

For example, we bought a TomTom on Christmas Eve in El Corte Ingles. That’s a fairly upmarket department store and therefore there are specialised departments for such things so it’s effectively in-between the supermarkets and the specialised stores. In practice, they were quite happily selling units that had a fault. Fair enough, they obviously can’t go around opening all the boxes and testing them but any that were returned went straight back on the shelf to be sold again. Stupid, eh?

So, we returned that one and bought the next model “up” in a supermarket for ‚€20 more. Unfortunately, although the shop was close to the French border they are piled high with models that can’t be used in both Spain and France as it’s the one model from the range that doesn’t use a memory card (which isn’t obvious as they cover up the relevant information on the box with their security label). So, we’ve to return to Spain this week to see about getting a refund for that too.

Perhaps we’ll get one third time around!

We’re just back from a very packed short Christmas break to Valencia.

What we’d not allowed for was that, of course, Christmas takes out several days from the time available as there’s Christmas Day itself and then there’s the Christmas shopping, etc. Anyway, net effect is that we’ve heaps of stuff to see when we go back there the next time.

The apartment that we stayed in was right in the centre with just a short walk taking us to the massive eight floor Corte Ingles department store and the almost as large shopping centre just behind it. Just beyond that were the arts & sciences museums that you can see in the photo.

By chance the Titanic exhibition was on so we started off with that. It takes a couple of hours to go round and goes into often tedious detail about maybe a couple of dozen of the passengers but skimps on other areas where you might like more detail eg there’s just the one short segment on how come they ran into the iceberg.

Next up was the Museo de la Ciencias (on the right of the photo). It’s one of those hands on interactive museums so sounds pretty good for the kids but in fact there’s very little on offer for children who are younger than mid-teens and even then we found that an awful lot of the exhibits weren’t operational. I suspect that the Hemispheric would be a better bet as it’s based on a series of IMAX shows though whether you’d want to stay there the whole day I don’t know.

We’d also a very brief trip round the old part of the city which we’d liked to have spent a lot more time on and will do next time around.

Definitely a city very suitable for a short-break.

Whilst the principle of going on holiday over Christmas sounds nice, the reality is often different.

You’ve to content with the traffic jams on the roads in and out of towns for a start which can easily add hours to your travel time before you even get onto the open road.

Then there’s the business of booking travel components.  Whilst there are a lot of people going on holiday around this time, there aren’t nearly the numbers that you get in the summer peaks. However, the winding down of everyone towards their Christmas break means that if there are problems then they aren’t always fixable. For example, you’ll frequently find a discrepancy between the availability as displayed online, in ticket booths and in automated ticket sales machines. Just today the message was “no seats available” in two out of three outlets.

And, of course, there’s the business of closures over the Christmas period. If you’re going to somewhere that you’ve not been to before over this period it’s often far from clear what’ll be open and what’ll be closed.

Don’t let all these complications put you off a Christmas break though. Just make sure that you do your research in advance so you aren’t surprised when something essential for you isn’t operating over Christmas.

If you’re upgrading the look and feel of your home it’s important to do it in a consistent way to avoid the impression that it’s just been splattered with various bits & pieces that you’ve come across by chance over the years.

The longer you’ve been living in a house, the more likely that effect is going to gradually creep into various rooms and therefore now and again you need to stand back and review what’s happened in terms of the look of your home overall and of each room individually. That’s not to say that every room needs to be done in the same style as every other room but rather that the look should flow through your home.

So, for example, it’s fine to have an olde worlde look to your bedroom with antique furniture throughout but a much more high-tech look to your living room might well be more appropriate if you’ve collected a lot of gadjets there as many of us have. Antique furtniture with flat screen TVs and computers is a look that needs a lot of care if you want it to work and it’s probably simpler to run with a modern look if you want something consistent.

You can even carry the feel of your garden part-way into your house by way of a conservatory perhaps with hanging wrought-iron baskets of plants or marble pedestals for them depending on the style you’ve used around the garden.