Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

You’re probably concentrating on Christmas at the moment but whilst you’re out and about doing your Christmas shopping, you should keep an eye on what’s available in the shops that would improve the look of your home as the sales will be starting shortly after Christmas is out of the way.

If you’ve picked out a few key shops you can easily find that you can get a lot more bits & bobs for your home than you’d manage by aimlessly wandering around the sales. Much better to target just a few shops as that way you’ll be there before the real bargains have been bought.

So, keep an eye out while you’re out!

Actually, this post is about none of those at all. They’re just some of the keywords that have been picked up recently by various news aggregation services that scan this blog so I can be fairly confident that this particular post will do well in terms of collecting inbound links for me.

The growth in news aggregators has led to a steady growth in the number of inbound links that I’ll collect for particular posts. Some are obvious: mention “Ireland” and I get picked up by the Irish blogs, “travel”, “credit” or “loans” and you get picked up by loads of financial aggregators. “Travel” is more hit and miss though as the travel aggregators tend to target particular destinations rather than “travel” in general.

“People search” is a peculiar one. Apparently it’s a very popular search term though I only came across it by chance.

I’m actually only throwing “sex” in for curiosity value. Rumour has it that it’s one of the most popular search terms on the Internet but, so far, I’ve never had a single inbound link from it!

Surprisingly, there are quite a number of blog aggregators which collect immigration information and it’s a topic that I touch on quite regularly.

Last, but not least, this particular post will mess with google’s algorithm in respect of this blog. Their algorithm relies on “natural” incoming links and this particular post will create quite a lot of them for me over the next few days. None will be paid for so on google’s argument they are legit incoming links which’ll boost my pagerank a little bit. Will any of them be  truly legitimate incoming links? Somehow, I doubt it.

It seems like ages since I’ve knocked airport security…

I bought a bunch of electronic gadjets whilst I was over in Belfast so figured that the best plan was to put all of it in a single case on the basis that it was sure to require some additional searching. What I’d not allowed for was that they’d want to search the other case too, hence almost 30 minutes in airport security resulting in me nearly missing the plane.

I should have went earlier I hear you say. Ah, but they wouldn’t let me into the security area any earlier. I went through as soon as I was allowed to as I knew that they need to do some additional searching of the case.

It really is getting qute crazy these days. Everyone is carrying more and more electonic bits & bobs but the airport security people just don’t seem to have moved on in being able to deal with it nor in their training as to what they should really be looking for. Despite the lady and gentleman making a slow and methodical search, they still missed checking two items which they should have checked (and, no, they weren’t small items either).

How come they missed them? Well, both items would have turned up on the scanner but the guy running the scanner doesn’t do the searching and so things are missed when they shouldn’t be.

I’ve been going back and forth to Northern Ireland for quite a while now but in the past year it’s started to change quite dramatically.

For instance, the elve taking the money for the Santa photos was Polish and just about all the waiters/waitresses in the hotel were Polish. In fact, Polish workers are seen just about everywhere in Northern Ireland now.

The immigration to Northern Ireland is probably more striking than it is elsewhere in the UK in that there was virtually no immigration to Northern Ireland as recently as three or four years ago. So far, it’s not really changed much about the province but I’m sure that’ll change as the new immigrants settle into live there and start wondering about a few of the peculiar things that go on.

If you’re travelling over the Christmas period and haven’t booked yet, then don’t hang around when you see a decent price as it’ll not be there for long.

Just about all the discount airlines operate load balancing software which means that as the plane fills up the prices rise automatically. Actually, it’s as the plane appears to be filling up that this happens so you shouldn’t constantly check the prices of a particular flight directly with the airline as this will have the effect of making the price rise.

Hotels aren’t so bad but the cheaper hotels and the cheaper rooms within a particular hotel tend to be booked first so the longer you leave it, the higher the price you’ll have to pay.

Buses usually don’t do this but those aimed at tourists tend to. For example, a route I priced recently has risen from the normal EUR 38 to EUR 134 this morning.

The one area where you’re usually OK is with trains but even if they don’t raise the prices (and many franchised lines will) they’ll fill up over the peak holiday seasons.