Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

The vast majority of the online catalogue shopping sites just plonk on one photo of each item of clothing. Even the better ones will only put a couple of photos of each item online.

Tobi is different. In addition to having several views of each item they go a lot further and include a whole series of combinations under The Brand Book which goes a long way to providing you with a consistent look and that’s before you even consider the editorial section which contains a whole mine of information. The blog will keep you up to date with the latest fashion trends too.

Naturally backing all this up is a massive catalogue of all the best clothing. Take for example the Nudie range. There you’ll find all the styles of Nudie jeans. If Nudie isn’t your thing, what about Seven for all Mankind?

Not enough for you? How about an online stylist to help you choose the clothes? That’s on offer too. In fact, I suspect there’s a whole lot more on offer that I’ve not discovered yet because this is a site designed to give you a very complete and enjoyable shopping experience along with providing an excellent range of clothing.

One noticeable difference in the bookings this year is that we’ve had a lot more Americans staying with us.

Americans, in general, only get two weeks vacation time each year which obviously has quite an impact on the type of holiday that they take. For one thing, it’s rare for a working American to take a holiday longer than two weeks and therefore they are, for the most part, channelled into taking package holidays as that’s the only way you can really pack a lot of sightseeing into a short period. Moreover that short period means that they tend to concentrate on the highlights of a country or group of countries (“doing” Europe is quite common) so typically they will consider that they’ve “done” France if they’ve been to Paris.

Therefore, normally, the long-stay Americans are either students on a back-packing type holiday to Europe or retired people. However, it’s been noticeably different this year and we’ve had both more Americans and more varied categories of Americans staying with us. The couple who have just left us today were normal working Americans for instance and moreover they are planning to return as they were both quite taken with the region (and us!).

After spending all that time looking around, we think it’s going to be a whole lot simpler and cheaper to go somewhere by car.

So, we’re restarting our search for a holiday destination yet again.

We don’t want to drive for days on end from here which limits us to a range of around six hours driving time or thereabouts. Thanks to the previous searching, we’ve ruled out the original northern locations and are instead looking south which simplifies the search process considerably.

All being well, we’re hoping to actually book somewhere today although we were also hoping to book somewhere last week too so you never know.

We’ve almost given up hope of getting flights to match the apartments/villas that we can find in Majorca.

For one thing, a lot of the self-catering places have specific days for checking in which means that the flight prices on those days are much higher than they are for the rest of the week. The effect of that is that we can’t run with a place that requires us to checkin on a specific day as we can’t afford the flights to get to it.

Then there’s the ongoing hassle of very little in the way of online booking for these places so we’ve to send off a heap of enquiries and wait ’til each place gets back to us which is a real pain.

On the plus side, at least the car hire is pretty cheap so we can add that on. Or can we? Given that it’s a peak holiday season I’m none too sure that we’ll be able to get a car which would, of course, affect the locations that would be viable for us for the villa.

Even before Schengen came into force, most of the borders around Europe had very little in the way of immigration control. Bit slow in getting out the passport? You were just waved on.

Yet, that doesn’t happen to some people apparently. One British/Russian couple are stopped at every border post and told that the wife needs to have a Schengen visa. How come?

Simple really. They offer up their passports at every border post and thereby give the border guards something to do. Everyone else just assumes that they’ve the right to go over the border and just keeps going anyway.