Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

We dithered around too long with the decision on Aarhus and the flight prices went against us which is a shame as it looks like a seriously cute place to be at Christmas.

Therefore, we’re back to our original thought which is of Baden-Baden in southern Germany. That has the advantage of having loads of choice in terms of hotels so the prices are lower than we’d expected to be paying. It’s also in Germany so we should get to see some of the famous German Christmas markets.

Now, “all” we have to do is to check out the flight prices one final time before we hit the “book it” button…

We’ve sort-of decided on Aarhus in Denmark for our Christmas break. Let’s face it, how much more Christmasy could a place look than that in the photo (of Den Gamle By, the open air museum of historic Denmark that’s in the town)?

It also fulfills our criteria of being walkable, having enough to do for a few days, “doing” Christmas and, as I say, it even looks Christmasy.

Normally, we’d book the flights first then look for a hotel but as it’s Christmas we’re checking that there is a suitable hotel before we book the flights this time as it’s easy to be caught out at peak periods like that.

Our car was totalled way back on May 23rd when a plonker in a tractor drove right into the side of it and we’ve been trying to collect on the insurance from GAN ever since.

The reason for a lot of the delay is that the “expert” appointed by the insurance company never gets back to us in response to our queries. We bought the car for around 9000 in July 2005 and their offer in June 2007 was 3800. Now, I’ll grant you that we had a lot of use out of it running up over 70,000 km but it was running fine and we’d no intention of replacing.

In fact, the “expert” is quoting the commercial value for the car whereas, of course, the value that’s relevant is the retail value ie what it would cost to replace with a similar car (ie same age and so on).

Oh, and there’s the matter of the car rental bill that we have for getting on for four months rental.

Probably one of the most neglected aspects of immigration or indeed moving in general is labelling your stuff and yet it can be a major pain if you don’t do it sensibly upfront as most of us don’t quite manage to unpack everything after we’ve moved. Yeah, perhaps we should clear out some more first but realistically who does that?

Unless you’re moving to an identical house then there’s not much point in trying to label things going by the room they’re going to finish up in as chances are they’ll end up somewhere else. Aside from that, you’re more likely to remember packing the stuff in a particular room before you move than “remember” where it’s going to end up.

Ideally you’d do a proper inventory before you start the packing so you could create a nifty database to tell you where everything is packed but that’s hardly viable for most of us. Therefore the best option is probably a middle ground ie try to pack the boxes in a reasonably logical manner and keep a little book recording any additional information that you can.

Believe me, that’ll save you endless head-scratching at the other end!

We’re now at the point where we have cut down the various options to two, namely Aarhus in Denmark and Baden-Baden in Germany.

Which will it be?

Baden-Baden is in the Black Forest and is a spa resort town. Other than the spa there’ll be the famous German Christmas markets of course but there doesn’t seem a whole lot else in the town. That doesn’t really matter though as we’re only going for a few days.

Aarhus is the second city in Denmark. It looks like it has a few things to do in the city centre, notably an Olde Denmark area which looks quite interesting plus there’s a theme park in the area too. Downside is that the days will be pretty short up there at that time of year and, of course, it’ll be darned cold.

Both are in the running at the moment but we’ll need to be quick before the flight prices go up much more and we’ve to sort out a hotel too.