Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

We’ve been hunting around for somewhere to go for Christmas for quite a while now and consequently have been quizzing everyone who’s came about where they lived and what it was like there at Christmas. That included several Germans, of course. However, to be quite honest we thought that they were pulling our legs when they said Dresden and Nuremburg! But then the second lot said Dresden too and we started to wonder: let’s face it, who would visit Dresden seeing as it was pretty much levelled in the war?

In fact, just about all of those perceptions that you have about it are wrong. We’ve certainly been reliably informed that it’s “the” place to go for the German Christmas markets and that it’s one of the livelier cities in Germany these days.

Why not check it out? Air Berlin do direct flights from London Stansted and from loads of other airports all across Europe.

Don’t you just hate it when there’s some daft validation check applied to what you want to enter in a form?

Despite many years of crazy assumptions being made by programmers and analysts, they still happen.

France, as always, heads the list though. It’s impossible to enter the date you got your driving license if it was before you were 18 as that’s the earliest you can get it in France. Applying for a job? Well, you’ll need a reference number to do it that you can’t get until after you’ve got a job!

In a similar category there’s the seemingly pathetic software testing that’s done these days. The reason why there haven’t been any posts from PayPerPost here lately is because they’ve updated their software and it’s not currently possible to submit entries to them! I suspect that the advertisers are having problems with them too as whilst it’s normally 200+ opportunities to select from, there’s only about 100 on at the moment.

If you’re like me and fancy a holiday overseas every year then you’ve probably considered either timeshare or buying a place for yourself.

The problem with both is that you’re effectively tied to taking a holiday in the same place every year if you do that and if you’ve gone as far as buying a place that involves a good deal of hassle too from paying electric bills for the place to ensuring that it’s not vandalised whilst you’re away from it.

Buena Viva Exeter offers most of the advantages of having your own place but without those downsides. Essentially it operates through you buying a number of points which you can use each year to get a week or more in one of their resorts which are in pretty much all of the popular locations around the world. The system operates in a similar fashion to a lease in that you can use the points every year for the next 40 years.

Choices include a raft of places in Spain in the likes of the Costa del Sol and further afield in Florida and indeed Australia.

With the rapid rise of the Catalán language just over the border in Spain the problems in communication with those coming north have been magnified considerably.

Starting earlier this year we began to receive guests from “Spain” who could barely speak French or English and simply refused to speak Spanish. Since we don’t speak Catalán we’re increasingly finding ourselves pretty much resorting to sign language with some of them.

Aside from anything else, that makes sending out of our acknowledgement e-mail something of a problem. The majority of those coming from south of the border are from Barcelona and that’s a very cosmopolitan city with Spanish from all over the country and indeed Latin America living there but obviously with a large Catalán component. The only language that we know they all speak is Spanish yet sending out an acknowledgement e-mail in Spanish will clearly insult the Cataláns.

The net effect is that we’re considering calling it a day with e-mails to Spain yet that causes complications for them and in fact we’ve already received a complaint from one Catalán couple (in English, as they won’t write in Spanish and nobody outside Spain can understand Catalán) because they say we were closed the night they’d booked. In fact, because they’d refused to read the directions e-mailed to them in Spanish, they were banging on the door of our neighbour’s house and he was off on holiday.

There seems to be something of a drift from issuing Visa cards to issuing Mastercards in the UK at the moment thereby reversing the previous trend which was to only issue Visa cards.

Although it doesn’t really matter which you have in the UK, it can matter a lot when you go on holiday and generally it’s best to be carrying both Visa and Mastercard abroad. In that respect the switch of my Halifax Visa card to a Mastercard suits me as that gives me a Mastercard credit card from them and a Visa debit card but others could easily find themselves with a Maestro card and a Mastercard which isn’t a good combination as Maestro isn’t nearly as useful as Visa debit and you’re left with two cards on the same system which isn’t good either.

Not a catastrophe for sure but do make sure that you have both varieties of card handy well in advance of your next holiday.