Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

We’ve our first hotel booked in Geneva and it’s cheap enough though that’s because it’s just outside Geneva and is actually in France. In fact, it’s quite common for expats working in Geneva to live in France simply because it’s so much cheaper.

That’s not an option for our second stop as Interlaken is right in the middle of Switzerland.

What’s particularly surprising to me are the child policies and non-ensuite rooms. Switzerland has the image of being a very child friendly place but many of the Interlaken hotels rule themselves out for us by charging up to SF30 per child whereas elsewhere it’s common for children to be free. Also, shared bathrooms are commonplace whereas elsewhere in the world ensuite rooms are very much the norm.

Still, we’re still looking….

We just had one of these days when everything seemed to go just right.

To begin with, we’d some people drop in who might be interested in buying our place. Early days yet I’m sure but at least they seemed to be making all of the right noises.

Then we realised that we were going to have a problem with our Swiss trip this Friday as the car insurance would run out in the middle of it. So we called the previous insurer and they, for once, came up with the goods in terms of the certificate that we needed to hand to the new guys.

Next problem was that the car needed re-registered as that had already run out. Off to the garage and they not only handed us the new papers but had the new license plates on as well within 30 minutes.

Onward to the new insurers with all the paperwork and we didn’t even have to queue!

Finally, we’ve managed to close our place down without somebody booking when we want to be away ourselves.

Oh, and we’ve even got ourselves booked into a lovely place just outside Geneva which we thought would have been gone by now!

Although, hopefully, we will be off to Switzerland this Friday, we’re definitely going to be heading for Barcelona in about two weeks.

Yeah, I know, sounds like the life of a jet-setter but I can assure you that we’re definitely not in the jet-setting crowd! In fact, we usually end up eating in McDonalds when we’re in Barcelona which doesn’t strike me as being a hangout for the jetset to me.

However, in that this time we know a couple of weeks in advance that we’re going to some research to find a more suitable Barcelona restaurant in advance. If nothing else, I’m sure that we can do a whole lot better than McDonalds with even a few minutes research. Who knows, perhaps we’ll find out which restaurant that the jetset go to and stare in the windows whilst we’re eating our Big Mac 🙂

We’ve decided to put off our Tuesday Trip this week in that we’re hoping to get away to Switzerland for 5 or 6 days from this Friday.

Hoping I say because we are still waiting for a paper from the old insurance company which’ll let us get the car insured. Without that, I don’t know that we’ll be able to go, although if that happens, we will most definitely be making a trip early in the coming week to the old insurance company where we’ll be sitting until the paper is produced.

Snag is that this coming week is the only real time-slot for the Swiss trip as James’ school is on vacation.

By special request from juniors 1 & 2 we bought them a “ladder-bed” (ie bunk bed) which just arrived this morning.

Junior 2 supervised the assembly whilst junior 1 was at school.

Of course, now that it is here, the question is: who is getting to be on the top bunk?

Now, you might think that it would be best to have the eldest on top but in trials in hotels that has resulted in him falling out as he engages the legs well before he’s awake enough to control them whilst the little guy generally stays in bed until he’s actually awake.

Still, at least it’s not so far to fall from this one!