Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

One of the things that we considered doing was flying somewhere for the short break that we had last week rather than driving there.

Now, on the face of it, you’d think that with all the cheapo flight offers these days it would bound to be cheaper to fly. After all, you can get to loads of places for £10 including taxes these days.

However, even when you look at flight prices including taxes and so on there are many non-flight charges to take into account. For one thing, if you fly, you need to get to the airport at home and park your car which isn’t cheap (£10 a day at least). Then you need to get to the hotel at the other end which’ll either involve a taxi or car hire. Even on an optimistic view for a family of four that’s £40 for flights, £70 for parking and around £30 for a taxi ie £140 just for transport.

Last, but often not least, taking your own car means lots more space to pack stuff and flexibility in departure time too.

Certainly if you’re travelling any sizeable distance in Europe you’d need to add in the tolls (around £100 for a round-trip across France for example) and probably a similar amount for petrol but if you’re just taking a short break to Brittany or Normandy it’s almost certainly going to be cheaper to take the car.

We’re just back from a spin round Switzerland which took in stops in Geneva, Interlaken and Zermatt so expect to see “some” posts about the trip over the next week or two.

One thing I’d not realised during our last trip to Switzerland is that the waterjet isn’t actually on all of the time and ordinarily runs from 10am through to 10pm. It’s also off for three straight weeks in November for maintenance each year. Funnily enough there aren’t that many photos of it that include the rainbow that you see here yet, of course, it’s visible every day that the sun’s out if you’re standing in the right spot.

Something that might catch you out too is that there are very few ATMs in Geneva in comparison to other major cities around the world.

Anyway, more anon.

We’ve got our Danish group back again this evening.

It’s an interesting aspect of the development of our bookings that we are starting to get picked out by tour groups this year. This’ll be the fifth time that the Danish tour leader will have been here on one of her New Age tours taking in this region. It seems to be quite a popular area for that type of tour, this particular one having a Mary Magdelene theme.

Anyway, that’ll keep us pretty busy this evening as they want meals through to lunchtime tomorrow.

Not really a milestone like 1000 or anything like that but it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was struggling to get into triple figures with the posts and now four figures is a milestone that seems to be looming up very fast indeed.

Of course, it was quite different in the days of the first 100 posts as the blog was primarily a means of letting friends & family know what we were getting up to each week. Just one post a week was a hard enough target to meet sometimes yet several times recently I’ve manage 18 posts in a day!

Starting towards the end of the Summer of 2006 that changed somewhat as we moved to ForeignPerspectives.com and the content became much more general as we moved into the Winter of that year.

The latest change has, of course, been our discovery that people will pay us to write stuff which is what’s really taken the number of posts up, particularly since July of this year.

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….