Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

For the most part, Americans tend to take what seem like peculiar holidays when they come to Europe.

Americans usually have the limitation that they only get two weeks vacation time per year which is something of a downer compared to the five or six week norm throughout Europe. However, in a two week holiday, Europeans almost always stay in a single resort be that in a European country or even in America and they don’t travel terribly far from that base during their vacation time.

Americans on the other hand come to Europe for two weeks and try to take in several different countries in that time. Typically they will spend a few days in London to “do” England, head over to France to spend a few days “doing” Paris before moving on perhaps to see the Normandy beaches before heading off for Rome or where-ever.

OK, to be fair the Europeans may well take several two week holidays per year and thereby they can get to see quite a bit of the world in the course of a year if they choose to do that (although many head to the same resort every year).

Americans tend to lose out a lot with their style of holiday-making in that they get a very cursory view of everywhere that they go and this is accentuated even more when they go on packaged holidays: the tour bus only stops for the minimum amount of time to see the highlights in each place so that, for example, in Versailles they’ll see the exquisite apartments but usually won’t see much of the magnificent gardens.

It would be much better if they tried a middle ground and concentrated on one country or even one area of one country. For example, Paris and Britanny/Normandy make a nice two week trip with a varied mix of city and scenic periods.

We didn’t make it to Geneva this weekend for all sorts of reasons so we’re aiming for next week now.

That means that we’ll have a whole lot more time to play with as the kids are on holiday so we’re thinking of something like a five or six day trip. Same starting point, so all being well we’ll be in Geneva next Friday evening and that’ll be our starting point for the tour.

As for this weekend, the plan is to see Geneva on Saturday and probably end up in Lausanne that evening. Then it changes as we could head on up to Bern, possibly on up to Zurich (haven’t looked at the guidebooks so I don’t know if that’s worth the trip) or possibly in the other direction towards Zermatt and perhaps swinging down via Austria to Venice before heading for home.

The distances above are reasonable but I will have to have a good look at the guidebook to see what’s worth seeing along the way.

One of the terms of service of PayPerPost is that you must have a non-sponsored post either side of one of the sponsored posts. The non-sponsored post can’t, of course, be sponsored by anyone.

That’s a sensible rule as otherwise their sponsored posts would end up largely in purely advertising blogs which would mean, in due course, that they’d only be taken by commercial outfits. There are already fully commercial blogs of course in that various companies write them but, so far, none that I know of which are purely advertising from the likes of PPP.

However, one problem that we’ve started to run into is that because we’ve a number of other websites they’re rejecting posts where the “normal” post is promoting one of our own sites! Are they sponsored? I don’t think so because we certainly don’t pay ourselves to write them.

Wendy’s even had one or two rejected when she’s written about a college of music as a normal post. That’s definitely not sponsored as nobody paid her for it nor does she have any commercial connection with them.

Still, ’tis nice to see that this is pretty much the only type of rejection that we’ve both been getting lately. It’s a sign that we’re finally getting into the swing of it.

Funnily enough this particular post is tagged “sponsored” because it’s about sponsorship but, honestly, Mr/Ms PPP it wasn’t sponsored!

We have been incredibly lazy over here on the whole but we’re planning on getting back into the swing of Tai Chi and Tai Combat in the not overlly distant future.

The snag is that when you’ve had a bit of a break from it, it can be quite extremely difficult to get yourself fired up to do exercise classes or even the thought of them for that matter. Not only that, but it’s obviously pretty crazy to start straight into a class at the gym when you’ve not done any serious exercise for a while.

So, the game plan is to ease ourselves back into it again and to start with we’ve already started on a little bit of hill walking which, much to our surprise, didn’t finish us off. After that, we’re going to work up via the treadmills and other machines to a nice gentle class to begin with (definitely not Tai Combat!).

Most of the time it seems to be Eastern Time, the time on the east coast of America at the moment, at least for us.

However, it is something of a problem as in the 24 hour world of the Internet the time zone used most of the time tends to be in America as that’s where the bulk of the commercial Internet places appear to be. Want web hosting? If you don’t read the small print then chances are your hosting will be somewhere in America which will make quite a difference to the hits that you get if your main customer base is in Europe (the difference can be as much as 10 fold!).

OK, so we might be in a 24/7 world but few offices actually work those hours. Why would they?

Still, it does make quite a difference to us at the moment in that PayPerPost is based in Miami and seems to work roughly 0900 to 1700 Miami time which works out as 1400 to 2300 our time and that’s the timeframe when the paid post opportunities come online. Our original tactic of doing the posts in the morning meant that we effectively got the left-overs from the night before but now that we’ve moved closer to Miami time in our postings, we get a whole lot more money for the same amount of effort.