Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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!

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.