Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

We had a lovely day out at Tollymore forest park at the weekend (or “on the weekend” as Wendy says: is that an Australian thing?) and managed to get round almost all of one of the longer walks that they have marked out. Actually, as it turned out we could easily have it round the whole walk but we the legs of the little guys were wearing out and we didn’t know just how little farther we needed to go to reach the turn around point.

With turning round though we had the benefit of seeing one of the true posers of the hiking fraternity. This guy was jogging off with a backpack on his back and another on his front and looked suitably impressive as he set off. Our turn around made it obvious that he was just trying to impress as he was back in about 20 minutes!

So don’t let the fully equipped guys put you off getting some exercise over the Easter break: our four year old managed a lot more distance than he did before his legs started to run out.

Yes, it’s the time of year when all good bloggers write a time-delayed post to totally clog up the Internet…

What happened last year? Well, the world economy took a definite turn for the worst as y’all know. We were expecting that to hit us bad but what it did in practice was to change the nationality mix which we normally get over the summer from Brits/French to German/Dutch/Danish/French and generally lengthened the average stay which in turn bumped up the profitability. Somehow I fancy that the economic downturn won’t be quite so benign on the travel industry over the coming year.

I did what was supposedly the hardest course in the university as the final one for my modern language degree and found it to be the easiest one that I’ve yet done. The net effect of that is that I had a considerably easier finish to the degree than expected and picked up my BA (Hons) Modern Languages in December. For next year, I’ve already signed up for a course on Child Development which is notionally the first one in my psychology degree although I’m really only doing it to help with looking after the little guys.

Although the last five years have been great here for the kids, now that their school life is getting underway we’re finding that the French education system locally just isn’t up to dealing adequately with non-French children. As we’d expected from comments last year James isn’t doing at all well in the local French primary school.

For a whole bunch of reasons we find ourselves in the process of moving to a France/UK split for our lives at the moment whereby we’ll be in the UK September to June and in France July and August. That will let us get James’ and John’s education back on track and should help neutralise any sustained downturn in the economy too.

If nothing else, the coming year will be an “interesting” period to come for us.

Most of the booking websites provide a mechanism for guests to comment on and score the performance of the accommodation which they’ve used recently.

In most cases the comments are approved by the booking site before they’re published so you only get to see the relatively sensible ones as they weed out those that are from another planet. For example, the commentary that we received a year ago that criticised the “ancient boxy hairdryer” in the bathroom; in fact it was a reasonably modern room heater. Or the couple that wrote quite an extensive critique of their stay that rarely touched base with reality and for which it turned out that all their problems stemmed from them not having changing the time on their watch.

However, as well as the commentary there’s generally a scoring system in place which can sometimes have quite bizzare numerical effects. For example, on one site we’ve the vast majority of scores 7 and over yet because of two 2.5s from a single group we end up with an overall 5. It’s scoring bias like that which makes a nonsense of the scoring. In a large hotel with hundreds of comments one or two low scores disappear of course but when you’ve only a few dozen comments just one disgruntled customer can really throw the overall result.