Foreign Perspectives

It’s been a long, long time since I was in New York and so it’s time that I was starting to consider it for a future trip once again.

Funnily enough a flight to New York these days costs much the same as it did when I went the last time way back in the 1980s and, if you’re careful, you can even get it cheaper than it was then! Not only that, but with the dollar being so low (or is it the pound so high?), even the hotels are pretty much at the same prices so overall the holiday would easily come out well below the price from 20 years back.

The city has changed a lot over that time. For one thing the Statue of Liberty isn’t shrouded in scaffolding as it was when I was there, the Twin Towers aren’t there any more and I gather that the city has been cleaned up considerably too thanks to a series of zero tolerance programmes over the intervening years.

Shopping is a “big thing” in any New York trip of course. Sadly, they still don’t actually do breakfast at Tiffany’s but it’s a beautiful store to wander around and whilst there’s an awful lot of stuff there at serious prices there are also many items that you can pick up at very sensible prices. Aside from there, you shouldn’t miss the likes of Macy’s.

Given the prices of both flights and hotels, it’s definitely a great time to be considering a trip to New York.

I’m something of an addict to browsing university prospectuses though sometimes it’s quite a while between getting the thing and getting around to signing up for a course. Last time it was all the way from picking up a prospectus around 1985 to starting a course in 2002!

At the moment I’m plugging away with a child development course which means that my next logical one is notionally the exploring psychology course which I’d have started last October were it not for the overlap with the final course for the modern languages degree. However, there’s an even worse overlap this year so I’m going to create a gap for myself by not starting the psychology course ’til October 2010 (with probably a little course popped into the first half of that year).

However, for a change, I’ve been looking much further ahead than I usually do and browsing the postgraduate prospectus which has a rather interesting little MSc in psychology that in turn leads on to a PhD.

Crazy, eh? Still, ’twas crazy talk like that which got me from “speaking a little French” to finishing off an honours degree in modern languages.

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.

South Africa has been out of the question as a vacation destination for a long time but has quietly been getting promoted as a destination for a while now so there’s quite a lot of moderately underused tourist infrastructure.

The country itself is vast and with an equally wide range of attractions so you’d need to be selective. Many of you will still be considering it as a safari type destination but there are major cities dotted around the country each with their own attractions and, of course, there are untold numbers of beaches around the coastline.

So great are the number of attractions that it’s one of those places that you should pencil in for repeat visits over the years. If nothing else, flights to South Africa will be sure to drop in price as the number of tourists grows.

Photo copyright South African Tourism

If you or your kids count as being students then don’t neglect the massive number of student discounts that are around these days.

One of the most valuable but probably least well known about are the software offers from Microsoft. Through these you can generally pick up software at anything up to 90% discount on the normal prices. These are genuine discounts too as it’s the full version of the software that you get. To confuse things they change how you apply for this offer each year so, for example, last year you needed to have a student e-mail address whereas in other years it was a student number. Part-time students count too as do school children and teachers.

Your students union card is worth having too. In my case it counts for discounts of 5% to 20% in a wide range of shops. For example, there’s 5% off and free delivery on Amazon orders, free fries in McDonalds, 10-20% off in New Look shops and lots more. That’s from the NUS Extra card but if that’s not enough you can also get the international student card if you’re classed as a full-time student (which, confusingly, also includes part-time students if they’re doing course totalling 60 points or more).

Definitely worth looking into if you’re a student.