Foreign Perspectives

I got the Nikon SB600 flash as a Christmas present but have only just started using it a little bit.

Whilst the flash itself is light enough, adding in the four batteries makes for a pretty heavy chunk of gear to lug around when it’s attached to the camera itself. It’s an awful lot faster recycling than the on-camera flash with all those extra batteries and, of course, the more serious lamp that it has means that I should be able to use it much farther back from the action than I could with the oncamera flash.

I always think that people are incredibly optimistic about the ability of their little flash units on their compact cameras to illuminate entire stadiums sometimes. Still, at least it’s not so bad as it was in the good old days of film and they can just delete the image when it doesn’t turn out.

Must see about reading the instructions for this one at some stage as there’s lots of buttons and, of course, it links in with facilities on the camera too.

In theory this’ll get published right on the stroke of midnight but since I suspect that there’ll be quite a lot of people timing posts for that particular time I suspect that it’ll appear a little later.

Well, it’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?

When we kicked off the year we were in blissful ignorance of the money to be made from sponsored posts yet now it looks like it’ll be quite a substantial chunk of our income in due course and we’re making a point of branching out with new blogs these days. Meanwhile, our listings sites have gone from strength to strength will both rising numbers of entries and rapidly rising numbers of bookings for those listed too. We’ve even moved into online guides which’ll be a focus for 2008.

Marketing all the above has been something that we did much more actively in 2007 and it’s paid off rather well so we’ll be restarting that in January 2008.

What about Mas Camps? It’s still plugging along of course but we’re hoping to be moving to pastures new in the course of 2008. Where, we don’t yet know although we’re hoping that James will be starting in a new school in September so we hope to get things sorted before the summer is upon us.

I’ve picked up a university Diploma in Spanish which leaves me one more course to do in 2008 to complete my modern languages degree (one phrase I never expected to be using!).

The blog has achieved an unexpected level of popularity this year starting with it being featured all day on France24 the day following Chirac’s resignation speech and latterly being taken up by Reuters.

Thanks to our discovery of sponsored posts, we’ve branched out with a few new blogs during the year. Wendy’s now writing both Cultured Views and Mum’s Finance whilst I’ve added An Age of Magic and On a Postcard. Oh, and we have three family history blogs in the stable now for the Douglas, Hamilton and Stewart sides of our families which Wendy is actively researching these days.

On other fronts, the steady expansion of the listings sites continues apace with Inns4U being the latest addition to the stable and the first which includes both B&B and self-catering properties. In a related development we’ve been working on Whole Earth Guide which is our first travel guide site and which’ll be used by the listings site as their main guide to the various regions.

Somehow in all this I managed to pass the final exams for the Spanish segment of my modern languages degree and find myself with only one course to complete the degree.

Meanwhile James has managed to go through about a year and a half at a French school without uttering a single phase in French. That’ll complicate our lives somewhat this coming September as the new school won’t take non-French speakers.

Although you can find that it’s arond the 700‚€ a week mark to rent a villa regardless of the season, many Spanish owners offer dramatic reductions in the price for long term rentals over the winter months.

For example, if you take a month long break in southern Spain, you can get quite a substantial villa for around the 600‚€ per month mark. Now, granted that doesn’t include food but it does include heating (which you’ll not need) and for a villa you’re effectively living there rather than in your own home ie you’ll be preparing most of your own meals rather than eating out so the price will be little different for meals in Spain than they would be if you were staying in your own house.

That lack of heating bills can make for quite a substantial saving taking the net cost down from 150‚€ per week to under 100‚€. This means that many pensioners are able to take up the winter in Spain option every year and with the increasing rise in “home working” it’s becoming a viable option for many more of us.

One thing that’s very noticeable in Valencia is that everywhere you see employment vacancy signs which implies quite a strong local economy.

As in other places in Spain there’s building work going on just about everywhere but it doesn’t seem so intrusive as it does in some cities (notably Madrid) with many quiet areas around the city. There’s more of a laid-back feel about the city too: everyone is certainly going somewhere yet they’re not going at the hectic pace you often see in Barcelona.

With the building work, there’s certainly money to be made in property speculation of course and the apartment we rented was owned by a relatively young Spaniard.

And the banks? It seemed like almost wall to wall banks in most of the central area of the city. Both more branches and a much wider variety of banks that I’ve seen anywhere outside London. They’re all competing for business too with many offers available on loans, credit cards and so on.