Foreign Perspectives

We’re now at the point where we have cut down the various options to two, namely Aarhus in Denmark and Baden-Baden in Germany.

Which will it be?

Baden-Baden is in the Black Forest and is a spa resort town. Other than the spa there’ll be the famous German Christmas markets of course but there doesn’t seem a whole lot else in the town. That doesn’t really matter though as we’re only going for a few days.

Aarhus is the second city in Denmark. It looks like it has a few things to do in the city centre, notably an Olde Denmark area which looks quite interesting plus there’s a theme park in the area too. Downside is that the days will be pretty short up there at that time of year and, of course, it’ll be darned cold.

Both are in the running at the moment but we’ll need to be quick before the flight prices go up much more and we’ve to sort out a hotel too.

James started in the local nursery school in September last year as the only non-French child.

When you look at any of the “moving to France” TV series, no matter what the age, the kids are put into the local school and are fluent in about three months. Over a year down the line, James uses single french words now and again but never a complete phrase. How come?

Ironically, I think it’s an aspect of them being helpful from the start in putting him in a class with the teacher who speaks a little english (they’ve even moved her up to the next class with him). The effect of that was that the children started speaking english which, of course, meant that he didn’t need to speak any french, so he didn’t.

Unfortunately, that’s going to mean that next year they will surely refuse him entry to the primary school and instead will insist that he goes to the CIPPA class in Perpignan. That’s simply not viable as you could hardly expect a six year old to negotiate two buses plus cross a very busy road by himself and besides it’s a class for 16 to 18 year olds who already speak french.

All this, of course, creates something of a problem for us as from September next year.

When Wendy started off her blog we just used the domain wendyreid.org for it as we already had that registered.

That was back in February but by the Summer she was well into writing paid posts and it seemed like a good idea to a) be using a dotcom domain and b) using one that was related to the blog content too.

Why the dotcom? That’s because a number of the paid post opportunities specify that you have a dotcom and therefore moving to one would increase the number available to her. Also, and related to that, for reasons that are far from clear a dotcom is better than a dotorg in terms of search engine positioning (which is why we’re also in the process of moving Our Inns to Inns4U).

Having the blog name related to the content is just a sensible thing anyway but it also helps for those paid posting sites where the advertiser chooses the blog.

Anyway, we registered Cultured Views and aliased it with the existing wendyreid.org domain so you can access the content by using either domain. Then we started telling the various sites that she’s signed up with.

No problem ’til we did PayPerPost. When we did that, the number of available opportunities dropped like a stone. Although nothing had really changed about the blog, they took the current pagerank of the new domain and used that to filter the opportunities. Naturally, that was PR0 therefore there were next to none available. So we asked them to change it back ’til we managed to transfer the pagerank over.

Ironically, just about the same time as the pagerank transferred over, somebody else in ppp noticed that the blog didn’t match the domain and changed it back. Well, tried to because they didn’t do it properly and Wendy’s not been able to post anything with them for days.

Finally, they replied to her support ticket and the guy said he’d changed everything including the URLs quoted in the past…. to culturedreviews.com. So she still can’t post anything! Perhaps they’ll get it 100% this time around.

I’m toying with the idea of doing a degree in english language & literature so I thought I’d have an initial look at some of the books for the first of the literature courses as I’ve already read all but one of the english language books for the degree.

The first of these is Jane Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea which I just finished the other day.

It was written in the 1940’s and it’s set in the Jamaica of 1830 ie just after slavery was abolished and consists essentially of a few incidents that happen to a family in that era from three different viewpoints.

The first thing that’s perhaps most striking to the modern reader is the sheer number of things that are deemed to require footnotes as explanation. Ordinarily that would say to me that this isn’t a book that can stand on its own and indeed it doesn’t because it takes characters from Jane Eyre and develops them more fully. But it isn’t that which hit me. It was that they felt that things such as “mango” needed an explanation yet today they are commonplace items in supermarkets.

It’s also written in quite an antiquated fashion with effectively three “chapters” to the book which itself is quite short (120 odd pages) compared to modern novels. I’m sure that it’s terribly presumptious of me, but I didn’t think that it was terribly well written.

Still, it wasn’t anything like the hard slog that I thought it might have been and I’m well into the next book, Pygmalion, which, so far, isn’t bad either.

The whole idea behind the common market, or European Union as we call it these days, was that borders between the countries participating would gradually cease to exist and, for the most part, that has been gradually happening over the last 20 or 30 years. How come then there’s almost always a queue at the border crossing between Spain and France then?

I used to think that it was just a case of “jobs for the boys” until I saw a number of cars and caravans being pretty much taken apart by the customs guys. Presumably they’re enforcing some import control then? Perhaps, but then anything that you can legally buy in Spain can be legally taken to France.

Whatever they’re doing it certainly causes major problems in the Summer when the queues of cars can reach right back to the toll booth (abour 6 kilometres!) and the hill leading up to the customs post is littered with cars that have overheated and had to pull in off the road.