Foreign Perspectives

Sony is one company that continually plows its own furrow in terms of standards and had done so for many years.

All through the era of the VHS-C standard, they kept producing their own Hi-8 camcorders and throughout the price of the corresponding tapes remained higher than the equivalent VHS-C tapes. Now, in those days they could argue that the Hi-8 tapes were better quality but that doesn’t apply in the digital era.

They continue to stick with the memory stick on their cameras when everyone else has mainly gone down the SD route. It’s certainly not the case that the memory stick memory is “better” in some ways than the SD cards yet the price is around three to four times! Yes, for what you’ll pay for a 1GB memory stick you’ll get 4GB worth of SD cards.

If you think that British ATMs are complicated beasties, you should look at some of the Spanish ones.

For one thing, they’re easily twice the size of the UK ones. That’s not because they’re ancient but because they have seemingly millions of different functions. Whereas in the UK, a bank ATM has basically three slots (card, money and receipt) and a UK building society machine adds two extra slots to deal with deposits, the Spanish variety has all kinds of slots and it takes a few seconds even to find where you’ve to stick your card in.

These days ATMs are quite sophisticated and generally work out what language you speak from the card you’ve inserted rather than asking you which language you’d like. However, that’s frequently a step too far when it’s an expat wielding the card as you may well not be using a card from your own country when you’re on holiday or just travelling.

It’s certainly something that the French machines don’t allow for. The machines usually ask you what language you want but revert to French if you use a French card regardless of which language you select!

We received an interesting e-mail from one of the European offices looking after consumer affairs last night.

They’re writing on behalf of a Spanish couple who booked with us last July but who didn’t turn up.

Ordinarly, that would mean we’d have billed them as a no-show but at the time the booking system had a technical problem so we weren’t receiving their reservation e-mails and therefore didn’t know that they were coming. Anyway, net effect was that we didn’t charge them although under the terms of the reservation system we were entitled to.

They’ve gone to this European office with their booking confirmation that has a note of the two nights booked and EUR 98 charge. Except, that it isn’t a change: it’s just a note of what they would have to pay.

The Spanish guy in the European office doesn’t understand that at all. They quoted their credit card number and they’ve a statement with EUR 98 on it, they didn’t get their accommodation (because they went to the wrong place) but he believes that they’ve paid it as do they.

Usually the Spanish are much more Internet-savvy than the French but in this area they’re just as far behind in that they assume that they’ve paid when they quote a credit card number yet it’s only used for a guarantee.

I suspect that it’ll run for a bit as he sent another e-mail this morning threatening to translate everything and sent it to the French consumer protection authorities to demand the refund of this EUR 98 which they’ve not paid.

Although we’d quite like to go to see the German Christmas markets at some point, it’s obviously going to be pretty cold where-ever we go in Germany.

That being the case, we’re also looking towards the south and Rome sounds like a place that would be pretty much ideal at that time. Christmas clearly would be a “big thing” there of course but there’s always lots to see in Rome at any time of year and it’s going to be quite a bit warmer than Germany too.

I thought that it would have cost a fortune to do Rome at Christmas but I was wrong and flights are available for around £20 a few days ago (they’ve jumped to £50 now) plus hotels in the centre are still quite reasonable.

We’ve also got Switzerland in the frame too though Wendy’s a bit worried about snow on the roads if we were to head into the mountains which you pretty much have to do in Switzerland.

We’ve been hunting around for somewhere to go for Christmas for quite a while now and consequently have been quizzing everyone who’s came about where they lived and what it was like there at Christmas. That included several Germans, of course. However, to be quite honest we thought that they were pulling our legs when they said Dresden and Nuremburg! But then the second lot said Dresden too and we started to wonder: let’s face it, who would visit Dresden seeing as it was pretty much levelled in the war?

In fact, just about all of those perceptions that you have about it are wrong. We’ve certainly been reliably informed that it’s “the” place to go for the German Christmas markets and that it’s one of the livelier cities in Germany these days.

Why not check it out? Air Berlin do direct flights from London Stansted and from loads of other airports all across Europe.