Foreign Perspectives

With the rapid rise of the Catalán language just over the border in Spain the problems in communication with those coming north have been magnified considerably.

Starting earlier this year we began to receive guests from “Spain” who could barely speak French or English and simply refused to speak Spanish. Since we don’t speak Catalán we’re increasingly finding ourselves pretty much resorting to sign language with some of them.

Aside from anything else, that makes sending out of our acknowledgement e-mail something of a problem. The majority of those coming from south of the border are from Barcelona and that’s a very cosmopolitan city with Spanish from all over the country and indeed Latin America living there but obviously with a large Catalán component. The only language that we know they all speak is Spanish yet sending out an acknowledgement e-mail in Spanish will clearly insult the Cataláns.

The net effect is that we’re considering calling it a day with e-mails to Spain yet that causes complications for them and in fact we’ve already received a complaint from one Catalán couple (in English, as they won’t write in Spanish and nobody outside Spain can understand Catalán) because they say we were closed the night they’d booked. In fact, because they’d refused to read the directions e-mailed to them in Spanish, they were banging on the door of our neighbour’s house and he was off on holiday.

There seems to be something of a drift from issuing Visa cards to issuing Mastercards in the UK at the moment thereby reversing the previous trend which was to only issue Visa cards.

Although it doesn’t really matter which you have in the UK, it can matter a lot when you go on holiday and generally it’s best to be carrying both Visa and Mastercard abroad. In that respect the switch of my Halifax Visa card to a Mastercard suits me as that gives me a Mastercard credit card from them and a Visa debit card but others could easily find themselves with a Maestro card and a Mastercard which isn’t a good combination as Maestro isn’t nearly as useful as Visa debit and you’re left with two cards on the same system which isn’t good either.

Not a catastrophe for sure but do make sure that you have both varieties of card handy well in advance of your next holiday.

To complete my Modern Languages degree, I “just” need to do one more course and that one is English which’ll be somewhat odd as all the exams and whatnot that I’ve done over the last six years have been in foreign languages.

It does leave me with one slight problem in that the English course I need to do is half of a Diploma in English Language. It’s not that I have to do the second course due to university regulations or anything but rather that I don’t like to leave an overhang of half a diploma like that.

Therefore, it looks like I’ll be doing a course in English grammar just after the English course that I actually need to do.

After that, it’s a bit up in the air and really far too early to be thinking much about it. Not that it has stopped me thinking about it, of course.

At the moment, I would have two basic ways that I’d consider going after completing the English diploma. The first is that I’d like to do their creative writing course (which, hopefully, would improve the quality of writing here) but that has a pre-requisite Humanities course so it’s a two year deal. Alternatively, I’ve always fancied doing a chemistry degree.

Going down the creative writing route would mean that I’d have 2/3rds of an English degree, the final third consisting of two literature courses. As a bit of preparation for that I’ve just bought all the recommended books for the first of those courses. Just to see what it might be like at this point, and not really committing myself to it. I’ve also bought a couple of books for the chemistry course so there’s quite a bit of reading material lying around at the moment!

One of the things that we considered doing was flying somewhere for the short break that we had last week rather than driving there.

Now, on the face of it, you’d think that with all the cheapo flight offers these days it would bound to be cheaper to fly. After all, you can get to loads of places for £10 including taxes these days.

However, even when you look at flight prices including taxes and so on there are many non-flight charges to take into account. For one thing, if you fly, you need to get to the airport at home and park your car which isn’t cheap (£10 a day at least). Then you need to get to the hotel at the other end which’ll either involve a taxi or car hire. Even on an optimistic view for a family of four that’s £40 for flights, £70 for parking and around £30 for a taxi ie £140 just for transport.

Last, but often not least, taking your own car means lots more space to pack stuff and flexibility in departure time too.

Certainly if you’re travelling any sizeable distance in Europe you’d need to add in the tolls (around £100 for a round-trip across France for example) and probably a similar amount for petrol but if you’re just taking a short break to Brittany or Normandy it’s almost certainly going to be cheaper to take the car.

We’re just back from a spin round Switzerland which took in stops in Geneva, Interlaken and Zermatt so expect to see “some” posts about the trip over the next week or two.

One thing I’d not realised during our last trip to Switzerland is that the waterjet isn’t actually on all of the time and ordinarily runs from 10am through to 10pm. It’s also off for three straight weeks in November for maintenance each year. Funnily enough there aren’t that many photos of it that include the rainbow that you see here yet, of course, it’s visible every day that the sun’s out if you’re standing in the right spot.

Something that might catch you out too is that there are very few ATMs in Geneva in comparison to other major cities around the world.

Anyway, more anon.