Foreign Perspectives

We’ve decided to put off our Tuesday Trip this week in that we’re hoping to get away to Switzerland for 5 or 6 days from this Friday.

Hoping I say because we are still waiting for a paper from the old insurance company which’ll let us get the car insured. Without that, I don’t know that we’ll be able to go, although if that happens, we will most definitely be making a trip early in the coming week to the old insurance company where we’ll be sitting until the paper is produced.

Snag is that this coming week is the only real time-slot for the Swiss trip as James’ school is on vacation.

By special request from juniors 1 & 2 we bought them a “ladder-bed” (ie bunk bed) which just arrived this morning.

Junior 2 supervised the assembly whilst junior 1 was at school.

Of course, now that it is here, the question is: who is getting to be on the top bunk?

Now, you might think that it would be best to have the eldest on top but in trials in hotels that has resulted in him falling out as he engages the legs well before he’s awake enough to control them whilst the little guy generally stays in bed until he’s actually awake.

Still, at least it’s not so far to fall from this one!

I really must stop looking at the Open University prospectus! It’s even more dangerous than looking at estate agents brochures: at least with them you know you can’t afford to do buy a new house all the time.

Anyway, now that I’m nearing the end of my modern languages degree I’ve started looking around for something to do afterwards. So far, that has only had one serious possibility in the frame ie the chemistry degree that I was always meaning to do but never got around to.

However, there’s now another possibility: an English degree. As with the modern languages it seems like a long way off but notionally I’ll have done the first course of it by this time next year so there would “only” be five more courses to do from that and I know from chatting with some other folk that at least two of those courses are very interesting indeed.

Still, way too early to be worrying about it now. I might just get some of the set books for one or two of the courses in the meantime. Just to see what the course might be like you understand. No intention of doing them at all. No siree bob!

One of the most surprising thing about the Internet is just how much people are prepared to pay for information from one site that is available free on another site.

This is probably best illustrated by the vast number of websites which sell you the information that you need to open an account in America when you don’t live there. I say “America” simply because that’s the most popular but there are many other sites offering to open accounts in Switzerland (the second most popular) and various countries around the world.

Now, I’ll grant you that it’s more difficult to come by the information for Switzerland unless you know where to look but I’d be wanting to do a whole lot of looking before I forked out the typical $250 to $1000 that some websites charge for this information. I’ll be covering this (free!) very shortly on the expat banking section of Whole Earth so, unless you need your Swiss account in the next couple of weeks, it’s probably best to hold on to your $250 ’til I get back from my research trip next week.

What about America though? Would you pay $100 or more for the information? Many people appear to yet it’s freely available on the expat banking section of Whole Earth already although, to be fair, many others seem to have been getting it there for free for quite a while if the site stats are anything to go by.

The thing that gets me is that, in most cases, the information isn’t difficult to find. What’s worse though, particularly for Switzerland, is that a number of the charging websites are providing information that simply won’t work as they typically recommend opening an account with SwissPost which stopped opening accounts for non-residents a few years ago.

I’m quite tempted to start selling the information on ebay myself!

The big problem with the Open University is that they have just too many courses available and therefore once you start one particular course you find yourself looking at the prospectus when it pops through your letterbox mid-way through that course and choosing another, and another, and another…..

For instance, I am (hopefully) on the home run to a degree in modern languages with “only” one course to go. However, I know that they’ll be sending me a prospectus shortly after Easter next year and in preparation for that I’ve had a look through the courses from the prospectus that arrived earlier this year.

That is, of course, fatal as I’ve already pretty much decided to go for their chemistry degree. I even bought the DVD of that on ebay last year (recommended: search for “S103” or “S104”; the DVD contains the complete course, less the mini science laboratory that they send you and which weights way too much to post).

However, I’d also quite like to have a go at the German courses and possibly some from the history faculty.

Although I’ve stuck to one course per year up to now I’m toying with the idea of combining some of the level 2 30 point science couses with perhaps the 30 point level 1 German courses which sounds like a doable amount of work.