Foreign Perspectives

OK, I’m not there yet, but at least it seems to be heading in the right direction.

As we’re edging into the Winter here, it becomes more and more appealing. We’ve obviously a lot less to do during the day and, possibly more importantly, I’m not doing the studying as the Spanish course is finished.

So far, it would appear to be quite a good fit with our normal activities as we’re busy in the Summer when there are relatively few paid post opportunities yet don’t have much to do in the Winter when there seem to be a lot more paid opportunities available.

The castle at Chantilly is one of the small collection of spectacular chateaux in the general Paris region. Yet, there’s a whole lot more to it than that as you can see from our Whole Earth entry on it.

Perhaps surprisingly, the castle houses one of the foremost collections of historical paintings in France and yet it receives relatively few visitors for that collection.

It’s easy enough to get there from Paris and very worthwhile too. Not only do you get a chateau, there’s the magnificent gardens and the artwork thrown in too!

If you value your “spare time” then you should be very careful never to pick up a prospectus from the Open University.

Nobody warned me about it and I started reading one in 2001 and it’s been eating up all my spare time ever since!

The booklet looks innocent enough, but then you start leafing through it and find that it’s just filled with all kinds of courses that sound really interesting. The short courses only take a few months and even a half-credit course only takes a few hours per week. Before you know it, you’ll be filling in the application form for one of them. Just to see what they send, you understand, after all you can pull out of it, can’t you?

You’re only planning on doing the one course, but then about half-way through that one they send you a letter about those that logically follow on from that one along with a little sampler of what the next course is like. All you have to do is to sign at the bottom and return the letter and before you know it, you’re walking along to the Post Office.

It’s the same next year, but by then you’re hooked and looking beyond the current strand of courses. You’re thinking “sure, if I do a couple of courses more I’ll get a degree”. That kind of thinking is fatal: you get another prospectus. Just to have a leaf through it, of course, but it never works out like that.

You think that it’s all over when you’re about to start the final course for your degree, but you’re totally addicted at that point and it’s time to get another fix. What about that other course that you were thinking of originally? Wow, they’ve updated it and it sounds even more interesting now, doesn’t it?

That’s what happened to me. I picked up the Diploma in French three years ago and have just completed the final exam for the Diploma in Spanish. That just leaves one English course and I get a degree in Modern Languages. But I always quite fancied their science courses and will be signing up for the first of those a little after Easter next year.

I think we need to start Open University Annonymous: it’s worse than drinking!

Even aside from the money aspect, I quite like a lot of the paid posts that come along.

For instance, I’ve written a whole stream of them about various holiday destinations and I love writing about stuff like that. I’ve even started up Whole Earth Guide so I can write more of it!

The finance related ones have been fairly thick on the ground here too as I can usually talk the leg off a table when speaking about finance as many people will attest to!

But now and again you get surprises.

For instance, today, PayPerPost just offered a very nice looking African safari post. At least it looked quite nice at first glance. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to go on a safari? Second glance revealed though that they want you to promote a place that guarantees you’ll kill a set number of endangered species.

Now, aside from the moral aspect of that, it’s actually illegal in that PPP is based in America and therefore subject to American laws.

I’m not blaming them on putting it on because I’m sure the whole process is quite automatic and after all it’s Sunday so chances are that they’ve locked the door and left the computers in charge but it just goes to show the range of things that you can get ie you can’t just start typing away with a post before you read what they’re actually wanting you to write about.

Wendy’s very keen on family history but we’ve only just got around to registering a domain for her to put her researches on.

You can look forward to seeing a constant stream of information on the Hamilton’s at Hamilton Family History which is just live as of today though already with its first post.

Over the coming Winter, she’s planning on putting the result of her researches over the years onto the site.