Foreign Perspectives

Some jobs sound really fantastic.

You know the ones: you hear about a friend who lands this great job which has them jetting about all over Europe and it sounds brilliant, doesn’t it?

Except, of course, that it’s incredibly tiring. At one point I had one of these “fantastic jobs” which at one point involved flying to London three times a month. Now, at the beginning, that was brilliant as I could pick up all kinds of things in London that I couldn’t get in the local shops and I could do a bit of sight-seeing as well.

After a month or two of that though you’ve seen all the sights and been to all the shops and then it’s just tiring which is, of course, the problem with jobs that involve a lot of travelling.

Well, that’s an easy question: it’s the English course that I need to complete my modern languages degree.

The snag is that you need to tell them a) before you know the results of the course before it and b) in the midst of the hardest part of your current course. Therefore, it’s best to have decided upon the course for 2009 before you have even started the course for 2008.

Now, up to now, this hasn’t been a problem for me. I started the French way back in 2002 and for the next three years obviously I was going to be doing successive French courses. Likewise for the Spanish from 2005. Getting towards the end of the degree threw me a little but made the next logical course the English one which completes the BA (Honours) Modern Languages degree.

Now, you’re probably thinking that I’ve reached the end of the degree therefore there aren’t any more courses to consider.

In a sense that’s right but once you’ve stopped studying for a while it’s really, really hard to get going again as I found out when I left an 8 year gap between the BSc (Hons) Computer Science and the MBA. Therefore, I have kept going with small courses ever since. Nothing major for sure between 1993 and 2002 but enough to keep the brain ticking over and that made it a whole lot easier to get going on the current degree.

Anyway, I’m sort of toying with the idea of starting off on a science degree for a change They work in a similar way to the languages in that I’d pick up two diplomas along the way. One major difference is that most of the courses are 30 points rather than 60 which makes them considerably more doable.

So, ’tis probably going to be S104 next year. Or it might be The Art of English which would complete a Diploma in English.

Must get a coin out when the signing up time arrives 🙂

It sounded like a good idea at the time that I booked it but flying over to Belfast on Friday (an all day affair due to the connecting flight), then needing to drive down to Dublin on Sunday for my Spanish exam on Monday, back to Belast on the Monday night only to go back to Dublin on the Tuesday for the flight to Girona wasn’t quite such a good move in practice.

The trip worked out fine though it’s pretty much knocked me out today and I’m only starting to recover now!

This is the first of the posts on the new computer which I’ve been setting up today. Just had a pleasant surprise when I checked the mail: for some reason it’s been a very popular time for people to pay me money. I’ve several new premium listings on the directory, a whole raft of paid post money from last month and to top it all, a paid entry for the listings sites.

Perhaps I should go away more often!

Just as we were assuming that we were back down to lower paid opportunities and not a great selection for that matter either, today happened.

Whilst it’s always possible that a particular paid post outlet could have a run of opportunities, today just about all of them seemed to be full of opportunities whereas only a few days ago they seemed to be drying up.

So much did this take us by surprise that we stuffed ourselves with them today and hit a new personal record of postings of 16 posts in a single day!

A pretty unbelieveable number, eh? Still, no more posts from now ’til Wednesday for me ‘cos I’m off to do the final Spanish exam of my Modern Languages degree.

One odd thing in this Internet age is that it’s becoming more and more common for people to phone up for a booking rather than doing it online.

Now, we always expected that from the French as, until fairly recently, they just didn’t trust the Internet and certainly didn’t trust it with their debit card details. However, recently it’s becoming rather common among the English and Spanish. Why, I don’t know, but there you are.

In summertime it’s something of a nuisance as it can be quite difficult to reconcile phone bookings with online availability without ending up with double bookings. In fact, we often need to confirm that rooms remain available before saying OK to people on the phone as bookings come in at a fair rate at peak times in the Summer.