Foreign Perspectives

This is our first “day off” for a while so we’re at a bit of a loss as to what to do!

Funnily enough, it feels very much like a Saturday so far, though why that is, I just don’t know.

We had our usual “Saturday morning” lay-in so everything is running later than usual. Somehow we’ve gotten to lunchtime already yet we’ve not done any of our usual morning things yet!

As we’ve been a bit lazy, we’ve all the rooms in the place to make up sometime between today and tomorrow morning so that’ll keep us out of trouble once we get going on it.

Wendy’s next in line for the computer (we’ll have two from next week: no more queuing!!!) so I’m off to have another look at the Spanish.

It’s been a while since I looked at our stats on Feedburner so I was really surprised to see that we’re now sitting at around the 75 mark vs 30 just a few months ago.

Where are they all coming from?

Well, a number of them seem to be various feed aggregator services which have been picking up on a number of my posts in the areas of finance and travel. That in turn is creating a steady stream of new incoming links for the blog. Surprisingly, quite a large chunk are picking up on the sponsored posts which just goes to show that taking sponsored posts is a good thing for a blog (even aside from the money, of course).

Even more surprising though is the rapid rise in incoming links to Whole Earth Guide which is looking like it’ll hit PR3 by Christmas (ie at the next pagerank update).

Having said that, perhaps the most ludicrous figure is the number of incoming links to Crystal Consultancy which despite consisting basically of one page has the largest number of incoming links of any of my sites!

It seems like forever since we had a whole day off so we’re thankful that there’s nobody in tomorrow and neither is it a school day so we get to lay in.

For me it’s a sort-of work day though as I’m down to only four days to go before the Spanish exam (the final one for the course). Still, at least that’s starting to come together and I can talk with the best of them about the society in Spain in the early part of the 20th century. At least, I can in Spanish…. as usual I can do some stuff in Spanish that I can’t in English.

Have to see about getting my case packed too as I’ve to fly out on Friday morning.

We’re sort-of looking for somewhere outside France to live at the moment. Not in a “lets’ go right now” kind of way, but in a considerably more musing about it all sort of way.

Initially, areas of Spain were first into the frame. It’s another European country, so that makes it relatively easy to move to. No real hassles about residence permits or such like things, same electricity supply and we can, once again, stick our Sky box under our arm and watch our normal programming.

However, Norman has suggested that Canada would be a much simpler option than we’d ever thought it would be. In fact, we never even considered it, thinking that it would be a rather difficult place to move to. Even our first playing around with the immigration points calculator throws up that we’re sitting at 80/100 with no problems and that’s well above the required level.

Very early days of course and we’ve not even ordered, still less read, the Living in Canada book.

It seems like a very, very long time ago that I thought I’d best get myself fluent in French if I ever wanted to live in France.

Some years after that initial thought, I started French with the Open University and three years later found myself the very proud owner of a Diploma in French. That should have been the end of that, but…. by that time we’d started picking up a fair number of Spanish guests so I thought I’d restart my long forgotten Spanish.

‘Tis now three years since I did that and the final exam for the Diploma in Spanish is next Monday.

Now that I’ve gotten this far, it turns out that one more course is enough to get me a BA (Hons) in Modern Languages which is definitely something I never ever thought there’d even be the remotest possibility of adding to my name. That “one more course” happens to be a level two English course which, all being well, I’ll be starting next February.

It still hasn’t fully sunk in that I have a Diploma in French and I get the certificate out now and again even now in case it was all a dream!

What next after the English though?

Well, as it happens, I’ll have an overhang of one course at that point (assuming that I pass the Spanish next week and the English next year). So, one more English course gets me a Diploma in English. That in turn leaves an overhang of one course towards the next degree…..