Foreign Perspectives

As I near the end of the Spanish course, one thing after another is getting finished off.

Yesterday, it was the end of the books that I reached. It seems like only yesterday when I was starting the first one yet it was right at the start of January!

Tonight, was the final get-together of our little online Spanish group. We’ve been getting together off and on for the last three years and ’twas the final meeting this evening so the headset has had its final use…. unless I take the head staggers and sign up for the German or perhaps the Italian course, of course…

Next week sees the exam so there’ll be something of a gap in the posts from me from later this week ’til at least Wednesday of next week.

Ordinarily, we can see Queribus no problem but for the last few days it’s been almost entirely shrouded in mist.

That’s messed up the walking season somewhat to put it mildly. Typically, walkers start with us and set off for Carcassonne which takes them about five days and goes pretty much directly there, over hill and dale. Ordinarily, I quite envy them as it’s a lovely walk (though, so far, I’ve been too lazy to do it) but it’s a different matter in this kind of weather. Cold and miserable is nice now and again but they’ll be lucky to even get up to Queribus the way it is at the moment.

We’ve even got snow on Canigou which ain’t a good sign this early on: usually it doesn’t even have a dusting for another month or so.

It looks like Pay Per Post lifted their 2 posts a day limit a little too soon as the number of opportunities on offer and the average payout from those available has dropped like a stone.

A few weeks ago, there would typically have been something like 100 posts available with maybe 1/3rd of those averaging around $7 to $10 or thereabouts. However, today there are still only 28 offers and only six of those are more than $6.

In fact, it’s worse than that as five of the six aren’t really available to me and the seventh is already used up.

So, nice idea to move the posting limit up to 3 per day but they need to pull in more advertisers or the whole lot will be cleared out very quickly indeed.

When you immigrate to France one of the things that they look for is a medical.

Seeing as Wendy’s Australian, she duly got the invitation for that medical exam in December 2004. We sat there for several hours and then just had to leave as we’d guests coming and loads of things to do. They said that they’d make another appointment.

That “other appointment” is this afternoon.

Yes, three years later!

In that time, Wendy has been to the doctor several times of course and even had a baby here so it does seem a bit silly that they’re inviting her for a medical at this point. Still, it’s France so they need documentation even if it’s pointless.

One of the problems with working in the tourist industry is that you’re really busy right through the main holiday season and therefore need to take your own holidays out of season.

That tends to rule out some types of holiday. For instance, many beach destinations are out as they’ll be closed down for the season by the time we’d be able to go. The weather isn’t so dependable out of the holiday season either so we need to take more care about the type of destination we consider.

At the moment, we’re looking into two quite different holidays for ourselves.

The first will probably be late October/early November and for that we’re aiming to do a mini-citybreak. Flight prices drop dramatically by then so we’ve quite a wide choice in principle though as it’s just a short break we don’t want to pay a fortune for the hotels at the other end (which ruled out Venice: the prices were unbelieveable) and also it’s a lot cheaper if you don’t need to get a hotel at the airport so that knocks out flights leaving early in the morning.

The second is Christmas which may surprise you. In fact, we are usually empty over the Christmas period as the locals don’t “do” Christmas. Anyway, the net effect of that is that we have a window of around 7-10 days and we’re hoping to go somewhere “Christmasy” for it. Options for that one include Brussels (surprisingly cheap on the hotel front as the bureaucrats have, of course, left for their own holidays) and southern Germany. In principle, we’d have liked to do Edinburgh or London but the flight prices knocked both of them out of the running.

After that? Well, we’ll be full in early January but would like to get away somewhere warm sometime in the late January to early March period to break up the Winter for us.