Foreign Perspectives

After you book your holiday, there are a number of things that you need to do in advance of the vacation itself. This is a fairly comprehensive list so not all items will be required for every country you visit.

Visas. Check with the embassies in your own country if you need a visa to visit the countries you are going to (this information is usually available online). It’s best to do this well ahead of your vacation as visas can take months to issue.

Vaccinations. Ask your doctor which vaccinations that you should have for the countries that you are visiting. For the most part, you don’t need vaccinations to visit mainstream countries but there are some surprising exceptions to this eg Tetanus for Hawaii, Typhoid for New Zealand so it pays to ask. You need to have some injections months ahead of your travel date.

Passport. You obviously need a passport but check that it will have at least six months remaining on it by the time you are coming home. A number of countries require this.

Insurance. Whilst you might think you only need insurance for the trip, you actually require this insurance as soon as you make the booking in case something comes up requiring you to cancel. If you already have health insurance, you may be able to extend this to cover you abroad. House insurance may cover your belongings whilst on holiday too (check this with your insurance company).

Debit/Credit cards. Change to a four digit numeric PIN. Not all countries accept more than four digits. Check the cost of using your cards abroad both in shops and in ATMs. If you don’t have both Visa and Mastercard, get the one you don’t have as not all countries accept both in equal measure. See our holiday money article for more information on this. Make a list of the numbers and cancellation phone numbers for the cards that you plan on taking. It’s best to limit the number of cards you take to about three or four in case of theft. Don’t forget to check the expiry dates!

Driving license. Check if you need an International Driving Permit (IDP) for the countries you will be visiting. Even if you aren’t planning on driving, it’s best to be able to drive. You can get an IDP from the motoring organisation in your own country. Check the expiry date on your driving license.

Guidebooks. Whilst the Internet is wonderful, it’s not practical to carry it around in your pocket so buy a good guidebook for the areas that you will be visiting. Buy the guidebook covering the area closest to that which you’ll be visiting. So, if you are visiting Paris, buy a guidebook for Paris, not one for all of France. Excellent series are Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. Fodors and Michelin aren’t really as useable or as useful.

Tickets. Check exactly when you are travelling. Remember that you need to be at the airport a minimum of two hours before the flight leaves. Be wary of the actual date of flights departing at 00.00.

Is it safe to go? Check the travel advice sections in the American State Department and the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

Are you allowed to visit those countries at all? America forbids its citizens to visit both Cuba and Vietnam all the time and sometimes adds other countries to that list.

This article is part of our series on holiday planning which covers things like how to book your holiday, how to take your holiday money, what to pack, etc.

You might think that medical treatment in France would be pretty much the same as it is elsewhere in the world once you get to the point of visiting the doctor, but it isn’t.

Assorted link trains seem to be the flavour of the season from the original Technorati Favourites Exchange (still plugging a way a month down the line), to the MyBlogLog train  (on a slower line) and now we have the BlogCatalog My Neighbourhood train which I came across at SYAF the Geek just yesterday. 

***Start Copying Here:***

Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction about how you found this list and include a link back to that blog.

2) COPY the rules and ENTIRE list below and post it on your blog.

3) Take My New Neighborhoods Members’ and move them into the The Original Neighborhoods Members’ list.

4) Find 3 new blogs, join their Blogcatalog Neighborhoods and add them to the My New Neighborhoods Members’ section. Remember to also add the Join this Neighborhood’ link next to your new blogs. ( Example: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/syaf-the-geek.html )

5) Join as a member to each Neighborhoods listed here by clicking on Join this Neighborhood’. The goal is that all of the new Members listed will join your neighborhood, and you should do the same!

My New Neighborhoods Members

The originals

1. Foreign Perspectives Join This Neighborhood
2. MdRafi2k Join This Neighborhood
3. ByDesign Join This Neighborhood
4. Blog To Profit Join This Neighborhood
5. Another Maria Join This Neighborhood
6. Webee Join This Neighborhood
7. Zakman Join This Neighborhood
8. One Eyed View Join This Neighborhood
9. Syaf The Geek Join this Neighborhood
10. Esplanade Join This Neighborhood
11. Wampago Join This Neighborhood
12. WonderWoman Join This Neighborhood
13. Kucau Join This Neighborhood
14. Cymru66 Join This Neighborhood

***End Copying Here***

The margin was relatively slim (53/47) but France has, much to my surprise, chosen the president that it needs at this time.

His first hundred days are likely to be turbulent ones and I suspect that last nights riots across France are merely a taster of things to come. Many of his policies seem to run against the deep socialist grain of French thought and practices.

The 35 hour week is to be reviewed. That was one of the planks of job creation from the socialist era. Reduce the time that anyone is allowed to work and everyone will have more work, won’t they? Well, perhaps in theory if you drop the permitted working hours by 10% you might think that employers will need 10% more people to get through the work but that’s only going to work with cuts much larger than 10%. As is clear everywhere else in the world, semi-parttime workers get through just as much work as full-time workers do.

Immigration rules are to be tightened up. This one seems pretty strange coming from the son of immigrants. The counterpart to this is that he seems likely to work with the countries in northern Africa to form a kind of African Union to help improve the economies of those countries.

France is to become a little bit more capitalist too as he plans to reduce the regulations on businesses to make the job creation process much easier. Taxes too are to be reduced to improve the incentive to work.

Will he have the strength of character to follow through on these reforms is the biggest question though. I think he will: he seems to have that inner strength that is so necessary to do it.

Family history is something of a now and again activity for me.

When I found the big family bible some years ago, I had a major flurry of activity going through it and integrating all the information into what I already had and then it was a few years before anything else happened.

Then there was the arrival of the Mormon family history site which seemingly filled in numerous details that were missing from the family bible. Mainly places of birth and death but also a number of relatives who weren’t mentioned in the family bible. I also ventured into the various family history forums on the Internet but with a name like Stewart they’re not nearly so useful as you might expect as there are just too many Stewarts around in the world these days.

It’s worth looking at that site now and again and indeed the forums as people add information to the various sites over time. By doing that, I picked up a whole branch of the family that we were sure had died out in the 1930s although I’ve not, yet, firmed up contact with them as yet.

Anyway, that’s all to introduce our new blog at Stewart Family History. As with my other activities in the family history arena, the entries on that’ll likely be now and again affairs but we’ll see. It’s separate from Foreign Perspectives as it doesn’t really fit here and should, in due course, interest a whole different bunch of people.

Initially, it’ll be principally the Stewart line as you’ll gather from the domain name but I’ll be starting into the Douglas history too fairly shortly and will no doubt add other names as I go along.