Foreign Perspectives

This is a course that certainly doesn’t hang around to let you admire the view. With a cut-off date of December 3rd, it was marked on the 6th.

Considering that it was my first history course since way before the A-levels I’m quite pleased with the mark. Actually, I’d have been moderately pleased with it even if I’d been doing history classes all along so definitely a decent start to the course.

At the moment, I’m in the midst of doing the TT280 ECA which requires a major change in style from the archaeology. There’s a major difference in the time I’ve been taking to do it too. So far, in the second day of working on it I’ve almost half of it complete vs somewhat longer to so the archaeology TMA.

The plan is that I complete TT280 over the next week or so, closely followed by the final question for SK185 and then it’s on to the second A251 TMA which is on the factors affecting the emergence of cities. It’s more explicit on this one that Internet references are required (which probably lost me getting on for 10% on the first one as I only added one at the last minute). The 1500 words isn’t split into two parts this time though you still need to consider old and new world sites which makes it quite a tight word limit.

Although I’m over half way through the reading for the course I’m still not sure whether I like it or not. The massive amount of reading makes for a feeling of not seeing the wood for the trees a lot of the time and in some sections it felt very much like sites were being listed just for the sake of listing them rather than furthering the argument. That reading volume also means that it’s very hard to keep a handle on the big picture and to keep in mind the sequence of events happening over the course of thousands of years and in any one of a half dozen or so separate regions. On the other hand, it’s been a fascinating journey ranging from the earliest farming in Mesopotamia around 12,000 BC through to, so far, Chinese empires in the first millennium AD.

I suspect that in practice this really needs to be a full credit course as it often feels like you’re just skating over the surface. That seems particularly to be the case with the Chinese empires which are into the historical period and for which there is oodles of documented history. For example, Confucius was only given a page when there have been entire books written on his works.

What is with this country? The second busiest airport in the country is closed, trains are stranded and thousands of people can’t get out of their houses. All because of a relatively small amount of snow.

What on earth would it be like if there was another mini iceage like they had in the 1800s when the Thames was regularly frozen?

Ironically, it would probably be a whole lot easier going. The reason for many of the problems this year is simply that the UK as a whole simply isn’t prepared for really cold weather. Were it to be a regular feature of our climate then more money would be thrown at the problem and many of the difficulties that we’re currently experiencing would go away. After all, colder countries don’t have all these issues.

We were tootling along quite nicely with our various regular activities until a week or two back but now it’s getting to the point that we can barely fit everything in.

It’s mainly down to the Christmas activities that the school seem to be throwing at us almost daily which are difficult to fit into what was already a reasonably full though doable schedule. Thus we have school photos to deal with, school calendars to come in the next day or two, the school Christmas fair this week, the school play next week, the school Christmas pantomime the following week and, no doubt, many more Christmasy things that we’ve forgotten or not been told about yet.

Naturally, there are also things like Christmas cards to write, Christmas presents to be bought, the Christmas markets to be seen and lots more besides.

And, of course, there are the non-Christmas things to be done which, for me, seems to be largely taken up with assorted course assignments though there’s lots of non-course things to be done too.

We signed up again for Fitness First again way back at the start of August when they’d one of their offers running… “sign up for BodyFirst, get three free personal trainer sessions by paying £35 now and you’ll get it refunded after 20 sessions”. Well, that’s what we were told at the time anyway.

It turns out that we should have been given a card to stamp for each of those 20 sessions which presumably lists a couple of extra conditions that we weren’t told about. First, those 20 sessions had to be taken within 8 weeks of signing up. That shouldn’t be a problem as we were attending 4 or 5 times a week so those 20 sessions were completed in late August or possibly early September. Except that 1) we didn’t have that card to get stamped, 2) their computer was down quite a bit towards the end of August so our attendance wasn’t recorded and 3) it’s quite common to get waved through without the membership card getting swiped. Net effect of that was that we have only 16 recorded attendances in the 8 weeks ie they swiped the card just twice a week on average.

Second problem was those “free personal trainer” sessions. It seems that they weren’t optional as, presumably was stated on the card which we didn’t get, not doing them within the 8 weeks means no refund of the £35. On that particular point, we were explicitly told by the membership guy at the time that we could take them at any time so I guess he doesn’t read the contracts that he’s signing people up to.

I’d say at this point that it was important to read all the conditions of a contract with Fitness First but seeing as we weren’t given the contract, we couldn’t do that.

Most of the time it’s fine to take a few cards and maybe a travellers cheque with you on holiday, but what do you do if you run out of money when you’re abroad or if your cards/cheques are stolen?

It’s safest to work on the assumption that your cards and/or cheques will be stolen and prepare for that. The way to do this is to keep a note of the card numbers, expiry dates and cancellation phone numbers for each card that you are taking with you. For the travellers cheques you need to note down the cheque numbers and the date & place that you bought them. Take one copy of the note of these details with you (separate from the cards, of course) and leave one behind with a friend or family member. It’s best to cut down on the number of cards too and go with the minimum which is three: one Visa, one Mastercard and one more for when the other two are stolen (keep the third one separate from the other two).

When they are stolen, you just go through the details and call to cancel the cards and cheques. The cancellation numbers are usually reverse charge numbers ie you won’t have to pay to call the banks. It’s useful to look up the number of the international operator and/or AT&T direct number for the countries in which you’ll be on vacation in advance.

In theory, cards can be replaced abroad within 24 hours but this depends on your card, your card company and the banking system in the country in which you’re on holiday. The best cards for replacement are gold/platinum ones but unfortunately they’re also the most attractive to thieves.

However, some countries just aren’t up to replacing cards quite so easily though a combination of language problems and primitive banking systems. Nobody who has stayed with us and had a card stolen in Prague has ever managed to get it replaced whilst they were there.

So what do you do if the card company can’t manage to replace the card? That’s when you need to look into how to get money to yourself from home and there are several ways of doing that which I’ll be covering next.