Foreign Perspectives

One of the least well promoted things in the OU is that we’re eligible to apply for the student card issued by the NUS.

At first sight, forking out £10 or so for the card doesn’t seem like a great plan but what makes it worthwhile is that as well as being a student ID card this card also gives you lots of discounts too. So many in fact that I usually find that it’s paid for itself within the first month or two.

On the whole, the discounts are from companies who you’d expect to have a significant number of student customers which means that many of them aren’t of major interest to the mainly mature students from the OU. So, for instance, I don’t see myself ever using FlatMatch. On tbe other hand, I save about £5 a month on my Fitness First membership and Wendy regularly gets 10% or 20% discount from Peacocks and New Look plus there’s the useful 5% off Amazon and free delivery from £5 too.

If you’re not sure whether it’s worth it for you, you can have a look at the discounts on their site first.

Separate from this, but potentially even more valuable are the student discounts available for Microsoft products (up to 100%!).

Wedding dresses are a bit of a peculiar kind of purchase, aren’t they?

After all, few people would spend anything like the amount of money on any dress never mind a dress that’s intended to be worn only once, would they? Yet, of course, destination wedding dresses are very much a purchase that people aspire to, pretty much regardless of the cost involved.

They’re slightly odd also in that they generally aim to have a strong hint of tradition whilst also trying to be quite fashionable at the same time. That’s not an easy combination to manage which, of course goes some way to explain the high prices for these dresses.

Make sure you make the most of your purchase experience… chances are that it’ll be a long time before you get that much attention when buying something.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that British kids collected money over the Halloween period by wheeling around a dummy and collecting a “penny for the Guy”.

These days though, I doubt that many would even know the phrase or where it originally came from. In case you’re one of those, it’s a phrase commemorating Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up the houses of Parliament as part of the Gunpowder Plot way back in 1605.

There was a vaguely confusing few years when that went out of fashion with nothing to replace it but thanks to the Americanisation of the Halloween period we are firmly in the “trick or treat” era. Still, at least it hasn’t degenerated into the non-traditional cry of “bon bons” (sweeties) of the French who arrived at that with no previous Halloween tradition.

It’s fortunate for us this week anyway in that it’s been pouring for most of this week but was quite pleasant whilst we were walking round with the kids on Halloween night last week.

At the moment, there’s Kindle for Kindle, Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for Android but sadly, so far, no Kindle for Linux. Naturally, that hasn’t stopped the Linux people running Kindle though…

Step one is installing Wine, which, for me, is via the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu 10.10. After that you need winetricks (for some fonts):

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks corefont

Then you install a not-quite up to date version of Kindle for PC:

wget http://ap.smu.ca/~taro/software/KindleForPC-installer.exe
wine KindleForPC-installer.exe

I say not-quite up to date as the latest version wouldn’t work for me; the latest version can be downloaded via Amazon.

Finally, you need to configure Wine to run the Kindle software in a Windows 98 environment. Do this by going to Wine configuration, add application, select Kindle in the Program Files/Amazon/Kindle for PC/KindleForPC.exe and choose Windows 98.

You can switch the screen to/from landscape by creating two launchers on your desktop (right-click on the desktop, select create-launcher) with:

xrandr -o right (or left if required)
xrandr -o normal

The mousepad orientation is “interesting” after doing this but quite usable; fixing that is rather more complex and the solutions I found don’t work on my system.

Although many people would tell you that travellers cheques (or travelers checks) are past their sell-by date, that’s not the case.

Their major plus point is that even if they’re lost or stolen, you can still get the money back which is not the case if you were carrying around the same amount in cash, their closest equivalent. In both American and Canada they can be used as though they were cash even in places that say “no checks accepted” and you can also treat them this way to some extent in the UK.

As with cash, it’s useful to have some travellers cheques in either US$ or Euro. If you’re going to America go with US$, Europe or Africa Euro are generally best. One key difference is that because you may be charged to cash them, it’s best to stick to 100 denominations rather than 20’s as we recommended with cash. Banks cashing them usually charge some combination of a per cheque fee and/or a percentage with, of course, a foreign currency conversion charge if the cheques aren’t in their local currency. You can avoid these charges by cashing them at an office of the issuing bank. Again, if you’re going to a civilised country it’s best to consider these as a backup and just get cash in an ATM when you get there.

Since there’s no expiry date on the cheques, you should keep any uncashed cheques for future holidays if they’re in a mainstream currency which’ll save you on charges and commissions.

Unlike cash, travellers cheques come with a brand and it’s best to stick to the more common ones which are American Express, Mastercard, Visa and Thomas Cook. Normally your bank will issue cheques with one of these brands plus their own. You can’t use American Express or any American issued cheques in either Cuba or Vietnam.

Charges are similar for cash at around 7% (even in “commission free” places). Sometimes it’s cheaper to get cash, sometimes travellers cheques. Check at your bank if they’ve any special offers for customers but otherwise shop around.

Take them in the currency of the country you’re going to if it’s a mainstream one, otherwise dollars or euros. If you have any left over after your holiday, keep them rather than cash them in your bank as you can use them later (there is no expiry date) and this will save you paying the commission again. If you buy travellers cheques on a card, it counts as a cash advance with all the charges that implies. Make sure that your travellers cheques come with the Visa or Mastercard or American Express brands as others may not be accepted. You can’t use American Express travellers cheques in Cuba or Vietnam nor any issued by American banks.

Downsides are that you will have to pay to cash them at foreign banks which will involve an additional exchange rate charge if they’re not denominated in the local currency. Worth noting is that not all banks cash travellers cheques and, bizarrely, some require you to have an account with them before they’ll cash them.

I’m going to work my way through the various ways you can take money abroad over the next few weeks. I’ve already covered cash and travellers cheques, and will be covering credit/charge cards, debit cards, cash cards and prepaid cards in future episodes.