British Expat Newsletter

7 December 2005

Hello, and welcome to those who have joined up since our last newsletter.

In this issue

This week: Holidays
On the website
Virtual Snacks
Sponsor
Bizarre Searches
Joke and quotation

This week

This week's subject is holidays. When you already live in Paradise (and don't we all?) where do you go for your holidays? Given that we are legally obliged to leave the country (Thailand) at regular intervals, we've tended to go to Penang in Malaysia because it's the most convenient place to get a new visa to return to Thailand. Some holiday!

Anyway, I wondered if any of you bother going on holiday. Brits who have not yet permanently escaped Blighty seem to take at least one overseas holiday each year if they can afford it - Spain, Thailand, and the Caribbean being popular destinations. Perhaps those of you who already live abroad go back "home". Hmm, it can't be for the climate. There's always the shopping, although these days you seem to be able to find most of the traditional British or international favourites wherever you are, if you look hard enough.

So I suppose the most common reason is to visit family and friends left behind, to catch up with them and what they've been up to since your last visit. That's never appealed to me a great deal - many of you will already be familiar with the feeling that your world and theirs are somehow drifting apart and that they can no longer really understand what you're doing with your life. (I suppose that could be an argument for visiting more regularly. But popping over from the Continent on easyJet is a very different proposition from flying halfway round the world.)

In recent years the word "holidays" seems to have taken on a new meaning. Since apparently it is no longer PC (politically correct) to say "Merry Christmas", the bland American greeting of "Happy Holidays" seems to have taken over. Personally, I am perfectly happy for people to wish me Eid Mubarak, Merry Christmas, or Happy Loy Krathong (which we had in Thailand recently), or happy anything else. How can it possibly be offensive to wish someone a happy day? But that's political correctness for you.

So, when you read that this week's subject was holidays, did you think of going on vacation (as the Yanks say) or have you too got into the habit of thinking of "holidays" as the festive season?

Do you have anything to say about this topic, or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not tell us about it on the forum?
British Expat Forum: BE Newsletter discussion

On the Website

This week, in keeping with this week's theme of holidays (in the festival sense, anyway), we've also added a new Pic of the Week - it's a Thanksgiving display outside a church in Georgia. Also on a festive note, we've added an article by our pal Sydney Sue about Christmas in Australia, and a book review of the very funny "Bad Christmas", a collection of anecdotes and news stories about Christmas disasters. We'll be bringing more articles about Christmas in the run-up to the day itself. We've also added a review of a brand new guide in the "A New Start In..." series - this time the spotlight falls on Vancouver on Canada's Pacific coast.

All the new articles and features are listed on our What's New page:
What's New on BE?

Remaining on the front page from last week is a message from the British War Memorial Project, which is working to document online the graves and memorials of British Service personnel from 1914 to the present day. They're considering organising a tour of the Somme in May next year - if you're interested in helping, please read the article.
BWMP Somme Tour: May 2006

If you're looking for travel features on the site, a good place to start is our Expat World page.
Expat World

Virtual Snacks

Wikipedia's definition of holiday plus loads of other interesting holiday-related info.
Wikipedia: Holiday

Try this link for a collection of puzzles to while the time away.
Christmas puzzles on radix.net

And for a bit of amusement: Google's online museum of their holiday logos.
Google - Holiday logos

Sponsor

Offshore Companies House offer fast online registration of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, Belize, Dominica and other tax havens, as well as quick and easy setting up of multicurrrency bank accounts. OCH, through their offshore services, will provide you with the full necessary support at each stage and will always try to offer the best possible prices. They offer attractive and inexpensive offshore packages, and their reliability and quality of offshore service say even more for them than their prices. Most of their new clients - over 15,000 in the last ten years - are referred by previous satisfied customers. However, if you can get the same service, or an offshore package which is a genuinely cheaper offer, they promise to match it!
Offshore Companies House

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

can british move canada
virgin mary gothic sculpture guild gold
book english second lunges
dream interpretations- seahorse
small town casino
british flag smile on yahoo
princes diana lottrey
japanese infidelity
fraud heersmink
deathwatch box office [Anything like deathwatch beetle?]
male melodrama & monster s ball
rollerball rocko

Till next time...
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell."
- George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright, essayist and literary critic (1856-1950)

Joke

Season's greetings

On the 12th day of midwinter festival hi-jacked by a Eurocentric theocratic hierarchy my significant other in a consenting, adult, monogamous, relationship gave to me:

Twelve males reclaiming their inner warrior through ritual drumming;
Eleven pipers piping (plus an 18-member pit orchestra made up of members in good standing of the Musicians' Union as called for in their union contract, even though they will not be asked to play a note.)
Ten melanin-deprived testosterone-poisoned scions of the patriarchal ruling class system leaping.
Nine bourgeois female persons engaged in rhythmic self-expression.
Eight economically disadvantaged female persons stealing milk products from our enslaved bovine sisters.
Seven endangered swans swimming on protected wetlands.
Six enslaved fowl of the genus Anser producing stolen non-human animal products.
Five golden symbols of culturally sanctioned enforced domestic incarceration.

(After members of the Animal Liberation Front threatened to throw red paint at my computer, the calling birds, hens and partridge have been reintroduced to their native habitat. To avoid further animal enslavement, the remaining gift package has been revised.)

Four hours of recorded whale songs.
Three deconstructionist poets.
Two Sierra Club calendars printed on recycled processed tree carcases, and
One spotted owl activist chained to an old-growth pear tree.

Blessed Yule, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Good Kwanzaa, and Happy Holidays*

*unless you are suffering from seasonally affected disorder (SAD). If this is the case, please replace this gratuitous call for celebration with the suggestion that you have a thoroughly adequate day.