The lengths people will go to to break a world record!

According to The Press Ass-ociation 100 sorry souls braved the cold to get together in St Pancras station in London dressed only in their underpants. You have to wonder about the organisers of this record breaking get-together. There are surely more than 100 people willing to bare most of their bodies in London. Unless of course they are all currently wandering around Las Americas in barely-there bikinis or jelly-wobble bum-revealing shorts.

Drag your little darlings along to the Mundi Juego at La Rambla in Las Galletas for Toys, Games and Stories (in Spanish obviously) on November 19, 20 and 21 between 4.30 and 6.30. Kids less than 6 years old should be accompanied by an adult.

As is demonstrated by this previous post on Tenerife Wedding Blues – and the comments it received – it is as easy for expats to get married in Tenerife as it is for Russell Brand to get through an evening without offending anybody.

There is so much paperwork involved that most couples give up and get the deed done in Gibraltar instead, reserving Tenerife for their honeymoon. Well, I can now tell you that it is indeed possible to get married in Tenerife because Sam has finally received the date for her and her beloved to get knotted in Arona town hall.

Yeaaaa! Good for her. And all it took was a mammoth amount of patience and perseverance. Exactly what they say goes into a good marriage so I guess they’ll do just fine.

In the meantime, Veronica, who has watched Sam’s Sisyphean task from the outset commented that the hotels would make a fortune if they offered Wedding Packages which included assisting the happy couple get the paperwork in order before their big day.

Not a bad idea that.

You could soon be checking out your next holiday to Tenerife along with your week’s shopping. The Aldi travel site goes live on January 8th and they promise to keep holiday prices as low as they keep their supermarket stock.

At a quoted price of just £6.50 per night for a Tenerife holiday it looks like the chain will be giving both traditional high street travel agents and online booking services a run for the money.

That is all good. The more choices we have to vote with our feet the more realistic the big companies are forced to keep their prices.

Checkout Aldi travel deals in the story published recently in the Guardian.

The OFT is taking part in a Europe-wide day of action to warn holidaymakers about Spanish bogus holiday clubs that cost tourists millions of pounds every year.

The OFT Scambusters Team are handing out information and fake holiday club scratchcards at airports including Belfast International, Birmingham, Bristol, East Midlands, Gatwick, Leeds/Bradford, Manchester, Newcastle and Stansted in an effort to warn holiday makers about bogus Spanish holiday clubs.

Cunningly designed to look just like those handed out by the timeshare touts that leap on the unsuspecting on the fringes of the Sunday Market the OFT scratchcards carry the teasing question, ‘Have you won a luxury holiday?’

The European Consumer Centre in Spain are supporting this initiative with representatives at the arrivals area of Tenerife South Airport and advertisements have been placed in the baggage hall of the airport as well as in the Thomas Cook and FlyBe in- flight magazines, which will be seen by thousands of holidaymakers.

The timing of this scheme is spot on as November is apparently peak hunting season for the holiday club predators. One can just imagine them rubbing their hands together as the incoming flights fly overhead and they think, ‘Hey up, another load of lambs to the slaughter!’

In these days of international press and internet access to consumer websites it is surprising that so many people still fall for these hoary old schemes. But fall they do and the average amount of money they lose per victim is over three thousands pounds. €3,500! Worse, once they’ve got in that deep, they are likely added to a suckers list and they’re contact details sold on to other scam artists.

The OFT Scambusters Team would like every holidaymaker to consider:

Holidaymakers who are approached by a scratchcard tout or who attend a presentation should consider:

• Do you have the time to sit through a lengthy sales pitch?
• Will the promises made by the salesman be in the contract and can you rely on them?
• Can you take away the contract to consider at your leisure or cancel later?
• Do you know exactly what you are getting for your money?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, then the OFT advises to simply walk away.

To that list of mild posers I’d like to add one.

• Can you afford to lose over GBP3,000 of your hard earned cash should your new friend turn out to be a scratchcard vampire instead of the chirpy lad from Essex that he makes out to be?

See a previous post on Timeshare in Tenerife and Tenerife Timeshare – Know Before You Go – an article which outlines your rights, protections and places to seek assistance should you fall prey to these unscrupulous conmen.

What should you look for when deciding where to open a business, buy your dream house or stage a Hollywood movie? Location, location, location! And as locations go, Teide’s lunar landscape couldn’t be better as a stand-in for the Moon for the first ESA Lunar Robotics Challenge.

Water trapped in ancient ice deposits on the moon could not only speak volumes about the very distant past of that cold star but also possibly support life stations sometime in the future. But to know more scientists need a reliable robotic friend to go and gather the ice for them and that’s where the rovers come in.

Eight European teams developed robots for the event though only Cesar, Germany’s entry completed the challenge successfully. Nevertheless Francesco Feliciani of ESA’s Telecom Directorate was pleased with the overall performance of the robots saying: “The successful live transmission of the videos streams from the LRC proves that the technology is ready to be used in real life applications.

Morning tv in Tenerife is much the same as anywhere else I expect – chock-a-block with advertising for kids’ games and toys for Christmas and the Three Kings. Everything is just so depressingly sophisticated. And expensive. Electronic dinosaurs or puppies, baby dolls that do everything from talk, walk and swim to pee, poo and burp. Whatever happened to imagination? Are our kids so over-loaded with input that they can’t use their imaginations anymore?

Sure, I remember my Tiny Tears. It cried tears and wet its nappy but that’s as much reality as I needed, thank you very much. Give me a couple of plastic animals and a painted green board and I happily played with my ‘farm’ for hours. It didn’t even matter that half the animals were stolen from my brother’s dinosaur set. If I wanted tyrannosaurus rex to be the farmer’s bull – well so be it.

I’ve gone down the expensive toy route. You convince yourself that as your child really, really wants that one item, you could get it and make up the rest with cheapie fillers. Rubbish. You’ll go ahead and buy that special present and spend just as much as always on all the other junk.

A couple of years ago it was a Furby. Having convinced ourselves that our four year old daughter who went loopy at the Furby Christmas commercials would take care of this piece of expensive electronic gadgetry we went ahead and bought one for her. We bought it too early as it happens because having it hiding in the house was just too much temptation and we couldn’t resist giving her the damn thing weeks before Christmas. Then we felt guilty that she had no other special thing to open so we ended up spending wodges more money on Christmas presents for her to open on the day.

At least Furby lasted through Christmas though some time soon after he stopped being so communicative. Turned out my daughter had thought he was looking a bit grubby and had decided to give him a bath.

If only I could stick to the plan I come up with every year about this time. By mid January there are going to be immense sales all over Tenerife. Shops are going to be practically throwing overstocked toys, clothes and fancy electronics at people in the street. If I could just forget Santa and the Three Kings and wait for the Tenerife Sales Fairy then I’d be able to buy whatever the kids wanted and then some.

The trouble is I can’t do it. I remember that although my family were never wealthy, my brother and I always had piles of presents to open on Christmas morning. I suspect that my Mum would split open packs of Dinky cars or farm animals so she could wrap them all seperately just to give us the thrill of unwrapping this huge pile of presents.

I get so carried away at the idea of the kids having a brilliant Christmas that I can’t help myself going a bit nuts and I always overspend and do not have a bean left over for the sales. So once again I am making a pre-Christmas resolution to give each child only one present each but to put the difference that I would have spent into a kitty for the Sales Fairy.

I’ve not yet managed to stick to this promise but you never know. In the meantime, I noticed that the toy shop in the village has those NEO transformers that are being advertised and that Playmobil Riding School too. I’m sure there must be a Hot Wheels kit somewhere in Los Cristianos and if we organise a trip to Santa Cruz we could look in Carrefourre for the Pleo…