So obviously my posting frequency has declined somewhat and I apologize for that but I've had to write my midterm essays, which took a lot of time. I also would have had Scotland stuff up sooner but I haven't edited videos before so I had to teach myself this - as you can see, it still says "Evaluation copy" on the bottom. If anyone knows of a powerpoint to video converter that is free and works, let me know. Or a video editing tool that's free and as easy to use as powerpoint is, for that matter.
The video ought to suffice for a lot of the narrative that I normally do. We flew in Ryanair and ninja'd 3 carry-ons past their sleeping foreigner employees. Things went well until we decided to take a cab into town, which ended up costing roughly 25 sterling. It's ok though, I managed to pee in his cab before we got out without him knowing.
Our BnB was quite nice, as the video shows briefly. It was run by a Marioesque Italian guy named Franco who danced around and made food for everyone. From his demeanor, I don't think anything bad has ever happened to this man. Anyway, we got heated towel racks, a four-poster bed, mimosas in the morning, and most importantly, wi-fi for me to Slingbox the tournament on. More on the tournament later.
The first day our flight got in later than we expected so we didn't have time to do anything significant. That turned out to be ok though, as Edinburgh is a perfectly nice city to just stroll around in. Much of it is done in Gothic-style buildings, cobblestone streets, etc, all interspersed with crazy volcanic topography. The castle sits on an extinct volcano, as is Arthur's Seat that we hiked on in the video. We walked up and down the Royal Mile, which is rather like an extended version of Dublin's Grafton Street (pedestrianized, lots of shopping), and ended up at a pub. We were hoping to sneak in a ghost tour, but they were more popular than we anticipated so we had to schedule one for Monday.
The next morning we did Edinburgh castle, which had massive lines. I had to wait in line behind a girl who looked about eighteen and was there with her grandparents and little sister. This girl thought she knew some things about history. Her grandparents were kind, pseudo-inquisitive types that were willing to encourage her verbal diarrhea. The line for tickets lasted an hour. Needless to say I almost dumped a cauldron of hot burning oil on her. Anyway, the castle was a lot of fun despite the snow and gale-force winds. After some lunch we walked down and saw the horrendous parliament building, just completed a few years ago after Scotland got its parliament back from London. It's avant-garde architecture and it looks like something out of a Doctor Seuss book, making it stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the city. If I was a Scottish MP I'd rather resign than go to work there.
Our hike up Arthur's Seat paid off with some great views. It was a fairly decent climb and we ended up walking several miles that day. That night I ate some dodgy seafood gumbo, and then later I un-ate it.
In the morning we started our "Highland Adventure" at 730. I was feeling less than awesome, even less so after out bus driver Chris informed us that there was a 40 pound fine for ralphing on the bus. There was some pretty heavy snow when we got into the highlands, stopping first at a Gatlinburg-esque town called Pitlochry. We continued to press north towards Loch Ness, all the while in crazy weather conditions. Just before arriving we received word that there had been a bus crash, and that we wouldn't be able to use the road we'd intended to. That meant no whisky=tasting and Sterling castle after Loch Ness, and that we'd have to go further north to Inverness and come back that way. It was unfortunate, but the accident happened on a stretch of road we had passed five minutes earlier, so we felt lucky to be in good order.
We took a cruise out on Loch Ness, which was very pretty, and the boat was really well done. They have high-def sonar imaging of the loch floor, so you can see whats underneath, as well as one that images all the objects in the water. In places the loch is almost 1,ooo feet deep, seriously. Apparently, it holds more water than any other thing on the island of Britain combined, and if you emptied it there would be enough water to cover all of Britain six inches deep. There are a lot of interesting things on or near the loch as well, like Fort Augustus, Boleskine House, and Urquart Castle (on video).
We got back to Edinburgh late and rather tired but we went straight to our scheduled ghost tour. It was a lot of fun despite being bitter cold and snowy, and the tour company owns some deserted 19th century vaults that were build over by streets and bridges that apparently have a lot of paranormal activity that is filmed by NatGeo and the like. They have a pretty sweet little dungeon-office down there too with a tavern and the works.
The next morning we took a bus out to Rosslyn Chapel. That's the one at the end of the Da Vinci Code where the annoying French woman finds out she's Jesus' daughter or something. Our bus driver handed us a pretty awesome evangelical booklet as we exited his vehicle that I mistook for chapel information. Evangelicalism is actually fairly prevalent in Scotland. The inside of Rosslyn is every bit as impressive as popular media suggest. The carvings are mind blowing, and it seems like every inch of the interior space is covered with them. There is a good deal of pagan imagery interspersed with the Christian, the coolest looking of which is probably the Green Man, who has vines growing out of his mouth. The most impressive thing in my opinion, however, is a window that is bordered by images of what is clearly (very clearly) corn. Rosslyn was done well before Europeans supposedly went to North America, and corn isn't native to Europe. This corroborates a legend that a Templar ship landed in America well before Columbus, and through their connections to Rosslyn (the patron family, St. Clair, had a Templar background), had the corn carved for them. Pretty crazy stuff.
Back in Edinburgh, I ate haggis. Haggis is beef and oatmeal mixed with spices, punched into a sheep's stomach, and boiled. It's served with "neeps and tatties" or turnips and potatoes. I found it all very agreeable actually, it tasted like a sausage-meatloaf. The rest of the day we wandered around and enjoyed ourselves, and checked out the "Scottish Whiskey Experience" which was pretty touristy but we got whiskey. We caught our late flight home and that was that.
Forgot to include, addressing previous questions:
As I may have mentioned in the past, weather reporting here is not as specific as it is at home. Nor can it be - the weather is so volatile that it's hardly worth forecasting in the kind of detail we're used to. Hourly forecasts are sometimes useless, if they had 15 minute chunk forecasts perhaps they'd be helpful. Anyway, a cursory glance at the weather before we left for Scotland suggested that it would be roughly the same temperature. When we arrived in Edinburgh we discovered that this was a patently false assumption, and as I've shown, there was nearly constant snow falling in Edinburgh as well as the highlands. In a last minute decision before leaving, I elected to leave my sleek, manly, and gear tech-savvy Mountain Hardware gloves at the apartment. In Scotland, realizing my mistake, we had to go on a perilous quest for gloves...not that it seemed too difficult, the Royal Mile literally consists of clothiers selling sweaters, kilts, and the like every other door for a mile...but it proved startlingly difficult. There were pink fluffy gloves, knit wool mittens that cost 70 quid, and children's gloves everywhere, but no normal gloves. At long last, we found some that actually fit and that were not colored so as to mark me as an aggressively homosexual male, with the trade-off that they were electric blue. Hence the "Aqua-Man," "Blueberry," "Voidwalker," or as Spence said, "Papa Smurf" gloves.
And no, peeing the in the cab was figurative language.
The video ought to suffice for a lot of the narrative that I normally do. We flew in Ryanair and ninja'd 3 carry-ons past their sleeping foreigner employees. Things went well until we decided to take a cab into town, which ended up costing roughly 25 sterling. It's ok though, I managed to pee in his cab before we got out without him knowing.
Our BnB was quite nice, as the video shows briefly. It was run by a Marioesque Italian guy named Franco who danced around and made food for everyone. From his demeanor, I don't think anything bad has ever happened to this man. Anyway, we got heated towel racks, a four-poster bed, mimosas in the morning, and most importantly, wi-fi for me to Slingbox the tournament on. More on the tournament later.
The first day our flight got in later than we expected so we didn't have time to do anything significant. That turned out to be ok though, as Edinburgh is a perfectly nice city to just stroll around in. Much of it is done in Gothic-style buildings, cobblestone streets, etc, all interspersed with crazy volcanic topography. The castle sits on an extinct volcano, as is Arthur's Seat that we hiked on in the video. We walked up and down the Royal Mile, which is rather like an extended version of Dublin's Grafton Street (pedestrianized, lots of shopping), and ended up at a pub. We were hoping to sneak in a ghost tour, but they were more popular than we anticipated so we had to schedule one for Monday.
The next morning we did Edinburgh castle, which had massive lines. I had to wait in line behind a girl who looked about eighteen and was there with her grandparents and little sister. This girl thought she knew some things about history. Her grandparents were kind, pseudo-inquisitive types that were willing to encourage her verbal diarrhea. The line for tickets lasted an hour. Needless to say I almost dumped a cauldron of hot burning oil on her. Anyway, the castle was a lot of fun despite the snow and gale-force winds. After some lunch we walked down and saw the horrendous parliament building, just completed a few years ago after Scotland got its parliament back from London. It's avant-garde architecture and it looks like something out of a Doctor Seuss book, making it stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the city. If I was a Scottish MP I'd rather resign than go to work there.
Our hike up Arthur's Seat paid off with some great views. It was a fairly decent climb and we ended up walking several miles that day. That night I ate some dodgy seafood gumbo, and then later I un-ate it.
In the morning we started our "Highland Adventure" at 730. I was feeling less than awesome, even less so after out bus driver Chris informed us that there was a 40 pound fine for ralphing on the bus. There was some pretty heavy snow when we got into the highlands, stopping first at a Gatlinburg-esque town called Pitlochry. We continued to press north towards Loch Ness, all the while in crazy weather conditions. Just before arriving we received word that there had been a bus crash, and that we wouldn't be able to use the road we'd intended to. That meant no whisky=tasting and Sterling castle after Loch Ness, and that we'd have to go further north to Inverness and come back that way. It was unfortunate, but the accident happened on a stretch of road we had passed five minutes earlier, so we felt lucky to be in good order.
We took a cruise out on Loch Ness, which was very pretty, and the boat was really well done. They have high-def sonar imaging of the loch floor, so you can see whats underneath, as well as one that images all the objects in the water. In places the loch is almost 1,ooo feet deep, seriously. Apparently, it holds more water than any other thing on the island of Britain combined, and if you emptied it there would be enough water to cover all of Britain six inches deep. There are a lot of interesting things on or near the loch as well, like Fort Augustus, Boleskine House, and Urquart Castle (on video).
We got back to Edinburgh late and rather tired but we went straight to our scheduled ghost tour. It was a lot of fun despite being bitter cold and snowy, and the tour company owns some deserted 19th century vaults that were build over by streets and bridges that apparently have a lot of paranormal activity that is filmed by NatGeo and the like. They have a pretty sweet little dungeon-office down there too with a tavern and the works.
The next morning we took a bus out to Rosslyn Chapel. That's the one at the end of the Da Vinci Code where the annoying French woman finds out she's Jesus' daughter or something. Our bus driver handed us a pretty awesome evangelical booklet as we exited his vehicle that I mistook for chapel information. Evangelicalism is actually fairly prevalent in Scotland. The inside of Rosslyn is every bit as impressive as popular media suggest. The carvings are mind blowing, and it seems like every inch of the interior space is covered with them. There is a good deal of pagan imagery interspersed with the Christian, the coolest looking of which is probably the Green Man, who has vines growing out of his mouth. The most impressive thing in my opinion, however, is a window that is bordered by images of what is clearly (very clearly) corn. Rosslyn was done well before Europeans supposedly went to North America, and corn isn't native to Europe. This corroborates a legend that a Templar ship landed in America well before Columbus, and through their connections to Rosslyn (the patron family, St. Clair, had a Templar background), had the corn carved for them. Pretty crazy stuff.
Back in Edinburgh, I ate haggis. Haggis is beef and oatmeal mixed with spices, punched into a sheep's stomach, and boiled. It's served with "neeps and tatties" or turnips and potatoes. I found it all very agreeable actually, it tasted like a sausage-meatloaf. The rest of the day we wandered around and enjoyed ourselves, and checked out the "Scottish Whiskey Experience" which was pretty touristy but we got whiskey. We caught our late flight home and that was that.
Forgot to include, addressing previous questions:
As I may have mentioned in the past, weather reporting here is not as specific as it is at home. Nor can it be - the weather is so volatile that it's hardly worth forecasting in the kind of detail we're used to. Hourly forecasts are sometimes useless, if they had 15 minute chunk forecasts perhaps they'd be helpful. Anyway, a cursory glance at the weather before we left for Scotland suggested that it would be roughly the same temperature. When we arrived in Edinburgh we discovered that this was a patently false assumption, and as I've shown, there was nearly constant snow falling in Edinburgh as well as the highlands. In a last minute decision before leaving, I elected to leave my sleek, manly, and gear tech-savvy Mountain Hardware gloves at the apartment. In Scotland, realizing my mistake, we had to go on a perilous quest for gloves...not that it seemed too difficult, the Royal Mile literally consists of clothiers selling sweaters, kilts, and the like every other door for a mile...but it proved startlingly difficult. There were pink fluffy gloves, knit wool mittens that cost 70 quid, and children's gloves everywhere, but no normal gloves. At long last, we found some that actually fit and that were not colored so as to mark me as an aggressively homosexual male, with the trade-off that they were electric blue. Hence the "Aqua-Man," "Blueberry," "Voidwalker," or as Spence said, "Papa Smurf" gloves.
And no, peeing the in the cab was figurative language.
2 comments:
You peed in a cab?
Also, what about the blue gloves?
I'm disappointed that you didn't reference Armageddon when you mentioned Haggis. I can't remember the guy's name, but the big guy with the tattoos described Haggis to the NASA psychologist and summed it up by saying "that'll put some hair on your chest."
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