Arriving In The UK and Edinburgh

G'Day all,

It's been a few hectic days since leaving Canada. I was glad to get out of Calgary and head to the UK, the flight to Heathrow was about 8.5 hours. Not too long, but long enough to start getting irritating. Getting through customs at Heathrow was pretty easy, even easier for Mel seeing as though she holds a British passport.

We got to Calgary airport 4 hours before our flight, and we had to wait 6 hours for our flight from Heathrow to Edinburgh. So on top of the long flight from Canada it was getting to be a long day. Sitting at Heathrow was a bit surreal. It is a massive airport, with a lot of underground passages and not many windows. I imagined that Heathrow airport is what life will be like once humanity is forced to live underground, I was surprised not to find a vendor selling bars of Soylent Green while we wandered around.







We made it to Edinburgh at about the same time that Scotland finished beating England in the Six-Nations Rugby. The game itself was actually played in Edinburgh so our bus was stuck in traffic due to the vast amount of drunken kilted Scotsmen out on the street. Walking through Edinburgh on a Saturday night when most of the city is out on the sauce is quite an intense way to be introduced to a city.

Over the last few days we've been concentrating on sorting out long term accommodation and jobs. Mel already has a job at Ikea, and I have an interview with them in a couple of days. We moved into a flat yesterday, we're only a 20 minute bus ride from the city centre. Our local supermarket is insanely large, and cheap (for once). I know I complained about the price of beer in Canada, but I have no reason to complain now. Beer is sold in supermarkets and I can get a 15 pack of Guinness for 10 pounds! That works out to about $20, at least half the price of what you would pay in Australia.

Well enough on the price of beer. Today we went to a place called the Ocean Terminal. I was keen to check it because I was under the impression that there would be a ferry terminal that would provide trips to Scandinavia. I wanted to see where we could go and for how much, a weekend trip to Stockholm would be great. I was wrong. All we found was a massive shopping mall.









We headed back into town and decided to check out Edinburgh Castle. It's a pretty impressive complex which sits pretty much smack, bang in the middle of the city. There was so much history in the place, to be honest the interior had been renovated in many places to appease the tourists but it was still worth the price of admission. We went into a Military Museum where they displayed a standard which had been captured from one of Napolean's regiments during the Battle of Waterloo.

There was much more historically significant stuff going on, too much to really go though right now. We have many more plans to get out and explore around not only Edinburgh but all of the UK, Ireland and Europe.

That's all for now, take it easy!