Edinburgh, continued, and Glasgow
No pictures for this part, really. It's too bad, but sometimes your vacation goes undocumented visually.
After our visit to Glasgow Castle we went and got a tour of a haunted house, which was wasted money cuz the ghosts failed to make a timely appearance, and then we got on the train and went to Glasgow to stay with Mads, the woman who was making the whole thing possible (we were staying with her employer in London because he's the nicest guy in Creation and the only man to ever out-generous the HLP in my presence). So the HLP had a suitcase full of things she had requested from America as her present for having been so nice to us. Plus, we got to see her pad and Glasgow.
We ended up seeing a lot more of the first than the second, which was too bad; after our train ride (and an exceedingly unfortunate interval in which my ATM card was devoured by an intransigent Scots ATM (they call them something else in Great Britain, but darned if I can remember what it is)) we went to dinner at an Indian restaurant and had haggis curry, which isn't any better than it sounds, and then went back to Mads' flat and watched part of 28 Days on the television, then sacked out.
And since the windows were all closed (with shutters, mind you) and Mads didn't have to get up and go to work and we had had about two hours of sleep the night before and we were all kinda jet-lagged anyway, we didn't even wake up until 11:30 AM, and we didn't get out of the house until something like one o'clock, which meant that we had just enough time to eat lunch and get on the train. So that's what we did.
One note will suffice for lunch--please, be aware of what you're getting into with the Scots soft drinks. Their ginger ale is not a polite ginger-inflected beverage like Canada Dry; it is like ginger amphibious commandos assaulting your taste buds, by which I mean you would get a similar experience by dousing your tongue with concentrated essence of ginger, by which I mean, BEWARE!
They also drink Iron-Bru, which is like Frescolita, if you've ever had that, and if you haven't lived in Venezuela you probably haven't. It's sorta like creme soda; if you could make liquid carbonated caramels it would taste a lot like it.
So that was Glasgow. And by the time we got back to London, it was late, so we just went out and observed the restaurants and had a fairly forgettable meal at a pizza restaurant (don't go to London for the pizza).
But Wednesday...a lot happened on Wednesday.
After our visit to Glasgow Castle we went and got a tour of a haunted house, which was wasted money cuz the ghosts failed to make a timely appearance, and then we got on the train and went to Glasgow to stay with Mads, the woman who was making the whole thing possible (we were staying with her employer in London because he's the nicest guy in Creation and the only man to ever out-generous the HLP in my presence). So the HLP had a suitcase full of things she had requested from America as her present for having been so nice to us. Plus, we got to see her pad and Glasgow.
We ended up seeing a lot more of the first than the second, which was too bad; after our train ride (and an exceedingly unfortunate interval in which my ATM card was devoured by an intransigent Scots ATM (they call them something else in Great Britain, but darned if I can remember what it is)) we went to dinner at an Indian restaurant and had haggis curry, which isn't any better than it sounds, and then went back to Mads' flat and watched part of 28 Days on the television, then sacked out.
And since the windows were all closed (with shutters, mind you) and Mads didn't have to get up and go to work and we had had about two hours of sleep the night before and we were all kinda jet-lagged anyway, we didn't even wake up until 11:30 AM, and we didn't get out of the house until something like one o'clock, which meant that we had just enough time to eat lunch and get on the train. So that's what we did.
One note will suffice for lunch--please, be aware of what you're getting into with the Scots soft drinks. Their ginger ale is not a polite ginger-inflected beverage like Canada Dry; it is like ginger amphibious commandos assaulting your taste buds, by which I mean you would get a similar experience by dousing your tongue with concentrated essence of ginger, by which I mean, BEWARE!
They also drink Iron-Bru, which is like Frescolita, if you've ever had that, and if you haven't lived in Venezuela you probably haven't. It's sorta like creme soda; if you could make liquid carbonated caramels it would taste a lot like it.
So that was Glasgow. And by the time we got back to London, it was late, so we just went out and observed the restaurants and had a fairly forgettable meal at a pizza restaurant (don't go to London for the pizza).
But Wednesday...a lot happened on Wednesday.
Posted by sealionii on
Friday August 8, 2008 at 1:07am
They call them "cash machines". We had that problem too, in London:
"Hey, where's an ATM?"
"A what??"
"An ATM. You know, you put your bank card in and get money out . . ."
"Oh. You mean a cash machine! There's one over this way."
Maybe they call them something still different in Scotland?
"Cash machine" is more intuitive, really, when I think about it. We Americans are suckers for acronyms, but not everyone likes them as much as we do!