Miles in London - Part 8

Hey guys!

I had written about a page of this email which I somehow to lose out of gmail, even out of the drafts folder. I must have hit the perfect combination of shortcut keys which meant not only did it exit from this window but I also managed to discard the draft as well. Unbelievable.
Its REALLY annoying to have to literally rewrite which I had spent the previous 15 mins writing, so luckily for all of you who have complained that these emails are too long, this will become shortened..

Its been been a pretty crazy 2 weeks since I last emailed. Work has been really busy finishing up a project and I have been to Scotland for almost a week and then Barcelona for the best part of 4 days, so pretty action packed on this end. I hope you are all well where you are, I know that you guys have weddings to plan, new boyfriends to entertain, new cars to drive, your own holidays etc, so write back with all the exciting things that you guys are up to! Sometimes I send these emails out and not many of you reply sometimes, so it would be good to get an update on what you guys are all up to.

I'll break this email up into parts so hopefully it will be easy to read.

Work

Work has been really busy - i actually got put on a project I enjoyed and the partner on the project went on holidays for the first 3 weeks of a 5 week project, which meant I was left to my own devices. It was good to get back to doing something i actually found interesting and actually work at the level I'm used to back in Australia and not a level below, which was what had previously been happening. Unfortunately, my holidays were right in the last 2 weeks of the project which was not ideal. It was OK for me, but I think the team had to work harder in my absence which I feel slightly bad about, but in my defence I was taking calls from Scotland to make sure that they were on the right track and to answer any questions they had. So after several late nights in between Scotland and Barcelona, I think we managed to keep the client and the partner happy. So for the first time since I've been here, work isn't a source of major complaints. Besides the fact that I have to work at all, I'm still looking to be a househusband at some point in the near future....

Scotland

Our trip to Scotland was in two parts, firstly a 3 day tour of the Scottish highlands starting from Edinburgh (Edinburgh and Glasgow are in the lowlands) with haggis adventures - whose slogan is 'wild and sexy'. I know this is pure marketing but I was a bit surprised that they didn't try to play up to this at all during the tour. I mean even contiki does the whole traffic light thing (everyone gets 3 colors at the start of the tour green = available, yellow = maybe, red = not interested) but there was nothing to show that the big slogan on the side of the bright yellow bus was true.... The highlands are quite beautiful - think new zealand but less lush and more desolate. The Scottish moors are beautiful in a barren, eerie way and ever since watching 'highlander' i've wanted to go to scotland and see what it was really like, and yes it is just like in the movies!

It does rain a lot in scotland though and for the first few days we did get severely rained on. The highlights of the tour include general scenery, visiting a nice scottish castle on a lake, the isle of skye (great scenery) a interesting and informative talk about traditional scottish life (how to wear a kilt, weapons used etc) where 2 people on the tour were dressed in traditional scottish garb - this is not quite the same as the kilts you see today. The main thing that i don't understand about this as why the traditional scottish kilt does not appear to be very warming. For a place as cold as scotland - lots of snow in winter, teens in the summer - how could people go around wearing just some kilt? The loch ness was not particuarly a highlight, it is massively touristy, and gimicky with lots of models of fake nessies and where we took our boat tour, there were heaps of little midges which are really annoying and bite your face etc...

Overall, a good tour which i would recommend to get a taste of the scottish highlands.

We returned from the tour on Friday where we met up with Nancy V, Jean, Helen and Matty at our hostel. The hostel was managed by quite an eccentric guy (JonJo) who seemed to take a lof pleasure in showing us how the lights in the room were able to dim, and the admittedly nice recreation room with projector.. When we checked out on Monday morning at 10am (the prescribed checkout time) the manager was still completley drunk from the night before and answered the door with his sunglasses on and reeking of alcohol.. did I mention that he slept in the office as well? Im a little recess you access through a ladder...

The main reason we were in edinburgh was actually for the fringe festival and we saw some great shows while we were there. There are a lot of great 'free' shows there too, mostly late night stand up. It usually features 3-4 comedians doing 10-15 minute sets and you are asked to give donation at the end but you don't have to. Generally, these are all in pubs/clubs with rooms set aside for these shows and in general these are quite good. We saw a few duds, in particular one guy with the 'Richard Mercer' voice but he just wasn't very funny... he had one sketch where he was playing a washed up james bond and put a gun to head to kill himself... not funny.. The best thing we saw while we were there was by far 'baby loves candy' which is a group that does improv musicals - the crowd yells out names of random musicals, past musicals include 'Jersey Whore'. and our one was 'The Last of the Norweigans'. This was absolutely hilarious and quite clever! We also saw Margaret Cho - shes the bisexual american woman. Nancy didn't like her at all, shes quite crude, talks about her vagina, oral sex, and toilet humour, in other words right up my alley. I found her quite funny, but the most interesting thing was how polished she was compared to any other act we saw. She was just smooth and you could tell she knew exactly what she was doing. With almost all other stand up acts we saw, there would be moments of hesitation, or they would get put off by some heckler etc, but margaret cho to her credit, put on a very professional show.

Edinburgh as a city is quite nice, there is a lot of nice old architecture there, the royal mile is great to walk downand there are so many old pubs everywhere. My one regret is not being able to see the Royal Military Tattoo which is supposed to be amazing. I guess i'll have to go back for that.
I found food in general to be quite good and we had some nice meals there, in particular a nice fish and chips place called seadogs.

London

We got back to London at about 11pm on Monday night and I was up at 5am to go to birmingham for work, where we pulled a couple of 2am's and I got back to London on Thursday night at about 11pm. We got up at 3am for our bus to take us to the airport for our trip to Barcelona on Friday.....

To be continued - I can see eyes glazing over already so I'll tell you about Barcelona in the next email - pictures are already on facebook!

Coming up -
Berlin with Alby and Linda
Amsterdam with Danny
NYC for Thanksgiving!

Hope you all write back soon!

Take care

Miles