The last time I wrote about my vacation I stopped short of our last leg in Edinburgh. Tuesday came and on we went to do some more touristy stuff.

Our group had seriously decreased in size as some had already left for home. The remaining four of us decided to go and see some of the tourist attractions around Edinburgh. After breakfast, our host and us got into Jeff’s BMW and took to the road. I don’t really recall all that much about the drive as I spent most of it sleeping comfortably in my seat. When we arrived at our first destination, I was told that it was one of the Millenium Projects the UK had built for the year 2000 celebrations.

Scotlands part in the project was the re-opening of the waterway connecting Edinburgh on the west coast with Glasgow on the east coast. What we came to see was the lock system they built do overcome a rather big drop.

I want to detour here for a bit and tell you about some of the other Millenium Project installations you have a fair chance of knowing about: The Millenium Dome and Millenium Wheel (otherwise known as London Eye), both in London. You’ve probably seen the former in one of the more recent James Bond movies and caught glimpses of the latter in TV footage of London.
Both impress with their sheer size, if not necessarily common sense. The Millenium Dome at least seems to be nothing more than a hugely expensive waste of steel and concrete. Supposedly they hired one of the EuroDisneyland managers to make it work economically. What I’m told is that they misunderstood names and hired the EuroDisneyland Parking Lot Manager…
The Wheel though turned into quite an impressive tourist attraction – if you want to take a ride on it, prepare for a few hours of queuing. Or better – get ticket’s online in advance. Now back to the trip -

The lock we visited is called The Falkirk Wheel. It’s an impressive display of very ingenious engineering.

As you can probably see from the pictures, the thing is *huge*. The trick about it way of functioning is that they built two massive bathtubs, big enough to fit in two boats. These are mounted in a turning wheel, thus lifting the totally balanced cargo of boat and water up and down.

This way of building the lock turns out to be quite economical, as only very little energy is necessary to turn the wheel (I was told a 60 Watt electric motor with a transmission was doing the job [hmm?]). Another bonus is that it doesn’t waste water as conventional lock systems do – just look up the Panama canal locks on the internet.

We spent about 90 minutes looking at this thing from all angles, finally getting back into the car and going back to Edinburgh for some food. There was however one small stop to look at a few stones on a field that apparently had been put there by druids centuries ago. It was something of a smaller, non-impressive Stonehenge.

Lunch consisted of the stereotypical British dish: Fish and Chips. The shop we got it from however turned out to be quite ok. It had even been awarded several stars (by the Edinburgh tourist office I understand – I don’t think it’s something on the order of Michelin but a guide nonetheless. Surprisingly enough, there was a rather good collection of Italian wine bottles next to the frying pans, something, I’m sure, that doesn’t exactly fit into the financial range of the students frequeting the place.

The afternoon was spent with some late shopping for our planned road trip to tne northern end of the UK main island. We went into Mark and Spencer’s and Salesbury’s to get sandwiches and other road food.

When we wanted to drive back to the house though, the BMW let us down. A nut holding the transmission gear in place gave out on us and we had to call the AA (Britain’s equivalent to Germany’s ADAC) to get a replacement. Nothing more boring than spending an hour in a big, dark, empty parking lot with temperatures rapidly dropping. As a result, when we got back, we decided to take Ken’s car to drive north, as our confidence in the BMW had decreased along with the temperature.

Next update: A road trip through the Highlands and up to the cliffs.

Monday morning we all managed to get our collective act together. People started to rise and prepare for the day’s worth of things to see, things to do. Breakfast, coffee and a morning shower later we were all ready to start the day’s first trip to the next bus stop. Fun fact about England: The laws of physics must not apply to double-decker buses. Or at least that’s what you think sitting on the upper floor and constantly worrying that the bus you’re taking will topple over, if not in this corner, than certainly in the next one.
We rode the bus into the city’s centre, stopped along a wide, stretched road, sided with shops and stores. As we got off, the dominating view was that of Edinburgh’s castle, sitting right atop a medium size hill in the city’s centre. All the slopes around it looked pretty much vertical from my point of view.

And so we started to climb… down. Not so much that the castle has to be atop a hill, there is a park (and the city’s train station) beneath it in a kind of valley. Our host and tourguide told me that this “valley” once used to be a lake, or, when in Rome, do as the romans do, loch. Obviously, it had been drained to make space for grass, trees and some sort of open amphitheater. The climb uphill turned out to be not so bad. There were small trails and to be honest, it wasn’t all that high.

Once we arrived at the top, we were greeted by a smell I at once associated with a military grade chemical attack on the city of Edinburgh or the tourists at its castle. Turned out I was only half wrong, too. There apparently had been a military marching show in the castle’s court. There were stadium-like seats built all around the court and the smell came from the truck pumping out dozens of chemical toilets. Talk about shitty jobs…
Some wretching and deep breaths later, we were standing upwind and looking at the entrance to the actual castle building. You can see it on the picture below. Notice, the metal guy to the left of the portal is not Mel Gibson… although it does represent the original character portrait by the actor in the movie Braveheart.

We decided against taking the tour of the castle’s insides, as it cost 8 pounds. Instead, we took a big gulp of breathable air and hurried past the awful smell towards the university. As it happened, there was the one-week International Comedy Festival in town. Actors and groups from all over the world doing a 24/7 comedy program on 5 stages. I don’t know about you, but I certainly pitied the staff responsible for building and taking down the stages every 2 odd hours. We went for two plays, the first one being a 90 minute blurr of music and weird images played on stage. I can’t tell you what it was all about as I a) have no idea if there actually was a point to it or b) just didn’t get it.
The second play was a very good and funny mixture of good-old-fashioned British humor. It was called Bill Shakespear’s Italian Job. For those of you unfamiliar with the 60s or 70s movie The Italian Job, it’s one of those few world-famous movies of British origin, centered around a big-scale robbery of gold in Italy’s industrial heart. It involves a widely stolen scene of the robber crew making their get-away in three modified Mini Coopers, best known for its scenes of them running down stairs, jumping over roofs and finally escaping through a sewage tunnel. There is a Hollywood remake around, showing in theaters in 2003.
For those of you who don’t know Shakespear, I can’t help you. Where have you been for the last 200 years? Anyway, they crossed the plot of the movie with figures and sentences from several of Shakespear’s plays, Romeo and Juliet being the central plot.

After taking in that much culture, the need for some substance in the form of food called out to us. With the advantage of having a local amongst us, we were led to an indian restaurant right next to the university. You could see it was making a lot of its business with students, as was apparent in the prices and policies of “no reservations, no liquor licence, no stylish location”. The last of those policies however seemed to have been abandoned as the restaurant had only recently been renovated, looking all gleamy, bright and in. The food certainly proved anyone wrong who ever said something about the UK not knowing how to run a proper cuisine. I had some fabulous chicken curry with rice, indian style, medium. That was on the conservative side, as it turned out I could have gone for the hot version, which turned out to be not as badly damaging as I’ve known from Ken’s cooking. There was only one person in our group to complain about the food being too hot: Juli, the indonesian wife of one of the groups members. It nevertheless certainly made for some fun watching her squeam. There’s more funny stuff from her but I’ll tell you about that in another post…

As we went back to our bus we came by one of the most stunning pictures I’ve seen in the city of Edinburgh: The main building of The Bank of Scotland. To properly comprehend this, you have to remember that the city is in a rather wet climate with the sea being right next to it. There is also the history of steam-driven trains that didn’t exactly help to keep the buildings clean. Most of the old buildings (and that really means: most of the buildings) were rather dark and covered with the black residue connected with burning coal. But there was one building recently cleaned, much like the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin.
It certainly stood out like a shining diamond amongst the other buildings. Here’s the picture:

In the end we went back to our tents and the torrent of dreams about the different ways one can be run over by vehicles. Not to mention the growing impression of someone sawing down a big forest right inside the tent next to us…

Next update: The Falkirk Wheel and a study in useless but brilliant engineering.

Sunday was the “big day”. Much too late, we packed the car and headed out for Edinburgh. Just to give you some perspective: The Flight from Germany is something like 600 kilometers. The drive north was around 700. Thank the controllers at Ken’s company for paying the gas.
Around 250 miles on the road, I learned that my wish to go to Edinburgh turned out to be a very fortunate coincidence for Ken. He’d been planning to go to a convention of this mailing-list of his. When I asked if it was ok for me to come over for a week, he’d half expected to miss out on this. Imagine his surprise when I asked if it would be too much to ask for us to go see Edinburgh for a few days…
So there I am, mentally preparing to meet these strangers, who, coincidentally, make up the probably most left oriented political group to be found in the UK. In case you’re not-so-convinced about this statement, look up “Mark Thomas Product” on google.com. That’s the whole central axis of this list.
Anyway, there was still a lot of ground to cover and having been updated about traffic developments,we tried to avoid the M6/M1 and somehow found our way onto the A68.
For me, this turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. The A68 is one of those routes that have neither a lot of traffic nor much in the way of towns along their way. But boy did it have scenery. Also, there is must be something sadistic about the UK’s manual for building roads: The countryside we went through consists mainly of hills and valleys. Those however don’t run the same way the road goes….. ,.-�’��`-., wheeeeee!
This turned out to be a lot of fun at first… going up a hill with a 14% slope, about 10 meters worth of summit and then suddenly dropping out below your wheels at another 14%… wheeeee! This was so much fun, in addition to the non-existant speed camera’s that we dismissed all those signs telling the number of accidents on the road in the last 3 years (something like 58). Until we got the shit scared out of us, anyway: There was another blind summit, only this one had a sharp turn on the top. Now that was exciting…
Some 50-ish miles down the road, another problem with the road-engineering made itself apparent: Pain. Drink several large caffeinated beverages and you will understand that they will make themselves known in your bladder. Add to that the constant ups and downs of a road at fairly high speed – almost resembling a roller coaster ride – the sudden changes in g-forces will make for one most unpleasant sensation. Soon we were actively looking out for the next sign telling us of the whereabouts of the next toilet facilities.
As luck would have it, there were none to be found for the next 30 miles, our discomfort growing exponentially with every minute not being able to relieve ourselves. But finally, there was the long awaited sign! We took the next turn left, drove along a well tended small road in the woods and arrived at a picnic site provided by the forest administration. In addition to having all the proper facilities, there was a wonderful view of the landscape as you can witness on the photo provided below.

Some sandwiches and 10 odd minutes later, we were back on the road. That was when Murphy’s law struck again: There were about 6 different restroom facilities along the next 10 miles. Doh!
The rest of the drive was pretty much uneventful but for a short stop at the border to Scotland.

Tired, but grateful, we arrived at our destination short outside Edinbrough and met the rest of the gang. Let it be said, they all turned out to be a nice and fun bunch. It was a lone house next to one of the main routes out of Edinbrough. About 5 meters off the road, we started to put together our virgin-tent. 15 minutes later, we realized we should have RTFM and de-constructed the tent again. Another 30 minutes later, the tent was up. We probably would have been faster weren’t it for the annoyance of having a 9-year-old “reporter” document our progress on video. I’m not sure if I’ll get my hands on it, but if I do, I certainly intend to put up some parts of it here.

Finally it was time for some relaxation and photos of the breathtakingly beautiful sunset that was visible on the wheat-fields behind the house.

Next update: Our trip into the city and The International Comedy festival

Although, the weather sure has tried everything in its power to make it otherwise. Tonite was a bastard to sleep outside in a tent. Or at least, my sleeping bag is not made for these temperatures. Woke up at 7 a.m. because of serious frostbite alarms going up all over my body.

Anyway, Edinburgh’s great. The city really does beat London, even the food we had so far has far exceeded even my best hopes, greasy as it may be.

Today we’re planning to go up to the northernmost part of this island, should get some pretty pictures out of that.
Talking of pictures, I haven’t gotten around to downloading any of them off the camera yet. I’ll fix that when I get back home. There’s some really mind-boggling scenery around here.

-Jan

I arrived here all right for all those of you that care. England hasn`t changed much, still a lot cooler than the rest of Europe. Scotland`s freezing however. Think I already caught a cold, having arrived here only 12 or so hours ago.

I probably won`t be able to post any pictures here this week. Don`t worry, they`ll be there eventually.

So far,

-Jan