Scottish Weather Lessons #1

So yesterday morning I thought, ‘oh it’s been warm this week, I’ll just wear my short jacket to work’. I always carry an umbrella, and I took the big super strong one yesterday. It’s got reinforced struts and is quite large, but the first time Angus put it up he managed to turn it inside out (???how I don’t know!) and it took us about 5 minutes (in the rain) to get it back around the right way! Anyway, I had the umbrella. I walked out our flat and up the hill and it was raining gently, but this didn’t bother me much. By the time I got to the bridge it was pretty windy and the rain was coming down. Normally when I cross the bridge with the umbrella up I’m a bit nervous that I might get picked up and blown off the bridge, so I hold the umbrella with both hands! This time it’s pretty bad, and I can’t really use the umbrella, so I’m getting a bit wet… By the time I’ve crossed over to the end of the bridge the rain has turned to horizontal-ish sleet. Hmm. Perhaps I should have worn my longer jacket today. The sleet continues as I walk through town to the office, and by now I’ve given up trying to keep dry, just hold on the umbrella and keep walking! It started snowing before I got to the office, which is a little kinder but still pretty wet! When I got up to my desk I realised I was soaking wet, so it wasn’t the happiest start to a working day I’ve had!

Lesson’s learned.
Watch the weather forecast.
If it’s forecast to rain sleet and snow on the way to work, wearing a) longer jacket and b) waterproof pants is sensible.
Weather here is amazing!! And apparently it get’s worse – it was warm yesterday but could have been 5 or 10degs colder!!!

Today I wore my waterproofs and looked a bit dorky but I’m over that anyway!

Today is Burns day (or Burns night tonight to be more exact) to celebrate the birthday of Robert Burns. Shame on you if you don’t know who Burns was (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Burns) if you are interested. (anyone heard of the song Auld Lang Syne?)Apparently the thing to do is read his poetry and eat haggis. So we’re going around the corner to our friend Amy’s place and apparently they are cooking haggis! Yay, home made haggis!

On the weekend we’re off to Aberdeen, the Granite City.

Cheerio,
Selina & Angus

Seagulls and Snow

So the last few weeks we've had a bit wetter, colder weather here in Scotland (which I'm sure all of you enduring the heat-wave in Adelaide can really sympathise with!) We had heavy snow fall in Edinburgh about two weeks ago - it was great, I walked to work and it was snowing lightly, but the time lunch came around it was heavy and starting to stay on the ground and by the time I walked home in the dark at 5:30 it was thick and slushy on the ground. Yay! It was beautiful! The hills around Edinburgh were all covered and it was very pretty. Most of it disapeared in the city by the next day, and on Sunday (6th) when we walked up Arthurs Seat there wasn't much around. It was a great hike up - took only about an hour to get to the top (the long way round) and the views were stunning - really amazing, over the old town, new town, castle, the firth of forth, over to the other side of the forth, to the Pentlands and beyond! It was sunny and windy but a great day for a walk! We had a picnic at the top and headed down again before we got blown away!

Last weekend (Saturday 12th) we left about 7am in our borrowed car (city car club rocks!) for the Scottish ski-fields. We drove north out of Edinburgh (leaving suburbia in about 15mins, this city is great – it’s so small!) drove across the Forth of Firth towards the city of Perth. We kept going north to the town of Spittal of Glenshee, home of the Glenshee Ski Resort (resort being a bit of an exaggeration, more like collection of antiquated ski lifts and an expensive café and some hills that are sometimes surrounded by enough snow to ski on – no funky bars or nightclubs here!). The views as we were driving were fabulous – the sun rising and filling the beautiful clear sky with gorgeous soft pinks, contrasting against the snow/frost covered hills and then the sky gradually getting more blue and the sun coming up – it was going to be a gorgeous day – perfect for skiing!!!!

We arrived at the place where I had (sensibly) booked ski gear, unfortunately they only had one pair of skis for the two of us and no boots for Angus. Now we’re pretty clever but we need 2 skis each. Luckily for us there was one pair of skis left by the time we got to the counter (ski rental in a tiny shed!!) and a pair of boots with some other poor bugger’s name on them which were given to Angus! We were in such a rush to get up to the slopes (we had been watching all the cars filled with people go past for the past 45mins that it had taken to line up to get our gear!) that we forgot (actually it was my fault, me supposedly being the skier!) to pick up stocks. I realised about 10 minutes later by which time we were in the 2mile long queue for the carpark. No way were we going back! So we _eventually_ made it to the carpark where we quickly changed into our ski gear and headed for more queues. After accidentally both buying two day passes (we got our cash back!) we finally made it into a lift line (stockless!) about 10am. So it took us about an hour and a half drive and an hour and a half queueing to get onto the slopes! Anyway, we were here! We went up the poma first (in beautiful sunshine) and just headed down an easy run first to get the old ski legs back. My skis were awful. Like skiing on gravel – I don’t think they’d been tuned since bought about a decade ago! Eeek – this was going to challenge me! Angus managed pretty well for the first few runs given that he had no poles! We did two on the poma and then decided to head over to the other side of the valley, which was more in the shade but the snow was apparently better and queues smaller (actually this wasn’t the case, but the runs were steeper too which we wanted). So we then lined up for about half an hour to wait for the (get this….) one person chairlift! Very 80’s! While in the line we had a bit of a chat to a couple of guys and we also had morning tea (muesli bar – we were prepared!).

At the top of the chairlift the views were AMAZING! What I haven’t mentioned yet is the absolute lack of trees or any shrubbery here – simply bare hills for miles and miles – all you could see from the top was snow covered hills and valleys – it was fantastic! (no photos unfortunately as somebody (that being me) forgot the camera – oops!) Anyway, it was stunning! We did a great run down to the tbar (again the queue was about 30mins) so when we got to the top there, we sat down in the sunshine looking at the stunning views and ate our lunch (again I was prepared, no mediocre Cloud 9 chippies and greasy food for us!). We skied down in the sunshine but this had obviously melted the snow a little so we did find a few rocks unfortunately. We decided we liked the snow better in the shade, even if it was a little cooler, so we went back and did a few laps on the tbar (the other one, with the slightly shorter queue!). We found a fabulous steep pitch that had some great powdery snow on it which we kept going back to – good practice for both of us! We think we got about 10 runs in over the whole day, which is a reasonable effort! And having to ski without poles was actually really good for both of us – me because I rely on them a bit much in the steeps (not that this was a problem here!) and Angus because he needs to be pushed from the comfort zone. Both of us looked a little funny but we’re used to that!

We actually didn’t take too long getting out the carpark, we thought it was going to be hell! And we bumped into a collegue of mine too so we had a drink back at the hostel where we were staying. We had a pretty quiet night, cooked up some tasty food, had a good bottle of French Red and went to bed early! We had planned on skiing on the Sunday but it was raining when we got up, and the hoards of people driving past the hostel suggested it was going to be just as busy as the Saturday but without the good weather! We decided not to stay so headed back to Edinburgh where we had a nice quiet afternoon! A top weekend!

PS – the reason this blog is entitled ‘Seagulls and Snow) is because the day it snowed in Edinburgh there were seagulls wheeling around outside the office as it was snowing – quite surreal!

PPS – we have a new blog – we miss having good discussions with all our friends about the world, politics, good books & movies and just life in general, so we’ve started a blog that we’d like you all to join in on, share your ideas and thoughts and so forth! The address is: http://youareinvitedto.blogspot.com/ and is set up as an online dinner party (we’ve been missing having these!). So all you have to do is email me with your gmail account and I’ll add you on as an author, and then share your thoughts! If you just want to comment then you can do that too (anon if you like, but we’d like you to share who you are please!). Please email me or angus with any queries about how it will work, although we’re not totally sure yet!

Christmas

We decided to go to Glasgow for a couple of days before we were to fly to Germany on Christmas Eve. We caught the train over on Saturday morning and then found our accommodation. We went for a nice wander around the city - it's quite different to Edinburgh - much more industrial and the city is not as pretty. It's situated on the river Clyde which is quite nice, but the city itself is hilly and the buildings and streets are not particularly pretty. We went for a walk down the mall (which was of course madly busy being the weekend before Christmas!)! We went to the cathedral which was spectacular! It overlooks a fantastic cemetary on a hill, which looked incredible in the evening light (it was the day after the shortest day of the year, so the sun set about 3:30pm). We only had a short time in the cathedral as it was closing for the day. Then we went to Mungo's museum of Religious Art. Might not sound too thrilling but it was really interesting - all different religions presented together in one museum, it was great! We stayed about an hour there. Oh... on our way out of the museum we saw the Tardis. Just sitting on the side of the road! We both looked at it, then each other and had a good laugh! It was so strange seeing it just there! Very funny!!! Of course we're not totally sure that its _the_ tardis, but surely there's only one....??? ;-) Then we found a cool little pizza bar where we had a pizza, drink and then wandered back through the city. It's not the nicest city on a saturday night - lots and lots of middle aged men out drunk on the streets, something we just don't see in Adelaide really ever. Here it seems to be more common...

Sunday we got up early and walked through town to grab breakfast before going on the bus out to the Burrel collection which is about 20mins on the bus out of Glasgow, situated on a big country estate typle place - a lovely stream running through it, and nice gardens. It was cold, and there was lots of ice and snow around - a bit slippery at times! It was a great gallery - the whole back of the building had floor to ceiling windows, looking out onto this forest - right there! With birds and squirrels playing right in front of you - we almost enjoyed looking at theview more than the (very impressive) collection of art! There was art from all over the world, including egyptian, tapestries, religious art, islamic art, paintings, lots of beautiful sculptures and statues, furniture and lots of other things - it was really nice to wander around for a few hours. There wern't too many people there either, so it was easy to look at all the works. Definately worth a visit. We then headed back to Glasgow for a quiet afternoon before going out for dinner to a very cool Russian restaurant. The food was influenced from all places around Russia, and it was pretty tasty! We finished the meal off with a really good dessert but the highlight was probably the vodka. Chilled perfectly to -18deg and served in a shot glass, it was exquisite! We had the herbal variety which was meant to be good for digestion, but no matter what they said it tasted amazing and certainly makes me look at vodka in a different way. We're currently planning a trip to Russia!!!!

The next morning we got up about 4am and walked to the bus station (luckily only about a 10minute walk) to catch our bus to the airport. We had breakfast at the airport (mmm...baked beans), caught our flight, then at the other end (Germany), caught a bus to the train station and took 3 trains to get to Bitburg eventually in the mid afternoon... a looooong way! We were very pleased to see Yvonne meeting us! Zoe arrived later in the afternoon (Ronald was there already) and we had a fantastic long dinner for Christmas Eve celebration in the evening. It was fantastic! A real feast! We then went to mass and after that came home for pudding.

On Christmas Day we slept in a loooong time, till about 11am, which was glorious! Then after brunch we went for a great walk, at Irrel Falls, close to the border with Luxembourg. It was really beautiful - there was snow on the ground and the trees were covered in frost which was needle-like and the air was filled with this frost. The trees were mostly white and there was ice on the rocks in the river. It was a lovely long walk! We also saw some deer and had a nice view to Luxembourg. The rest of the week was similar - lots and lots of fantstic food, walking, chatting, relaxing, playing games - it was a really lovely week ;-) Back in Edinburgh for New Years (I had to work New Years Eve) we had a quiet night as it was cold and raining!
Happy New Year!