Last day in Glasgow

After three nights of not getting more than 5 hours of sleep, I'm ready to head home! The conference ended early this morning, which meant I actually got the chance to walk around Glasgow for a bit.

I went down to the shopping boulevard, and passed this little storefront:

It's a little hard to read, but the sign says "MacGregor MacDuff Kilt Hire and Kilt Makers". What a perfect set of last names to go into the kilt making business together! Or if I was going to make kilts for a living, I'd just go ahead and change my name to MacDuff to be more official-sounding.

Not much to report regarding Glasgow's shopping area except for the noteworthy mention that the sun came out! It was glorious!

I also popped into an accessory store to try on some "fascinators," those little hats that the British wear to weddings:



It's a little hard to make out, but the bottom one is a tiny top hat - brilliant!

Time to finish up my work, and then try and catch some sleep before leaving at 3 am for my 6 am flight from Glasgow airport!

Vegetarian Haggis

And the verdict is in: vegetarian haggis is awesome! Good texture, just the right amount of spiciness, none of the sheep stomach/lungs. A win-win in my book.

On a side note, is this the most un-intuitive microwave interface you've ever seen?!



It took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to work the darn thing. Note: there are no number buttons to key in the time for cooking. Instead, I hit the round button marked "M" (for "mode", duh), to select a cooking mode (um, "heat"?), then I select a category of food that I am heating (by pictograph, no text here!), and then I use the large round dial second from the top to select a time. And that button in the bottom right, with the diamond icon? Yeah, that's the START button. Of course.

It's like by trying to make a microwave that a non-English speaker could use, they made a microwave that NOBODY can use.

Edinburgh!

Woke up at 5 am today, definitely not my usual start time. I thought I'd use the extra time to my advantage and make myself a full Scottish breakfast (minus the blood pudding) in my apartment's kitchen. The poached egg, toast, and beans went according to plan, but my potato hash hit a minor speed bump as my kitchen comes with a cutting board and vegetable peeler but no chef knife. I wound up hacking at my potato with a table knife, with limited success.

Made it onto the 7 am train to Edinburgh, and since it's a mere 50 minutes away, that I meant I could pack a full day in - and let me tell you, I made the most of it! I walked and walked and walked until my feet were sore, and then I sat for 15 minutes before starting to walk again.

First stop was a stroll down to our old flats from my University of Edinburgh day. It was nice to stroll around and relive some fond memories of my time there. It looked like some new students were just in the process of moving in too, which just got me waxing all nostalgic about my own excitement about starting a school year in a foreign country! Before all the homesickness and longing for Mexican food kicked in..



Then a climb up to the top of Arthur's Seat, which I remembered climbing a few times but couldn't quite figure out how we got up there. Luckily, I found a nice Australian family temporarily living in the UK who knew a super secret shortcut to get up to the top of the hill.

Arthur's seat:



And the views from the top:




This is the way I came back down, stairs the whole way. My knees were wobbly by the time I got to the bottom!



Then I did a grand walking tour of downtown Edinburgh, hitting up all of the historic parts, the shopping, basically re-visiting all of my old haunting grounds. It was a fantastic visit, and I'm glad I got the chance to do it.

When I returned to Glasgow, I saw a TON of guys in kilts, wearing the Scotland football (soccer) team jersey. They were everywhere: queued up for trains, at the fish and chip shop, at the ATMs, just flooding the streets. As it turns out, the Scottish team was playing the Czech Republic for a spot in the Euro 2012 games (Scotland lost) in Glasgow today; I must have just arrived back in Glasgow just after the game got out. Everybody says football fans are super rowdy and annoying, but everybody I saw seemed on good behaviour (especially considering their team had just lost!) Anyway, kilts are awesome. I didn't take this picture (it's from the Telegraph), but this is what they looked like:

Glasgow - Weather Forcast: Rain

Landed in Glasgow this afternoon and guess what? It's raining! (Note: this is not surprising at all)

Had a little bit of excitement in Amsterdam through a bit of comedy of errors. I landed at Schipol airport a mind numbing five hours before my second leg. After making sure I knew where my departure gate was, I wandered around their vast shopping area, trying desperately to stay awake (1 pm CEST = 4 am PST).

I finally wandered back to my gate an hour before boarding and settled in to one of their nice comfy lounge chairs. At the time that we were supposed to begin boarding, an airport employee made a long and important-sounding announcement in Dutch that everybody around me groaned upon hearing. I asked the guy next to me what he had said and he told me that the buses that would take us to our plane were delayed, and it might be up to two hours before they sorted it out. I did the responsible thing and called the taxi company that was scheduled to come pick me up at Glasgow airport and told them about the delay, settled in for the wait, and wound up drifting in and out of sleep for the next 30 min.

When I sat up again, I noticed that people were lining up at the gate, but didn't seem to be boarding yet. I hemmed and hawed about abandoning my comfy lounger to go join the queue, and ultimately decided I should. As I approached the line, I noticed an overhead display that listed the departures for the gate, and (BUH-BUH-BUH-BUM!) saw that my flight to Glasgow had at some point been moved to a different gate!! That it had never been delayed, and was in fact scheduled to leave in ten minutes! I bolted over to my new gate (luckily only two gates away), just as I heard over the intercom "Could Ms Chun please make her way over to Gate 24?" I sprinted onto the plane and then did the walk of shame down the plane's aisle to get to my seat, enduring the glares from my fellow passengers who were all seated, luggage stowed.

Anyway, that was more excitement than I needed today. I'm now safely ensconced in my serviced apartment in Glasgow, watching the rain outside. They're pretty sweet digs - almost too much room for just one person:



Finally, I made it to the grocery store to stock up on food, and came across the item below. How could I resist?!


I'll let you know how it is.

Traditional Prague

Pictures from my first day wandering around:

Very brutal statues flanking the entrance to Prague Castle. I think they're gods, or something

The view from Prague Castle, which sits at the top of a hill. I felt lazy and took the tram up to the top of said hill.

More very traditional architecture:

It's hard to see in the picture, but the streets are all cobblestone. EVERYWHERE. Which is very picturesque, but a little hard on the feet when walking 4+ hours at a time. Glad I brought comfortable shoes! My colleague Lucy from the UK was wearing heels and they kept getting caught in the cracks between the stones. Yikes!

That's berry weird...

Fruit kiosk in the mall. Selling strawberries and raspberries at the moment, apparently has other fruit available in other seasons. Strange place to buy your fruit...

Also had an "Aha!" moment at the grocery store (actual grocery store, not kiosk). I just realized that they don't have any "pennies". Eg, if your bill comes to 57.90 koruna (like mine did), you hand over 58 koruna and call it square. I was getting very mixed up at the cash register, since smaller koruna (50 koruna or less) are in coin form, which seemed like it should be like our coinage and equivalent to whatever comes after the decimal. I'd taken to just holding out my money to the cashier and letting them pick out the appropriate coinage.

Now that I finally get it, I aspire to come across as less of an idiot when I purchase things. Key word there is probably "aspire".

Whirlwind Prague

I'm in Prague! I think this wins hand down for my worst flight experience ever. SFO to JFK leg I was stuck in the middle of a pack of about 8 under five-year-old kids - I think they were doing some sort of ill conceived multi-family trip to Germany. One little girl industriously colored for the entire six hours, but there were a few screamers and kickers in the bunch.

JFK to PRG was looking like a nice reasonable adult group. BUT, then I made the mistake of trying to be nice and switch seats with a man who was sitting 10 rows behind his wife. Which put me two seats away from the mother-of-all-screaming-kids. The four year-old little terror wouldn't stop kicking the seats, jumping up and down, and full-blown-tantrum screaming. I tried to slip in a couple of hours of sleep in between his tantrums, but it was mighty difficult.

All in all, I landed in Prague after 20 hours of traveling with about three hours of sleep. No rest for the weary though (or those that want to get on Central European Time ASAP), so I hit the streets of Prague for the next 9 hours. In the 85 degree humid heat.

Top-line summary of Prague: beautiful architecture, too many tourists. It's like being in Disneyland! Nothing looks real. (See below for evidence)

I hit up all the major Prague highlights my first day: Prague Castle, Charles Bridge, Old Town, New Town, Mucha Museum, Museum of Communism. Maybe it was my jet lag, maybe it was the tourists and the heat, but I didn't actually enjoy it very much. I felt like I was just going through the motions of being a tourist. Well, that's not exactly true. I really liked the two museums, probably because I escaped the hordes of tourists for a little while.