Megan Away

Only in Newfoundland?

2010-03-10T19:26:00.005-03:30

Following up on holes in the road, here's the sign that went up on the nearest main street to where I live. It seems some long-pothole-suffering resident has decided to make a statement by adding on to the city's sign:

There was a whole shelf at Sobeys stocked with these buckets, just add it to the list of strange things that Newfies eat:
I'm not really reluctant to eat what might be considered by most to be "scrap" meat, but I do wonder why one would want an entire 2-kilogram bucket of specifically navel meat.

Holes in the road

2010-02-05T19:25:00.003-03:30

Signs like the one above are how St. John's deals with potholes in the short term, a technique I've not seen anywhere else. The hole in the picture is a particularly large one, but the sign and sandbag combination are the same around the city to mark holes. Eventually, after a few days to a few weeks, the signs are removed when some sort of fill gets put in the holes.

Personally, I find the signs worse than the holes, especially at night when they're hard to see (even with the orange stripes; they don't seem to be reflective). Every time I encounter one of these signs after dark, either parked cars, misty weather, or just plain poor lighting means I don't see it until I'm nearly on top of it, and I have to stop suddenly. I've come upon signs that have been knocked down, so I guess some people do end up bumping into them.

A few Christmas decorations

2009-12-04T20:15:00.005-03:30

Well, I haven't travelled any where of late, just been tearing up the road between the house and MUN for work. In my non-working hours, I've spent a bit of time making some Christmas decorations. I'm teaching myself to crochet, so the crochet snowflake chain and the crochet stars (which I just strung together) to hang in the window have been good practice.
Below is a close-up of the gingerbread house that Pat and I just assembled. It was Pat's first gingerbread house buiding ever, but since he's working in construction these days the skills transferred over well. I haven't done a gingerbread house since I was a kid back with my Mom.
This is Pat's gingerbread man, complete with shocking blue eyes and curly brown hair.I made a few knitted decorations which I felted, including this snowman who has turned out rather demented-looking. I think I need to find something for his nose to soften the face. The way the hat shape turned out makes me think that he's an angry Russian. And the face makes me think of The Nightmare Before Christmas.And on to other people's decorations. I was behind this truck at a stop-light (it just turned green as I took the picture) a couple of weeks ago. First time I've seen a tree in a truck.

Driving in The Shininess

2009-11-16T23:38:00.000-03:30

A photo I took (from the passenger seat) of the view through the windshield as we approached a set of traffic lights with cars lined up in 3 lanes. All the lights reflecting off the wet pavement made it very difficult to see. It's like this many nights in St. John's (humidity comes out of the air as it cools down, I suppose). I call it "The Shininess".

Scotiabank expands across the universe

2009-11-06T11:48:00.004-03:30

I've been watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica (the remake series) recently. Today, while watching an episode, this scene caught my eye:

(this image is a screen-shot and is owned by whomever owns Battlestar Galactica)

The heading of "Cylon-Occupied Captrica" is to indicate that the planet Caprica, one of 12 colony planets of the people who feature in the TV series, has been taken over by the enemy synthetic race of Cylons. That's not why I put the picture up though - take a close look at the logo atop the central tower in the image.

It's the Scotiabank logo. So perhaps I should switch banks, as clearly no one can match this bank's number of service locations.

Photos From the Archives (and the scanner)

2009-10-30T09:50:00.002-02:30

I was putting away some photos and stumbled upon some other old photos that are personal favourites.

Below is a couch on fire.
I took this photo on Christmas Eve in 2001. My family had decided to swap our couch in the den with a better one that was in the basement. So my dad, my uncle, and I moved the couches around, and then we hauled the old one out in the backyard. The three of us so hated that couch - its cushions had the habit of sliding out from underneath you, leaving you slumped in a trench in the back, and the seat was too wide so that most people's feet couldn't reach the floor - so we decided to dispose of it in fire. My brother and aunt were somewhat fond of the couch, but we wanted to make sure that it could never surface again, so it was burned before they got back home.

It took a bit to get it burning (I think we may have used some oil to accelerate it), but once it caught fire, up she went. It was rather fun to stand round and watch it burn; I suggested at the time that we should make it a Christmas Eve tradition to burn an old piece of furniture, but it never caught on.

Now, what do you think this photo shows?That is the antenna on the hood of the old Corsica that I was driving back in 2001, covered in ice crystals. I came out of the house one morning in February to walk the dog before going to school, and the entire world was covered in little crystals like that.

Finally, I think this is one of the funniest photos that I have taken. Just read the sign, it says it all (a clothing shop on Princes Street in Edinburgh, in June of 2002).
(If you're having trouble, it reads: "Mr. Toskana has had an expensive divorce and now needs the money, so sale now on!")

Gros Morne Mountain Hike, Or the day I really thought I wouldn't make it

2009-10-27T22:12:00.000-02:30

Back in August, in the aforementioned trip across Newfoundland, Patrick and I spent some time in Gros Morne National Park.

Now, if you've read about my previous travels, you'll know that I'm not opposed to a long walk. I've walked 10 miles in the pouring rain just to get to a ferry on a bus-less day. According to my Dad, I move faster than most armies when I'm out doing long-distance hikes.

However, I do have some weaknesses in hiking. One is hills. I grew up on PEI, where there may be hills all over the place, but they don't keep going up for that long (all less than 500 feet). So hills do slow me down and tire me out, but I can generally plug away and manage them eventually.

But I have a greater weakness than hills - heat. Heat wipes me out from any activity other than laying in the shade and eating frozen things. And by heat, I mean anything above 25 degrees Celsius. We can probably blame my inability to suffer heat on my ancestry; my genes expect me to be in the British Isles, not in a Canadian summer.

So what this is leading me to is the day that Patrick and I climbed Gros Morne Mountain, or as I called it, the Overgrown Gravel Heap. It was hot and humid that day - in the vicinity of 30 degrees Celsius. To do the hike, you start with a half hour walk through the woods and then a bog, going slightly uphill all the while, to get to the base of the mountain. Then you have to climb it (the rocky path up the middle of the picture below).
Midway through the first "easy" section of the hike, I felt like I was the unfittest person imaginable. My energy was gone, I was stumbling along unable to lift my feet, hunched over and I felt like I was on some sort of death march. I told Patrick so, but he insisted on me coming along, saying that it would be cooler on the mountain because there would be a breeze. Let's just say it wasn't cooler enough.

Here's Patrick starting up the mountain, amongst some of the smaller rocks we would climb through.

The photo below is looking back down the mountain from where we'd climbed so far. By this point, I was climbing from large rock to large rock - moving for about a minute or two, and then sitting down on a large rock for a minute or two. It took us over two hours to climb the mountain itself, about 400 metres (the mountaintop itself is 800 metres above sea level). It was breezier, but it was still too hot for me.
The rocky, flat top.

Looking down at one of the ponds and towards the coast on the other side of the mountain.

Anyway, the hike was finished (after coming down the other side of the mountain you go around the base and it takes even hours more) with me exhausted. I would do that hike again, but only if it were a cool day.

Camping in August

2009-10-23T17:10:00.000-02:30

I'm going to do a few posts about my holidays back in August, since I didn't get around to it at the time. Patrick and I travelled across Newfoundland to go to PEI. We spent a week camping in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, which is the most number of days I've camped consecutively. I've wanted to do a long-distance camping road trip for quite some time (like going cross country) so this gave me a taste of what such a trip could be like. Anyway, here's a few photos of the camping specifically; I'll put up photos of the sights later on.

This is Patrick's tent that we used; it's just large enough for two people to fit in. While sitting in the tent in one campground that was dominated by RV's, I heard some kids walking pass exclaim "Wow! That's a small tent!" The owner of the campground was incredulous when he saw the size of the tent.

The back of the loaded-down truck with tailgate being used as a cooking storage space. The big bag of stuff wasn't ours, but stuff I was transporting to PEI for some friends who were moving.
Patrick, having mastered his family's old French gas stove, served as the chef, whereas I acted as the prep cook and dishwasher. Here he's cooking up some sausages and frying some potatoes I believe.
Being the East Coast, the weather was not always spectacular and sunny. On one night when it started pouring just around supper time, we fortunately had a spare tarp to set up a crude shelter so we could cook and eat in relative dryness.
Another meal, cooked on that rainy night, of chicken, potatoes and vegetables and gravy. Not thwarted by being outdoors, we ate pretty good.

"The St. John's Left Turn"

2009-10-14T21:12:00.001-02:30

At a lot intersections in St. John's, left turns are not permitted. Since I'm still getting to know many parts of the city, I will often have a plan in my mind of how to get somewhere that will be foiled by one of these "No Left Turn" intersections. In many cities, one would just make a left turn at the next intersection and then go down that side street and turn left again to get back to the street you originally wanted. In St. John's, this doesn't seem to work most times, as it might be quite far until the next street, or because the city lacks a grid-like pattern.

So I've occasionally found myself performing a manoeuvre I have decided to call "The St. John's Left Turn" (illustrated below in a sketch I made - the path of the vehicle is the green dashes). Since turning left isn't allowed at the intersection, I go straight through it and then make a left turn off the road into the next avaiable parking lot (conveniently, there always seems to be a business with a parking lot of some size not too far from these no-left-turn intersections). I whirl around in the parking lot and then go back on the street in the opposite direction, so as to make a right turn at the intersection on to my desired street. Voilà, a left turn.

Berry pickin'

2009-10-11T11:31:00.009-02:30

I've been going out berry picking about once a week, when the weather's good, in the last while. September was blueberry picking, and Patrick and I went out to Blackhead (just outside of St. John's) several times, walking up the hill along the East Coast Trail and then going off-trail berry hunting. (All the photos herein were taken with my phone, so they aren't the best). The blueberries were good and thick, and I now have a freezer largely filled with bags of blueberries.

This is the view of St. John's (between the hills in the distance) from up the hill in Blackhead.

The sea was quite foamy and it was reflecting off of the rocky shore, resulting in interesting, irregular shapes.

Yesterday I went out to Logy Bay with Patrick and his dad to go cranberry picking, again along a section of the East Coast Trail. Cranberries are sneaky little berries, hiding under other vegetation, and I had to be pretty much down on my knees before I could spot any of them. They were sparser than the blueberries, although I did find them in bunches when they were growing near a stream or on boggy ground.

Some unhidden cranberries:

Looking down the hill toward the coast (Patrick is kneeling down picking just near the coast).
Just before leaving to go home, we stopped in at MUN's Ocean Science Centre, where we had parked as it's at the base of the trail. They have two tanks with harp seals in them that we watched swimming around for a bit. They have a web cam that you can connect to here.

And darkness descends

2009-09-13T22:34:00.004-02:30

Yesterday's forecast for St. John's

Something a little foreboding about one day of sun and then clouds as far as one can see.

I've been away from the blogging for a while now, but I might have enough spirit to get back at it again, at least here and there. I've got some trip photos I'll try to whack up soon.

How big is that plant in the window

2009-02-07T17:20:00.004-03:30

My garlic plants looking out the front window (dreaming of being big trees, perhaps). This is the big excitement in my life at the moment (teaching occupies my days but it's not exciting). I planted two garlic cloves a week ago. The one on the left started shooting up within a day and is now just over 6 inches tall. The other clove, on the right, started about four days ago. I put the plants in front of the window during the day and pull back the veil curtain, and when I'm walking up to the house in the afternoon it has appeared to me as though the plant is peeking out, waiting for me to come home (I miss having a dog).

And yes, they are planted in a plastic ice cream container. I've become one of those old-lady-types who saves all my plastic tubs for reuse. Or in the case of this one, gets them from other people since I don't buy ice cream much these days. In other old-lady-behaviour news, I've also started filling a jar with boiling water to take to bed with me to keep my feet warm on cold nights, since my room can't be heated well without making other parts of the house scorching. And my hip was aching, but that was from fencing lunges.

I've planted some green onions today (by snipping off the white bulb bottoms of green onions from the supermarket; they already had little roots on them), so we'll see how that goes now. The space by the window will be getting crowded.

More cold

2009-01-25T20:55:00.005-03:30

No, not a mistake photograph - this is a frozen pond with drifting snow blown by a fierce wind (see below).

This is my first experience of a real winter for several years now (since early 2006), so I'm getting accustomed to cold again and also getting back into winter sports I haven't done in years.

There was some good snow earlier in the month, so after school I was heading up to Pippy Park (right in St. John's) and going cross-country skiing or snow-shoeing. The trails were pretty well groomed there due to skidoos using them, so to snowshoe I went off-trail and ended up frightening some dog-walkers when I finally re-emerged on to the trail from the bushes and spruce trees.

The other weekend I went "up the Southern Shore" (south of St. John's down the coast of the Avalon peninsula) to visit my boyfriend Patrick at the cabin (a cottage we'd call it in PEI, but a winterized one) he's living in for the winter at Kingman's Cove. We went for a walk through the woods (no need of snowshoes as it was a packed trail), but then couldn't find a return trail through the woods and so ended up walking along the frozen pond for about a kilometre in a bitter wind (and unblocked wind since we were on a pond). We walked backwards to keep the wind off our faces, and then when we reached the end of the pond we were able to walk over a hill across the barrens (wind at our backs, fortunately).

Caked with snow from the walk on the pond (all in good fun). I turn pink both when cold and hot, just the colour I'm meant to be it seems.
Part of the community of Kingman's and its cove.
The snow melted (except for frozen banks) this past week, but then froze all over the ground, so there's a lot of ice about. I've considered skating instead of walking along the sidewalks. I went with Patrick for a walk in one of the parks and ended up sliding on ice whilst grabbing hold of fences and flailing about to regain my balance like I was in Mr. Bean sketch. Unfortunately, there's no photographs to document that.

The pink snow

2008-12-26T13:51:00.003-03:30

The yard on Christmas morning, snowbanks coated in topsoil - what happens when winds run across plowed PEI fields (you can see one in the very back of the photo).

Hockey is best kind

2008-11-09T19:18:00.001-03:30

("best kind" = "great" in Newfoundland-speak)

So beyond writing papers that bore me stiff, I've started playing ice hockey here. One of my professors organizes people who aren't superstar players to get together and play just for fun. As he puts it, if you can skate backwards, you're too good to play with them. He invited students from our class out to get some more players. I've wanted to play hockey for years but always had the problem of finding people my age who weren't overly good, since I'm no good myself. So this seemed like a chance.

Now, if I hadn't known some guys from my class were going to be there, I probably wouldn't have gone on my own since I really lack confidence in my hockey ability (and rightly so). As it was, one friend, Andrew, convinced me to give it a try, and so I got Patrick, a fellow I've been going out with, to go with me to the used-sports equipment store to help me buy basic stuff like shin guards and gloves and a stick (I saved some money because I can fit into the large boys' size equipment - hooray for being small!). Patrick gave me his old helmet which was on the small side for him, and I already had my own skates.

To set the scene for you, it was 12 men of all ages and me. They all had full hockey gear - shoulder pads, big jerseys and padded pants, you know all that stuff that makes a person look even bigger. I wore my fencing breeches and a long-sleeved shirt, both of which added no volume, so I imagine I looked pretty tiny. One fellow told me my gear looked "old-school", like a picture of his grandfather playing hockey back in the day when they wore actual sweaters, slim-fitting pants and no padding.

I had a great time and have been back another two times for the same. I'm definitely one of the poorer players, but as the only girl I'm probably going to slide by on that fact for quite a while. We're playing non-contact which is actually a problem for me because I can't stop all that well, so I've occasionally checked someone because I couldn't change direction in time, which the fellows find pretty funny (one buddy has called me the "enforcer" of the group). Although when I've run into someone and fallen down as a result (being the lighter of the two bodies in a collision, it's sort of bound to happen), the fellows usually apologize to me profusely which I'm trying to train them out of by hopping to my feet as quick as possible and telling them not to worry.

So that's my fun new thing, and maybe if I keep at it for a few years now I might actually get better!

Marker fumes, fries with dressing, and fires

2008-11-06T18:45:00.002-03:30

For Halloween this year, I dressed up as a tiger (I had a pair of orange tights I got real cheap once with the idea of a costume, so it stemmed from that). I used permanent marker to make my stripes, and boy do tigers have a lot of stripes! I ended up smelling like a permanent marker while wearing my costume. I was told repeatedly that my costume was very "cute", so I guess it was worth whatever brain damage I suffered from marker fumes.(I'll answer in advance that I attached the felt nose and whiskers with double-sided fabric tape, since loads of people asked me that.)

On George Street they hosted an event called Mardi Gras to celebrate Halloween on November 1. I've not run into anyone yet who knows why they call it Mardi Gras; from what I know that's a pre-Lent day.

On said Mardi Gras night, I got to try fries with dressing and gravy, a local variation on fries with the works (the dressing is what is known as stuffing to some people - what you have with turkey or chicken). It is one of the best foods I have ever had. I will not describe it any more as my mere words will do the taste no justice.

Bonfire Night (aka Guy Fawkes' Day) still seems to get some attention round here, mostly in the form of people setting stuff on fire (not in the form of organized community bonfires like in the UK). There's been a few stolen cars set ablaze; a couple in the soccer field near where I live.

Along the southern shore

2008-10-12T23:03:00.004-02:30

On the long weekend, I did some hiking on the East Coast Trail on the peninsula jutting out from Fermeuse (see map). I forgot to bring my proper camera with me, but my phone worked well enough to take a few pictures.

A view of the rocky stretch of coastline along the trail (it went through the woods with offshoots to viewpoints at rocky cliffs along the way).

These stones, on the top of a very high cliff, appealed to my sense of symmetry.

We walked right out on the top of this archway, looked down over it's edge, then walked farther down the path to where I took this photo before we realized that it was open underneath.

I saw some of the twistiest trees in my life during this walk. Along one little stretch of woods, it looked as though all these trees had laid down in surrender or perhaps to die:
These particular trees nearby seem to have laid down to writhe in agony before dying:
Oddly enough, the trees on the other side of the path were all fine - like one side of the path was cursed.

Cleaning the Plastic Forest

2008-09-27T13:26:00.005-02:30

This morning I joined volunteers with the East Coast Trail Association for a clean-up of a section of the trail below the municipal landfill. Plastic bags, styrofoam, newspapers and anything else light has blown down from the dump and filled the forest below. It's been called the "plastic forest" in the media, and there's an article here about it.

Bags had entangled themselves in the branches, were entangled in tree roots buried in the ground, and were wrapped around the bases of tree trunks. I unwrapped some 40 bags from the base of one tree. Someone compared it to being able to tell the age of a tree by the number of rings, so I joked (in the loose sense of the word) that perhaps we could tell the age of the dump by the number of bag layers.

This photo shows a heap of bags that I pulled out of a little hole to the right of the heap. Some were buried as far down as a couple of feet. The woods just kept growing around these things, the roots wrapping all around some bags and all the trees were pretty healthy-looking. So for all those nae-sayers who think we will bring about the end of all the ecosystems on Earth, well I think we may hinder them some, but life is pretty tough and adaptable.

I spent some time with a small rake trying to pull bags out of the tree-tops which was really tricky in some cases like this tree where the bags have pretty much tied themselves on to the branches.

The mound of bags of garbage that we picked up. It was a bit odd to be picking up plastic bags to put them in large plastic bags that are going to go back up to the dump from where they came in the first place. However, the garbage at the dump is now being buried straight away, so at least most bags won't be able to blow down the hill any more.

A closer-up of Sugarloaf Mountain where the trail continues on to.

Hiking and screeching

2008-09-24T19:59:00.000-02:30

On the weekend our student society held it's first event, which we called the CFA event, that standing for "Come From Aways" (people not from Newfoundland). We did a hike along the East Coast trail out to Cape Spear, the most easterly point in Canada. Here it is, with a line of secondary education students walking toward it (we had fabulous weather for it - clear skies, and a wind of course).
This is just some weathered wood I thought looked cool. Couldn't call it driftwood as it's on top of a very high cliff.

In the evening, we gathered again to go down to George Street for supper and then across the street to one of the bars for "screeching in" in which 17 of us participated (an initiation for non-Newfoundlanders I suppose you could call it). It entailed a performance of sorts by some fellow in a sou'wester, and we all had to eat Newfie steak (bologna), drink a shot of screech (we were warned not to let it come in contact with our skin), kiss a (frozen) cod, and in response to the question "Is you a screecher?" reply with: "Indeed I is me ol' cock and long may your big jib draw". And of course we were each presented with a certificate to commemorate the occasion:
I had no idea that man was acting on behalf of the Queen!

It's been a while there now

2008-09-19T22:06:00.007-02:30

I've been in St. John's 19 days now and not written a word! How unlike me. Well, things were a bit hectic with the move since I had to find a new place to live at the last minute, but all worked out well and here I am settled into the life of a student again. My program (intermediate/secondary teaching) is pretty busy, so you probably shouldn't be expecting me to write as much as I did when travelling (and it would end up being stories of my research papers if I did). I will try to pop something up here when I do get out and see the province.

I arrived here to an evening and a day of fog, so it was that long before I could even see the place I was living in. Since then the weather's been pretty good though, lot's of sunny days and I've not had to walk to the university in the rain yet (it's rained mostly at night).

My first weekend here I was down around Signal Hill with some fellow students, and we walked along the paths and staircases and picked wild blueberries.

There are loads of wild blueberries around here; I've been out walking in the woods elsewhere since and am always finding some. Berry picking seems to be a provincial past-time. I'm certainly for it.

My first days here I was surprised to here girls calling other girls "b'y"; I'd always thought it was a term reserved for males. I wouldn't refer to a woman at home by "buddy" so I just figured it would be analogous, but I stand corrected.

I learned that the "fishing net" I found in the hall closet is for covering up the garbage when you put it out to be picked up - to keep the birds out of it. I had wondered why the sidewalks were covered in "fishing nets" on certain days.

Newfoundlanders out-do even Islanders for friendliness, so it hasn't been hard to get to know people. I've been meeting lots of people in my program as well, from Newfoundland and the "Come From Aways" (of which I'm now one, despite being Away currently). Been downtown a couple of times and for a hike on the East Coast Trail from Blackhead to Fort Amherst. I've gotten involved with our student society in planning events, joined intramurals and ran a road race for the first time in my life the other day - 3km and I came in 9th place in womens' with a time of around 12 minutes.

The Harbour from the Battery.

One of the hills in the downtown (I navigate back from the downtown by going up). I won't be rollerblading down there! It's not even one of the worst.Waves reflecting off the rocks below the East Coast Trail.
Gulls in queue.

Why I never made it to Newfoundland before moving here

2008-09-01T07:05:00.001-02:30

Because the trip takes about 20 hours not including waiting-for-ferry time.

See this Google map of getting here from PEI.

Yes, that's right, there's no road through Newfoundland along the south shore. Up, over, and down again.

The Badlands

2008-08-26T14:52:00.000-02:30

I met up with some of my friends from Edmonton: Jocelyn, Amanda, Anna, and Ross in Drumheller, Alberta. We were camping for the weekend, so we spent the Friday afternoon/evening setting up, cooking over the campfire (Ross is a good campfire cook) and just hanging out.

The farming plains of southern Alberta:

Saturday morning, Ross went golfing while the rest of us went to the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleotology which has a great collection of dinosaur skeletons, skeletons of other prehistoric creatures and loads of fossils. My favourite was this little guy, who clearly looks like a pre-historic Ey-ore and its name is even Erysis?

We met up with Ross in the afternoon and all piled in one car to go see the hoodoos (the pillars in the picture below). They're formed by erosion, so of course they're also changing due to erosion, getting smaller but then new ones can form as well. The hills in the background are typical of the Badlands with the sedimentary layers forming stripes.

Then we visited the old Atlas coal mine (there's still coal in Drumheller, but it's not being mined any more because it's more the household cooking type so not in demand anymore - although with the price of other fuels going up, who knows?) and we got to ride on the restored, battery-powered (so it didn't produce any source of ignition) coal/man train and climb up the tipple.

Then, on the recommendation of our tour guide, we went down a gravel road to check out the ghost town of West Monarch (once had 500-1000 people living in it). This is what it looks like now.

Anyway, the road was fine except to where there was some puddles, which when trying to avoid we fell into a grass-concealed ditch-of-sorts (perhaps created by spinning tires before?) from which we tried valently to extricate ourselves, but to no avail. Here you can see our attempts to build up height and traction under one wheel (there was conveniently a scrap heap nearby so I scuttled under the barbed wire fence to bring back useful things).

So we ended up stuck out in the heat waiting for a tow truck, after I had said earlier in the day "Wouldn't it be terrible to be stuck out here in this heat?" (thinking of all the old cowboy films). And after having wondered whilst on the bus the day before if cactus plants did grow in the Alberta Badlands, I discovered first-hand (literally) that they do when I got this fellow stuck in my forearm and then hand:

Anyway, the getting stuck was an unexpected adventure, but dinner that night, once we got back to the campsite, never tasted better.

On the Sunday after we broke camp, I went up to Edmonton with Ross and Anna, and I stayed with Anna's welcoming house until I flew back. Anna and I wandered around Edmonton and the university campus, both of which have become massive construction sites since the days when I was there.

Then it was time to fly back to Charlottetown and end my holiday to prepare to move to St. John's (and find a new place to live, but that's another story).

West Coast finally

2008-08-21T15:10:00.000-02:30

I arrived in the city early on Monday afternoon, hardly able to hear a thing because my ears had been popping going up and down the mountains on the drive from Kelowna (my ears pop even on small hills, like Nova Scotia and New Brunswick size and up. I assume it's because I'm from PEI and was never up a mountain until fully grown. I'm a sensitive barometer, basically).

While walking around trying to find a hostel I had to admit to myself that Vancouver is a nice city. I hated to do so because Vancouverites are always bragging up their city - "oh, it has the ocean, and the mountains, and it's international..." and so on. Anyway, they're right, dammit. I ended up staying at the Univeristy of British Columbia because all the hostels were full, presumably because of the Radiohead concert that I found out was going on. My room had this great view of the mountains and the city.

On the bus out there, I was even pleased to see that the locals say hello and thank-you to the bus driver. I haven't seen that in many big cities. A downside would be the local young people have a most annoying accent. And speaking of accents, I don't know if mine was a problem but several people seemed to have trouble understanding me and others seemed amused by my (to me) mundane answers to their questions.

From the university, I walked down to the beach (meeting one of my old Acadia students along the way, small world that it is) and had my first contact with the water of the west.

The next day, I hit up Stanley Park and wandered amongst the big trees.

I visited the aquarium in the afternoon; here's the beluga whale who recently gave birth, thus she has stretch marks/love handles on her (she's swimming upside-down as she's wont to do on occasion, so the rolls are on the top of the picture).

Lion's Gate Bridge and North Vancouver under the clouds that were hanging around.

My foot was really killing me, so I actually went to a doctor to get it checked out and found

out it was just a really bad soft tissue bruise. So the good news was that I wasn't damaging myself by walking around, but I still had to take a day of rest of sorts. So I sacrificed my plan to go to North Vancouver and check out the canyons there.

My last day I wandered around Chinatown, Gastown, and the East Hastings district (they were all within 30 minutes walk of the bus station). Around East Hastings was especially interesting, as that's where a lot of the street people are, and I saw folks lining up for the soup kitchens, people sleeping on the sidewalk in the middle of the day, and just a lot of people who looked worn and down on their luck. So the other side of the glossy city, I suppose. Strangely, that was one part of town where no one was begging for spare change.

Oh, and the final good thing about Vancouver - you can get 20-plus pieces of freshly made sushi for 5 bucks.

Drive through Rockies to Okanagon

2008-08-18T15:23:00.000-02:30

Just some photos from the bus trip through the Rockies to the Okanagon Valley.

Plains giving way to foothills outside of Calgary heading to Banff.

Stopping at Banff.

Either Okanagon or lake north of it near Salmon Arm (sorry, memory failing me. Just look at the pretty colours!)

Okanagon Lake with window reflections extra at no cost.
Houses spreading up the hills in Kelowna; a dry place that produces lots of fruit nonetheless (irrigation, I presume).
More dry hills outside of Kelowna.

Saskatchewan is not all flat (Regina)

2008-08-16T17:17:00.001-02:30

I just spent a day in Regina, arriving on an overnight bus and leaving on another overnight bus. If I had thought that Thunder Bay reminded me of Edmonton in appearance, Regina jolted me into remembering what Edmonton looks like. The residential lay-out is the same: close together houses of concrete-like stuff with high stoops, no driveway in front but off the back alleys - single lane streets that run behind the houses, so that the back yards are large and long.

I got to the bus station and looked around for the tourist info that one can usually find, and there was absolutely nothing. My guidebook indicated to me that there wasn't any tourist office in the downtown (it's an old guidebook), and I couldn't find one. It's like Regina doesn't want tourists.

I headed to Wascana part, quite pretty, and then to the Royal Saskatechewan Musuem when it opened where I was greeted by a lady so enthusiastic about teh museum I couldn't help feeling it as well. It was a really cool museum though, with exhibits that had just the right amount of reading to supplement the otherwise visual exhibits. There were diorama of all Saskatchewan's ecosystems (I learned that the prairie part is just in the very south) that were so well done I could imagine I was in amongst the landscape viewing the plants and animals myself.

Afterward I tried to walk out to the Mountie museum, and was thwarted by fenced off highways and then a fence off, unsigned compound when I got near. My foot was so sore by then (I hurt it somehow in Winnipeg) and I was so hot that I just caught a bus back to the downtown and spent the rest of my time there reading in Victoria Park (that lady got around).

Again, unedited photos in My Photos 2

Into Manitoba (Winnipeg)

2008-08-14T21:43:00.005-02:30

I ended up on a sort of tour of Thunder Bay when trying to reach the Old Fort William by bus. Thunder Bay looks like a prarie town to me in terms of its street lay-out and the house designs. The bungalows are of the squarish, made of concrete and bricks design that was common throughout Edmonton, as opposed to the clap-board houses, bungalow or two-story, of the Maritimes.

After Thunder Bay, the drive out of Ontario took another 7 hours, with only some very small towns scattered along the way. I know Canada's big, but nothing hammers home that fact like the seemingly never ending highway stretching across forest. We got into some gentle, rocky hills that the highway was blasted through (they were removing more rock around Upsula to widen the road), then Kenora, nearly at the Manitoba border and looking part eastern, part western in building style. Then I was finally in the "west" of the country, after more than 45 hours of road travel from Charlottetown (I subtracted rest time from that while doing mental math on the drive from the border to Winnipeg).

What with arriving in "Friendly!" Manitoba, that only leaves two provinces I've not yet been to (BC and Newfoundland), and those two will be knocked off by September 1 anyway.

Winnipeg looked to be the dodgiest Canadian city I've been in. By that, I mean there was more scruffy, looking down-on-their-luck folks wandering around the downtown then I've seen elsewhere. I did notice on the bus out of Thunder Bay that the percentage of dirty, smelly passengers increased dramatically.

I can see how the intersection of Portage and Main could be so windy and cold in the winter - even in the sweltering heat when I was there, it was still quite windy on Main Street. I wandered around the city for the day, down to The Forks where the muddy Red River (as I know it, the one that always floods) meets the Assiniboine River (also muddy). Checked out the Exchange District which has old skyscrapers, and Chinatown that seemed almost deserted.

People in western Ontario and Manitba keep telling me about how great they think PEI is and Islanders in general. Makes a nice change from the reaction I've come to expect from Westerners towards East Coasters. My experience was mostly based with Albertans, though.

Oh, and the ride into Winnipeg wasn't actually all flat plains until just before the city - there were trees and hills for a fair while.

Un-edited photos can be found in My Photos 2

Northern Ontario

2008-08-12T20:59:00.003-02:30

My bus from Ottawa went through North Bay and then to Subury, where I had a layover of 2 hours. All I know about Sudbury I learned from Stompin' Tom Connor's song "Sudbury Saturday Night" and from hearing about the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in physics classes. That, and I knew there was a big nickel because I'd seen it in a book I read about Ontario from my elementary school library. So I was pleased that we drove by the nickel on the way out of town, as that's mostly what I wanted to see (and I pondered why it is that people find miniature and larger versions of things to be neat, and would we do so if we didn't know the original size of the object?). The rock there is sometimes black, as is the soil, and from the mining that's gone on outside of town the earth is scraped bare for miles seemingly, although there was grass being planted as well.

Otherwise, northern Ontario roadsides looked a lot like New Brunswick with lakes - vegetation pretty much the same as PEI, and rockfaces sticking out like NB. In the first stretch after Ottawa I got to see the Laurentian Hills that graced all my pencil crayon packages as a kid.

Got into Thunder Bay in the morning after a not-as-comfortable night on the bus (Greyhound buses not as nice as Acadian's), dropped stuff off at hostel and went to see Old Fort William, a historical recreation of the original Northwest Company fur-trading post with people in costume acting out the roles of the people of that period (1815). I really enjoyed the visit; I like history afterall and that's not a period or a region that I know a whole lot about.

Going to go check out the shore of Lake Superior after this, with the tune of Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in my head.

I've posted photos in an album called Ontario (there's a few Maritimes at the start) in my photos 2 link (on the side of this page), but haven't had a chance to sort them yet or anything so might not be too clear where they're from.

Oh-tah-wah

2008-08-10T20:46:00.002-02:30

That's Ottawa the way Americans are made fun of for saying it.

Anyway, I spent the night of the 9th on the bus up from the Maritimes, zooming through Quebec in the night. In the morning I arrived in Ottawa and my cousins Sarah and Robyn, who live there now, picked me up. We went for brunch, then went off to the museums which were actually in Hull (Quebec side of the river) and went through the Museum of War. The surprise artifact there was Hitler's parade car, with bullet riddled windows, that had been brought to Canada by American soldiers.

After that we went down to the Market section of town, near where Robyn lives, and had coffee and cake. Then it was off to Orleans in the east, where Sarah and her husband live, and we had supper outside in the first sunny weather in a while.

I stayed the night at Robyn's lovely apartment, and she took me to the station in the morning to catch my bus westward.

Didn't dig my camera out of my bag the whole day (silly me), so no photos!

Go west, young lady

2008-08-09T07:50:00.001-02:30

This afternoon I`m leaving on a nearly-cross-Canada bus trip by bus. I`ve got a 15-day pass with the now internationally-imfamous Greyhound buses so that will get me all the way to the west coast, and then I`m flying back east from Edmonton (the catalyst for my trip was to visit my old buddies in Edmonton).

I`ll stick photos up if I can as I go along, but if I`m not near internet then you won`t be hearing from me for a bit. Here`s an approximate itinerary, it gets a bit hazy as it goes on but I`ll fill the time I`m sure.

9th - bus to Ottawa
10th - visit cousins in Ottawa
11th - bus through Ontario
12th - arrive in Thunder Bay, spend day and night there, check out Lake Superior, find a gale
13th - bus through rest of Ontario and into Manitoba
14th - arrive in Winnipeg, spend day and night there
15th - bus to somewhere in southern Saskatchewan and find some grasslands prairie
16-17th? - bus to Kelowna, BC to visit with my uncle?
17th-20th - time in BC, get out to Pacific coast, Vancouver and environs probably
21st - bus back to Alberta in afternoon/night
22nd - arrive in Drumheller to meet friends for weekend of camping
24-25th - back up to Edmonton
26th - fly to PEI

Round PEI: Village Green

2008-08-08T19:46:00.002-02:30

Our mailbox (the grey one), beaten and still recoiled in horror at the memory of the snowplow.

Round PEI: Miscellania

2008-08-06T21:48:00.000-02:30

This plant wouldn't bloom, then the family started using it as an ashtray and lo and behold, it flowered. Coming to end of it's flowering now. And cigarettes are supposed to be bad for you!
What happens when the submersible sump-pump gets water in it? It quits, and the basement floods. This is what it still looked like after pump was removed (another pump on the other side still on the go) and my brother and I had shop-vac-ed about 200 gallons out of the place; it was still raining and the water was still seeping in. Brought back memories from my childhood of frequent basement floods.

Looking into Charlottetown over the bridge crossing the Hillsborough River (if it weren`t for that bridge, people wouldn`t be able to live where I do and commute to Charlottetown - it`d be about a 2 hour trip to go up round the river head and back down the other side).
Rush-hour coming off the Hillsborough Bridge heading east.

Little did I know that there's a Department of National Defense firing range on the shore not too far from where I live. Went down a clay road I've never been down and there it was.

Like the way the power lines are shining in the sunlight here.

Round PEI: Charlottetown

2008-08-05T17:52:00.003-02:30

Taken on a sunny day before all the rains started.

Down at the waterfront, the Prince Edward hotel on the left (it's probably a safe bet to say it's the tallest building on PEI). The blue awning is where you'd find Peake's Quay restaurant/bar, one of Charlottetown's big nightspots.

City Hall and Queen Street, one of the main drags downtown.
Victoria Row, pedestrianized for all the tourists to flock to it.

This photo shows mostly that I'm a lazy photographer. Also, the intersection of Grafton Street with Queen Street.
Some houses on Great George Street. As you can see, (and can't see houses), Charlottetown has many trees.
And as this photo overlooking downtown residential areas shows, you can't see the city for the trees - looks like a forest in the distance.
It's not all pretty buildings and trees of course; there's always the dirty alleys behind the buildings.

Another sign that amuses me

2008-08-02T11:40:00.003-02:30

This sign (and other identical ones) grace the parking lot of the Charlottetown Canadian Tire, a department store of sorts that sells automotive goods, assorted electrical, plumbing, sports and household goods amongst other things.

What amuses me about these signs is not the signs themselves but that they are necessary to keep people from carrying out work on their cars in the parking lot. Because people would otherwise (and I'm sure some fellas still try to get away with it). Maybe such incidents are encouraged by Canadian Tire's offers of rebates on certain automotive parts if you bring your old one in (to be refurbished and sold again), as it would save you a second trip to the store and town if you could change the part right there and then.

Still, I think it says something about our culture that a fellow will go into the store, buy some motor oil and a filter and then want to do his oil change in the parking lot. I'm not sure what it says about our culture, but it's a statement of some sort for sure.

Round PEI: Old Farm

2008-08-01T07:05:00.001-02:30

Every time I come back to the Island, there's always something different - a new building, some trees missing, that sort of thing. I've never been away longer than a year and a half, but there's always change.

I drove down the road that my father grew up on the other day. Dad grew up on a farm outside of Charlottetown at the time, but town's since expanded out. Here's a map.

I never saw the farm when it was my grandfather's, he sold it when he retired and that was well before I was born. But I've driven down memory lane, the Upton Road and the Hurry Road, with my dad many a time.

Nowadays the old Hurry Road isn't getting much use, as you can see it's overgrown and needing a good grading (this is a not too flooded and bumpy stretch of it).

My grandfather sold the farm to the government because he didn't want to risk seeing it covered in sub-divisions (housing estates) some day. He was prophetic, as much of the surrounding area is now sub-divided with more going up; here's the back of some next door.

The old farm is now used for forestry works of some sort, with buildings on the Upton Road, viewed from the back...
...and trees on the back lane.

I tripped over this fallen barbed wire fence when taking some pictures.

This creek (crick, if you will) has scummed over something terrible.
These fields are between the Hurry Road and the North River. I'm not sure how much of them was once the family farm, if any, I would need my father or uncle to point it out to me. These views probably haven't changed terribly except for the addition of the tower.
My Dad has since pointed out to me that this one below was called the Black Pasture because it was burnt at one time and stayed black for a long time, and so it was part of their farm.
And someone's got a field of potatoes, so this one's probably not the government's (unless the government's experimental farm is borrowing forestry land.
Makes me wonder if 30 years from now, I'll be looking at a sub-division or two in what is now fields surrounding my childhood home on the Village Green Road.

Round PEI: Rocky Point and West River

2008-07-31T18:36:00.004-02:30

Since I've been hanging around the Island, I figured I'd put up some photos of the place, and if you happen to not be from PEI then maybe it'll be of interest.

In the interest of viewing Charlottetown from afar (and because it was too hot midday to go for a walk), I drove out to Rocky Point, south west of Charlottetown and on Charlottetown Harbour.

Sailboat on the harbour and some neat clouds.

Blockhouse Point Lighthouse (this is near the first capital of the Island, Port-La-Joye, back when PEI was French territory called Ile-St-Jean. The site then became Fort Amherst when the British took over the Island)

View of Charlottetown from across the harbour (I need a better zoom on my camera for a shot like this). The tallest building is the Prince Edward Hotel; you can also see the two spires of St. Dunstan's Basilica.

Old wharf; I believe there might have been a ferry across the harbour before, possibly from here? I need some old folks to fill me in on that one.

West River bridge and a sign seen on most bridges around here: "Bridge freezes before road". Important to know in winter time, but not so much this time of year.

West River again and some more neat clouds. Some farms thrown in for good measure.

NB Highland Games

2008-07-28T19:08:00.005-02:30

My friend Janie invited me to go to some Highland games with her and her friends, so on Friday I took the bus with her over to Fredericton, New Brunswick with a change of buses in Moncton. All buses leaving PEI go through Moncton; it seems to be the bus hub of the Maritimes. The coaches here don't have seat belts on them which I don't like. Anyway, Janie and I took advantage of the 6 hour trip to get caught up on what's happened in the 3 years since we last saw each other.

In Fredericton we met up with Janie's friends Dave and Lisa. We went to the Games for a bit that night (Friday), but because there had been heavy rain a lot of things weren't up and running yet. Saturday and Sunday, however, were hot and clear, and so we were able to spend the days watching the Heavy events and dancers, listening to music (bagpipe and non-bagpipe in the Ceilidh Tent), browsing the stalls and sampling whiskey. It got up into the 30-degrees with the humidity, so shade was my friend. Janie and Lisa had never been to a Highland Games before, whereas Dave was a veteran complete with kilt. We all had a good time and the girls have been converted to Highland Games attendance.

Mass pipe bands in front of Old Government House:
Caber tossing:
Stone throwing:
This is Fredericton at dusk as we walked back to our motel.
At the closing ceremony, we were told that Billy Connolly was in attendance and being filmed for ITV. I still have no idea what they were filming him for, or why he was in New Brunswick, but it was indeed him. I find it odd that I spent over a year-and-a-half in Scotland and that I end up sighting him in the Maritimes. I took this picture so that I could pick him out from a distance myself as my eyes are no good (using my camera zoom as a telescope, sort of). Play "spot Billy Connolly" with this photo.
Coming back Sunday evening, I arrived at the bus station on Belvedere Avenue and then walked the longest distance ever for me across Charlottetown to pick up my aunt's car from her work so I could drive home. It was only a 3km walk and I've certainly walked more than that in other cities, but not Charlottetown. You must remember I was a country kid - when I was little, I got to town generally no more than once a week with my parents, and then when I was older I was there for school and thus constrained to the schedule of classes and the school bus. I've rollerbladed all over Charlottetown, but I've not really walked a whole lot, other than in the downtown. If I was in town, I usually had the vehicle that got me there. So that was two firsts in one weekend, as I'd never taken a coach bus in the Maritimes before either.

Everyone wants dirt

2008-07-24T22:26:00.004-02:30

Two posts all of a sudden in one day! Well, I was snooping through my blog hits in Google Analytics and was surprised to see a referral from HostelManagement.com

I was curious as to how my site was linked, so after some hunting I found a post in the forums where a fellow wrote this about my site (quoted from this post):

Re: Blogging traveler writes about his hostel stay

If anyone's interested in reading a blog about working in a hostel I found this one interesting:
http://meganglover.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html
Not really humorous as such or containing any inside dirt on the SYHA, but interesting to see how many places she's been to in the course of her work - they're usually short staffed so there is always the opportunity to see some of the country while getting paid. The pay isn't great, but when you don't have to pay for accommodation you can save if you want.

If you're planning a trip , you could certainly do worse than hostel work if you want some interesting experiences - more interesting than office work in London anyway.

It's interesting that he mentions the lack of "inside dirt on the SYHA" in my blog, because that's one thing I was always very careful to keep out of my writings about my work - after all, people have gotten fired from jobs over what was written on their blogs.

Anyway, I often kept my opinions out of my posts whilst working because I wanted to keep that job at the time. Now I don't work for them anymore, but I just can't be bothered writing about what I think because it wouldn't change anything in the end anyway. Let's just sum it up this way: I worked with some good folks and I worked with some that were terrible. I won't work for the SYHA again because I happen to disagree with many aspects of the management of the organization, but that's just my opinion and I did have some good times in my hostel working days.

As a correction on what the forum poster wrote: you don't get free accommodation as a staff member with the SYHA. I had to pay 24 pounds per week for my room - cheap, but not free. The pay for me was hourly at minimum wage with no compensation for overtime (and I was assigned more hours per week than my contract unless I argued about it). I managed to save money, but I manage to do that at any job (and if you're wanting to save money, DO NOT become a seasonal/summer manager, as from what I've seen they get paid a low salary per month and end up working way more than the estimated 40 hours per week - even I wouldn't take that job as a holiday one).

It was more interesting than an office job in London to me, and I did get to a few different places in the country by working with the SYHA and I got to chat with loads of different people, and that's where I took the most out of the experience.

Flying as cargo out West

2008-07-24T20:20:00.009-02:30

Drove my dad over to Moncton (map link for non-Canadians) this morning to fly out West for work (my brother came along for the ride, I should mention). The company Dad's going to work for flies you to and fro every five weeks for a week home and thus does company flights so many times a week to different parts of Canada.

The Moncton flight leaves from what is the old Moncton airport, normally reserved for cargo. In fact, the terminal for the flight, if you can call it that, is a warehouse building labelled "Air Cargo" as shown here:
(That's the nose of my wee truck sticking in on the left, by the way)

But the sign on the little blue door does say that it's passenger check-in, if you can read it (we had to ask for directions there from the airport Shell office as the place isn't well sign-posted.)

I didn't think they'd like me taking pictures inside the building what with security reasons and all, but I probably could have, as the inside consisted of two ladies at a folding table who checked names, asked if luggage was labelled with the name of the camp (accommodation is provided in camps - big buildings sort of like university dormitories except each room has its own bathroom and TV and there's housekeeping staff to do the cleaning), and then the carry-on bag was given to the guy at the security folding table who took a look through it. No metal detectors or X-ray machines.

Then since we had about 1.5 hours until my dad's flight actually left, we just left his bags there, went for a drive, then stood around in the parking lot and watched everyone else stand around in the parking lot. The flight from the west came in, passengers left it through the gate in the chain link fence as here (crappy photo I know, but was being lazy. Shows big Chevy truck better than plane):
Then within 15 minutes of that plane landing we saw men getting on the plane so Dad headed off for his 6-and-some hour flight (stopping in Thunder Bay and Winnipeg). He told me that the plane holds 120 people, they've been pretty much full any time he's been on them, and it barely gets off the ground as it's so loaded with people and luggage (most of these fellas are taking tools in their luggage as they're tradesmen).

And with that another Islander headed off for the big money of Alberta.

Cell/mobile phones in Canada are a rip-off, and yet I still have one

2008-07-22T09:53:00.000-02:30

I got a pre-paid (or "pay and talk/pay as you go" if you prefer) cell phone set up here the other week, and after having had the same in the UK I must say that phones are a gip over here.

I went with the provider Rogers because I have a GSM phone, i.e. one that takes a SIM card. I learned only while hunting around for a provider that the two other major ones around here, Aliant (owned by Bell) and Telus, don't do GSM phones but use CDMA instead, not that I really know much what that's about. Apparently the sales people don't either - when I asked the girl at Telus on the price for a SIM card, she thought I meant a phone card, and then said "oh, you mean like a Rogers phone?"

(I'll let someone who knows what they're talking about explain the difference between GSM and CDMA)

CDMA does seem to make it easier for providers to keep you stuck with them, as you can't just pull your SIM card out of your phone and stick in a new one. I had a CDMA phone when I was in Alberta with Bell on a contract, and then when I moved down to the Maritimes I got it switched to Aliant since they're same company but it took the fellas in the store one hell of a long time to get it so the phone could work on Aliant.

GSM phones can of course come locked in the UK, but you can buy them unlocked (both phones I bought were unlocked from the get-go) and you can unlock locked ones. When I just searched "GSM phones" on Google, I got hits for Canadian sites selling unlocked phones. I didn't get any hits for that when I searched "CDMA phones", although I did find this CBC article talking about it not really being worthwhile to unlock them.

Then there's the expiration of phone credit. In the UK, I could top up my phone with any amount of credit I wanted (I usually did it 10 pounds at at time, but really if I wanted to just put on a few pounds I could) and it never expired as far as I knew (maybe if you don't use your phone for ages, I don't know). Here, you have to buy vouchers for certain amounts, often the lowest is $10. And the credit will expire, generally after a month, unless you put more credit on your account. For example, I bought $10 credit to start with, and it expires on August 11. If I haven't used all that 10 bucks up by then, I will lose it unless I top up my account, and the minimum top-up is $10. Buddy at Rogers did tell me that if you put $100 on, it won't expire for a year so there is a partial way around that but it requires a big expenditure up front.

Not only does credit expire, but the amount of credit you buy determines the rate plan you're on. The bigger the top-up you buy, the cheaper the per-minute rate is. In the UK, my rate plan was the same no matter how much credit I bought.

Then there's the fact that many providers charge people to receive text messages, not just to send them. That's just ridiculous in my mind, because you can't control if you're sent a text message by someone else. It might even be someone you don't know sending it, there are such things as wrong numbers.

With Canadian cell phones you also pay for incoming calls, so if you're talking on your phone you're paying for the airtime even if you didn't make the call. In the UK you only pay for your outgoing calls on mobile phones, but then the billing system is also different for land-line phones over there so that's all intertwined (if you call a mobile on a land-line, you pay a different rate than calling a land-line).

Then there's the neat feature of UK mobile phones that there's no such thing as being on roaming while you're in the country, because mobile phones have their own area codes. Canadian cell phones are tied to a regional area code, my cell phone's area code is 902 just the same as land-lines in PEI (and Nova Scotia), but I wouldn't even get away with travelling everywhere in the area code without ending up roaming - I'm tied the Charlottetown and surrounding region (Of course, Canada is a lot larger than the UK, so having some roaming within the country could be sensible. However, PEI and the Maritimes are not larger than the UK, and yet you can be roaming on your phone within the same area code.)

I was writing this last night and a pertinent report was on Compass (the CBC PEI supper-hour TV news) about how Canadians lag behind the rest of the developped world in cell/mobile phone use. Only about 66-69% (depends on which article you read) of adult Canadians have cell phones, with many saying they do not plan to get one, whereas 90% of Yanks the same age have cells and 97% of people in the UK have mobile phones. The CBC reporter attributed the difference to the expense of cell phones in Canada and the low cost of land-lines compared to other countries. The Globe and Mail wrote about the same survey, as did many other papers with links to articles here.

Anyway, the short of it is the only way to protest the high cost of cell phones is to not have one. Of course, given I don't talk on my phone a whole lot, it's actually cheaper for me to have a cell phone compared to the cost of a land-line phone here. But I don't like it.

Adjusting to the Island

2008-07-13T11:29:00.002-02:30

Well, I've been back on the Island for a bit over a week now. Getting used to cars driving on the right and all that sort of stuff. Still saying "hi-ya" as a greeting but people don't find that too odd; "cheers" or "ta" for thank-you they do however. Slowly changing the rest of my vocabulary over back to Canadian speak. I'm still having trouble saying "pants" for what you wear as outerwear on your legs. I keep leaning toward saying "trousers" but I know people here will find that funny-sounding, so I've just been avoiding using the word.

The coins here seem light and flimsy after UK money. I nearly threw a dime out when it was sitting on a scrap piece of paper because I didn't notice the weight of it. I don't know the coins by feel anymore - going through Tim Horton's drive-thru I was trying to pick out quarters but kept thinking I was getting nickels. Somehow imagined a quarter would feel bigger.

Money seems to fly away here, like things are more expensive. Not sure if it would be if one sat down and calculated out prices in reference to typical wage, but it feels like it. 20 bucks doesnae last long.

I've been bitten by mosquitoes for the first time in almost two years. If I had to choose a blood-sucking insect, I'd go with mosquitoes over midges though.

The main adjustment has been the heat. I haven't been able to go outside in short-sleeves for ages, usually I had two layers on plus a jacket. Here it's been above 20 degrees every day, going down to about 15 degrees at night (warmer than it was in Scotland by day). My jacket's been hanging in the closet and it's been sandals instead of shoes. It was 30 degrees, feeling like 39 degrees with the humidity one day. You can have no clothes on in that heat and still feel too warm.

It's funny how memories of a place can be buried deep in one's brain. If I don't really think about where I'm driving when I go into town, I end up at the university. That's the route I drove the most, so that's my auto-pilot.

Banking like a spy

2008-07-06T10:55:00.002-02:30

We could subtitle this "Banking in Canada versus banking in the UK".

From my experiences, it seems that banking in the UK tries to be much more secure than in Canada.

Opening a new account
Canada: Went into the supermarket (since it's PC Financial), told the guy working there I wanted an account. We filled out all the forms, he gave me a temporary card and I set the PIN on it using the bank machine. He told me that I'd get my new card, with my name printed on it, in the mail and that the PIN would be the one I'd just selected. I walked out with a working bank card.

UK: I went to the bank and filled out the forms. Was then told that they would send me a bank card in the post.

When I got the bank card, the letter attached said I had to go into the bank to activate it. I did that when I could get to town, and was told by the people at the bank that now I would have to wait for them to send me a PIN for the card in the mail.

Some days later I received the letter containing the pin, the numbers being written as words instead of numeric characters. With that, I went to a bank machine, entered the pin and then changed it to one of my own choosing. Only then did I have a working bank card.

I thought all the rigmarole that I went through might have been due to me being foreign, but having seen other banking procedures in the UK now, I think they put everyone through that. Like with online banking...

Setting up online banking
Canada: While setting up my new account, the guy asked me if I wanted online banking. I said yes, he did something in his computer, and told me to go to the website within so many days. I think I was probably given a temporary password. Logged in with my bank card number and that, changed the password, and that's what I still use to log in today.

UK:
So I went into the bank, told the lady there the story, and she did a few things on her computer. Then she gave me a piece of paper with my "customer number" on it and told me that I would get information on how to go about setting everything up in the mail. I thought she meant e-mail (this being an online thing and all), but she meant regular mail. It was weeks before I actually got the letter what with my travelling. The letter instructed me on where to go online, etc. but first I had to get an activation code. This code was in the letter but not just printed there. There was a little plastic rectangle covering up a grey box. My instructions (should I choose to accept them) were to turn the letter over, use the perforations to tear the paper behind the plastic, scratch away the metallic dust stuff (like with a prize scratch ticket), then turn the letter over and place it on a white surface in order to view the code. Then I could enter this information on the website and - lo and behold! - internet banking.

I just logged into my online banking services for the first time since I set it up. I have to use the customer number I was initially given. Then I was presented with six questions, along the lines of "Enter the 4th character of your password" and "Enter the 2nd digit of your personal identification number" (I had two set up the password and PIN the first time).

Western Isles photos

2008-07-01T12:03:00.003-02:30

Photos are here. If you think there's lots of photos of sheep, trust me, there were more sheep than I've shown. Posts about the isles are back a few posts from this one.

Flying to Halifax this Thursday. Bags are packed, not weighing too much, so I should be good to go!

Back to go back

2008-06-30T06:14:00.002-02:30

I'm in Inverness now, just spent the last 6 days in the Western Isles - Lewis, Harris, and Berneray to be specific. There'll be more on that later. I'm flying to Halifax on Thursday from Glasgow, so the next few days are to be filled with packing up stuff, tying up loose ends, and seeing people before I head off.

Western Isles: Berneray

2008-06-29T17:29:00.003-02:30

I spent Friday night and Saturday night on Berneray, an island about 3.5 miles long and 1.5 miles at widest. It's home to about 130 people, is joined to North Uist by a causeway and has a ferry link to Harris.

Since the weather had improved, I pitched my tent at the youth hostel, after clearing away the sheep crap littering the ground first. The first night was good camping, but the second night the wind changed direction so that I was in the brunt of it. I was impressed with my wee Tesco tent - it shook like mad but it didn't collapse or come uprooted. It did make sleeping a bit harder that night - I used my earplugs to block out the noise of the flapping nylon.

I walked all around the island one day, going anti-clockwise from the youth hostel. It only took me about 4 hours and that was not at full tilt.

Looking out over a sizeable chunk of Bernerary from the top of one of its hills.After the rain stopped on the West Beach; it runs for about 3 miles up the west side of the island.
I would bet that there's more sheep on Berneray than people.
Houses along the island's main road.

I left the island Sunday. I was taking the ferry from Lochmaddy on North Uist to Uig on Skye. That particular ferry runs on Sundays, but nothing else does. It was about 10-12 miles from the hostel to the ferry, so I decided that I would walk that Sunday morning as my ferry wasn't until 11:50am. It wouldn't have been a bad walk except that the weather turned bad again and the wind blew fierce, against my direction of travel, and there was heavy rain much of the time just to make it that bit extra special. Needless to say I ended up wet; waterproofs are only waterproof for so long. I've been drier after soaking in a bath. It took me 3.5 hours in those conditions to reach the ferry terminal and the only thought that kept me going was that I could be dry again. I couldn't even have hitched a lift if I'd tried; the only traffic I encountered was going the opposite direction to me.

Anyway, I did make it, changed all my clothes but having only one pair of boots spent the rest of the day travelling to Inverness with slowly-drying feet.

Western Isles: Harris

2008-06-27T08:10:00.000-02:30

I left Garenin on the bus to Stornoway, where I passed a couple of hours getting food and then visiting the town musuem before catching a bus southward.

We drove over the central moorland of Lewis before getting into Harris, where there's a lot of rocks to spare. The landscape started getting hillier as well.

My stop came just after it had started chucking it down with rain. I got off at Maaruig turn, 6km from the village of Rhenigidale where I was going to stay at another Gatliff Trust hostel. The village was only connected by road around 1990; prior to that it could be reached via a footpath from Tarbert or by boat.

I was getting aboslutely drenched and struggling up the hairpin bends of the hilly road when a car stopped for me, a couple who lived in Rhenigidale and offered to take me the rest of the way. Of course I hopped in, and they told me all about their neighbours in the village and who had been visiting PEI and Nova Scotia (after they had asked me where I was from).

I got to the hostel and dried out and warmed up with a cup of tea. Later when another girl arrived, sodden and tired on her bicycle, the warden stopped in and lit the fire for us. The girl, Thea from London, and I read and chatted over the next day, as it was blowing such a gale that we didn't dare go outside until sometime Thursday evening to ease our cabin fever was the weather had calmed down.

Finally seeing the village without rain hammering from the sky.

Friday morning I packed up my stuff and took the footpath that leads to Tarbert. It goes around a bay and then steeply up a hill that I was well glad to reach the top of. No matter how much I go up hills, they're always just as tough it seems. I don't do ascent well. Must have been quite the walk for the kids of Rhenigidale going to secondary school in Tarbert every day before the road was built.In Tarbert I sat in the sun and took in the scenery and read until time to take the bus southward to the ferry to Berneray, my next destination.

Western Isles: Lewis

2008-06-25T08:02:00.000-02:30

I took the ferry from Ullapool to Stornoway, from where I headed to Garenin on the west coast of Lewis. The hostel is one of the Gatliff Hebridian Hostel Trust, which are volunteer-run, very basic but very cheap hostels in the tradition of hostelling. I camped at the hostel, which costs less than having a bed in it. My campsite was just outside the restored blackhouse village that encompasses the hostel.
My first afternoon there (after coming from Stornoway on what became the primary school bus - there's nothing like hearing 10-year-olds talking about when they were young to make one feel old), I just wandered around after setting up my tent, and napped in the sun by the shore in my tent.

Around the village of Carloway. There's ruined houses mixed in amongst the new houses.

The next day (Tuesday), I walked down the road to Carloway to visit the broch just past it. It's about 2000 years old, one of the last ones built, at a time when competition for good growing land was increasing due to climate change making things wetter and the trees disappear. It's a dry stone building - no mortar - and it's still solid as anything.
Then I went farther down the road to Callanish where I had lunch before visiting the standing stones. As you can see, they're irregular shapes but still pretty tall. Like all other standing stones there seems to be debate about their purpose with calendar and religious purposes topping the list.

Back to Civilization

2008-06-21T08:32:00.001-02:30

I got back up to Inverness yesterday. Been putting photos up today (it takes a while). I've added photos to the Lairig Ghru post, and when I do post about my Cowal Way walk I'll do it "back in time", i.e. on the dates it occurred.

Cowal Way, Day 4: Lochgoilhead to Ardgartan

2008-06-20T10:50:00.003-02:30

The last bit of the walk was a short section, only six miles but climbing higher up then on any other sections. Straight from Lochgoilhead, I started heading uphill, on a forestry track at first, then steeper on an ATV track, then even steeper on a boggy path marked with posts occasionally. Once over 500m up, my guidebook gave compass readings for directions as well, because it can be so cloudy at that elevation that sometimes you cannot see the marking posts (a few were tricky to spot from far off just due to the landscape.

The view from up high was sensational, though I couldn't dawdle seeing it as it was windy and cold up there. I did get plenty of time to enjoy it during my breaks climbing up and then on the way down.

Once again, it was a Forestry Commission road that I followed out to Ardgartan, on Loch Long, where the Cowal Way ends. I then walked another few miles to Arrochar, where I grabbed some fish and chips for lunch before catching a train to Fort William, a scenic journey with views of Loch Lomond and some spectacular glens and Rannoch Moor. Then it was a bus to Inverness for the weekend.

And some more photos.

Leaving Lochgoilhead in the morning.Cows blocking my path; the younger ones ran but this one stood her ground.
View back from the pass. Lochgoilhead is on the right, the pass I came through the day before would be in the middle area.
I'd huffed and puffed to get up the hills, and then there were some sheep, grazing nonchalantly like it was just another day at the office to be up there (it was for them).
You can just see Loch Long as I stand at the pass summit.

Cowal Way, Day 3: Glenbranter to Lochgoilhead

2008-06-19T10:48:00.004-02:30

This day's walk was described as the most challenging of all sections by my guidebook, because of the bogginess and lack of a proper path for much of the walk. At first I walked along the old main road, then I made a detour up to the village of Strachur to buy some food. Then it was back down to a side road that led me to the forestry road up into the hills. The total distance for the day was to be 11 miles, but what with my detours I probably ended up walking a full 15 by the day's end.

The path was very good up until I got along a burn (stream) that led to a lochan (little loch) up on the pass. Then it got very boggy and uneven. The wind had picked up at that point, but it was on my back fortunately.

Then once past the lochan, the trail pretty much disappeared at times and where it existed it was really muddy. I had to pick my way down a hill, skirting cliffs around the base of a waterfall, and that took a while. Even so, I beat my guidebook's estimate of 7 hours walking time (I seem to walk faster than the person it estimates for) and came down into "outer" Lochgoilhead after 3pm. I spent the afternoon taking care of food and then hunting for a good place to camp, eventually deciding on a spot in the woods outside of the village, where there was no midges!

Now some photos.

I'd walked miles away from the road by now, and here were someone's cows and sheep pasturing. Trickier back fields to get to than farmers have in PEI.

Mist rising off the hills.
Currain Lochan, very wavey due to a strong wind.

Cliffs I had to pick my way around coming down off the Lochain pass to get down to Lochgoilhead.

Waterfall.

Lochgoilhead, at the head of Loch Goil, of all things.

Cowal Way, Day 2: Glendaruel to Glenbranter

2008-06-18T10:46:00.002-02:30

I woke up to sunshine and no sign of rain (nor the intense midge swarms of the night before), so I was a happy camper as I laid out things in the sun to dry while I had a shower and breakfast. It did drizzle a bit as I packed up, but nothing too much to worry about.

The walk for the day was to be not too long or hard, around 12-13 miles I think. I set off down the single-track road, probably the old "main" road as it ran parallel to the now main road. However, after a couple of miles where a bridge was supposed to be, I reached a "Road Closed" and construction site fence. The bridge was being repaired/replaced, and I couldn't pass through as it was a job site (hard hat, etc. required). Checking out my map, I saw no easy way around, nor an easy way to the main road that didn't involve risks of bogginess while cutting through pastures (after the mud incident of the day before, I was eager to not get covered in smelly mud early on in the day). So I walked back to the campsite and out to the main road around there. The main road met up with the next stage of the walk, staring at Garvie Burn onto Foresty Commission roads to go through to Glenbranter.

The walk through the forest had a few steepish hills, but was on a good track so not too bad really. It rained lightly and then it stopped and then it started again. I didn't see any people, just sheep, until I came out at Glenbranter Village, where there's houses and forestry offices, around 4pm. Glenbranter is along the river Cur, which runs into Loch Eck from the north-ish direction.

I'd decided to treat myself to a night in a bunkhouse (to dry out) and a cooked meal, so I caught a bus down the road after 5pm to the Whistlefield Inn, on the shore of Loch Eck, which you may remember me mentioning from the days when I lived a few more miles down the road from it. The bunkhouse was just like a hostel, with great heaters for drying things in front of, and I had an excellent burger for supper, Aberdeen Angus beef mixed with haggis.

Glendaruel, from the churchyard. An old archway on the road through Clachan of Glendaruel.

On the Forestry Commission road, sheep running from me. Even the ones in fields beside roads where they should see people often ran away from me. Maybe it was the backpack, gave me a weird shape to them.
Looking back toward the hills surrounding Glendaruel (it would be on the right, with the wind turbines on the hill defining the left side of the glen).
Coming down into Glenbranter.

Cowal Way, Day 1: Portavadie to Clachan of Glendaruel

2008-06-17T08:41:00.006-02:30

I haven't had time to make up a Google map, but there's a map of Cowal here that's not too bad. All photos plus more are in my second web album (filled the first) at My photos 2 link on the side of the page.

The day got off to a poor start. I got up around 6am to pack and head for my bus from Dunoon to Portavadie at 7:11am. Turns out this bus did not exist on that day. I'd looked up timetables on Transport Direct's website (usually quite useful) as West Coast Motors did not have up-to-date timetables on its website. Well, the bus I wanted to take only existed on school holidays, and before the bus "didn't turn up" I already realized I was in trouble, as I had been on a bus taking a little trip out to the Coylet Inn with many school kids the day before - they clearly weren't on holidays yet.

So there was only one bus going to Portavadie that day, at 13:36 or thereabouts. If it had been a Wednesday, I could have taken a connecting bus, but it was a Tuesday. I figured that by the afternoon I could even walk the entire distance to Portavadie, and then I could certainly hitch a ride by then, so that was what I did. I walked out of Dunoon to where the road turns off to go westward, managed to hitch a lift with a forestry worker who was driving to Clachan of Glendaruel, and just after 9am we turned onto a road behind the bus that I could have connected to if it had been Wednesday, so he flashed it's lights to get it to stop. So I ended up arriving at Portavadie at 9:40am, not too bad afterall.

The walk for the day was to be around 15 miles to complete 2 stages, plus an extra mile or so to get to the campsite where I was going to stay the night. It was a fairly easy walk - gentle hills and roads, with the exception of a shoreline stretch that was quite tricky just north of Tighnabruaich. It was along slippy rocks and then up to a narrow, winding, up and down path through the woods because the tide was in. Anyway, I present a few photos first.

Ruins of castle by Loch Asgog (just after Portavadie). I fell in a muddy hole trying to get down to it and spent a lot of time cleaning my boots up at the public toilet in Kames.
Walking along the shore to Tighnabruaich. That's Isle of Bute on the very right, but more of the Cowal peninsula in behind it.
Bute again, now from north of Tighnabruaich.

You must be this small to walk the Cowal Way: rocks I had to squeeze through to continue on the path as the tide was high.

The path goes up behind this rock into the woods. I wouldn't have found it without my guidebook (and even then it took some work).

The forest path was hard up and down work, and it was raining heavily, but the ground was covered in pretty rhododendren petals.
Just as I arrived in Clachan of Glendaruel it absolutely started chucking it down; the rain was bouncing off the road. I took shelter in the porch of the closed Glendaruel hotel, where some kind soul had even left the cushions off of the patio chairs so I sat comfortably on the wooden bench. As soon as the rain cleared, I made down the road to the campsite so that I could set my tent up before it started pouring again. I set it up in a misty rain. The tent held the water out alright, but many of things were still damp in the morning, not drying well in the humid environment.

Off to Cowal

2008-06-15T14:29:00.000-02:30

I'm in Glasgow just now, been catching up with some friends. Tomorrow I'm doing a trip I've done a few times before, taking the train to Gourock and then the ferry across to Dunoon, the town nearest to where I stayed when I first came to Scotland. I'm spending the night in Dunoon before heading out to Portavadie in the morning to start walking the Cowal Way (I would link to some pages here but the computer I'm using isn't letting me see all Blogger features, so will have to wait).

The Cowal Way is a 47 mile journey. The book I have outlines it as a 6-day trip but I'm going to do it in 4 days, possibly 3, as I know my fitness is such that I can do 15 miles a day over the terrain of some of the route even with a heavy pack. My pack will be heavy enough because I'm going to camp along the way - hostels are non-existant and even B&B's and hotels aren't plentiful. Plus, with a tent I can just stop walking at the end of the day when I feel like it and don't have to push myself onward just to get out of the elements for the night. I've picked up a small tent, a sleeping bag, and a foam sleeping mat (for comfort) from Tesco for £27 altogether. I'll use it for the remainder of my trip and then pass it on to someone else. The cost altogether is less than a night's stay in a hotel, afterall.

Just checked the weather forecast and it's improving. Tuesday, my first day of walking, is now predicted to be light rain, whereas it was heavy rain when I checked a couple of days ago. And it looks like it's clearing up some the next days. One can only hope.

So I won't be near any internet until probably the weekend, when I will report on the walking.

Lairig Ghru

2008-06-12T13:10:00.006-02:30

I walked the Lairig Ghru, a mountain pass through the Cairngorm mountains with Tina yesterday.

We left Inverness Tuesday afternoon, and took 3 different buses to get to Bramar 4 hours later. The first bus took us to Grantown-on-Spey (that's the biggest town in the Speyside whiskey district), then the next bus took us to Ballater. That journey was pretty cool; it was over winding, high-up roads in what I believe is the sub-arctic climate of the Cairngorms. No trees, just scrubby plants and livestock. We passed through Tomitoul, the highest village in Scotland.

At Ballater we had a wait of an hour before taking the bus to Braemar. From there, we walked about 6 miles to Inverey where we stayed the night at the youth hostel.

Wednesday morning we set out at 8am walking toward the Linn of Dee (a gorge that the River Dee passes through) and then the Lairig Ghru. We got a few rain showers in the first hours and we stopped at the Corrour Bothy for lunch. There we decided to put on our waterproof trousers (we'd only been wearing raincoats before) and it was fortuate that we did as it started to rain heavily, stopping from time to time.

What Scottish hills most often look like - forget all those sunny postcards :)

Hills we passed along the way - sorry, I don't know names.

By the time we got to the Pools of Dee, just beyond the source of the River Dee (it runs all the way to Aberdeen), there were rocks all over the glen bottom, having fallen from the mountains on either side. I had been calling the first mountain we saw with loads of rocks on its sides the "gravel hill", but the rest of them were like that for much of the length of the valley.

The first "gravel hill".

The path is under those rocks:Path gets less rocky as it skirts around this little hill.

Just as we paused for a second lunch by a pool of Dee, it started to hail, so we started walking again. We spent a couple of hours picking our way through large rocks, often in heavy rain (the forecast that day had called for "scattered showers" but the weather is notoriously unpredictable and quick to change in the Cairngorms), so that our progress was much slower compared to the smooth wide path of earlier in the day.

I called this one the "Scary Hill"; it was shrouded in cloud much of the time (really, my namings are no different than the actual ones, they're just descriptive ones in Gaelic most of the time, and mine are in English).

The path finally returned to rocky but existant farther along, by that time it was almost 3pm. We had made it over the top of the pass and could see Aviemore. So long as it rained, we kept moving with as short breaks as possible otherwise we just got cold. My boots and rain trousers had been saturated by the hail and so I was damp in the legs and wet in my feet, but oddly walking in wet socks felt quite comfortable and soft.

The heavy rain stopped as we came down off the pass. Tina's knee was hurting her, so we kept walking so as to get to the main road as quickly as possible. The last bit was through Rothiemurchis Forest along a nice path, so we made pretty decent time for those last miles and emerged in a caravan park at Coylumbridge just after 6pm. It would have been another half an hour walk along the road to Aviemore, and having just walked about 22 miles, we opted for calling a taxi, which was £5 well spent.
After one of the best hot showers I've had (courtesy of Aviemore Youth Hostel), we went to an Italian restaurant where we could watch the evening's EuroCup football match - Switzerland were playing Turkey, so we cheered on Tina's home team during dinner, but unfortunately the game was a draw which means Switzerland won't have enough points to advance. However, the dinner was excellent, and I even had room for dessert which doesn't often happen in a restaurant.

I can't put pictures up just now (using internet cafes), but may be able to next weekend when I get to the Inverness library.

Some scenic journeys

2008-06-10T06:58:00.010-02:30

I forgot to mention before that on my trip back from Belfast, on the Manchester-to-Inverness stint of the journey, the view from the plane was incredible. Coming out of Manchester itself, I could see Yorkshire and some of the Lakes District quite well. Then it got cloudier for a bit, but the clouds cleared around Glasgow and so Tina and I could see everything from Glasgow northward.

I could see all the peninsula of Argyll, and Loch Lomond, and then Ben Nevis (it is quite big) and Skye. Could pick out Loch Ness by it's length and see the Highland mountains to the north. As we neared Inverness airport, we got close up views of the Black Isle and the Moray coast, including Findhorn beach, and the Cairngorm Mountains in the near distance. It was really cool. If I'd had a flight like that a year ago, it wouldn't have been as cool because I didn't know enough geography to name things - it would have looked nice, but being able to put a name to the regions now made it better for me.

Then last week when I left Corrour, which is on the West Highland Line of the railroad, I took the train all the way to Mallaig. The West Highland Line is rated as one of the most scenic rail journeys in the world (it starts in Glasgow and I'm going to do that stretch up to Fort William later in the month).

The journey was indeed beautiful, with several places being stunning. Not being able to take pictures from inside a train very well, I was just going to direct you to some photos of the places I saw taken by other people. However, it has proved difficult to find a nice site with loads of pictures. I've put up a map here; the railroad is already marked on it and I've just put a few place names in to guide your eye. If you're really keen for photos, you could search place names in Google image search; I've linked to a few searches below.

Glenfinnan topped the list of stunning places. The railroad crosses the glen on the Glenfinnan Viaduct, now famous to the world for appearing in the Harry Potter films. The vantage point from the viaduct allows you to see either way down the glen. I could see the Glenfinnan Monument, which marks where ol' Bonnie Prince Charlie first started out on his campaign in 1745.

Photos of Glenfinnan: try here, here, Google image search here.

Other places: Loch Treig, Loch Eil, Lochailort, coast near Arisaig

Then from Maillaig, I took the ferry to Armadale on Skye. I have some of my own pictures of that, in this album.

Sair feet

2008-06-05T20:02:00.003-02:30

More photos are here. A map of the walk is here (terrain setting is useful to view it in).

Well, Wednesday I packed some of my stuff into my backpack and headed to Fort William on the bus, from where I walked the couple of miles to Glen Nevis Youth Hostel. On Thursday morning, I set off on foot from there to walk through Glen Nevis on ward to Corrour, a 20 mile or so trip over all, where I would stay at Loch Ossian Youth Hostel.

Glen Nevis is the glen at the base of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the country. Then a river or big stream called the Water Nevis according to my map, extends south and then eastward toward Loch Treig, and from there it's only a few miles to Loch Ossian. There's a path that runs along the river that I followed (using follow in a loose sense here).

It was a long day's walk. It started out in an area busy enough with other people walking out to see the gorge and Steall Falls. The midges weren't too bad as there was a bit of a breeze, but I did gradually accumulate some bites.

Then as I got farther into the glen, the number of people dwindled. I accidentally got away from my riverside path by following a path up a hill. I should have clued in much earlier that I was going along the wrong path, since I was climbing up the base of a Munro, but I was also quite hungry at the time and not thinking straight. I wanted to figure out where I was on my map before stopping to eat, but not being on the right path sort of interfered with that. Eventually I figured it out and headed back down to the valley, although having gotten a nice view while up the hill.
By the time I descended again, there was no one else around. There wasn't even any midges, it's like they only stayed where the people were. For a few hours, it was completely silent save the occassional trickling noise of water and the sounds of my own footsteps - I didn't even hear any birds for a while.

Just some interesting trees near a ruined house in the middle of the glen.
As I neared Loch Treig, I started to see people again, and then I neared the rail line and trains were going past. The last stretch coming up to Corrour was the absolute hardest - being tired from walking all day, I found I nice, long hill to climb, and not only that the sun came out and the breeze died down meaning that there were swarms of midges biting me as I sweated up the hill.
Finally, Loch Ossian and the hostel came into sight and I arrived to rest, hungry and with sore feet (hence the title), but after a good night's sleep I was brand new again.

View from the youth hostel of Loch Ossian.

Northern Ireland

2008-06-04T08:04:00.007-02:30

I got back from Belfast last night (via Manchester, due to a flight cancellation on the part of Flybe airline). It was short trip, but fun (as always, more photos are here)

Tina and I flew out of Inveress airport at about 1:30pm, a small airport to Tina but still bigger than Charlottetown airport. The flight over took only about an hour, and then we were at Belfast City airport with Alysha greeting us.

We dropped our stuff off at the guesthouse where Alysha works and she had gotten us a room. Then we embarked on a walk about the town centre with Alysha as our tour guide (she told us that all historical dates she gave us were to within the nearest 100 years). We went up to the viewing platform in the new Victoria Shopping Centre (I'd heard about it on the BBC, it was that exciting for Belfast).

An important building of some sort in the city centre.

Then we finished off the evening by going to the Sex and the City film, and then hanging out around Alysha's.

Monday our plan was to hire a car and drive out to the north coast. First, we walked to a neighbourhood that would probably be described as "divided by the Troubles" (it might have been called Shankhill, not sure, but it was around St. Joseph's Cathedral. We hunted around for murals inspired by the troubles, and didn't find the ones that Alysha meant for us to see but found some others. We checked out the cathedral as well (filled with light and quite pretty, although appearing "new") before catching a cab to the airport to hire a car.

Fence topped with spikes around St. Joseph's Primary School; the school windows also had metal grills covering them.

A mural depicting Celtic Football Club; there's some politics in that of course.

I was to be the driver, since I have a license (an important bit) and was also the oldest of the group. Just to be informative, Tina has her learners license but hasn't driven a car in years (but she just got a scooter), and Alysha as well has her beginners, but being from BC she's already done on practical test and has to do another or something like that.

Not having booked in advance, I figured we'd have to hire a manual transmission (standard for you Canadian readers). I told the girls that it could take some practice for us to get going anywhere, but they were game. We were given a Renault Clio. The first moving around in the car park was shakey as I tried to find the biting point on the clutch, but we got rolling out and on the ring road, and then tried to figure out where we were going. We ended up heading south-east before we could get back to where we wanted to go, but that provided a good training run for me in the car. We even passed through Belfast on the way back (where roads are really, poorly, signposted) with me shimmying across lanes and not stalling (yay!). Outside of town, there was an incident of needing to turn around and having to reverse of a slight slope in a cemetery where I kept sliding into the empty mesh rubbish bin, but some spinning of tires got me out of that.

We got out on the coastal route, with the Giant's Causeway being our ulitmate destination. We stopped at Ballygally to get some snacks at a Spar convenience store which we found to be closed, so we stretched our legs and took in the view.

By this time, I was feeling quite comfortable handling stopping and starting and had even gotten my gear shifting to be quite smooth. Then we met the mother of all hills outside of Ballygally, and in trying to down shift from 3rd to 2nd gear, I ended up in 4th by mistake and stalled the car. My confidence took a major beating about being able to get it up and going without rolling back, so I made Tina get us up the hill, which she pulled off better than I would have.

After that, it took some time before my fear of getting the car stuck on some hill subsided, and at approaching hills I would ask Tina for her recommendation on gears to confirm my own theory. I did have to make some stops on slight hills, but managed to get out of them with some spinning of tires. That's a technique I need some practice on.

Anyway, back to the countryside. The coastal route was beautiful, as was the weather (it was hot in the car without air-conditioning). We stopped again at Cushendal around 2pm to get some sandwiches (I'd been so nervous driving that I hadn't felt hungry at all). Then it was along the coast until we got to Carrick-a-Rede, where there is a rope bridge from the mainland to a little, cliffed island that the locals go to for fishing salmon, and is now open to the public. Not being a fan of heights, I was worried about crossing it, but after the 1km walk down to the bridge I saw it wasn't as rickety as it could have been, so I got across it fine and even stopped to look down (I had more fear of heights in the Victoria Shopping Centre). We spent some time lying in the grass and the sun - it wasn't even too breezy, and warm enough for short-sleeves.

The rope bridge:

Nearby cliffs.

Then the last stop was the Giant's Causeway, where Alysha told us the legend as we walked down to the causeway, and then we did some more sitting and investigating. The rock columns are naturally hexagonal, but it looks like someone laid down a bunch of paving stones.

We went back to Belfast along a main A road and then the dual carriageway at my request, as I wanted a break from scary-hill-possibly-stalling driving. By the time we'd returned the car and gotten back into the city, it was about 9pm, so we found some food to eat and then went to a bar near Queen's University for the rest of the night.

Tuesday morning, we had a bit of a lie in, then sat in the Royal Botanic Gardens for a while before having lunch at the Crown Bar, an unusual old Victorian place with very private booths for eating/drinking ("snugs"). Then it was to the airport for our flight at 4pm after saying goodbye to Alysha. Hopefully we'll see her again sometime soon.

A mosaic lizard at the botanic gardens.

Some of the elaborate decorations at the Crown Bar.

More days in Glen Affric

2008-05-30T14:41:00.000-02:30

I got back from working at Glen Affric Hostel yesterday afternoon. The days went really quickly this time, with few electrical/plumbing issues to deal with, and no guest accidents!

All photos are here.

David (Inverness manager) drove me in Monday morning. We were joined on the trip by Dave's wife Ailsa and their two dogs, Ash and Cillie. The last time Dave brought the dogs there, they ran up a mountain on him, so this time Ailsa was able to keep an eye on them so they didn't do that.

We all sat in the front of the Land Rover with the dogs sitting in the back, Cillie constantly trying to perch on top of my box of food, so my bread ended up with a squished-in lean to it.

At the Affric car park, we were joined by Carl the water treatment guy, so I moved to sit in the back with the dogs to let him, being taller, sit in the front (having experienced the track ride in both the front and the back, I can definitely say the front is more comfortable. Riding in the back involves holding on to the wall and sort of riding on the balls of your feet more than sitting down at times.)

A rocky section of the track in; you can see why it's bumpy.

The last 7 miles of the trip takes about an hour due to the roughness of the track. From what I remember reading about horse-and-wagon speeds, I think 7 miles per hour is on par with that.

We arrived at the hostel to find Stephen cheerful and even more tanned than last month. There were other changes: the glen was much greener, it now being late May instead of mid-April.

If you look at my pictures from last time, you'll see these same two trees, but without any leaves on them:

The bridge by the hostel that had been washed away in the rains before Easter has now been put back in place by the National Trust guys, and labelled.

After some business, everyone else eventually headed back out. I spent the afternoon sitting out of the wind in the sun (it was warm without the wind) reading my book and waiting for guests to arrive.

Later Monday evening, we ran out of water, which I had known might happen since the burn was so low due to the lack of rain. With the help of the hostel guests, we got the inlet pipe back under water by damming up the burn with rocks, then removed the airlocks from the pipe and got it flowing again. Because the bottom of the tank had contained much silt, the water flow then stopped around 10pm that night because the mechanical filter had clogged up. A couple of the guests again helped me clean it out and reassemble it, and then I cleaned it again in the morning and the water was fine after that.

On Tuesday, I did some cleaning and water works as I mentioned. While working, a fellow popped his head in the back door, asked me if I was the warden, and then asked "Are you serving food during the day?" in a tone of voice that implied that he was sure we'd be serving in the evening. I informed him that we never served food, and he seemed quite surprised. He asked me if the Cluanie Inn served food (a 7-8 mile walk back to the main road), and I told him that they would. Fancy expecting a restaurant in the middle of an otherwise empty glen!

By the time I got out the door for a walk it was about 1pm. I walked down to Loch Affric along the path, here's some photos I took along the way:

A couple of little waterfalls:

Mountains before the loch.

Loch Affric:

Part of the forest the National Trust is working at restoring:

I walked back to the hostel, arriving just after 4pm. Again the evening flew by with having dinner and chatting with guests.

Wednesday was cold and rainy, so I didn't go for a walk but stayed in with a book. I never managed to read much of the book, because the weather meant that lots of people stopped in - people who had been camping and wanted to stay, and also those who had booked in. I didn't have enough space for all the campers, but they sat around and dried out by the fire for a bit.

The weather started clearing up some in the evening, with the low cloud gradually receding on Thursday morning.

Then before I knew it, Thursday had arrived, when I was to be picked up. Not knowing exactly when Kevin would arrive with Stephen, I went for wander up the mountain path out back just for an hour or so. Took another requisite photo of the youth hostel from above:
Kevin and I had a bumpy ride out, as the rain had softened the ground and allowed for several potholes. We also had to haul out bags of rubbish that people had sneakily been leaving behind (lazy people!). So it was a smelly and noisy ride out of the glen with bottles clanking in the back. Fortunately, once we got back to the road we got enough air circulation from the open windows that we couldn't smell the rubbish anymore.

So that was my few days in Glen Affric once again. And so ended my career with the SYHA, as I'm now finished work. The first of my trips starts this Sunday, when Tina and I are going to visit Alysha in Belfast.

Back in town

2008-05-30T08:01:00.001-02:30

I'm back from Glen Affric, and will post about that later today or tomorrow.

Last of the sheets!

2008-05-25T18:21:00.002-02:30

I'm nearing the end of my last shift at this hostel. Tomorrow I'm going to Glen Affric to work there until Thursday, and after that I'm finished work. For those who don't know, I'm then doing a month of holidaying around Scotland before returning to Canada.

It's been a busy enough last shift. I just finished the sheets about half an hour ago. Who knows what jobs I'll do in the future, but for the moment I've folded my last laundry professionally (well, paid laundry folding - if there's a professional laundry folding association, I'm afraid I don't belong to it).

There's no bed linen provided at Glen Affric, so that's why I'm done doing laundry if you're wondering.

A few things I've never gotten around to putting in a post that I'll do now. I'm sure they'll be more at another time.

There's a cat that lives at the train station - I've only seen it next to platform 6, so I'll assume it sleeps somewhere around there, maybe under the floor that's built for the operators to use. The railway workers must feed it, as there's often a dish out for it. It's a little black cat, quite friendly, lets strangers like me pet it. I call it Station Cat (how original), but I'm sure the railworkers have named it something themselves. I like it when businesses can have animals around like that. We don't have official office pets here, but our manager's dogs are in sometimes, and his cat pays visits when he's lonely or roaming at night.

I don't know if I've talked about the instances of men wearing kilts over here before, but it does happen, generally for weddings where it goes with the fancy shirt and jacket. It does look quite sharp. An odd/funny thing about this to me, is when you see a guy kitted out in the full Bonnie Prince Charlie (i.e., the formal jacket, shirt, socks, shoes, dagger, sporran, etc ), looking like he's stepped out of the past, and then you see him pulling his mobile phone out of his sporran. Old and new.

Anyway, I'll once again be away from the internet for a while, so it'll be Thursday or Friday before I can post again.

Visitors!

2008-05-22T14:03:00.005-02:30

The past two days I spent hanging out and playing tour-guide a bit with Kelly and Sean (some photos are here). Kelly lives in Dublin but is from Nova Scotia, I met her when I first arrived in Scotland and then visited her when in Ireland. Sean is a friend of hers from back in Nova Scotia, where he lives now. It was his first trip overseas, and he and Kelly had done some touring in Ireland before coming over here on the ferry in Kelly's car (a Nissan Micra).

Tuesday morning I caught the bus down to Fort William to meet them, and we did some hiking in Glen Nevis. Kelly was well amazed by the twistiness of the road through Glen Nevis and the way there is so many blind crests on it. We didn't walk up Ben Nevis (the highest mountain in Britain), as it's a long ol' slog, but instead walked along a burn into the glen.

We then started the drive up to Inverness, stopping to view Loch Ness at a few locations along the way. The fresh air in the morning had made us all a bit dozy on the rest of the drive up. Went out for a really good Indian dinner once in town, and then went to Hootananny's pub to satisfy Sean's mission of trying one new beer per day of his travels.

On Wednesday, we went out to Cawdor Castle, another sight on Sean's list. Although the castle is quite old (around 14th century), it's a fancy modern home inside with the owners still living in it outside of the summer months (we figured they must have a "summer castle"). So there's old portraits and books mixed in with modern art, some carefully chosen family photos, and fashion magazines. The descriptions of the rooms were often funny in a dry sort of way due to the language used; a fireplace in one room was described as "hopelessly off-centre".

We took a walk in the castle grounds and found some gigantic old trees; here's Kelly demonstrating the size of one.

Next we went off to the Black Isle to tour the small brewery run there on an organic farm. Then we went up to Foulis (across the Cromarty Firth) for lunch. The rest of the day was spent taking care of errands back in town and then just hanging about. Thursday morning saw Kelly and Sean heading eastward to visit a friend in Aberdeen.

Kite Flying and the Water of Life

2008-05-18T18:08:00.004-02:30

Two completely unrelated topics in the post title.

I've had a cold this past week, and when it was in it's filled-sinus stage I was treating it with whiskey (and bed rest, I should add - I read 4 novels in 3 days). I've had people back in Canada recommend the spirit for head colds to me, but I never tried it back then. At some point in my sojourn in Scotland I was given whiskey, in the form of a hot toddy, when sick and it is rather miraculous stuff. Truly the "water of life" as its Gaelic name indicates. Honestly, try the stuff - whiskey, hot water, and sugar or honey if you don't like the taste of whiskey.

Unfortunately, I'm now at the irritating cough stage of the cold, which whiskey doesn't really seem to help with.

The weather's been holding up nicely - it's a bit cool due to the breeze at times, but it's still largely sunny, and not raining anyway. When it was warm enough (i.e. out of the wind), I've done some of my convalescent reading in the sun. Inverness is a really pretty town on a sunny day - walking down the High Street you see all the old buildings, and then the river and hills glimpsed in between them. Along the river loads of people are out for walks with their kids or their dogs. I think it's really nice that Inverness has a clean river, so that animals like ducks are in it, people can let their dogs swim in it, and people fish in it

Taking advantage of the sunny weather, I went kite flying with Sam out at Findhorn on Saturday afternoon. He bought a kite that has two lines on it, which means you can steer it, so it was unlike any kite flying that I've done before that was basically just holding on to a string. I crashed it a few times when trying to make it dive, and occasionally got it twisted up from loops and couldn't remember which way to make the kite loop to untwist it, but over the course of the afternoon I can say that my flying improved and it was lots of fun. And with a kite that you can steer, you can use it to chase people who annoy you, although I didn't put it to that use.

Ducks

2008-05-12T09:41:00.002-02:30

It's sunny and warm again here today, not as hot as last week but still quite nice.

It hasn't been that busy a morning today. Yesterday, we had 170 people checking out, which made for a busy morning of check-outs for me and trying to get laundry done. I was wading through sheets. This morning, there was only 26 check-outs. I was able to take time to feed the ducks - there's 3 mallard ducks, 2 males and 1 female, that have been coming by the hostel everyday for the past couple of weeks. I'm told they come every year. They usually stop out at the back door of the kitchen (they come in shifts lately - only one or two at a time, but several times a day) where Gail, our chef, will give them some bits of bread. When Gail's not in, they wander up toward the main doors, where I can spy them. The other day they got muesli, today it was cornflakes. The female's quite accustomed to people; she had no fear of waddling right up to me.

The nationality of our guests goes in phases. For a few weeks, the coach groups were either French or German people. Then we got some Swedish groups, and another French. In the last week, the Americans and Canadians have started to appear, first as a trickle and now in droves. We had a Haggis Tours group of them the other night - a nicely behaved group, I should mention, if you remember my previous experiences with those groups.

The odd thing to me is how few of the Americans and Canadians realize that I'm from Canada. I don't think my pronounciation has changed that much - it's more intonation of speech, changing to the rhythm that people speak with in the UK, and using the vocabulary. It's enough of a difference that most North Americans don't pick up on my accent unless they talk to me for a while - longer than the usual check-in conversation. I have my work voice, I guess, just like I have a telephone voice, and it's those voices that have changed. If the conversation gets more informal, then I slip back into my old speech and the guests start to clue in to my origins.

Of course, no one Scottish ever mistakes me for Scottish - they might wonder where I'm from, but they usually peg it down to me being a native English speaker, so from a former British colony.

More photos and sun

2008-05-09T14:50:00.002-02:30

I've put up my photos from Nairn and Elgin in the linked albums.

The weather's been sunny and even hot the last few days, up to the mid-twenties by times. I've been having to wear sunscreen and walking around in shirt-sleeves, a rare occurrence for me over here. I had the last two days off and spent some of it with Tina who stayed over Wednesday afternoon until Thursday afternoon. Otherwise I've been going for walks along the river, rollerblading, or reading outside - just taking advantage of the weather while it lasts. It's supposed to start raining tomorrow, so that'll be the end of it for a while.

Daytrips in Moray

2008-05-02T17:51:00.004-02:30

My days off this week were Wednesday and Thursday. I took a daytrip each day; here's a map to show you where I went (described below) relative to Inverness. I haven't gotten my own photos uploaded yet because the library has been closed due to the Bank Holiday weekend and I've been busy other days. I'll add the photos when I get the chance, until then there's some to see if you follow the links I've posted.

I went to Nairn on Wednesday, hoping the predicted rain would hold off (as it looked nice and sunny when I left Inverness). It was a 30 minute trip on the bus, and getting there I wandered down the High Street before taking a stroll on the sandy beach. Around then it started getting rainy, so I sat in a shelter on the beach for a while, watching the waves, before heading back into town to get some lunch. The rain was keeping staying pretty heavy, so I headed back to Inverness at that point.

Nairn's not a bad looking little town, although it unfortunately has some not-so-nice looking abandonned buildings on the main road that you see driving past (the High Street being one street over). At the cafe where I had lunch, they had three clocks on the wall, labelled Nairn, Auldearn, and Cawdor. The first two clocks had the correct time, and the Cawdor clock was 20 minutes behind. I'm not sure if that's a local joke about Cawdor folk being late all the time or what.

Most interesting street name I spied in Nairn: Society Street. Sounds rather la-di-da.

Back in Inverness that afternoon, I went to the local musuem, which is free, and learned a bit about Scottish geology and early.

Thursday the weather predictions were for better weather, so I had saved a trip to Elgin for that day, primarily to visit the ruined cathedral. Elgin town itself, once I found it, was nice (I was navigating from the train station to the town centre by looking for small, old buildings and more people on the streets, and ended up in New Elgin (a relative term) first). Although the High Street has all the chain shops you expect in any UK town nowadays, the layout is still the medieval streets that open up on a marketplace around St. Gile's Church (you can see this on the page I linked to).

I picked up some lunch and ate it at the base of the Lady Hill Monument, a pillar to the last Duke of Gordon (and called the Gordon monument on the Elgin page I linked to). There's a small ruins of a castle at that site as well, although sadly it's become a local drinking spot judging by the empty cans and broken glass.

Interesting street names in Elgin: Seceder's Close (it was closed off by a door) and Lazarus Lane.

Despite the guidebook saying that the cathedral was "clearly signposted", I found no sign for it in the town centre, although there was directions to just about everything else a tourist could want, and beyond - a shop for mobility scooters was signposted everywhere as well. I eventually found it by following my books directions to go north-east of the tourist office, once I found the tourist office.

The cathedral lies in ruins primarily because it fell into disuse after the Reformation and people looted bits and time took its toll on the others. From what I read, back in the day when the central tower was still standing and the rest of it, it was a pretty big player as far as cathedral stature goes.

One of the in-floor tombstones in the cathedral that I could read was for one Colin Innes Glover, a former official of some sort in Elgin. No idea what year he died, but it was in February and in a time when "life" was spelled as "lyf". The stone had a skull and crossbones on it, and that motif appeared elsewhere in the cathedral carvings, more than I've seen in any other I've been in.

The two towers around the main cathedral entrance are still standing for so many stories, so I was able to climb up the winding narrow staircase to get an overhead view of the ruins after I'd wandered around in them. As I was coming down, a coach tour group was arriving, so I figured by then it was a good time to leave to avoid the crowds, and high-tailed it back to the train station to catch the next train back to Inverness.

More sunny days

2008-04-27T19:08:00.001-02:30

Today has been gorgeous! It's been sunny and about 15 degrees, so t-shirt weather if you're out of the wind (or handle cold better than I do). Not wanting to waste the day by staying inside, I went down to Loch Insh (see map) with Sam and we hired kayaks for an hour. They gave us waterproofs fortunately, since Sam got wet owing to his paddling technique, and I got slightly wet owing to him using his paddle to splash me.

Stopped in Aviemore around lunchtime to pick up some bacon rolls that we ate on the shore of Loch Morlich, near Glenmore (and where Cairngorm Lodge Youth Hostel is). They were so good we stopped again for seonds on the way back to Inverness - Asher's Bakery, top-notch bacon rolls. Good sweet baked goods as well, I stop at their Inverness bakery every now and then for a treat.

Didn't feel like I was out in the sun too long today, but my face still feels a wee bit warm from it tonight. When I started work this afternoon, I had the hostel doors open whilst folding sheets and it was quite nice, sunny with a bit of a breeze. There was some ducks by scrounging for bits of food outside the front door, and they were here yesterday morning as well so perhaps they'll be regulars. Until they meet the manager's cat Scooter, anyway.

We had another eat-in-the-outdoors earlier in the week, Sam and I picked up fish suppers (the supper part means it comes with chips, so fish and chips) from a chippy on route to Kinloss (about 30 minutes east of Inverness, see the map) and sat on a beach on the Moray Firth accessed by Roseisle Forest, near Burghead. There's a long stretch of sandy beach with the dunes along the coast from Findhorn eastward , where I've been out to for a walk as well a few weeks ago. On the topic of really good food, that chippy, called the Bervie, does really nice fish and chips. It's also huge fish pieces that seem to come from whales, but it's so good I can usually manage to eat it all even when I think it will be too much.

Glen Affric photos and posts up

2008-04-23T14:42:00.004-02:30

As the title says, I've uploaded my photos, they can be found here.

I've finished writing posts about my stay at Glen Affric, they start on April 18 and there's one for each day. So just check backwards on the blog.

Back from the Glen

2008-04-22T09:31:00.001-02:30

I got back from Glen Affric around 4pm yesterday. It was an eventful few days, and I'll write about it as soon as I can and get some photos up (in the process of doing that now). I will keep you posted!

An uneventful day (Glen Affric Day 4)

2008-04-21T15:10:00.001-02:30

Monday morning I just puttered about after the tree-planters (the only guests) headed out for the day, cleaned what needed cleaning and then wandered around outside, up the hill to the south-side a bit, and then back for lunch.

Shortly after my lunch, a Belgian couple arrived and asked if they could leave their bags at the hostel while they went up the mountain (they were planning to camp later on). I was having cup of tea and chatting to them outside when I heard a motor and then saw a Land Rover coming up over the little hill in the road. Up pulled Dave, with Stephen in the passenger seat and Dave's two dogs (Ash and Cillie) between them.

The first thing Dave said was to joke about leaving me with the place for a few days and having two guests go to hospital. The ice-axe accident guys had stayed in Inverness after being discharged from hospital, and Willie had been in touch with Dave about the broken ankle. The dogs started running around straight away while we unloaded supplies and then loaded up my stuff, the accident-ladies' luggage, and rubbish to take away (all hostel guests have to take away their own rubbish, so what we were taking out was Stephen's and mine).

We were all ready to go, but the dogs couldn't be found and weren't responding to Dave's calls. After much thought, Stephen suggested that maybe they had followed the Belgian couple up the mountain when they set off about 30 minutes earlier. Stephen got out the binoculars, and sure enough he could spot two black shapes bounding up the path ahead of the two people on the moutainside.

So Dave had to race off to catch up with the dogs to the point where they could hear him calling. They were a fair distance away by then so it took some time. When they made it back down, we hopped in the vehicle and left Stephen contentedly back in his little hostel.

Helicopter (Glen Affric Day 3)

2008-04-20T15:06:00.002-02:30

Sunday morning brought more misadventure. All the guests had left and I'd finished cleaning and then washed my hair in the kitchen sink (as that way I could mix hot and cold water and not worry about scalding myself or freezing myself in the shower). I was just heading out the door when Willie the National Trust guy stopped by again. He wanted to get a map reference, as one of the tree-planters had fallen and broken her ankle on the hill and he was driving out to call for an air lift. He pointed out to me the ridge where they were, to the west of the hostel.

As I was planning to head in that direction anyway, I walked down the glen and then over an hour later I spotted them on the hillside and went up to chat. I arranged with the injured woman and her friend to take their luggage to Inverness with me tomorrow, and after a while the air ambulance eventually appeared over the mountain opposite (after having first gone down another glen).

We weighed down all the bags so that nothing would blow into the blades and gathered in one spot while the helicopter tried one spot after another in order to land. The pilot eventually managed a brief touch down to allow one medic to get out, and then continued trying landing spots on the hill, but it was too steep. He settled on a spot down the hill, which meant that once on the stretcher, the pilot, the 2 medics, and 3 other guys helped to carry the injured woman down the hill.

Here's the NHS Scottish Air Ambulance. The swirly stripe on the bottom is tartan, just so you know it's Scottish.
The rest of the day was uneventful, fortunately. Back at the hostel I had to take a brief nap while the tree planters were having dinner. My face was quite warm from the sun and wind. I think my fatigue might actually have been a bit of sun exhaustion - I haven't been exposed to so much sunlight since last summer on the Continent!

Up a Munro (Glen Affric Day 2)

2008-04-19T15:01:00.003-02:30

Saturday morning after all my guests headed out for the day and I had cleaned up around the place, I headed out for a walk. Not owning a winter jacket over here, I just layered a couple of tank-tops, shirts, and sweaters (including a thick wool one) under my jacket, and was quite warm other than the cold east wind blowing on my face that even my scarf could not block out. Not having brought a small backpack with me (I don't have a good one), I carried my map, lunch, and water bottle in a small plastic shopping bag, which made me look as though I was just strolling down the high street according to one guest the next day.

I should mention here that the weather had been reasonably sunny in Inverness since Monday, and in Glen Affric as well. The mountaineering fellows told me that it was the first time that they had seen the tops of much of the mountains, as every time they'd been to the glen before it had been cloudy and misty. So it was still sunny on Satuday, but windy as I mentioned.

I was feeling stiff in my legs, probably because I'd gotten back at rollerblading earlier in the week, and I'd also taken a hit from an epee on my thigh that had left a good bruise on the muscle, so I figured I'd take it easy walk-wise and just go down to Loch Affric. I set out along the road that we'd driven in on, but eventually ended up wandering up a hill and once started, I figured I'd go all the way up.

The hill I went up just makes it into Munro qualification, as it's over 3000ft (it was 941 m = 3087 ft), so that is the first one I have been up, and the highest I've ever climbed up entirely myself. There was snow on parts of the ridge at the top, and the ridge leading off to other mountains was deeply snow covered, so I didn't dare head that way.

A few views from the top:

I meant to take a path back down to the hostel, but cut down the mountainside to early to avoid snow and ended up having to traverse a steepish slope that was boggy and covered by snow in parts:

I eventually made it to the path after some downward trekking and crossing a burn. Coming round a bend near the hostel, I surprised some grazing deer, who pictured here are all starting to flee me.

I rested back at the hostel, and around 5pm a fellow from the National Trust (they own parts of Glen Affric, including the land the hostel is on), Willie, arrived in his Land Rover with supplies for a group of volunteer tree planters that were due to arrive at the hostel. He informed me that to heat the water, I needed to light the stove in the kitchen (which we hadn't been doing since the kitchen was kept warm enough with people cooking). I set about doing this, and it did result in hot water again, although how it did, I don't know, as when Stephen got back on Monday he told me that there was indeed an electric immersion heater. Must have just been coincidence.

Whilst lighting the fire, one of the younger mountain climbing guys rushed in to tell me that his friend had had an accident on the mountain and cut himself with his ice axe. Willie was still around, so I went out to see if he might have a satellite phone to call out for help, but he told me that if the fellow got down to the hostel, he would drive him out to hospital. So the young fellow went back up the hill to meet his friend and escort him down. When the injured guy arrived down, one of the older mountain climbers helped to re-bandage his face (where he'd been hit by his axe when he fell through the snow), and then Willie drove him out to Inverness. It was very fortunate that Willie had been there at the time; otherwise the young fellows would have had at least a 7 mile walk out to their car at Cluanie.

The hostel became very busy then, as there were 11 tree-planters, which filled the hostel up a bit. The two older mountain-climbing guys were staying on, and another fellow had arrived, and we all sat in the lounge to wait for the group to finish eating before going in there ourselves to cook. The new arrival had grown up in Sandbank, near Dunoon, so we actually found we knew a few people in common. We sat around talking mountains for a while (well, they talked mountains, I asked questions and listened) and they forced whiskey upon me that they didn't want to carry back out, as they put it.

Trip in to Glen Affric (Day 1)

2008-04-18T14:55:00.003-02:30

Glen Affric Youth Hostel:

To go to the youth hostel, I was driven by Kevin, who has the title of Northern Region Property Manager (his office is in the Inverness hostel building). We had to take in some workman as well once we got to the road end, some water, fire, and gas inspectors.

We met the inspectors at the Glen Affric car park, and since one of them had a Toyota SUV, he drove the others in as far as Strawberry Cottage, a little building that is a mountaineering club. That was on the track that is past the locked gates of Glen Affric itself, and it's a stoney road, but passable for trucks and SUV's. Once we reached Strawberry Cottage, we had to all pile into the Land Rover - I moved to the back to allow a taller man to have the passenger seat, and two other fellows joined me on the bench seats, with their equipment and my clothing and food for 3 days.

We had to ford the river - there is a bridge but it's narrow and "scary" given its steepness on either end - and Kevin told us how the river level was so high the last time he was through that it was up to the doors on the Land Rover. Then the track got bumpy and stoney, often being crossed by burns. We passed the broken rear axle of a trailer, and then the trailer itself, abandonned. This is what one section of the track looked like.

It was slow going driving-wise, often not much faster than one could go on foot, but it sure beat carrying everything in. It was quite bumpy in the back; I had both legs braced against the floor and was riding my seat more than sitting in it.

Eventually we reached the hostel. The total trip from Inverness took over 2 hours; nearly one hour of that was the last 8 miles. The hostel is pictured above, to give you a sense of the remoteness of it, here's a picture taken from up the hill later on. You can just make out the two hostel buildings in the lower right of the photo:

When we got to the hostel, I got the necessary information from Stephen, the manager, whilst the others went about their work. The only means of communication at the hostel is a satellite phone that hadn't been working, so it was decided to take it into Inverness to see if they could sort it out (it wasn't like it was going to do me any good if it wasn't working). So once everyone had gone about their business, the fellows all piled into the Land Rover, now with Stephen in my place, to head out, and off went my contact with the outside world.

The hostel is composed of a main building, with the kitchen, lounge, toilet, shower, a 4-bedded dorm, a 2-bedded dorm (that I slept in), and the manager's room. There's another building, the annex, that has two 10-bedded dorms in it, and is unheated. The heat in the main building is supplied by stoves in the kitchen and the common room. The electricity is supplied by a wind turbine, and the water comes from a nearby burn running off the mountain that is then filtered. The kitchen has gas cookers and no refridgerator - I kept my fresh food cold by putting it in the outside coal shed, or even in my room, as it was generally so cold overnight that I could see my breath (each bed has two duvets and people bring their own sleeping bags). I pretty much wore 3-4 layers of shirts and sweaters at all times.

I went for a bit of a wander after settling in and having some lunch. Then I went back to the hostel to await the arriving guests. First were a French couple, then two older Munro-baggers (people who try to climb all the Munros), and then two younger ones.

All the folks were nice and things were going very well until we discovered that there was no hot water. I had been told by Stephen that the water was so hot that it bordered on boiling. In fact, there were signs posted by every tap warning of the water's hotness (the French girl remarked that must be some sort of "sarcastic Scottish humour"). I couldn't find anything wrong with the electrics (electricity is powered by a wind turbine), nor could I locate the immersion heater that I had heard heated the water (manuals indicated that it was in the attic). So we just dealt with the cold water, and had a pleasant evening of sitting around chatting.

Deer came down off the hills when it was getting later in the evening, and I went for a walk to look at some of them from afar (as most deer I've seen having been sprinting away from the vehicle I'm in, bar one stag on Raasay). Otherwise I just sat inside and enjoyed the view this photo shows:

Going to Glen Affric

2008-04-16T08:30:00.002-02:30

On Friday, I'm going to work for a few days at the SYHA hostel in Glen Affric. Now, it's a special sort of hostel, in that there is no road access. People come in on foot from where the road ends, at the Glen Affric Lodge I believe it's called, over 7 miles away to the east, or they come over land from the west, where it's 17 miles to the Association's nearest hostel at Ratagan.

The manager of the hostel (the only staff member) has been there since it opened around March 20, so to give him some time off I'm going in. I'm being taken in by Landrover Friday morning, and being picked up Monday morning. The hostel isn't very big, only 26 beds, so the amount of cleaning I'll have to do will be minimal compared to larger hostels, as will reception duties. Glen Affric is supposed to be one of the most beautiful glens in the country.

Electricity for the hostel is produced by a windmill, as far as I know, and there's no heating in the dormitory buildings, just the main one where there's a small stove. There's also no mobile phone signal or even a land-line phone, only a satellite phone to use if necessary. So needless to say I won't be posting to my blog until I get back. I'll be taking my camera with me, so there'll be loads of pictures if all goes well.

A few links about the place:
walks in Glen Affric area
Wikipedia article

Google map I made up (will be added to later I imagine)

Sun!

2008-04-16T07:15:00.004-02:30

The weather has been sunny here since Monday, and it looks like it might continue for a bit, so that's rare and great! I got out skating Monday afternoon, had to break the skates in some and they are heavy so my legs need some conditioning to that. I'll go out later today and continue my search for the smoothest surfaces to skate on in Inverness.

Last week I got in touch with a fellow that I met in Skye who works in Inverness, Conor, who's from Ireland. We met up to hang out and discovered that we live on the same street - he lives up the hill from the youth hostel. It's a wonder that we didn't bump into each other on the street at some point in the last few months.

I was down to the Cairngorm area briefly on Friday evening, went for a drive with Sam down to Aviemore to get something to eat and drove up to the base of Cairngorm Mountain for a look while we were there. There's loads of snow down, the best in 20 years supposedly.

Days off today and tomorrow; I'm going to enjoy civilization before being sent to the most remote hostel in the country for work on Friday - that's in the next post.

Skating

2008-04-14T05:59:00.003-02:30

Well, the spring-ish weather has turned my fancy to rollerblading, as it is inclined to do, so I went and bought myself a pair of skates yesterday. I looked around the shops last week and discovered that it's not a popular sport over here (I've never seen anyone skating in Scotland, now that I think of it), and people seem to think it's a kids' sport since most skates available are for them.

Anyway, I figured that my feet are small so I could squeeze into large boys' skates if necessary, so I headed to JJB Sports after work yesterday and asked what they had in my size. There was only one model available, a pair of what are meant to be aggressive skates (i.e. for doing tricks and the like), although when I commented on that to the sales guy, he gave me a blank look. The model name is Sledge, odd since that's the word for a sled over here. They have no brake (so I'll get to work on my hockey stops), but they did come with wrist guards and knee pads, and for a decent price. Anyway, they'll be good enough for me to scoot around on for the next couple of months. I haven't been on them yet, other than skating around the store slowly (where everyone stopped to watch me), but if the weather holds I'll be out this afternoon.

Last week's trips: Black Isle and Northwest Scotland

2008-04-08T06:44:00.009-02:30

Day off today, but it's raining steadily so don't know if I'll do anything out-of-doors, since that's what I usually do in my day-off travels. It will be a lazy day. I'll watch my rental DVD later - I'm into Father Ted at the moment.

I had Thursday and Friday off last week. The Thursday was a slighty-cloudy but not too bad day, and having not been able to make up my mind about where to go, I decided on Thursday morning to go for a walk over to the Black Isle and up the coast. The walk was one suggested to me by Alistair (who's from North Kessock) when I asked him for walk suggestions in the area.

Here's a map of my walk (still can't imbed them, it crashes Internet Explorer :-( ) .

I left the hostel about 11am, and walked back into Inverness about 5pm, so it was a proper day's walk. I even tore my jeans on barbed wire, just two small holes, but they're the old ones so no big deal. The coast is pretty rocky where I walked, so that made it more adventurous and fun then just walking on flat ground. A few photos are below, the rest are in this album.

Here's the Kessock Bridge from North Kessock; I've just crossed it and walked down.

The village of Kilmuir that I walked past along the coast. I later headed up the hill at Arrie Wood and then inland along the single-track road.
Later in the day, when back at the hostel, I got a call (and by call, I should say text message, since that's the standard mode of communication here) from Sam, who I met through the fact that he is Alistair's flatmate. Anyway, Sam didn't have to work Friday so asked me if I'd like to go up to the north coast and stay at Durness and then tour around on Friday. So I quickly threw things in a bag and met Sam in the car park (we went in his works van that he's able to use as a personal vehicle).

A map of the route we took is here. We arrived in Durness at about 9pm, so all the photos I have are from touring around on Friday. The drive up took us between 3 and 4 hours, I can't remember exactly. Around dusk we saw loads of deer around the roads (it's marked on my map roughly where), more than I've seen at any one time over here. We also saw a few the next day, but never managed a photo due to bad lighting conditions or the deer not sticking around to pose.

A beach on the east of Durness:

Walked along this beach that is west of Durness on Friday morning. Note the blue sky.Walked up to the cliff overlooking the little bay (I think it's Balnakeil Bay).
Now check out the sky - this is 20 minutes since the first photo, and there's a storm quickly moving in.The storm blew over, whilst we were walking in it (I was only wet down one side, where the wind was coming from).

Drove down the coast, as shown on my map, stopping for photos here and there. It was one of those days where it rains hard, then rains soft, then stops raining, then repeats. The road through the Assynt area, near Lochinver, was a particularly winding one - not for those who get carsick!

A gushing burn off the roadside:

We stopped in Ullapool for lunch, and then headed out southward. We stopped at Corrieshalloch Gorge, as Sam had never been to it nor even heard of it. Neither of us likes heights, or railings over heights, so walking across the shaky bridge was a slow process, as was going out on to the viewing platform. The prospect of watching rocks fall was enticing enough to get Sam to look over; I can look but at a safe distance from the railing.

We finished off the day by driving up the road over the Applecross Pensinsula, the Bealach na Ba or "Pass of the Cattle". It's the highest road in Britain. We'd both been over this road before (I've put up photos from last time in summer with Jamie and Matt), but it's such a cool drive we decided to do it again.
Had a good view over to Skye and Raasay on the drive back toward Torridon before returning to Inverness. Could also see a submarine sailing along northward past Rona (island north of Raasay).

That's all for now, there's loads more photos in my web album, of course.

Haircut

2008-04-07T12:45:00.002-02:30

So I mentioned I got my haircut, and I figured I'd post this for those folks in the colonies and elsewhere that haven't seen me since I did. Voici (I'm on the beach on the Black Isle if you're curious).

More photos to come from travels soon! Sorry for wait!

Guess where I am?

2008-03-29T13:28:00.002-02:30

I'm down at Loch Ness again this weekend, though perhaps the last one for a while as someone else is coming down from Inverness next weekend to be the relief. Anyway, it's not a bad wee hostel and good for a change.

Didn't go anywhere on my days off this week, as with being up and down between hostels I felt I could use some time staying in one place. Just took it easy reading a book, doing some cooking, went out with a fella a couple of times, and caught up on sleep.

I think I met some of the "we're not Canadian" Quebecker types the other day. I heard them speaking in French, and asked them in French if they were French, to which they replied "Non, Quebecois". To that I replied "Oh, je suis canadienne aussi!" to be met by silence. One of them later said "Ontario?" to me, but that was about it.

On the other hand, a woman who was actually from France mistook me for French when I informed her about how to get to the kitchen, since I could hear her mumbling to herself in French, wondering where it was.

New posts

2008-03-28T08:35:00.001-02:30

Posts on Skye trip are up. Sorry some of them are kind of choppy; I've been writing them on rushed time. Might get to edit them up a bit later. There's photos (more than what's in the post) in the usual spot on my web albums.

The roundabouts are coming?

2008-03-23T05:52:00.004-02:30

Just looking through the PEI news, and I've seen two suggestions that there should be roundabouts on the Island (when they started being called that back home, I don't know, I've always heard them called rotaries).

There's a letter to the editor in The Guardian suggesting that a roundabout could have made a recent fatal accident much less serious if not avoided it at all, because people are forced to slow down for roundabouts.

Then there's a comment added to an article in The Guardian about some hour-of-darkness-for-the-environment scheme that Charlottetown's going to do. The comment suggests that to help avoid energy waste we should replace intersections with traffic lights with roundabouts because then cars aren't idling creating pollution and lights aren't running consuming energy.

Besides the fact that I think Island drivers are going to have a hard time dealing with roundabouts as they can't merge and the like (I remember the two-lane Hillsborough Bridge, and I remember all the fuss in the news when two side-by-side left turning lanes were installed at the Southport bridge intersection), my problem with roundabouts is that they slow traffic down. You're motoring along on the highway, and then because there's a road junction everyone has to slow down, not just the people who want to leave the highway.

I heard tell on a visit home of a rotary up Summerside way; I believe it was proving to be a little difficult for big trucks to negotiate. I've never driven through it, so I've never driven through a rotary on the Island. I don't really expect to be finding them there any time soon.

There will be posts

2008-03-22T16:47:00.002-02:30

Well, I'm at the Loch Ness hostel tonight, working reception and reading through the Inverness Press and Journal while I wait for arrivals and turn away people who haven't booked (most places are full this weekend). The north of Scotland may have more people than PEI, but that doesn't stop its newspaper from having characteristic small-town/rural stories. Like the news brief about how the shops were busy yesterday as people prepared for the Easter holiday, and that some readers reported not being able to find parking spaces at the Morrisons supermarket. I just love those sorts of stories.

On the more bizarre side is the article entitled "White witch curses latest Nessie hunt". Unfortunately, the online version doesn't have the picture of the witch, a long-yellow-haired fellow in a burgundy bath robe on the loch shore.

There was snow overnight in Inverness, and some small hailstones fell here at Alltsigh briefly while I was carrying a mop bucket from one building to the other. The forecast called for "wintry showers" today (I think we'd call that "flurries" at home) and predicts heavy snow overnight.

The point of this post was to tell you that there will be some more posts soon. I spent last weekend here at Loch Ness, then went back to Inverness to work for three days there. Then I hired a car Wednesday afternoon, drove to Loch Ness to visit Tina overnight, then drove to Skye on Thursday morning and ran the roads around there that day and Friday morning, staying in Broadford overnight. I returned the hire car Friday afternoon, spent a night in my own bed, then it was down here again this morning to relieve Tina. So I've pictures to upload and tales to tell, but what with the Easter holiday and my jet-setting lifestyle, I've not gotten to the library to put up pictures. I might get some up tomorrow if Tina lets me use her laptop. Anyway, when I do post I will probably archive post them to the day I'm writing about, but I'll let you know.

Skye Trip Day Three

2008-03-21T06:25:00.003-02:30

Here's a map of the day's travels.

So, due to my camera batteries dying and having forgotten to bring my spares, the only photos I have from the second day of travelling on Skye are on my phone, and at the moment I can't get those off it on to a computer. So the internet will have to provide photos, hopefully from people with better cameras than I who visited the places on the better-weather days!

I left Broadford in the morning, and on the drive up the island I saw on the Cuillin that there had been snow on the tops overnight, and also that there was no cloud covering the very top for the first time that I recall.

On the drive, I noticed some sheep warning signs, which I'm pretty sure were not on that road last summer. They looked pretty shiny-new red and white, so I'm wondering if they are a new initiative. Again, they were on a road where there isn't really the risk of sheep running on to it, because it's a busy road so people keep their sheep fenced off of it.

I passed through Portree and then up the east coast of the Trotternish peninsula, on a road that I haven't been down since I cycled it almost 6 years ago on my first visit to Skye. I passed the Old Man of Storr, but didn't stop to walk up to it as I did that walk on the aforementioned cycling trip.

I did stop quickly to see Kilt Rock, since it involved just standing in the car park to look at it. It was so windy at that time that a nearby waterfall was blowing upward in gusts and I dashed around it several times to the amusement of a couple who were staying inside their car.

Then at Staffin, I took the road to the Quiraing, and got out of the car to do a walk on a side more sheltered from the wind. It's an amazing location; the landscape is a bit weird and surreal.

I followed that road along to Uig and nipped up to the Faery Glen for a short walk and to eat my lunch.

After that I did the return trip, although I did alter my route to go along the single track road on the south side of Loch Ness for a change of scenery.

Skye Trip Day Two

2008-03-20T17:30:00.007-02:30

Here's a map of my trip this day.

I had stopped overnight at Loch Ness with Tina, and I left the hostel at about 9am in the morning. I drove down to Invernmoriston where I took the road toward Kyle of Lochalsh. It first passed by Loch Cluanie, which is held back on one end by a big dam.

The road then passes through Glen Shiel. It's absolutely stunning, though pictures don't convey it so well due to the mistiness. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road!

Once on to Skye, stopped in Kyleakin when the weather was back to absolutlely miserable. Had a look at the old closed up hostel, popped into the shop for a snack and then drove on up the island.

Passing through Broadford got stopped by roadworks. Had a convoy van to lead you through, something I've not seen before. I sang/hummed "Convoy" to myself whilst waiting for the cars ahead of me to move.

Drove down single track road to Elgol to get a nice view of the Cuillin. Single track roads are my kind of driving; you have to be courteous or you will run into someone. One car has to pull into a passing place to allow another to go by. It's just the logistics of the situation. And then you give a little wave to each other when you pass. There are the mad folks who want to drive super fast and try to run you off the road, that happens even on the main roads (there seems to be more of those people over here than in Canada), but they're fortunately not the majority.

I might have gone for a walk on the beach at Elgol another day, but the wind was so strong I had trouble standing in one place just to take photos without being blown off balance.

After coming back up from Elgol, I drove up the west of Skye toward Dunvegan.

Skye Trip Day One: Hitting the road

2008-03-19T17:11:00.004-02:30

I picked up the hire car after finishing work. I booked an automatic because I figured it would be good to take things step-by-step and get used to driving on the opposite side before having to get used to a manual transmission. I booked the smallest car possible (i.e. the cheapest) but was told when I picked it up that I was being given a larger car due to availability. They gave me a Peugot 407, about an average-size car to me, similar in size to Chevy's like the Corsica and the Malibu or the Pontiac GrandAm (I'm just naming cars I've driven around that size).

Driving on the wrong side of the road isn't the biggest problem for me, it's sitting on the wrong side of the car. I've realized that when it comes to driving, I've developped my spatial sense on my right side, because that's where the rest of the car always have been, and on my left side I've not had to develop the distance judging quite so well. It probably doesn't help that my right eye is my better one. Anyway, it's made me paranoid about the whereabouts of the left-hand side of the car.

Had some moments of confusion involving roundabouts in Inverness itself (I've mentioned the preponderance of roundabouts over here as compared to Canada before). Stopped at the supermarket and discovered the parking spaces are smaller; what is a small-medium sized car in Canada is on the larger size here. I can't imagine how the people with pick-up trucks over here park them. The car park spaces are also designated by a complete rectangle, there isn't one open side.

Then when getting out on the A82 heading down along Loch Ness, it was getting used to the narrowness of roads and the twistiness.

The key for the car is really cool; it folds away into the plastic bit, and there's a button that caused is to swing open again. It's immensely fun to play with as you carry the keys about.

Sheep can eat pickles and die

2008-03-10T04:34:00.003-02:30

This sign is posted along the road along Loch Ness's northern shore. Oddly enough, for the two miles after this sign, I saw no sheep, whereas I've seen them on every other rural walk I've ever taken in this country. I'm not sure where the sheep are meant to be - the loch is on one side of the road, and a forrested mountain is on the other side. There is a sign indicating falling rocks for 2 miles as well. I think the sheep must be at the top of the mountains, throwing the rocks.

The post title is a quote from Alysha. She likes neither sheep nor pickles and so combined them into one expression.

At Loch Ness Hostel

2008-03-07T15:17:00.006-03:30

On Thursday, my hostel group was out for the day, so I headed out for a walk myself. I walked from Alltsigh (where the hostel is) southwest-ward, along the roadside, hoping to find a path up to the Great Glen Way footpath so that I wouldn't have to walk on the road. I didn't find one before arriving at Invermoriston (about 3 miles down the road), the village in Glen Moriston at the junction of the road from Inverness, the road to Fort William, and the road to Kyle of Lochalsh. The village consists of a shop/post office, a hotel with restaurant/bar, a craft shop (that didn't appear to be open yet), a coffee shop/tea room (opening in a week), a village hall, a school, and some houses.

I bought some chocolate at the shop to supplement my packed lunch, then walked in the direction of the waterfall. Along the way I stopped at Columba's Well, as it was marked - it's a not-so-spring-like (i.e. some still water surrounded by a hole in rock) spring that legend says was poisonous until St. Columba made a stop there in the late 500's and blessed it, giving the water curing properties. I guess if you're a Columba fan then it would be a highlight.

The waterfall was actually pretty neat - no Niagra, but quite fast moving water none-the-less. The bank above the river was high and dropped off sharply.

To go back to the hostel, I joined the Great Glen Way where it came out in Invermoriston. It took a seemly circuituitous route up a hill, but did provide a good view point before heading back down the hill, nearer to the road. I walked along, drinking an Irn-Bru to give me the strength to get up the hill (I'd lost my water bottle from my backpack when I'd take a bit of a fall into a hole along the riverbank), then had my lunch on the hill-top with my back turned to the rain blown by the wind. Later on, the sun broke through the clouds as the rain stopped.

I found a path down about a mile from the hostel (it had appeared to be a gated driveway from the road), and a map indicates there must be one closer to the hostel, so I shall endeavour to find that one next time (I think I'm back here in a week to cover another Rent-a-Hostel).

Finally, here's a few photos of the Loch Ness Hostel. It's a bit old, but it's got a great location right on the lochside.

Ok, so I'm getting server errors from Google when I try to upload today (from two seperate computers), so for the photos I was going to put up and more, please see my web album. It's disorganized at the moment, and shows my fascination with trees growing in unusual ways, but I'll fix it up and label it sometime soon. And add to this post with photos.

Heading to the Loch sans locks

2008-03-03T13:35:00.003-03:30

That post title is terrible, really.

I'm going down to the Loch Ness hostel this week to cover a "Rent-a-Hostel". This is where a group pays to have an out-of-season hostel all to themselves. It's a few hundred pounds for the entire place, so if you have a group that will fill it (in the case of Loch Ness, about 38 beds), then it's a good deal.

Anyway, tomorrow several of us from the Inverness hostel are going down to tidy up the place, then I'll be going down again Wednesday and staying there overnight and Thursday night, coming back on Friday after cleaning the place up. So that'll be another hostel under my belt.

Not too much else new with me, other than I got my haircut. I had it lopped off to what you'd call a bob cut, I guess - not quite shoulder length and layered. I'm happy with it; it's made a nice change from the ol' long hair.

Quiz comedy

2008-02-26T09:43:00.002-03:30

A type of show that exists in the UK but not in Canada is what I've heard called "quiz comedies" (or "quizcoms" as one channel, Dave, has abbreviated it as). Essentially, these quiz shows are as much quiz shows as Who's Line Is It Anyway? was a game show - they follow vaguely the format by having contestants who answer questions, but the focus is really on comedy and not on the contest (as Drew Carey put it in the American-version of Who's Line Is It Anyway?, "the points don't matter"). In fact, some of the quiz comedies were created by Dan Patterson, the same guy responsible for Who's Line.

Why I mention this is that many of these shows are quite funny, becoming some of my favourite shows over here.

The shows that I'll describe below are orignally produced by BBC and Channel Four, but I've been watching them in re-runs on the afore-mentioned channel Dave ("the home of witty banter" according to their slogan), which was running them every week night all in one go. There's video clips at the websites of most of these shows, so you can check them out if you so wish (and since writing about comedy is sort of fruitless and impossible, I really suggest the clips over my descriptions).

QI (Quite Interesting) is a quiz show hosted by Stephen Fry that has 4 contestants, generally comedic personalities. Alan Davis seems to be on it perpetually as as contestant, generally losing. The questions are quite difficult and obscure, so giving a wrong but interesting answer is encouraged, or just discussing the question. Points are deducted for giving incorrect answers that are commonly believed to be true (for example, answering that "Ring Around the Rosie" is about the Black Death was one of them). It basically ends up being a reasonably intelligent conversation peppered by jokes, so it's quite enjoyable (and unusual for television).

Have I Got News For You has a celebrity host who cracks jokes about the news of the week, and quizzes two teams on the news. The captain of each team is constant from week-to-week (being Ian Hislop and Paul Merton) and is joined by a celebrity guest, generally a comedian. Like QI, questions result in panelists satarizing the news.

Mock The Week is sort of a spin-off from Have I Got News For You, but is more improvisational political sketch comedy than quiz show. The host is Dara O Briain (that's Irish, being pronounced something like "dahra oh-bree-an"), and there's 3-4 regulars and comedian guests to add up to two teams of three each. A few of the sketches aren't hilariously funny, but the banter between regulars and the rapid-fire segments makes up for it. I particularly enjoy the aforementioned host O Briain, Frankie Boyle, and Hugh Dennis.

Never Mind The Buzzcocks (doesn't seem to have its own page so that's the Wikipedia one) is a quiz about the music industry, with varying hosts over the years and two regular team captains, Phil Jupitus and Bill Bailey, who each have two music-industry guests on their teams. There are quiz rounds that involve music itself, like finishing-off lyrics and guessing songs based on versions performed by team members, but some of the questions are almost designed as ways to make fun of pop musicians, like asking what strange items stars demand to have backstage, or who flew his hat first-class across Europe to a charity concert. Bascially, they just mock pop music.

Watching these shows has introduced me to many new comedians and allowed me to see more of comedians I'd only caught snippets of back in Canada. The two news-oriented programs have also had the benefit of teaching me about the politics and recent history of the UK. I first learned about politics by listening to the Royal Canadian Air Farce on the radio with Dad when I was a kid, and I've learned much about US politics from watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, so I've just carried on that method over here. It's more fun learning that way.

I'm branching out in my comedy viewings now, having started watching Chewin' The Fat, a Glaswegian sketch comedy, on DVD and so far it's very funny. The DVD actually comes with subtitles as an option for those who can't understand the patter, but so far I'm getting on right enough without them.

"Chips, glorious chips!"

2008-02-25T17:55:00.000-03:30

McCain Food, the New Brunswick company that sells frozen fries and the like, also sells food in the UK, which I never imagined that they did. Although looking them up online, I discover that they're a very large company.

Anyway, over here their fries are known as McCain chips, and they have an elaborate song composed for their advertisement in which people who appear as though they're in a stage musical sing about sunflower oil making the chips have only 5% fat. It's quite catchy in its own way. I found a video version of it online here; there's probably others out there as well, like on YouTube.

And just because it's on the same website, here's the Christmas Irn-Bru advert that parodies a UK-well-known song called "Walking in the Air" from a Christmas special show called "The Snowman" (based on a book). Even not knowing the original song I like the ad. It's serene and amusing at once, and I have often had it stuck in my head, especially the final line of "He nicked my Irn-Bru and let go of my hand."

If you watch the video, you can see the boy and the snowman fly by famous Scottish places: the Falkirk Wheel, some sheep, the Forth Bridge, Edinburgh Princes Street Gardens (ice rink and can see the castle briefly), Loch Ness (with monster), deer, the Glenfinnan Viaduct (now famous from the Harry Potter films), Eilean Donan Castle, the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, and then the boy falls into Glasgow's George Square. It's a pretty animation; I'd like to see the original sometime.

Out to Loch Ness/Rights of way

2008-02-21T14:59:00.005-03:30

This is Urquhart Castle, on Loch Ness.I went out on the bus to the castle on Tuesday, a day off, figuring that since hostel guests are always asking me about Loch Ness, I should finally see it for myself (that I can recall - I saw it in 2002 briefly).

Just because I discovered Google Maps the other week, I'm including a link to the map I made of my little trip, just to test it out. I always like to have a map to look at anyway when someone's talking about places, so perhaps you do as well (check out the terrain and satellite modes as well for a better view of the area). I've tried putting the HTML for the map into this post so that you can see it and click on it, but it has crashed this browser several times already.

It was a nice sunny day, as you can see from the photo, so it made for a good day to walk about. I strolled around the ruined castle at its excellent vantage point on a head of land that allows one to see both ways down the loch. The modern visitor centre is nicely hidden in the bank of the hill between the castle and the road, so it doesn't spoil one's attempts to imagine the castle as it was.

I later walked down the road to the village of Drumnadrochit, in the valley known as Glen Urquhart (the lands of which the castle protected and where all the cattle that the MacDonalds stole away back to the isles at one point were presumably pasturing). I spent a few hours wandering around in the woods and then into the farmland before catching the bus back to Inverness.

On Monday, I walked over the Kessock Bridge to North Kessock where I climbed up Ord Hill which is on Forestry Commission land. It was a hazy day so the light wasn't great for photos, but here's one of Inverness and surroundings as viewed from the north (the hill in the middle is Craig Phadraig that I climbed before).

The public rights of way around this country are neat. There's old paths and stairways between streets, paths through fields and woods and up hills. In Inverness, because it's hilly, there are stairs in the town centre to take you between streets, allowing you to save time on foot as compared to following the car routes. There's also paths between houses that are public as well. When I first lived anywhere "urban" it was in Kyleakin, and I wasn't used to all the idea of between garden paths (garden = yard). I saw the paths, but with my Canadian land mindset I figured I would be walking on to someone's lawn. It wasn't until I was walking through the village with a village resident who took some of those paths as shortcuts that I realized it was alright. Since most houses have gardens that are enclosed by low walls, hedges, or fences, with gates to enter them, if a path is between those walls and isn't gated then it's ok to walk down as far as I can tell.

The paths in the "wild" so to speak, are often accessed via kissing gates, so that is how I generally figure out that it's a public path if there's no sign (since I don't tend to plan where I go well enough to have a map). I found one of the paths near Drumnadrochit because someone had kindly put up a big red sign that said "Public Footpath" and a stile (stairs, basically) over the roadside wall to what I would have assumed to be just a farm lane. I wouldn't have walked down it otherwise, and when I did I found some forest trails.

In Scotland, you basically have the right to access most land in the countryside for recreational purposes if you're reponsible according to the Scottish Outdoor Access Code. As it was first put to me, there's no such thing as tresspassing. So there's doesn't need to be a public footpath for you to go walking on land (whereas in England they have the public rights of way and then there's other land). I still stick to paths if I'm near houses, just because I'm uncomfortable walking through what might be the farm of someone I don't know. I tend to follow the rule I always used at home: if they cut the grass, I don't walk on it because it's a lawn.

Transport and diversions from that

2008-02-19T07:02:00.000-03:30

So a few word differences relating to roads today. Firstly, the title, "transport". I rarely hear the word "transportation" used, it's always transport - Ministry of Transport, transport issues, etc.

Walking through the town centre the other day (not the "downtown" as I would call it), I saw a road sign saying "Diversion". In Canada, the sign would read "Detour". I find the Diversion signs amusing still; to me it's like the road works people don't want you to notice that they've closed some streets, saying "Look! Over there!" Either that, or if you follow the diversion you'll end up having a pleasant day occupied by doing things that you hadn't intended to do at the start.

Another sign I saw on my walk: "Humps". Those are speed bumps.

Yield signs look the same, but have "Give way" written on them.

The curb on the side of the road is written "kerb". The "pavement" is the sidewalk, sometimes referred to as the path. What I would call pavement, i.e. the surface that the road is made up of, I've generally heard called tarmac.

When I was in Argyll, pretty much all the guys would refer to their cars as their "motors" (and said with the accent of the region where the "t" is barely said in the back of the throat (a glottal stop?), it comes out like "mo-er"). It then seems logical that the highways are always referred to as "motorways".

If you have a motorway that is divided, i.e. some barrier between opposing directions of traffic, then it becomes a "dual carriageway". The carriage bit seems to me to be old-fashioned sounding, and I imagine carriages and horses zooming along at 70mph. Or horseless carriages, as those new fangled things are these days.

Another old-fashioned word - the electrical or telephone poles along the side of the road I've heard called "telegraph poles". This was by young people who would not mind the days of the telgraph either. "Pylons" gets used as well, they're not the little orange cones. Towers for cell phones get called "masts".

Continuing on the old-fashioned note, and completely unrelated to the road, is saying you're "going to the pictures" for going to the movies. I heard that first from a fellow my age and was teasing him about whether it was a "talkie" or not.

Grammie

2008-02-13T14:49:00.002-03:30

My grandmother, Jessie MacKinnon or "Grammie" to me, died Monday night. This doesn't quite seem entirely like the place to write about it, but it doesn't seem right to not mention it, so I'll write something, maybe more for myself than for anyone else.

All the while I've been away, I've written about what I've been up to on this site, but I've also written letters to Grammie. She wasn't online obviously, so I kept her updated with letters every week or so, and postcards from all the places I travelled to. I liked the fact that I couldn't communicate with her online - it may be quick and easy, but it was nice having something that forced me to write the old-fashioned way. All my family said that she really appreciated the letters (she'd saved them all), so that was good encouragement to keep writing.

So when my aunt Marlene called me Monday night, at what was 1am here, one of the first thoughts that entered my half-asleep mind was that I wouldn't be writing a letter to Grammie while work was quiet Tuesday morning as I'd planned. I've never travelled without sending Grammie a postcard every day or two. The first postcard I ever received, when I was about 8 years old, was from her when she made a trip to Edmonton to visit her cousins.

Grammie was 94 years old and the last of my grandparents living. It was only in the last few years that she slowed down and had to go into a nursing home, just down the road from the house where she and my grandfather raised 6 kids in Eldon. She was still sharp as a tack when I saw her last in December, although having trouble hearing me speak and having to use a hearing aid.

I won't presume to sum up her entire life, but here's a few tidbits. Grammie grew up on a family farm as Jessie Nicholson, the eldest of the six kids. She told me that her grandparents spoke Gaelic when they didn't want her overhearing what they were saying, and because of that connection to Scotland she had a life-long interest in the country and her roots. She married quite late for a woman of her time, in her late 20's, having occupied herself in the typical way of the time by caring for elderly women. I'm not sure how she met my grandfather; I always meant to ask but never did. She was the last telephone operator for the Belfast area (switched to automatic in the 70's) and my cousins and I used to play with the switchboard when we were kids. She moved into town when my grandfather went into a nursing home, and he died in 1985.

Like any grandmother, she knitted and I still have the afghan she made for me when I was young. She travelled in her old age more than the rest of her life: she was on one of the first passenger flights out of Charlottetown airport (they served champagne) and she did a European coach tour when in her 80's, finally getting to Scotland after so many years. She was active well into her 80's; I remember staying overnight with her and going shopping around town. She did the crossword and the cryptoquote in The Guardian newspaper everyday and was very pleased whenever a visiting family member could fill in a tricky word she was stuck on. She wouldn't let me leave her presence without giving me food, money, a book, or some other thing.

Most of all, Grammie loved her family - having visits and arranging get-togethers. From her six children, there are 15 grandchildren, 9 great-granchildren so far, and what with spouses and boy/girl-friends, there's about 40 people if everyone's together at once. Here's everyone that made it down to visit Grammie just after Christmas, and that's not the entire family.

I discovered when I went to The Guardian website today to check the death announcement that funeral homes now have online death notices (here's Grammie's) and guest books, so that you can send condolences online and make the traditional donations to charity. Grammie said that she'd never heard of what a radio was until she was about five years old. That's a lot of change in a lifetime.

A social week

2008-02-10T15:26:00.001-03:30

Well, this week I spent my days off visiting friends. I had Wednesday evening off, took a nap and then came down to make my supper and learned that Jamie had come up from Cairngorm to get a haircut and was staying overnight. So we watched Torchwood on television and then went out to Hootenanny's where a terrible bagpiper was playing loudly indoors.

Thurdsay morning I caught the train to Aberdeen where Alysha, back from B.C., is staying for a week. It was really good to see Alysha again and I had fun with her as always. We just hung around the hostel in the afternoon, having tea together again and dinner shared with Katie who was working desk and Gareth who was painting. We went to a few bars in the evening, one called Slain Castle that looked to be in a huge old church and had a sort of haunted theme going one, where we had dessert to top off our dinner.

Friday involved more hanging around, went walking around the town and then back to the hostel in the evening to wait around for the supposed-to-be-arriving Rob. We spent a few hours playing a card game called Quao that Alysha had been given by a friend with two hostel guests, CJ from England and Scott from the US. I then had to catch a train at 10pm to get back to Inverness for work Saturday morning.

At dinner last night, I ate with Zoltan, Amy a Chinese tour guide (she had a group staying with us), and Anthony from England (a secret physics graduate like myself). Alistair, who worked here before and will be again next week when Hardy moves back to Germany, showed up and we all went down to the nearby hotel to play some pool and chat. So my promise to myself on Saturday morning that I would either take a nap or got to bed early (I have to make promises like that frequently in order to get out of bed in the morning) was broken, but I was able to sleep in this morning and thus able to have the best of both worlds as far as fun and sleep were concerned.

Not Standard

2008-02-10T15:26:00.000-03:30

Living over here has shown me that many things in modern society that I have been accustomed to all my life, specifically in the operation of mechanical and electrical devices, are not standard worldwide. Not knowing that things operate differently can often make a person (or me, at least) feel like an idiot when I'm unable to operate some simple thing. I'll list some specific differences here and it'll hopefully make more sense.

One first thing that's different is plugs for AC current on electrical devices. They are bigger, about 1-3/4 inches square, and always have 3 prongs. Of course, the voltage supplied over here is different as well (and different from countries in Europe as well), it's 220V I believe.

(Source: http://www.wikipedia.org)

The sockets on the walls have switches on them, so that you can turn the current off. This means you can leave something plugged in, but switch off any power to it at the socket itself. It also means that occasionally you plug something in, like a vacuum cleaner, go to use the vacuum cleaner, and realize that you forgot to switch on the power at the wall so you have to go back and do that. Or if you don't know there's a switch at all, you end up asking the person at hostel reception how to plug something in.

Light bulbs tend to have bayonet bases instead of screw ones. The first time I needed to change a light bulb over here was when the light in the laundry room at the Coylet burned out. Because it was dark I couldn't see what I was doing, and it was hanging from the ceiling where I had trouble reaching it, so I had trouble getting the old bulb out to look at what type it was so I could even find a replacement. I quickly deduced that it wasn't a screw-in one like I'm accustomed to, and I suspected bayonet but I had no idea if I had to pull or push in, and twist while doing that or what. I eventually had to get my co-worker to take it out for me, which he did in one twisting motion and made me feel completely inept.

Light switches for residential bathrooms seem to vary - they're sometimes a pull cord from the ceiling inside the bathroom. If there is a wall light switch, it is usually outside of the bathroom. I was told that this was so you don't get your wet hands on the switch and risk electrocuting yourself, but seeing as we have switches inside bathrooms in Canada and manage to survive it I don't know if there's a big risk.

On the topic of light switches - I can't recall seeing a toggle switch like the ones that were standard in Canada for most of my life. Light switches are rocker switches, but much smaller switch size than the rocker ones that have come to be used in Canada in more recent years. I don't know why the switch itself is so small, because as you can see in the picture below, the plastic pannel is a lot larger than it.

(Source: http://www.topmanservices.co.uk)

Showers are very often electric, and have to be turned on to either operate at all or to get hot water. The switch mechanism is either a pull-cord from the ceiling, or outside the bathroom, as with bathroom lights. When I first started living at the Coylet, I couldn't find the switch for the shower that I presumed to be electric, and had to take a cold shower the first time. I then found it outside the door, looking all red and dangerous like something that I shouldn't mess with.

Of course, when switches are outside the bathroom, that means that people can play tricks on you by turning off the lights and the hot water while you're in the shower.

Toilets in older homes are sometimes flushed via a pull cord or chain, as the toilet tank is mounted high up along the wall. I think this is where the expression "pull the chain" for flushing must come from.

A differenc in bathrooms that doesn't make one incapable to operate them (like not knowing how to flush the toilet or turn on a light) but that is just plain annoying is the two taps phenomenon. Many wash basins have a hot water tap and a cold water tap. A lot of kitchen sinks have this as well. So to get warm water you have to plug the sink and mix it from both taps, unlike at home where you adjust your hot and cold taps and nice warm water comes flowing out of the one tap. I can't really see why you'd want two taps - for starters, it costs more to have to taps I would think.

Gas stoves and ovens seem to be far more common then electric over here as well, and I've had to help numerous guests from other countries to light the burners. In all fairness, they vary in how you get a spark - on some, you turn on the gas and then press another button to get a spark, on some you hold in the gas control knob at some point until it sparks, and I'm sure there's other variations as well.

Televisions have a stand-by setting, so if you press the power switch on the TV set, a little red light generally comes on, but the picture does not, because the TV is now on stand-by. To get the TV fully on, you have to do something like press a channel change button. That's all I'll say about TV here, as I'll write some more another time.

Video and audio input to televisions from devices such as VCR's and DVD players is connected via SCART leads.

(Source: http://www.toolstation.com/ )

In Canada we use RCA cables, with the familiar red, yellow, and white coloured plugs. The standard over here is the SCART, although I have seen video game systems (a Nintendo Wii) that had RCA output, so an RCA-to-SCART adaptor was necessary to hook the game system up to the television.

More snow at Cairngorm

2008-02-05T12:31:00.000-03:30

I went down to Cairngorm Lodge on Wednesday (a week ago) with the idea of learning to snowboard at the mountain on Thursday. There was a bunch of wet snow overnight, continuing in the morning with a good wind, so the hill was closed for the morning to clear roads. So I just went for a walk around in the snow, had a snowball fight with Jamie and the one hostel guest, Willa-Lee from B.C., and did some "sledging" (sledding) on a little hill with them as well. The Thursday night there was more snow, coating all the trees once again, so Friday morning found Jamie and Rob trying to clear out the car park of snow in preparation for their guests arriving that evening.

The rest are just photos I took wandering around on Thursday morning.

Loch Morlich, and you can see a hint of Cairngorm Mountain through the white sky.
Loch water was choppy due to the wind.

Glenmore is a largely Scots Pine forest.

I took a bunch of other photos (it's mostly trees, then some snowball fight and shovelling) and they can be found, as always, in my Picasaweb photos.

A few Invernesian photos

2008-02-05T12:29:00.000-03:30

The other week I took a walk north through Inverness and up the hill called Craig Phadraig. I took these photos looking out over the Firth (as you can see, the trees at the top were getting in my way):

Wandering back toward the hostel, I took these two from the castle site along the river. The hill with trees in the middle is Craig Phadraig.

This is the opposite side of the river from the town centre, and from where I stay.

Blackcurrant and Squash

2008-02-05T05:49:00.000-03:30

A common fruit used for flavouring over here (that I can't recall seeing at home) is blackcurrant. You see it in drinks and in candy. Where in Canada we'd have a purpley-red coloured candy that would be called "grape" flavour in the mix with strawberry, orange, lemon/lime, etc., in the UK you wouldn't have a grape candy but a "blackcurrant" one (and it'd be called a "sweet" instead of a candy).

The taste of blackcurrant is something like cranberry without the tang, but more full tasting, like a bit of grape juice was thrown in as well. It's a sweet, reddish-berry tasting flavour, but it's a distinct flavour of it's own, so hard to compare.

The drink Ribena is blackcurrant flavoured and readily available, sold in tetra packs and plastic bottles in fridges at convenience stores ("newsagents"). My first encounter with blackcurrant was through drinks, as a "squash" flavour. To make sugary, fruit-flavoured drinks over here, you buy a concentrated liquid, known as "squash" or "cordial" and then mix one part of the concentrate with four to five parts of water and the resulting drink is also called squash or cordial. The resultant drinks are much like what we get in Canada from using powdered drink crystals to produce things like Kool-Aid.

Squash as a drink on its own is popular with young kids, but bars also use squash/cordial concentrate to add to alchoholic drinks. For example, "lager and lime" is popular with some, that is lager beer with a dash of lime cordial on the top to cut down on the bitterness of the beer. Some people drink Guiness with a dash of blackcurrant, also to cut down on the bitterness. The three standards of squash/cordial - orange, blackcurrant, and lime - also get used to add flavour to mixed alcoholic drinks.

Children's songs

2008-02-02T05:55:00.000-03:30

In the UK, the kids' song "The Hokey Pokey" is known as "The Hokey Cokey", and has some different variations on the lyrics. The Wikipedia article outlines the differences world-wide, so it's a good reference to check out.

The main difference between the version over here and the one that I grew up with is that limbs are put in and out more than once, and more quickly. So, a Hokey Pokey verse would go like:

You put your right leg in,

You put your right leg out,

You put your right leg in

And you shake it all about.

You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around.

And that's what it's all about.

All at a pretty mellow pace.

The versions I've heard over here go:

You put your right leg in,

Your right leg out,

In, out, in, out

Shake it all about

You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around

That's what it's all about.

That "in, out, in, out" bit makes you move faster, so if you're on one leg it would take better balance.

There's also a variation on the chorus in some parts of the UK as well that I've only seen on TV and you can read about in the Wikipedia article (see The Dance in the UK section). The article also mentions later a German parody of the song done by comedian Bill Bailey that's pretty funny (and links to a YouTube video) and it was in viewing this version and translating it back to English that I first realized that the song was different over here and then asked my friends about it.

Another kid's song that is sped up in its UK incarnation is the old "Head and shoulders, knees and toes" one. The words are the same for the first "verse", but done faster - at least twice as fast, if not three times. The last bit, which I know as "eyes, ears, mouth and nose" is changed slightly, I think there's maybe a chin mentioned instead of ears, but I'm not sure. Since the song involves bending to touch your knees and toes and is done faster, it is more exercise over here than the lazily-done Canadian one.

Culloden Battlefield

2008-02-01T13:01:00.000-03:30

This is fairly verbatim from a letter that I wrote to my grandmother, so it'll be a slightly different style than my usual posts, but I'm too lazy to recompose it entirely. I didn't have my camera with me, so some pictures can be found at Undiscovered Scotland.

I had Wednesday off, so I went out to the Culloden Battlefield in the morning. The battle took place at Culloden Moor, which is a couple miles out of Culloden, which is east of Inverness by a few miles itself. I took a bus out that left Inverness at 9am and got out there at 9:20am, leaving me some time to wander around the battlefield before going into the musuem which is in a new building (with a new exhibition) that opened up in the last month.

It was really windy, but I think the moor is probably one of those places that are always somewhat windy. The only trees around the battlefield were on the side opposite where the wind was coming from, so there was nothing to block it. The ground is uneven and boggy; there's clumps of grass on the bumps of land, and heather and some other short green plant mixed in, with the occasional gorse bush. The holes between the bumps of land were filled with water and often concealed from sight by plants. I've encountered this sort of bogginess elsewhere in the Highlands; the hills behind Kyleakin were like that. The only place I've ever experienced walking on ground like that was back home where there was boggy ground that had once been plowed and then lots of bushes and grasses grew over it. There the holes were in regular intervals; on the moor it was like someone had plowed it in an eratic fashion, but it's just the natural state of it.

There's a path around the battlefield these days, flags to mark the Hanoverian and Jacobite lines, and stones to mark the places where different clans and military divisions lined up. The path was flooded in one section, which is when I started cutting across the moorland and experienced the joy of sinking into concealed holes. Even watching my footing carefully, trying to step from tuft of grass to tuft of grass, I would still occasionally fall through spongey layers of plants into wet ground. It was slow going, and I can't imagine trying to charge across to fight a battle. When I was in the museum later, it made mention of the difficulty the Jacobites had in implementing their "Highland charge" due to the poor ground, and that the clansmen were slowed down. I'm amazed that loads of them didn't go down with twisted or broken ankles trying to run across that.

At 10am I headed into the exhibition, which started at events leading up to the 1745 uprising, then battles throughout 1745-1745 and then the Culloden battle itself in April 1746. I actually found a mistake in the first bit of the exhibition - it was a world map showing wars that Britain was involved in during 1745, and one was the siege on the fortress of Louisbourg. In addition to Louisbourg being mispelled as "Louisberg", the map indicated Louisbourg as being somewhere around Truro, at the head of the Minas Basin, instead of being on the Atlantic coast of Cape Breton (the map also showed Cape Breton as two islands because the Bras D'or Lakes were made too big). I pointed this out to the woman at the desk, and she grabbed the in-costume historical interpreter on his way by who asked me to explain the mistake and made a note of it.

The exhibit was pretty good, having the usual articfacts in cases and posters on walls, but also some audio-visual stuff like film recreations and audio recordings of actors reading from letters and diaries of the period. What I appreciated most was an animation projected on to a large table that showed the battle from overhead, showing troop movements with individual people represented and a voice-over explaining the tactical decisions made. I've always had trouble imagining battles just from written descriptions and static diagrams, so that was really helpful.

The same historical interpreter I'd spoken to earlier did a presentation on weapons later on, and as one of the weapons he had was a replica basket-hilted broadsword, I asked him afterward if I could hold it just to feel the weight and balance of it (here's an image for you). It surprised me by how light the sword was - it's shorter than my fencing sabre would be, the blade is much wider of course (a couple inches), but the balance of it was so good I didn't find it hard to hold, even though it's heavier than what I'm used to holding (but not too much heavier than an epee I'd say).

I was told by the historian that many of the broadswords that had been found from the 18th century have basket guards that are quite small, implying that the men of the time had smaller hands than the average man today - it's thought that the Highland men were short and stocky. Since we always hear that people are taller nowadays than years ago, that seems sensible.

Is that a sabre in your rucksack...?

2008-01-28T13:34:00.000-03:30

This post isn't going to have a lot of continuity to it.

I was down to Edinburgh on the weekend to do a Level 1 Sabre Coaching course. The weather was pretty wild, with high winds and rain from Inverness down to Edinburgh. I took the bus, a 3.5 hour trip during which I was in a state between wakefulness and sleep for much of it and couldn't wait to get off the super-heated bus at the end of it. When I came back Sunday night, I heard that the rail line had been closed due to flooding in some parts, so if I had taken the train I would have ended up on a bus anyway.

The course was challenging for me, but I definitely learned some things about coaching fencing, in particular in giving individual lessons which is not something I've done before and lacked confidence in doing. I also learned that if you walk around with a large backpack with two sabre blades sticking out of the top of it (at least a foot in length) that you will attract a lot of curious/fearful/strange looks, but will never be asked what it is that you have in your backpack.

On a related note to that: last Tuesday when I was returning from fencing with the afore-mentioned two sabres in my hand, I boarded the bus to find that the supervising bus driver (she was training the driver) was eyeing me quite closely. I thought to myself that she was not going to allow me on, and that I was going to have to argue through the whole deal about sabres being sports equipment and no more dangerous than a hockey stick or a cricket bat. As it turned out, she used to fence way-back-when in school and had always been looking for a fencing club to join. So I gave her the coach's contact information and I answered her fencing questions for most of the ride back to Inverness.

I've had some visits with friends as well in the last week or so. Jamie was up to Inverness from Cairngorm Lodge (where he's working with Rob now) on his birthday (the 16) at my invitation, and we went out to celebrate. Then Rob and Tina were here the middle of last week due to interviews and courses being held at our hostel, so I got to hang out with them some as well. I tried to meet up with some buddies in Edinburgh, but their work schedules didn't mesh with my course schedule, so it'll have to be another time.

I also learned last week that various levels of management have read my blog, since it pops up on Google if you search "Inverness Youth Hostel" and "blog" (usually when looking for reviews of the place - hey, we're great!). So the readership is growing!

Taxi's in Inverness have the most easy-to-remember phone numbers that I've ever seen. One is 222 555. Another is 222 900. And, for the immensely drunk, all you have to do is go to a payphone and mash the 2 key until it starts ringing, and you'll get the company who's number is 222 222.

Pedestrian crossings in Inverness make people wait for a minimum of what seems like 5 minutes before crossing. The closer you get to the city centre, the longer the wait. Traffic seems to flow twice in each direction before the pedestrians get to cross. Which is why no one waits for the lights in the city - I certainly don't, and I've basically given up on pushing the button in order to get the little green man (the walk symbol - the don't walk symbol is a red, stationary man) to eventually come up.

I see a lot of BBC news these days since we often have the reception TV at the hostel set to that channel. A regular feature of the news programming is a segment when they look at the day's newspapers to see what the headlines and pictures on the front pages are. Now, I don't know about you, but I find this extremely odd. Here we have the medium of television, in which moving pictures (they call them videos, I believe) and sound are available to convey information. And what do the news anchors do with that medium? Let's all take a look at some typeface and still-pictures printed on poor quality paper. Also, they've become journalists once-removed. They're reporting on what other journalists have already reported on. Strange.

Money

2008-01-22T10:01:00.000-03:30

I've been planning to write about the money over here for quite some time now, as it's different in more ways than you'd think. So let's get cracking.

The basics, you probably already know. The currency in all of the UK is the pound sterling (£). It's divided into 100 pence (p). For coinage, there's 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, 1£, and 2£ coins. See picture here. Just like in Canada, you get different pictures on the coins on occasion, although this doesn't occur with the frequency that quarters get done over back home (i.e. every year). Mostly, I see different versions of the pound coin - ones with a coat of arms, with 3 lions, with a thistle, with a dragon, with a rose and cross.

The 1p coin is called a penny, and collectively with the 2p coins they're referred to as "coppers". All the other coins are called by their value: i.e. "a 20p". I know some people that refer to the silver coins - 5p, 10p, 20p, and 50p - as shrapnel, but I would not say that's universal.

It's not the coinage that's quite different over here, but the banknotes, or what we would call "bills" in Canada. Firstly: they're different sizes. The £10 note is about the size of a Canadian bill of any denomination; I compared when I was home and found the £10 is a bit shorter and a touch wider. However, the £5 note is smaller than the £10, and the £20 note is bigger than both, so that the edges of it always stuck out of my old, Canadian wallet and got bent. I've only seen £50 notes on occasion, but they're bigger still. So I figure if I ever get my hands on a £100 note, I'll have to fold it two times just to get it into my wallet.

If you just went to England, you probably wouldn't find anything other than the sizes out of the ordinary - you'd have the coins, and then notes issued by the Bank of England for £5, £10, and £20, etc. If you went to Wales, it'd just be the same. However, it's a different ball game when you go to Scotland or Northern Ireland.

In Scotland, there are three banks that issue banknotes, so for every denomination, there are three different notes. Now, these banks aren't like the Bank of England (or the Bank of Canada) - the Scottish banks are actual banks, as in you could go to a branch and open up an account with them. For example, my bank over here is the Royal Bank of Scotland, and it's one of the banks that prints notes. The other banks are Bank of Scotland and Clydesdale Bank.

So in day-to-day life in Scotland, it's common to come across 4 different versions of banknotes. Here's some pictures I took of my own money (you can find pictures of all the UK possibilities on this site, where they want to sell you signed notes):

£20 notes: Clydesdale on top left (Robert the Bruce pictured), Bank of Scotland on top right (Walter Scott pictured on all their notes), Royal Bank of Scotland on bottom left (Lord Lay, First Governor on all their notes), Bank of England on bottom right (with the ol' Queen).Reverse side of the notes above.
£10 pound notes ("tenners"): same bank order as above. That's Mary Slessor on the Clydesdale note; I'm guessing she has something to do with the African missionary work shown on the reverse.

Reverse side of the above notes - that's Charles Darwin on the back of the English note.

£5 notes ("fivers"): I commonly only see these two versions, and when I took these pictures ages ago I actually thought that they were the only two. But there are fivers made by Bank of Scotland - I've only seen the "new" ones (more about that in a minute). Robert Burns is on the Clydesdale note. Reverse of the fivers. That mouse is in reference to Burns' poem to a mouse.

There's also one pound notes in Scotland, but I haven't seen any of them since I worked at the Coylet Inn, where customers would have them and I'd get them in my change when shopping once in a while.

Also, there's now new Bank of Scotland notes that are much more colourful then before (looking more like the new Canadian notes, so I assume the added colour is for security reasons).

As I mentioned, Northern Ireland has different notes as well - I've occasionally seen banknotes from Ulster Bank and Northern Bank when I get customers who've been there recently. Wales doesn't have its own notes any more since the last bank that issued them there folded. And English provincial banks used to issue their own notes up until the 1800's, I've gathered.

It gets more complicated. I hear frequently of how businesses in England won't accept Scottish banknotes, either because they don't think it's legal tender in England or because they're not confident they can spot counterfeit since they don't see the money often (then there's the theory that they do it as just another way to oppress the Scots).

The Wikipedia article on banknotes states that Scottish notes aren't legal tender even in Scotland, because they are promissory notes (this is based on a very strict economic/accounting definition of legal tender that I won't pretend to entirely understand, not the common usage definition of legal tender). Indeed, all the Scottish notes bear some statement that the bank "promises to pay the bearer on demand X pounds sterling". However, the banknotes are as good in England as they are in Scotland in terms of legality; the Scottish banks have to back up their banknotes with that actual amount of currency to the Bank of England.

Anyway, there's a lot of information out there on it and I'm not going to regurgitate it all, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to research more if desired.