Hey gang, so we finally accomplished a life long dream to swim across the English Channel, or at least to traverse it by train in one of humankind's greatest engineering feats: The Chunnel. And guess what? It was really anticlimactic. There you are, cruising across French farmland in a high speed train that suddenly goes into a pitch black tunnel for 20 minutes with nothing to see, and boom, you're in the UK, cruising across more farmland. Now if they suddenly screeched to a halt in the Chunnel, made sounds of water rushing in, shot bullet holes in the windows....now that would be interesting. I guess we're just that hard to please.
Anywhoo, we arrived in London and met up with Diane's mom, Eva, so we were once again 5 (remember, Aviva left us in Switzerland to join her band of traveling minstrels). We settled into our cozy little house and hit the town for the next coupla days, with our go-go-Granny. We boated on the Thames, bussed around London-town, went all over by tube, and saw many of the major sites. In Greenwich, we had lunch at an awesome market where you could get just about anything from anywhere in the world....and we did: Ethiopian Vegetarian, Mediterranean fusion, French crepes, sweets, sushi, blah blah blah. We then checked out Greenwich Meantime which was also kinda cool. In the evening we had our first (and for some of us last for this trip) taste of fish and chips. Yum (ish).
Perhaps the most challenging part of our time in London was spent trying to figure out their incoherent public transit fare system. We dare you to even try to figure it out:
The pay as you go Oyster card gets you 10% off the boats, but not if you already got on the boat; and if you have a flat rate travel card, you spend more than the Oyster card, but less than a point to point, but you get 33% off on the boats. And if you are a kid, which is 16 or less, then you pay less than a travel card, but more than an Oyster card, but you can't get the child ticket on the bus so then you have to pay the adult rate. And the boat requires a 5.50 supplement each time you get off, but you can ride the rest of the transit system all day long for one rate...unless it's peak time.
Get it? We certainly did NOT. So a couple of times the credit on our passes was depleted and so they no longer worked, and we were told we had to pay more. But we had this really innocent looking Grandmother with us, who would do her best rendition of bewildered righteous indignation, and we would all get waived on.
Next we all headed up to Edinburgh, Scotland, to meet up with Aviva. As you may know, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (the largest festival of its kind) was in full swing at the time of our arrival. The place was thick with crowds, and you can't walk two steps without running into a street performance, or people handing out flyers for their performances in theatres all across the city. Our first stop was The Dreamcatchers, the Earl Haig/Claude Watson performance that Aviva was in. It was really special to see the group perform; they were amazing (but hey, we're not biased). Over the days that we were there, we saw a few of the many buskers, who seemed to try to out-do each other when it came to dangerous juggling, i.e., juggling machetes, hatchets, and even chainsaws (yikes, that was scary!). These guys were world-class, and could entertain street crowds in the hundreds for 45 minutes at a time, often effectively dealing with drunken nasty hecklers.
On our second day in Edinburgh, Eva headed back to London, and we did a day-hike up Arthur's seat at the top of the Holyrood mountain, walked along the mountain's edge and came down at Holyrood palace, the Queen's residence when visiting Scotland; although she didn't wanna invite us in, so we just stood in front of the palace in the rain :( We also walked the Royal Mile (the distance between the castle and the palace), and did a free walking tour of Edinburgh, which was amazing (Sandeman tours) and we could actually understand the guide despite the outrageous, but charming accent.
So that's it for this summer. We're now somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, way way up high. See you all soon.
With love,
RANAD
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