Namaste

From Istanbul I flew over a quarter of the world to New Delhi to meet up with my mate Kevin - lovely American chap I spent my time in Ghana with, and then saw again in Japan early last year. He's on a crazy 6-month long Asia expedition on his lonesome going through SE Asia, India, Nepal and hopefully getting up through China to Mongolia, so I said I'd love to join him for the India leg. He said he'd love to hit the dusty trail with me again and the rest is history :) So here I sit in an internet cafe in a tiny town called Pushkar, 2 hours west of Jaipur, watching cows walk past the open door. India. What can I say? We read somewhere that it would take a week or so just to get used to India and its heat and it has rung true - we're on our 8th day together and we finally feel fine. Admittedly we both got a dose of the ole' Delhi Belly within 3 days of seeing each other, and Delhi was in a heat wave that brought with it its hottest day in 50 years, so it would take anyone some time to adjust..

We've ripped through India's 'Golden Triangle' of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur in the past week. We pretty much took 2 days for each city, which before I got here I thought would be too little and thought we would stay far longer in each but now I'm glad we've done what we've done. It looks as though the towns and cities we're set to visit in the next 2 weeks will blow the so-called 'Golden Triangle' away!

So India. The most out-of-my-comfort-zone country I've visited in the past 14 months since leaving home but I really quite like it. It's dirty, dusty, hot and aggressive but it's also beautiful, colourful and surprising. When I first stepped out of the hotel door in New Delhi on my first morning (my plane got in at 3am so I hadn't seen anything when I arrived) I was in absolute awe of what was in front of me.

It was exactly as I imagined India to be - an absolute chaotic mess of people, cycle and auto rickshaws, falling apart buses, motorcycles and cars, along with the odd cow or horse and cart and lots of dogs; small stores selling the necessities and carts selling juice or offering cheap long distance phone calls; delicious fruit on every corner, not to mention the chai; little kids running about the place, men sitting around wearing their 70's style clothes under the shade and women walking gracefully dressed in saris. Sometimes it's difficult to enjoy being here with all that I've mentioned plus little kids hassling you for money, rickshaw drivers wanting to drive you everywhere and people staring or asking if Kevin's my husband, but if you can get past that, like we almost have, it's a rockin' place to experience!

Delhi was my least favourite of the cities we've seen so far. We sort of expected Delhi to be the most city-like but I think it's been the least. It's really spread out and the 'highlight' sights to see didn't interest me that much.. We saw the Red Fort on our first day, but Kevin got ill while we were there so we headed back to our hotel for the afternoon. The following day he felt a bit brighter so we took the spanking new metro to Connaught Place, the downtown area in Delhi where it seemed the most like an actual city - shops, restaurants, McDonald's, etc. Had a wee wander around but the most exciting part of the day was having my bag fixed! The strap broke while we walked along and I was considering looking for someone to fix it when a man sitting cross-legged on the street, a shoe polisher it looked like, waved me over to him. Kevin and I sat on the ground with him and he went to work on my bag - glueing, stitching, hammering. We were utterly impressed and he only charged me 150 rupees, or about 2 pounds! Couldn't get that sort of service in the UK!

After our 2 quite uneventful days in Delhi, we took a train to Agra to see the magestic Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal is one of those wonderful things you can find around the world which everyone knows about and thinks is amazing, and when you get to see the actual place in person is actually as magnificent as you had hoped and imagined. We decided that a monument to love such as this deserved a guided tour so we hired a student guide to take us through. Turned out he was also a blooming photographer so he loved getting us to pose in various places and positions throughout the complex, not being afraid to let us know if our photo ideas were 'not possible'! The actual Taj is great, but there's also the gates leading into the complex, the mosque and the guest house - all fantastic. The detail in the architecture is un-matched by anything I've seen. Floral patterns are all throughout and one particular type of stone they use glows when there is a full moon! I guess I'll leave my photos to speak for me..

The city of Agra didn't really suit us either, especially because this is where I had my turn of the Belly, so we moved on promptly to Jaipur, the 3rd point of the 'Triangle'. It's dubbed the Pink City because all the buildings within the city walls are painted a peach colour! We liked this the most out of the 3 - wonderful, vibrant markets selling spices, chai, chilli and colourful fabrics, a cool palace with an amazingly arranged arms and weapons room, and an ancient observatory to boot! We had our first day of us both feeling great in Jaipur so this helped us to have a good time :)

The plan at the moment is to head further west towards the Thar Desert before whipping all the way to the east to see Varanasi, and then finally overnight-training it to Delhi for my flight back to the UK. We'll see how it all goes!

Peace
x

And PS Big love to my dear grandpa :) I wish I was at home right now with you xxx


Posted from Pushkar, India

Me with thali, an Indian dish which usually includes dal, rice and a couple of curries

The south gate which we walked through to visit the Taj

Ole' Taj and me

Freakin' monkeys are everywhere and I can't stand the things!

Mmmm mangoes..

Enough chilli for an Indian family feast ;)

The Aquarius..measuring..thing (didn't quite catch its significance, but there was one for each star sign haha)

Sari!

This is served to us after most meals in restaurants - sugar and aniseed which you chew together. Pretty good!

Pink buildings in Jaipur

Istanbul for ANZAC Day

My new adventure began with saying farewell to my flatmates and mates in Edinburgh, along with my Netherlandish friends who were staying with me for the weekend, and FINALLY catching up with Rory after 2 weeks of not seeing each other. I made a big stirfry with rice for 6 of us and then I grabbed my bags and left for the overnight Megabus down to London. I was in London for about 2 hours or so but it was nice to be back again. Every time I go there it feels like home for some reason - maybe because it was our first stop on our Europe trip back in 05 :)

Everyone in Istanbul is really friendly and cheeky so I'm loving it! I flew from London to Istanbul and caught up with some Edinburgh mates that night who were with a crazy tour group of Aussies and NZers. We all sat in a restaurant on huge colourful cushions, smoked shisha (flavoured tobacco if you didn't know, and they had a list of about 15 flavours!) and drank beers while some buskers serenaded us with Turkish tunes. Paul arrived the next day and it was good to be back together again. I don't actually see him very often even though we're both living in Edinburgh at the moment! We spent lots of our time hanging out with the 2 guys we were sharing the 4-bed dorm with - Kader, a French-Moroccan who's living in Dublin, and Daniel, a cool guy from Melbs who's on his way to do Camp America in NY. We became a little family :) We haggled our way through the grand bazaar and the spice bazaar (where we found the tastiest kebabs for 1.5 lira - about 75p!), and visited the Blue Mosque which is right near our hostel. The staple foods here seem to be kebabs, rice pudding and Turkish icecream which are lovely but I'd love to eat anything else right now haha.

Paul and I headed off on Friday for our tour down to Gallipoli for ANZAC Day. We left Istanbul at 6:30am and finally arrived at the actual site at about 5:30pm - along the way we stopped for lunch, visited a museum about the Gallipoli war and visited the sites where the commemoration services would be held the following morning. By the time we got there all of the ground space was taken so we were left to find chairs in the grand stands - 13 hours of sitting and lying in plastic chairs in the freezing cold overnight is not the most comfortable, let me tell you! It was really cool though because they'd banned alcohol last year so everyone was pretty chilled out, and stuff was playing on the big screen or on the stage throughout the night so we were kept entertained. The army and navy bands from NZ and Aus played songs from 1915, we got to see speeches by K Rudd and the NZ PM, and at about 4am we got to see a medley of ANZAC Day ceremonies from around NZ and Aus.

At 5:30am we watched the dawn service and then walked up to watch the Australian service, walked further up the hill to watch the Turkish service, which we were too late for but could hear it from outside the gates and it sounded amazing, and then walked even further up the hill to the NZ service. It was a moving day but also very tiring. At the end of the NZ service some guys from the crowd got up and did the hakka! That was awesome and got the most cheers. Walking through the cemeteries reading the stones is by far the most upsetting part of ANZAC Cove. These men who died so senselessly in this war were usually between 20 and 25 and the words that their parents had engraved on their stones are hard to read without tearing up. I'm glad that I was able to visit Gallipoli - it sure does make you appreciate how lucky and precious our lives are.

Posted from Istanbul

Blue Mosque

Entrance to the grand bazaar

Spice bazaar

Crazy nougat type stuff

Men fishing over a bridge, next to a sign with men fishing over the bridge!

Turkish brass band playing in Istanbul with some crazy machine gun security

Our new mate Daniel enjoying a weird syrup-soaked pastry

Paul smoking his first shisha

Paul and I at ANZAC Cove

Sleep-time at Gallipoli

Famous speech by Ataturk about the ANZAC soldiers

Amazing scenery around the peninsula

The one that made me cry..

"Our dear son who lost his life to find it"

Listed names of soldiers who died at ANZAC but have no grave

The desertiest birthday you could imagine

We took an overnight bus to Merzouga. We'd just left 20-degree weather in Fes but while we were driving we went through metre-high snow! The landscape in Morocco is so varied it's insane. Half-way through the night we stopped for a feast of meat, bread, salad and mint tea. It was past midnight by this point so it was the first meal of my birthday :) Colby asked if I happened to know what time I was born. I did - at 1:45am. He looked at his watch and said "that's RIGHT now!" So it might have also been the first time I've celebrated my birthday at the exact time I was born! The rest of the bus trip was uneventful and we arrived into Merzouga at sunrise.

After a quick snack at the hostel we had a nap on the most comfortable beds of our lives before heading into the town centre to buy scarves for our camel trip. Karim received a phone call from his sister saying that his mum was in hospital so he went back to Fes that night rather than coming into the desert with us as promised, but not before having about an hour long disagreement with Colby who wanted to change his arrangement and cut his trip a day short so he could head onto Marrakech with us. It was the most awkward situation Susan and I had ever been in - being caught between two guys, one who's promised his whole family a bunch of money from a traveller who now wants to change his plans, and who has also just gotten the news that his mum's sick in hospital, and the other who's being completely disagreeable and inconsiderate, but who's point of view we could also see because if he didn't change his plans it meant he would be stuck out in this hostel by himself for a whole extra day when even Karim wouldn't be there to keep him company! In the end, in a not very happy compromise from either of the two guys, they agreed that Colby could leave with us but he still had to pay the majority of his money - he ended up paying 50 pounds more than us! Even after this Karim guilted Susan and I into giving him an extra 200 dirhams each so that he could get back to Fes..

This only slightly tainted our experience because later that afternoon we were all introduced to our camels! Susan's was Ali Baba, mine was Hamouda (Karim told me to tell my mum that my camel would be named Hamouda earlier on the bus! I thought he was just being funny!) and Colby's was Hadanni. We had two guys who were going to be with us for the whole 3 days - Omagh and Saheed. Saheed did a lot of running around for us, setting up our beds, bringing us breakfast, etc. We really liked both of them. And so we set off over the dunes! For just a moment until my camel came loose from Susan's and Colby and I started our own trek through the desert.. Haha that was a fun 3 seconds! :) It was so incredible going over the sand dunes. It was a really lovely warm day with a light breeze, sand all around us. I had a hard time getting used to the movement of my camel so I probably looked ridiculous to the other two, but what can you do? Girl from Adelaide riding a camel doesn't exactly sound natural to me haha. Omagh and Saheed stopped us on top of a dune to watch the beautiful sunset before we continued on to our oasis. There was no water there but there were trees! We had an amazing desert tent to sleep in with huge heavy blankets to keep us warm in the freezing night. We ate dinner of chicken, vegetables, bread and tea under the stars before going over to join Omagh, Saheed and a few other Moroccan men near a fire where they were playing and singing songs using drums and some hand-held cymbals. I asked Omagh what they sang about and he said they sing about how their ancestors, the nomads of the area, came together about 30 years ago to form the town of Merzouga! It was a brilliant end to a fabulous 23rd birthday :D

We woke up at 6:30ish to stand on a tall dune and watch the sunrise. It was chilly and definitely not as beautiful as the sunset from the night before, but I'm still glad we did it. I slowly got used to squatting in the desert to pee, only once did I pee on my belt (somehow) and another time I peed on my shoe! We went back to bed in the tent after sunrise and slept until 10 when we woke up to breakfast of bread, jam, butter, laughing cow cheese, olives, tea and oranges. Straight after we'd eaten we got back on our camels and headed off to the black people's village, stopping halfway along in a tiny mud-building village which seemed to house only 5 people where we ate lunch before heading off again. We arrived in the evening right before they started playing music for us and about 7 other French tourists. The music was nice but it seemed a bit put-on to me, and as soon as the French tourists left the guys playing seemed to completely lose interest - they started smoking weed and drinking, playing their own very loud tunes on the drums. We hung out with them for a bit after we'd eaten dinner but then went to bed. They were really friendly and the main guy told me I should come back and live with them for a month working with the women doing handicrafts!

When we woke up on this final morning, all 3 of us were in pain from the camel-riding - our backs and bums were killing us! But we got back on the horse, so to speak, and rode our camels all the way back to Merzouga. Colby still needed to pay the remaining money so Omagh came in a share taxi with us to Rissani, a nearby town which was much bigger than Merzouga. We ate lunch there and got a short tour by one of Omagh's friends - he took us through the market and to a small store where we ended up spending a lot of time bargaining. Susan bought 2 pairs of earrings and I got 2 camel leather poofs! I got the guy from 650 dirhams down to 200! From there we walked to the bus station where we were told there would be a direct bus to Marrakech but we found out that it hadn't run for the past 10 days.. Convenient. It was tough to make a decision from here because all of our options didn't seem very attractive to us, but we ended up taking a share taxi to Errachidia which was about an hour and a half away where we were promised we would be able to get a bus to Marrakech in the morning. Our taxi smashed into a dog along the way - it completely broke the headlight so I'm sure we killed the dog. A friendly guy at the station helped us to buy tickets for our bus, took us across to his uncle's hotel where we stayed for 25 dirhams each (2 pounds!) and arranged dinner and wine from the black market for us! Good evening.

Our bus driver drove like a madman so we got into Marrakech at 4 in the arvo. Walking into the main square was like walking into the middle of a circus - tourists everywhere, snake charmers, henna ladies, open stalls in the centre selling food for dinner with smoke pouring out into the night, orange juice stands offering you their cheapest price, old men walking around completely covered in gold bells.. Mayhem! Such a difference to anywhere else in Morocco. I feel bad for people who just fly into and out of Marrakech and never leave! We ended up spending about 4 days here but it was definitely my least favourite place on this trip. Some highlights of Marrakech were - seeing a guy try to stab another guy in a marketplace, eating honey pancakes with mint tea for breakfast in the sunshine, walking through the souqs (markets) and getting people in the stalls to lower their prices before we've even looked at what they have, eating couscous and listening to a 2-piece band on our last night playing The Cranberries and Bob Dylan.

Our first experience upon re-entering the UK, besides the drizzly weather, was a man screaming abuse at his children - the little girl spilt something and went to clean it up and the father's response was the scream at the top of his lungs "don't you touch that mess! They get paid to clean and we don't!" Oh. My. God. It was slightly depressing getting back there after the sunshine and relaxation of Morocco, but it was wonderful getting back to the flat and catching up with Paul and the others, and then seeing Rory the next day :) So that's the end of my adventures again until April when I'm heading to Turkey for ANZAC Day and then onto India for about 3 weeks! Stay tuned.

Peace
x

Snow!

Amazing skies

Susan and I with little Mona, some relation to Karim

Camel time

Sunset

Our tent in the desert

Tracks made by a desert beetle

Saheed and Omagh

The guys warming their drums in the black people's village

Cutest exchange I've ever seen - he'd just given her a piece of laughing cow cheese and she couldn't open it so he was giving her a demonstration while she stared up at him

Colby and Susan with wine from the black market

Driving through some amazing mountains

Me in an orange juice stand, Marrakech


One of the evening stalls in the main square

Loving the Maroc!

We got into Fes at 8pm. I'd had a cold and sore throat for a week at this point, and my wisdom tooth decided it was a great day to start pushing through as well so by the time we got there my mouth and head were in absolute agony! We could not be bothered with any bull-**** but when we asked for a taxi into the medina (old town centre) to Hotel Erraha we were told that there's "no water" in the medina so we should go to the something-something hotel in the new town. This is possibly the worst attempt at a scam I've ever heard! We demanded that he take us to the hotel anyway but he wasn't interested so we found another taxi who agreed to stop at the pharmacy on the way for me to find some paracetamol. I "took too long" in the pharmacy so by the time I got back out the price that we'd agreed on had inflated by 50% haha.

At the hotel we were checked in with hot showers not included for 40 dirhams each - about 3.20 pounds! Karim, our friendly hotel receptionist, sat us down with him and a Canadian traveller, Colby, while we ate dinner outside the hotel restaurant. Eating dinner outside - what a novelty for us semi-permanent UK citizens! The dinner of chicken, cousous, that amazing flat, white bread that we got with every meal and mint tea was just lovely. We went to bed fairly early that night after a tiring day and thoroughly enjoyed sleeping with our mattresses and pillows that felt like they were filled with concrete :p I told susan that if I hit her over the head with my pillow it'd probably kill her!

The next morning we went on a half-day tour through the old town with a lovely guy during which he took us through loads of small alleyways showing us the mosques and markets, the only small stall in Fes which sells camel meat (!!), the first section of a leather tannery where they were taking the wool off the skins, and a few blanket and rug stores where we had rug after rug rolled out in front of us to have a look at. He stopped us at a tiny shop for us to eat garlic soup for lunch - it was a creamy and very garlicy soup that they poured a ladle of olive oil into, and we ate with the flat, white bread. Took a bit of getting used to but I think we both liked it by the time we finished our bowls, and it only cost 5 dirhams (about 40p)! He also stopped us at his aunty's house just so that he could use the bathroom! It was an incredibly lovely house with amazing furnishings. She was really lovely - spoke French and almost no English, but she seemed to really like us so she served us mint tea and some homemade biscuits :)

We were offered by our hotel receptionist that we could go on a 3-day desert tour with the Candadian traveller if we left that night - we would be put up in his family's hostel in Merzouga, then trek out into the desert by camel to sleep in a tent, and finally spent the night in "the black people's village" where we would listen to the music they played for us. The cost was 140 pounds which we were pretty deterred by, but eventually we agreed that we would go along..

Posted from Edinburgh

Entrance to the old town in Fes

Garlic soup!

One of the few blanket stores we went into - we sat on the chairs you see at the bottom and had about 40 rugs and blankets rolled out for us to look at


Small alleys

First stage of the tanneries

Inside our guide's aunty's house :)

A beautiful palace-type thing

The flat, white bread en-masse

Camel meat!

The land of the flat, white bread

Susan, my lovely Australian flatmate, and I headed off on an adventure on the 7th of February - spending 10 days in Morocco! Paul took over my room in Edinburgh while we were away, and after a breakfast with him and Rory, we said our goodbyes and walked to the station to train it to Glasgow Prestwick airport with its slogan 'Pure Dead Brilliant' written everywhere in huge purple lettering. Ridiculous slogan for an airport! We flew to Malaga in the south of Spain where we spent a night. It seems like a really lovely city with a beachy feel to it, massive wide boulevards and a huge castle ruin overlooking the place, but we didn't get the chance to explore. The next morning we got up extra early thinking we could get an morning ferry across to Tangier in Morocco, but it didn't quite work out as planned, as is often the case with travel! We spent about an hour at the bus station in Malaga trying to get help with figuring out whether there were buses to Tarifa or Algeciras, the two places from which you can get ferries across to Tangier, but people seemed fond of the "I-don't-understand-you-so-no" sort of responses. Eventually we figured out that we could get a bus to Algeciras at 9am so we had some breakfast while we waited. The bus journey was lovely - winding along the southern-Spanish coast line with beautiful white-washed buildings and the sun glittering on the ocean. It was such a relief to be away from the wind, rain and snow of Edinburgh!

In Algeciras we wandered over to the port to buy tickets for our ferry which was extra confusing - choices between about 20 different companies heading to Tangier or Ceuta, fast or slow ferries, about 3 different prices, 2 different leaving times but about 4 different arrival times! We ended up choosing the fast ferry to Tangier for 37euros which took an hour and a half. It was a horrendous ride to say the least - I've never been on a boat so bumpy in my life, people were throwing up all over the place and sometimes it felt like we were about to flip over! Surprisingly, it's probably also the first boat ride I didn't think I was about to die on. I guess that ferry from Japan to China did wonders for my fear of oceans.. When we finally arrived in Tangier, we breathed our breath of relief and walked up the plank (?) to dry land only to find that we were supposed to have had our passports stamped on the ferry! I don't know when they expected us to do this between holding down our stomachs and watching the other passengers slowing moving, white-faced, towards the back of the boat, but we had to get back on the boat to wait for the police to stamp them so we could finally enter Morocco.

We were pleasantly surprised with Tangier after hearing about how horrible it is - there were hardly any people who bugged us and I told the two that did that we had been here before so we didn't need their help - good line to use for the future! We ended up spending a few hours here wandering around, eating our first delicious Moroccan meal and trying to get money out of the ATMs. Good times. I loved just walking about enjoying the sights and sounds - took me straight back to Ghana again with the way that people were living and the way that they stared at us. We were happy to find that the Moroccan men paid more attention to local women than they did to us - relief! A man and his girlfriend offered to walk us to the station where we could find a grands taxi (shared taxi, which means 3 in the front, 4 in the back for those who don't know, as Susan didn't haha) to Asilah, our first stop. The guy who walked us there used to work for Busabout, a bus tour company which goes through Europe and also, apparently, Morocco! Cool as. At the station I asked for a shared taxi to Asilah but the guy gave me a ridiculous price which meant he was obviously a normal taxi driver. We walked away from him and into the station where we were surrounded by about 10 men trying to get our business/figure out what we wanted. So much fun :) Ended up getting to Asilah with no problems. People had been so incredibly lovely to us so far! Huge difference to the stories that we kept hearing about the millions of people surrounding you trying to sell you everything and anything. Even after we arrived in Asilah, our taxi driver asked us if we had a hotel and we asked where Hotel Sahara was - his friend came over and answered our question and then they both left us alone! Amazing :)

Hotel Sahara was so cute! We had a tiny room which opened onto an open courtyard with mosaic patterns all over, and the receptionist was a little old man who had no English but we communicated with him okay anyway, and everytime he said something that made us laugh he would give a little chuckle and pat us each on the arm. So adorable! We went for a wee wander in the balmy evening weather and had our first of many Moroccan mint teas - from this point on, mint tea came with almost every meal and sometimes we would be offered it if we just went into a shop to have a look - sometimes we'd have 5 a day! We were just about to head back for an early sleep when a man offered to take us to visit his 'nomad' friend's market which would be gone the next day. How could we resist? He took us for a bit of a walk and we ended up in a little shop where we ended up learning how to say hello and thankyou in Arab, and I bought a beautiful leather handbag for 120 dirhams (10 pounds). After that we headed back to our hotel, but not before being offered couscous and dancing the next day at our friendly guide's sister's house.

We both just loved Asilah. There was a bunch of caravans parked by the ocean, presumably owned by the nomads we had visited the night before, people used donkeys all over the place for transporting goods, the people were friendly, the food was great and the sun was shining! We ate breakfast at a place where the waiter didn't speak English, and we still hadn't found the time to learn French or Arabic, but we managed to communicate quite easily in a mix of all 3 languages that we wanted omelettes with cheese and orange juice. The guy had to bicycle off to buy eggs for us! So lovely. We'd planned on spending half the day there before heading off to grab a bus to Fes a bit further south, but we went to the bus station straight from breakfast to check on the bus times and the guys there told us to get our stuff quickly and run back or else we'd miss the only one for the day! And so we did run and get back on time to board our bus with no side mirror (the driver just held up a jagged piece of broken mirror when he needed it haha).. to Tangier!! No! They told us it was to Fes, but as we were driving along we noticed the signs on the street were pointing to Tangier. So that's where we ended up. We quickly bought tickets for a bus that was actually going to Fes and boarded it for a 7 and a half hour ride.

Posted from Edinburgh

Susan with her pure dead brilliant boarding card

Surprisingly nice Tangier

Sign in Asilah - yes you can go through here with your crazy donkey-led cart!

Some beautiful Moroccan country-side - something we didn't expect from the country

Someone's washing hanging in the empty building

Living illegally in the box room of life

Wow. So much has happened recently and I’d almost forgotten to keep you all in the loop! The festive season came and went with its German Christmas markets, frosty weather and Christmas cheer and all we’re left with now is the frosty weather. I’m still most definitely loving the Edinburgh and am certainly glad to be missing out on the over 40-degree days in Adelaide at the moment. Good luck at the Big Day Out guys! 43 degrees is going to be a killer...


Susan, my lovely Waarnamboolian flatmate, got us free VIP tickets through her job at the city council to see the Christmas lights get turned on in the city, along with the opening of the Winter Wonderland, German Christmas markets and a whole bunch of show rides. We got to stand right by the ice-skating rink and watch silver Olympians and the under-14 squad doing their rounds on the ice, showing us what we probably shouldn’t try at home! Unfortunately the CD was skipping for the entire evening, leaving the skaters a bit lost with their routines. Oops!


Paul arrived in Edinburgh a few days before Christmas and we got to hang out a bit which was lovely, and then Saskia, my NZer friend I met in my first days in Edinburgh, came back up from London for the occasion. I made rum balls from mum’s recipe and spread the Christmas cheer by sending some to Rory’s family in Fife and giving some to my work mates. Susan, Paul and I, along with Magali (one of my workmates from NZ) made meringues for pavlova in my work kitchen – for future reference, if you try to beat eggs for a meringue by hand it takes 1 ½ hours! It turned out well though and come Christmas Day we all had a few gifts under the tree thanks to lovely packages from home and we put on a very successful lunch of lamb, turkey and vegetables followed by pavlova, rum balls and mulled wine! Susan was loving it dressed as Ms Claus :) Boxing Day was possibly the best any of us had ever had – an early afternoon spin on the show rides (during which I received a phone call from my old friend Kevin from Ghana! What a lovely surprise!), followed by lunch at Wetherspoon’s (cheap chain throughout the UK) and a viewing of the movie Australia in which we giggled throughout, and then a walk up to the top of Calton Hill to see the unfinished replica of the Acropolis and a fine view of the city by night.


On the 29th we had another fantastic day. Paul and I finally made the trek to the top of Arthur’s Seat, a lovely peak which right near the city centre. From my flat to the top it only took us about 45mins! Perfect day for it as well. That evening was the Torchlight Procession – a night when thousands of people take to the streets with flaming torches, marching to the top of Calton Hill to light a Viking ship on fire. This marks the start of Hogmanay! Rory came back down from Fife for this night and we all had an absolute ball. The fireworks at the end were some of the best I’ve ever seen as well!


New Year’s Eve itself was also a fun night! Susan, in her powers as council member, had scored us free tickets, not only to the street party, but also Ceilidh in the Gardens where we got to dance the Scottish jig along with a few other numbers. Susan had a few Aussie friends up from London staying with us so we had a nice little posse. Carrying around my 2L plastic bottle of Strongbow cider, I was quite the classy sight! We rang in the new year standing on Princes St, staring up the at fireworks as they lit up the city sky.


From the 4th to the 6th of January, Paul and I hired a car and went for a road trip up to the north of Scotland. It was just absolutely incredible... We visited St Andrews to see the ruins of a castle and cathedral, then drove across to Inveraray to see the place our cousin Adam and his wife Eva spent 2 years on their working holiday visa and were extremely kindly offered a free room in the hotel they worked at! The next morning we headed up further north through Inverness to Ullapool (seeing Loch Ness along the way!) where we spent the night in the car, and then the next day we drove back to Edinburgh through the amazing highlands, stopping at some cool places along the way. We even got to see a Highland cow!!

More recently, on the Sunday just passed, we held a Robert Burns Night/Australia Day lunch at our flat! Robert Burns Night is on January 25th and this year would have been the 250th birthday of the renowned Scottish poet, the man responsible for Auld Lang Syne. In our infinite wisdom we figured out that this fell at the same time as Australia Day in Australia so we decided it was a great time to do some cross-cultural event-organising! We had about 13 people over at our flat for the traditional Burns Day food of haggis, neeps and tatties (haggis, mashed turnips and mashed potatoes) with Scotch, Irn Bru (the national drink which outsells Coke!) and shortbread I made at work, mixed with Tim Tams, green and yellow facepaint, more Australian flag tattoos than you could poke a stick at and a whole playlist of Australian music! It all went quite well with the 2 cultures seemingly complementing each other perfectly. For the afternoon and night we all headed over to the Ozbar where we enjoyed Coopers, Pizza Shapes, Redskins and numerous shots while we listened to the Hottest 100 that they streamed as it started back at home. Brilliant day was had by all. For Monday the 26th of January here, we went to the Walkabout, the Australian bar chain throughout the UK, which was absolutely heaving with green and gold Wallabies jumpers, thongs, zinc cream, akubras, cork hats, I Heart Adelaide t-shirts, Snakebites (the supposed traditional drink of Australia – half beer, half cider with blackcurrant) and loads of Aussie rock like Last Train Out of Sydney and The Holy Grail. Oh yes we had a blast!


Susan and I have a trip to Morocco planned for mid-February so stay tuned for that ball of excitement :)


Peace x

Ms Claus and the gang at Christmas lunch in our kitchen

Looking over the city from Arthur's Seat

Rors and I at the Torchlight Procession

Susan and Paul wielding torches

Amazing fireworks..

The beautiful drive in northern Scotland

Highland cow!

Inveraray Castle in the morning light

The Australia Day gang

EatinBurgers - my new home!

I arrived into Edinburgh city on the bus from the airport and it immediately felt like home to me. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps it's the multi-culturalism of the place, perhaps it's the big, grey stone buildings that make me feel like I'm actually in Scotland (yay!), perhaps it was because everyone here is so friendly, perhaps because I feel more positive about life here than I have felt for awhile, perhaps because it seems to be so easy to meet people here.. I've mentioned this feeling to almost every Australian I've met here and we all feel pretty much the same! There's something about this city. Initially I planned to only stay here until Christmas and then perhaps move to the south of England to try and find work there, but after being here for a month and still loving the vibe of the place, plus having found an amazing central flat with some incredible flatmates, I've decided to stay on here until February or March until I want to start travelling again. It's incredibly freezing cold here and it's only going to get worse over the next few months, but I'm loving it.


For my first 4 nights here I stayed at a Couchsurfers place about a 30min walk from the city centre. Ferlynn is a very cool Singaporean chick sharing a flat with 3 other CSers - 2 guys and 1 girl, all Spanish. They happened to be hosting a girl from NZ at the same time called Saskia, who has now become a good friend of mine even though she's moved down to London. On our first night in town, Ferlynn took us out to an awesome club called Espionage - 5 floors underground, each with a different style of music playing! We had an excellent time dancing the night away, and I even managed to pick up the Scottish bartender ;) Saskia and I spent almost the entire 3 days together until she took the bus to the south, and we had a brilliant time just looking around the city, going out and meeting people everywhere we went, and finding me a flat.


I looked at 2 flats - 1 is the one I'm now living in, and the other was even more central but it would mean sharing a room with another girl, and it was more expensive! I moved into this one on the Wednesday - not bad for only being in the city 4 days! The room I initially moved into was 220 pounds a month, which is ultra cheap for Edinburgh and especially when you consider the location. At the time there were 2 Spanish girls, 1 Scottish guy, 2 Australian girls and 2 NZer guys living here - crazy amount of people! The 2 NZer guys have now left for home and I've moved into one of their rooms. It's a box room with no window, but it feels like a little private cove to me, it has a ladder leading up to a double bed and it's EVEN cheaper at 170 a month! Now the mix of people in the house, besides me, is 2 Scottish guys, 1 Spanish girl and 2 Australian girls. One of the Aussies is leaving in a week and a Spanish girl is coming back home from India so it's going to be a very even spattering of cultures :)


I've finally just found myself a full-time job after weeks of searching! I now work at Wellington Coffee and Kiliminjaro Coffee for 6pounds an hour making coffee, paninis and soups and I'm loving it! The owner is ultra friendly and everyone I've worked with so far has been great.


So, what has happened in the last month besides all of this? I got to celebrate my first hallowe'en which was absolutely brilliant! Although I didn't dress up (I didn't realise how seriously it was taken here!), the people were out in full-force across the city. There were the Village People, Duffman, man-sized babies, wolves, the entire cast from Wizard of Oz and even Credit Crunch people! I went out for the night with Susan, one of the Aussies in the flat, and we went on a bar crawl just soaking up the party vibe.


I went on a day trip to Glasgow with Susan and Tim, one of the NZer boys. It was a really great day even though I'd had 40mins of sleep the night before haha. Glasgow is pretty cool, though I think the night-life is supposed to be one of the highlights of a trip there and we didn't experience that. We managed to visit the oldest house in Glasgow which was interesting - it was built in 1471! The city has a bad reputation for stabbings though..

I learnt about and tried to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night - a night of fireworks in memory of foiling a plan by a guy that tried to blow up the London parliament in 1605. I don't know why they still celebrate this, but there were fireworks on all over the place - official ones held by the council and random ones being let off by people in the city. Apparently it's celebrated in New Zealand too! That's another thing that I've learnt while I've been here - that NZ celebrates lots of UK holidays that we haven't even heard of in Aus. We worked up the nerve to bare the cold at around 8:30 and walked the 15mins to North Bridge but we'd missed the fireworks! Oh well.


So that's been my last month! You're all welcome to come and visit me in this wonderful city :) I'll probably be a bit slack on the blogging from now until February but I'll keep you in the loop on anything exciting that happens.

Peace and love
x

Saskia, my new NZ friend, dressed in tourists Scottish hat complete with red hair!

My amazing flatmates. From the left - Tim (NZ), Troy (NZ), Amaya (bottom, Spain), Kieran (Perth), me and Susan (Melbourne). Great bunch :)

The view of Arthur's Seat from The Meadows, a lovely green part of the city near my flat

Susan, Tim and I at the oldest house in Glasgow

Me and Rory, Scottish bartender turned mime


Credit Crunch Men

The Village People

Edinburgh Castle, right smack in the city centre!

Typically Scottish?

The Aussie chef and Jesus at a dress-up at my CSers place

The Scott Monument opposite the main shopping street