touring scotland

Hillwalking

We did some hillwalking a couple of days ago. It was fascinating, 4 Munros (a hill must be higher than 3000 ft to be called a Munro), lots of water, fog, sun, birds, hares (big rabbits), wet shoes, stunning scenery, wind,....

Went all the way up...

..and further and it was wet and foggy..

...saw a hare (amazingly close)...

...and loads of deer..

..saw even snow up there..

...and finally reached the top (just to go down again and climb the next one)....

..where I fell asleep..

..and then we took stupid pics..

	..and even more pics to show that we can climb all those thinggys after a few hours of sleep and a good night out...

..and all that just to go all the way down again..

	..but the view was stunning and breathtaking

... and it was really worth it. 8 hours later we returned to the bus: exhausted, wet and dirty but really happy and inspired (and miraculously enough tanned, wherever the sun came from).

St. Andrews

Went for two days to St. Andrews, the capital of Golf and a royal place to study. Since I started to play Golf up here, I also had to play Golf in St. Andrews. Alright, we didn't play on the "Old Course", the Mecca among the golflinks, where it costs 110£ for a game and the earliest time available is in October. Se we went for the cheaper version, Putting. We tried hard and had a tough match, but the decision came on hole 16. A narrow miss from leading Ida and a fabulous hole-in-one fro myself saved the win and a coffee. Additonally I played virtuell golf , quite weird, haven't even seen one of these gadgets in Japan, and they've got every imagineable machine over there... What else did we there? We crouched trough the tunnels under the castle, which were built when the castle was under siege a couple of hundreds year ago. . Went to the remains of the cathredral and up an old tower and saw the whole city...


The day after we went to the beach and had a good varied walk along the coast with its stunning scenery and over golf links. It must be gorgeous to play golf right next to the see and watch the birds flying around while hitting the balls..

Eastertrip

Went by car around Scotland for a weekend. Good trip, but we should have booked accommodation in advance. But then we hadn't had the chance to do B(us) & B(reakfast).

Pics - Eastertrip

VIDEO Easter

Shetland - Orkney - Trip

Tried to put the some of the best pics online. I outsourced these and some more on my old page where I can easily upload by ftp. Links are below and also on the left. (Connection could be slow.. But if anyone has a good and cheap idea where I can upload my pics just tell me.)

Pics - Shetland - Orkney - People

Pics - Shetland - Orkney - Rest

The story of the trip
Once upon a time lots of

(Rina, Gerrie, Karen, Felix, Janneke, Wilco (sitting), Elisabeth, Marie, Anna and Linda)

[people] , 9 grown-up and 31 nice
went up to the Shetland Islands and the Orkney Islands.


Up there is nothing except some people, millions of , lots of , even more ,some (which lie around on the beaches) and even some . It was always [windy] and three days of sunshine and two days of rain.
But the countryside itself is amazing. Blue like in the Caribbean, green [hills](ups, wrong pic... anyway, its nice) like in Ireland, [fjords] like in Norway, [sunsets] like in Egypt (only nearly, its warmer over there), lots of old [remains/settlements/stones/buildings] of the neolithic age (5000 years ago) and even more seemingly useless [stones/pillares/stonehenge-thinggies] which just seem to stand around in the middle of nowhere. Additional to that there are some recent (ca 500 years) buildings like this [church] which seem to be build with whatever was lying around.



So, the whole bunch of us went around by [bus] and played the tourist-style "off the bus - go out - take pictures - get wet - run back - hop on the bus - game" quite often. We saw animals, country side and the sea pretty much all the time. But we also went to a , to an old [castle], visited Britian's northernmost saw more [Stones] (Old man of Hoy), went to a [Military museum] (Scapa Flow Museum), saw the [airport] (where normal traffic has to stop if planes are starting and landing, otherwise they would simply crash into each other) and had long [walks] and more long [walks] around the islands where we had to climb over [fences] and others walked on their own ways.


Another important activity was taking crazy pics on lots of diff places

or just some group pics

Even playing did not came short, let it be the boy's way or the girl's way .

Our friend Mr Funny also joined for the trip and saw the whole island from various perspectives.

After one hilarious, amazing,.... week and a rough trip (the ship seemed to dance on the waves and half the ship got seesick) on the ferry back to (Aberdeen) all of us came back home, beeing exhausted but happy.




The (happy) End

Edinburgh

Went for one day to a really cool conference in Edinburgh. The trip to there was really nice, although we started at 6:30.

The winners of the Scottish Business Plan Competition. But are there any real Scots in there?

Dublin

Instead of learning for my exams we went to Dublin for 3 days. Flew there on tuesday and came back on friday. Dublin is actually the only connection Ryanair serves from Aberdeen. Anyway the flights were cheap (£0,01 each, but the taxes added it up to a total of £ 37 ) and also the accomodation was really cheap (10 € p/n). Altogether it was much nicer than sitting in my 7 sqm and learn. It was really worth it going there.

The highlands from above, cloudy as always....

..but it was beautiful in Ireland.

There is actally not that much special to see in Dublin. But this Millenium Spire is quite interesting and they finally managed to erect it in 2002.

Another thing are the construction sites all over the place. When I was here in 2000 they were building all over the place. But it is even worse now, the city still seems to be a big construction site. Besides that a lots of buildings are co-funded by the European Union. They must have spent billions in here, but it looks like as if the money is well spent and they will catch up. The Irish therefore will not benefit from the events following the 1.5.

Why did I take this pic?

Posing around

It was really nice weather on thursday and we found a place to take some nice pics...

...Konrad and me...

..and finally tried to be on the chair altogether. It would have been nice to try how many people would fit on this chair... I would say at least 10.

Oscar Wilde and us....

And there's one thing I forgot. We are in Dublin where the famous Guiness comes from. So therefore we visited their Brewery and paid a whopping 9 € to get into which includes one beer. Compared to the other prices it was not that bad, because a Guiness costs around 5 € in the Pubs in Dublin's Temple Bar...

..which is even worse than here in Scotland (3 € to 4,50 €) Cheers!!

Edinburgh

We went with the International Society at the beginning of December to Edinburgh. It was a nice 2 day trip and we had wonderful weather and a good time.

Monument Hill They somehow put a lot of unfinished monuments up there. A quarter of an Akropolis style building, a obelisc and a couple of towers.

The "Gothic Rocket" and a ferris wheel on the christmas fair

A chuch (forgot which) and a statue (also forgot who that is)

A typical house in Edinburgh. In the old times, the poor lived in the ground floor. The rich in the first 2-3 floors and all the poorer in the remaining floors

The amazing castle. It is on top of one hill and is quite nice and very expensive (12€). But anyway, the view from up there is beautiful and the castle itself very interesting

You only see this guys around tourist places. Anyway, I like the sound of bagpipes since I've been to the Tatoo in 2001.

This were the only red telephone boxes I saw since I came here. There are on the Royal "Tourist" Mile and everybody takes a picture of these, because they are so typically British.

We had a nice mulled wine at the "German Weihnachstmarkt", but payed 3€ for one. Quite expensive and only lukewarm

Tourists...........

Dublin - live

Sitting in an Internetcafe in Dublin. It's raining and totally cloudy. But we did not expect anything else anyway. But surprisingly we had some sun yesterday and that was really amazing. nice, expensive city.
It's only 4 days to the exams, but cruising around in Dublin is nicer than sitting in Aberdeen and learn , isn't it....

London

I was in with Annika for a couple of days in London. Great city but it was raining all the time. Anyway, I did not expect something else, because we went to England.... We went there by bus, which was cheap (special offer £10 return) but it took us 14 hours nighbus to London. The next night we spent at my relatives, one night on the Stansted airport and another night on the bus to Aberdeen. On the return trip, I fell asleep 20 min after Victoria and woke up in Aberdeen. It was a perfect night, but I didn't sleep the night before.
Due to the rain we didn't saw that much. But went at least to St. James Park, St. Pauls Cathedral, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Harrods, Oxford Street, Madame Tussauds (but did not go in, was £18 arg..), Picadilly, ..... Was a good time and luckily we went there after Bush. Otherwise we would not have seen a lot, half the city wasthe days before blocked.

These are my relatives where we slept at

I met Matt (right) in St. Petersburg and we met up with Matt and some of his workmates in London. By the way, we had nice falafels (Doener auf Libanesisch mit Kichererbsen) somewhere in Soho. Just £3,50, but could have been worse. However, they are one of my favourite meals since I ate around five each day during my time in Egypt. But I paid less than 20 p there.

Anti-Bush-Marches

We went there the day after they had the big march where they toppled a statue of Bush

Protesters pull down an effigy of US President George W Bush in Trafalgar Square, London. (Reuters)

St. Pauls Cathedral

	Modern Tate (old powerstation) on the right, Shakespeare's globe next to it.
	The new building in the middle which looks like a .... is called Gherkin (Gurke) and was designed by Sir Norman Foster, that chap who also did the Reichstagskuppel. I kinda like his design, the roof in the British Museum is also amazing.

Big Ben & CCTV

Big Ben on the left. CCTV on the right and all over London. Those cameras are all over the place, we even got them everywhere in Aberdeen, also in the Buses. Most places in London are covered and I think there are just a few places where you can go uncovered. Big Brother is watching you.

U.S. of Buckingham

The pavilon for Dubya in front of Buckingham Palace

Raining

I'm in London and it is raining allday since 2 days. I want to have Scottish weather, it didn't rain that much up there in eight weeks as here in two...
So I can't stroll around, use my digicam and enjoy the city itself...
So what to do? I still don't know in which museum I will go, V&A Museum, the Imperial War Museum and the Science Museum are my favourites. Saw the Tates, the British and the National Galleries last time.
Just looked it up, I think I will go to the Science Museum and check the Lord of the Ring show.

On tour I

	Thats me between some trees! We went to a nice hilltop, but it took us ages.
	On the top. Looks like the prairie in the states.
	Loch Katerine

Braveheart

We did one of these cheesy tourist trips, following the traces of William Wallace and Robert de Bruce trip the whole day.
After a two hour trip we arrived at the William Wallace Monument aka (also known as) Mel Gibson. There was even a William Wallace statue, which looked like Mel Gibson.

After that we went to the Stirling Castle in Stirling, a highly cultural place, which is mainly connected to Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scots.
Some famous lady, but I never know why she was so important. Bus she must have been dangerous, because her husbands never lived long.
The first died quite fast after just two years of marriage (Mary was 17 then). She killed the second one, because he has killed her lover. The third on got also killed (but this time not by her) because he was a Protestant (and not a Catholic). And then somwhow Mary had to flee to London and was put into the London Tower, where she got killed 20 years later. What a tragedy...

Anyhow, that castle was boring and it was raining again (what a surprise). Then we went to a beautiful cemetry where I have already been a 3 years ago. At that time I went there with a local student in the middle of the night, which was quite frightening, but very exciting.

Finally we went to the Battlefield of Bannockburn, one of the most famous place for the Scots, because after that victory they had 400 years of independence. That war was won by Robert de Bruce (also known from the movie) with the tactics invented by William Wallace (you remember the scene in the movie).

Thats the place where Scots are really proud of and where they got their national prid from.

All in all that trip was quite nice, mainly because I know much more about Scottish history now...