Glasgow/Dublin

We left Glasgow yesterday morning, after a couple of days exploring the city. It was nice to have a look around, but there wasn't anything of great 'tourist' value there, although we did look through the 'Glasgow Necropolis' - which was essentially an old and elaborate cemetary and gardens perched on a hill overlooking the city. It was different, but something interesting to have a look at - as well as providing some good views.






Glasgow









Glasgow Necropolis (and views from..)


Upon waking up and checking out, we quickly caught a train to Stranraer, which is right on the coast of Scotland, in order to catch a ferry to Ireland. I had visions of a small ferry, with maybe some sort of open deck, but this thing was huge. Owned & operated by a company called Stena Line that I had previously (and in retrospect arguably ignorantly) never even knew existed - the ferry was part of the worlds biggest/best ferries, and inside was reminiscent of a shopping centre/restaurant/cruise ship. In short, the ferry was nice inside, and a pleasant way for us to spend the two hours between Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Upon arrival at Northern Ireland, we were greeted by an empty carpark - and were informed by a bus driver that there was no such busses between the port and Belfast Central - a fact later confirmed by the administration at the port. The same administration who advised us that the earlier bus driver was driving the bus that was meant to take us to Belfast Central - and had somehow left/failed to tell us that HIS bus would take us there... Slightly annoyed, we caught a taxi to Belfast Central, which only ended up being about £9, so between the four of us it worked out alright. We also got some sort of amusement out of The Corrs being the first song we heard on Irish radio.

Once at Belfast Central, we were quickly onto getting a ticket through to Dublin, as with the delays caused by a lack of bus - we had only 15 minutes to buy tickets and get onto the train. This ended up being no hassle whatsoever, and we disembarked from Belfast and Northern Ireland, and headed south. After seeing the stock-standard (for here, at least) rolling hills, valleys and lucious green fields, we arrived into Dublin at about 8:15pm last night, with a suprising spring in our step, despite the lengthy amount of travel we had endured throughout the day.

We're currently in the extremely attractive and pleasant city of Dublin. Upon arrival here and walking through the major shopping precints, such as Temple Bar and O'Connell Street, all of us agreed that Dublin is one of the better (if not the best) looking cities we've been to. At night time the city is still 'bustling', and the vibe around the place is incredibly pleasant - even as it gets on through the night. Talented buskers are a plenty, as are people engaged in a variety of sociable activities, entering in and out of the cities many charming pubs, sharing a good time with friends and the like.





Dublin

The city itself is divided by the Liffey River, and with everything lit up throughout the night, it really is a sight to behold as it is incredibly 'pretty' and all works together nicely.



Liffey River


The room we have here is incredibly basic, it's essentially bunk beds and... a small bathroom. Nothing else whatsoever, but all we really need is somewhere to shower and sleep, so there's not much to complain about - although everything here is incredibly expensive. I'm not sure if it's just the exchange rate between the Euro and the Australian dollar, or Dublin in general, but everything is at least 25% more expensive here than LONDON, and considerably moreso than Scotland (which was the cheapest of the places we have been to so far).

Anyway, after we checked into our room, we made our way around Dublin, which as I said earlier is an incredibly attractive city - and accidentally, but luckily, walked ourselves right in the middle of the Temple Bar district - which is just an exciting and interesting few streets full of buskers, restaurants and pubs and clubs. There isn't many landmarks here persay, we've just been walking around taking in the atmophere of the city, as well as looking at a few places, such as Trinity College (this really old, fancy college) and Dublin Castle.



Trinity College



Dublin Castle


We have another couple of days here, and then we're planning to head south through Kilkenny and/or Cork, and then back to the UK before our tour.

Also off to the Guiness Brewery tomorrow hopefully... and Im sure you're all wonderfully jealous.

Hope everything is fine back home,

Mark

Glasgow

So we're in Glasgow at the moment, and leave here tomorrow. I can't write much as I'm doing this from my phone and it's a hassle to do so... Glasgow is nothing special, as expected, just a modern industrial city. It's nothing glamorous, but nothing worse than many places in Perth. Edinburgh was considerably nicer, though. We're going to Dublin tomorrow in a bit of a long one day trek, as we opted to save time and money by doing it all in one go, instead of staying a night in Belfast. We have to change mode of transport about four times, including a ferry between Scotland and Ireland so hopefully it all goes smoothly.

Edinburgh

The whole process of getting from London to Edinburgh went pretty smoothly, with our pre-booked tickets and accommodation all being recognised and going through, so we got into a cold Edinburgh Station around 9pm on Saturday night. It’s still light here until 10pm or so, so there were no real troubles in finding the accommodation which ended up only being a five minute walk away anyway.

The accommodation here is a few pounds a night each cheaper than London – (in the low 40’s a night, Australian, as opposed to high 40’s), so it’s helped our finances a bit. The general food prices around here a lot cheaper also, so we’ve done pretty well in Scotland. Glasgow looks to be even cheaper still although, with cheaper prices, there is a bit of a drop in the surrounding area/social demographic and so on.

Edinburgh is a lot smaller than I thought it would be – there’s just under 500,000 people that live here, and the city reminds me a bit of Perth in the way the streets and whatnot are laid out… it’s kind of hard to explain.

Anyway, Claire and myself explored a bit of Edinburgh while Ben and Sarah relaxed in the hostel, which wasn’t as promising as hoped because, unlike London, everything isn’t open to all hours of the night (like Perth), so we settled for a burger/chips type place for dinner and made our way back to the hostel. It’s cool here, not overly cold as such, but definitely jumper worthy – especially if you choose to wear shorts which I made the mistake of doing on our first night out here.

After a bit of minor exploration and a ‘scoping out’ of the sights nearby, we headed back to the hostel and slept as well as we could with hundreds of loud drinking people in the downstairs bars.

We slept in a bit the next day, unawares as to the time, so felt we better get a move on in exploring the city. Heading up what is known as the ‘Royal Mile’ – essentially the main ‘tourist’ drag, we had a bit of a gander at the many street performers (including an amusing American magician Todd Various) and various stalls and whatnot, before ending up at Edinburgh Castle. We also sampled the infamous local dish Haggis – which we all came to the conclusion tastes like chicken stuffing.



Outside Edinburgh Castle










Edinburgh


There's a crazy amount of cool stores in the U.K. & so so many tshirts and sneakers and jeans etc I want to buy. Luckily my suitcase is pretty full and I can't bring myself to throw out any of my clothes, so I've saved a bit of money due to my distinct lack of room to spare. CD's are also incredibly cheap here... the new Sigur Ros album (amongst many other new releases) are all of £7 ($15AUD) - and I'm sure it would be close to double that in Perth. We found a cool store called Avalanche records which had a nice collection of stuff I couldn't find in Australia... but seeing I have no discman or stereo here, there was really no point in me buying CD's that I can't listen to.



Avalanche Records


After seeing the Castle and the local shops, we decided to go on a tour of Real Mary King's Close, a sort of 'underground (but not)' series of streets and buildings. It was okay, and I managed to ruin the group photo for everyone else ahaha. So incredibly smug as I emerged and saw the group photo - even more so when I was told off for taking a photo of the 'preview' photo that they expected us to pay £6 for. Owned.



We were making our way back to the hostel afterwards, when after a bit of thought we decided to keep exploring for the day. In an arguably stupid move, we thought we would attempt to conquer the hill which towers over Edinburgh, which is known as Arthur's Seat. Ben and myself rated our fitness pretty highly, so decided to take a shorter (and considerably more steep) route up the first section of the hill, which was much more of a struggle than originally planned. Despite a bit of an arduous trek up, the views up the top were well worth it, and we were all glad that we braved the freezing wind to get up there.











Arthur's Seat


After walking through Hollyrood Road, past Scottish Parliament and so on, we made our way into the hostel, and decided to head out for dinner to the cafe downstairs which was incredibly disappointing (gross, overpriced). We ended up getting a few drinks and just relaxed for the night in our room.

Having explored an insane amount of the smallish Edinburgh the day before, today we did a lot of stuff that we had put off for a while - namely washing clothes and organising accomodation for Glasgow. We almost booked a flight to Dublin, which was fine (and cheap), if not for the 15kg baggage limit and £12/kilo excess baggage charges. Ben and myself may have juuuust scraped in under that, but the girls would be pushing 20kg's of baggage, so had we booked the tickets they would have been stung nearly £60 each. After looking at various other modes/routes of transport, we established that going to Glasgow would be a better, albeit longer way to make our way further south.

After getting all of this sorted, we experienced another 'Amazing Moment' on tour - by eating at an Edinburgh burger chain known as Wannaburger. So amazingly awesome. Best burger of my life.

We're just chilling before going out to dinner tonight... and then onto Glasgow tomorrow. Yeow.

London 4.0

Sometimes this whole Europe thing seems a bit unreal, and I kind of have to pinch myself. Walking out of Wembley Arena the other night after a sold-out Def Leppard concert was one of those moments.

Despite it being sold out, Sarah and myself chanced our luck, and headed to Wembley Arena on Thursday night, and looked to buy some tickets off one of the kind folk (read: scalpers), outside the stadium. One guy was selling them for £70 a piece, but I got him down to £50 each, which I was happy to pay considering cost price was £43 anyway... His wife was Australian, and he spoke to us about going to Australia, so I'm not sure if that helped my cause....

Once we got into the stadium, it's a pretty amazing sight - think Burswood, but 1000 times more extravagant, and the atmosphere is electric. A weird thing I noticed here, and elsewhere around the UK, is their really relaxed attitude towards drinking. You can pretty much drink ANYWHERE in public - in fact, only this month was drinking banned on public transport. You can be walking through the streets, and someone will be holding a pint glass from the pub 30 metres down and across the road. There's also considerably less drunken hooligans - everyone is so well behaved and friendly and it's an awesome atmosphere.

Anyway, Def Leppard and supporting band Whitesnake were absolutely amazing, and I don't think a concert in Australia could ever come close. The place was packed, and the atmosphere insane.









Def Leppard @ Wembley Arena



Yesterday we went exploring around London a bit more, and went to Trafalgar Square. Unfortunately, they had some 'Veteran's Day' event on, so a lot of the Square was fenced off - but we got in the obligatory photos anyway.







Trafalgar Square



We wandered down to the Thames again, and this time saw the Tower of London, and Trinity Square, the latter of which is pretty spectacular - all the buildings around here are so nicely built.





Trinity Square




Tower Of London



With half a day still to kill, we headed over to South Kensington and went to the Natural History Museum which was once again, an amazing building in itself. After exploring a variety of exhibits which mainly consisted of stuffed animals and dinosaur skeletons, we headed off back to the hostel.









Natural History Museum



Last night we had a couple of drinks back here, and I dared to buy some Fosters ahah, which wasn't as bad as expected. I found it amusing that my first real encounter with Fosters was in London...

We've booked a 2:30pm train to Edinburgh, which we got for about half price because it's at night (we arrive at nearly 10pm). We've also have booked in a hostel there for another three nights.

Not much to do until our train leaves.. so we have a couple of hours here before we leave.

Mark

London 3.0

So I'm really starting to get into the whole London swing of things, as everything here just seems and IS so interesting. I've taken an extreme liking to Oxford Street, which is just this huge street that has an insane amount of shops and food outlets - mainly of the clothing variety. I guess the Perth equivalent is Murray Street Mall, but there's really no comparison.

One shop in particular called Urban Outfitters (amongst many others) has an amazing array of sneakers - some Nike sneakers were only £25 pounds, which is crazy considering a similar pair in Australia would be well over $100.

All of us got UK Sim Cards, however Sarah's phone isn't compatible with it... rendering her pretty much uncontactable by phone at the moment. That being said, the four of us are pretty much always together, so it's not so bad. With our phone we got some magic numbers deal where we can call 3 other numbers for like 15p an hour, which worked out pretty convenient for us four.

The Thai Buffet's we have eaten at haven't been that great, so we're making an effort to avoid them from now on - but we're still venturing to the Tesco up the street almost daily for Cheese Twists and OJ.

Every morning the power in our room also seems to cut out, which is a bit of a (major) annoyance, but we've been assured they know about the problem and "someone is looking into it".

Despite that, everything else here has been great - we went to Lords today, which is pretty much THE home of cricket, and got a tour there. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, and we/I managed to sneakily get around the no photos rule which was apparently due to everything being 'copyrighted', but anyway..









Tonight I'm hopefully seeing DEF LEPPARD at Wembley Stadium, which will be amazing, I just have to hope that I can manage to pick up a ticket...

On that note, I'm off.

Mark

London 2.0

So today was a pretty full on day, and we got most of the main touristy things out of the way.

After checking in the other day, we lazed about the hostel for the rest of the night, and ended up eating food from Tesco for dinner. Tesco is kind of like a Coles - except it's open until midnight. They also have an awesome bread/bakery kind of section, and we all seem to have taken a liking to the 'cheese twists' there. They also sell Krispy Kremes.

Everything has been pretty fun so far, and we have invented numerous games including 'camera wars' and 'beddingware wars' - it's like we're on school camp again or something. We had a pretty early night last night - as we were all tired from the flights and stuff - Ben didn't sleep at all on the flight over, so he ended up staying up for 40 hours in a row or something, poor guy.

This morning we woke pretty early - and headed off throughout London. We went to Piccadilly Circus, and looked at a few shops there. There was like a London (ie better) equivalent of Joynt Venture, and a lot of small places to get food.



Piccadilly Circus

We then made our way over to London Bridge via the National Theatre, and Sarah's horrible directions (ha).. and then onto the London Eye, Westminster Abbey and Parliament House.





Some exhibit outside the National Theatre




London Bridge



London Eye

After being entertained by a cool Jamaican busker, we headed over to Green Park and walked over to Buckingham Palace, after which we realised our 'off peak' Tube Passes were set to expire soon, so we made our way back to the hostel.#



Londoners sunbaking in Green Park





Buckingham Palace


Probably going to a Thai Buffet tonight - something like £3.50, or so we've heard. Will have to see how it compares to Ruby Thai.

Internet time is running out now, so I'll expand on this later on...

Cyaaa

Mark

London!

So we've been in London for a few hours now, and finally made our way to the hostel (after a bit of a trek...), and are just killing time in reception until we can check in at 2pm, which is about 2 and a half hours away.

The flight from Singapore to London wasn't as bad as expected - probably because I decided to be the 'selfish person in front' and move my seat back for added leg room. That being said, I still couldn't manage to sleep for more than 20 minutes before waking up.



Leaving Changi, Singapore

The food was okay, we didn't get a choice - it was just fish, which was surprisingly good (plane food ruling so far). Also got Oreos and some other snack type food, as well as apples, which were horrible. I'm assuming they were Australian apples, but for the sake of blaming someone else, I'll place the blame on them being gross foreign apples or something.



Flying over Austria



Hahaha, hardcore mountains, mannnnn




London


Once we arrived in London, Sarah 'zipped' through all the official stuff thanks to her British Passport, while Claire and myself lined up with the rest of the 'plebs'. As a result of my Ancestry Visa I got through the whole process with only a couple of questions, but Claire on her normal holiday visa got questioned in something that resembled American Gangster (Crowe and Washington scene). It wasn't really that intense, I just needed to use a metaphore, and American Gangster is a cool movie.

London's Arrivals section is just full of heaps of men holding up signs for people they're picking up. Some guy had the worst sign ever, and for some reason chose to write it in highlighter. Why?! Stupid English man.

The tube is pretty simple and straightforward to use, despite looking like some sort of weird mess of lines and circles. For some reason the train driver needed to point out that "there is a delay on ___ line, because there is a man under the train". All four of us kind of looked at each other, thinking we had misheard it, but it was repeated later. No idea why they needed to be so specific...



Ben and Claire on the tube..

Since the tube ride, we've made our way to the hostel where, as I mentioned earlier, we can't book in until 2pm. Not sure what we have planned for tonight, but I think everyone is pretty keen on just sleeping.

I'm on the 3G UK 3 phone network at the moment, so I can now recieve calls for free (I think..), and messages and whatnot don't cost too much, so if anyone needs to get in contact with me via mobile on my old number, then you can now do so. Still haven't got a UK number yet..

Hope everyone is okay in Perth.


Mark