May 24th 2005 Bayswater, London, England. I first visited Buckingham Palace about a month ago and apparently forgot to write about it. I haven't seen the famous Changing of the Guards yet, but the infrastructure and monuments and so forth are duly impressive in their own right, and worth a quick description: The outer grounds of Buckingham Palace are defined alternately with high ornamental black metal gates and squat stone fencing. There are four wide, many-laned roads coming through the gates to circle around a large roundabout located centrally in front of the palace. At the break [View Full Entry]

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May 21st 2005 Bayswater, London, England. Today I was up at the crack of dawn and off on a £15 bus tour to see Stonehenge and the nearby town of Salisbury. The bus was pretty awful, with very tiny seats and no legroom. People who know me are cognizant of the fact that I'm not anywhere near approaching tall, yet even I couldn’t fit my legs into the space between my seat and the one in front. It was also booked out, so there was no room to be had with an empty seat to the side, either. But, hey, you [View Full Entry]

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May 16th 2005 Bayswater, London, England. Well, holy shit. I literally almost died this morning. My hands are still shaking. Some idiot, who was driving illegally without a license, almost hit me, almost squished me between his car and a parked vehicle. I mean, sandwiched on a dance floor between two guys is one thing, but between fast-moving metal is another entirely. No fun factor there, not for me. I had just been to my first job interview since hitting London (finally stopped procrastinating), for a receptionist position in a high-end hotel in the Euston area. The accident occurr [View Full Entry]

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May 14th 2005 Bayswater, London, England. After such a good start on the job front one might expect my next journal to contain some hint of prospective employment. Nup. I have spent the last week watching tv and dvd's, ambling about London, and spending entire days on various seemingly small tasks like going in to Trafalgar to pick up my mail, researching a bit on Newquay (I'm thinking of going there for the job hunt), paging through endless/useless job guides, and surfing the net. London is just so big. I do not know where to start - should I get an [View Full Entry]

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Cyberspace. No specific time. Well, I usually hate placing pictures without text to flesh them out, but with Edinburgh there are just so many photos and so few entries to fit them all into. As it is there are crowds of photos at the end of most blogs, which really annoys me. So bugger it, here we go, some last-minute additions to my sharing of Edniburgh with you: PICTURE 1 I actually saw many men, more that I had expected, in kilts during my time here. I had thought that they were mostly ceremonial these days but apparently some men prefer [View Full Entry]

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May 5th 2005 Glasgow, Scotland. Well, yesterday was certainly a full one. After the day trip to Loch Ness, which returned around 7:30pm, I had some dinner, wrote down some core basics of my day on the internet (most of these blogs are written in full only days later), and then took off to attempt, yet again, to do the ghost tour of Edinburgh's underground vaults. I had tried to do this tour before but they do not run it unless there are four or more people and you can’t book ahead. And luck be a lady, but I turned up, [View Full Entry]

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May 4th 2005 Edinburgh, Scotland. With time running out I finally organised to do a more extensive tour of Scotland and so was up and off at 7:30am to join today's "Monsters, Mountains and Massacres" tour up to Loch Ness with the Highland Experience company. There were only six of us in the mini-tour bus, plus the guide-cum-driver, so it was a very comfortable drive, with a bench-seat all to myself and easy access to the windows on either side. Our itinerary was to head for Loch Ness via the northern routes through Pitlochry and Dalwhinne, rather than going the eastern [View Full Entry]

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3rd May 2005 Edinburgh, Scotland. Well, it only took me a full week to get around to it, but finally I stopped in my pleasurably aimless explorations for long enough to do the fairly simple act of exploring the Royal Mile from beginning to end without being sidetracked away into other pursuits. Well, mostly stuck to it, anyway. The Royal Mile was the main or 'high' street of Medieval Edinburgh until the late 1700's, when, for many reasons but mainly due to a lack of room in the city's walls, the New Town was built just outside it and then so [View Full Entry]

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May 1st 2005 Edinburgh, Scotland. Last night Clorinde and I went to the annual Beltane Fire Festival up on Carlton Hill. Beltane, for those not in the know, is actually an ancient festival which has been resurrected here in recent years, and traditionally it's purpose was to mark the arrival of summer and celebrate life and fertility. You can find out more on it by following this link for Edinburgh-specific Beltane: http://www.edinburghguide.com/feats/beltaneritual.htm or this for the ancient aspects: http://www.witchvox.com/holidays/dt_holidays.html?a=usma&c=holidays&id=2765 S [View Full Entry]

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April 30th 2005 Edinburgh, Scotland. It's been a few days since last I updated and things are a bit hazy, but I'll do my best. I soon met a lovely French woman, Clorinde (pronounced Cloh-rrr-andhe, kind of), and an older American woman, Rosemary, with a lot of spunk. We went out drinking and nightclubbing....two days ago? and accidentally stumbled upon an underground hardcore rock club - which I may well revisit - before going on to the more traditional pubs and clubs. I have discovered the Screaming Orgasm (which is really fun to order at the top of your lungs in [View Full Entry]

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