Six Nations Rugby and Queuing

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Hello everyone,

Meant to write this up sooner but I've been a little distracted with things over here as it is the end of the semester. On that front things are going fairly well and everything is just starting to get wrapped up; 2 weeks left of classes and then all that's left is the dissertation.

Last weekend a group of us (I think there were around 12 of us) went over to Edinburgh to see the Six Nations Rugby match of Scotland vs Italy. The Six Nations is a yearly tournament between England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France and Italy. The match itself was entertaining and I'm told (it was my first rugby match so it's hard to judge) was good if a little dirty. I was a little confused throughout the game but I think I started to catch on the end of it. I also have to say rugby is quite the rough sport and I was cringing at some of the hits.

We arrived in Edinburgh early to have lunch and wander around for a bit first. Luckily a few people had lived in Edinburgh before so we had some natural tour guides. The city was nice and very fancy (it had a castle) but I got a Victoria-ish vibe from it; nice to visit but a bit boring to live in if you know what I mean. I enjoyed the city and definitely plan on going back to do a proper visit at some point, especially since it's only a 40 minute train ride away. I also saw, for those interested, the birth place of Harry Potter; it was a small coffee shop beside the place we had lunch (a Frankenstein themed pub) and the Harry Potter angle was prominently advertised in the window.

One thing none of us really expected was all the queuing (that's standing in line for the uninitiated) we'd have to do. The wait for the train to Edinburgh, and for one back, was about 45 minutes, which wouldn't be so bad if it didn't mean that there were so many people on the train that I had to stand for the entire trip both ways. Other people in our group managed to grab seats but it got a bit cut-throat there when there were only a few seats left for such a large group. The stadium also had a huge line since they decided that everyone with student tickets, which was probably half the people there, had to go through certain gates so that they could show their student IDs, which is apparently impossible at other gates. Anyways we missed the first 10 minutes or so because of this but no goals (if that's what you call them) so no worries.

One final note. I was quite impressed with our ability to not lose anyone, for an extended period of time, over the course of the day as we often got split up, few of us knew where we were going, and we had to negotiate huge crowds. I think we did as good as possible short of using the buddy system and a checklist.

Photos aren't the best quality since I stole them from a friends Facebook but it's the best I've got since I didn't want to bring my camera with me.

Cheers,
Nate

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Photos

Booooo!
Something exciting is happening but I have no idea what. People seem angry though!

Italians
The Italians, in blue, having a little get together between play.

No idea someone was taking a photo
My attention is rapt and I obviously have no clue that there are people with cameras around. That's Hanah (German) and Laura (Spanish) beside me. Apparently everyone who was clueless about rugby managed to sit together so we could wallow in our combined ignorance