Four Months in a Nutshell

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So I know for the past four months or so I’ve been incredibly quiet on the blog front, excluding one post I did while delirious with tonsillitis. I’ve set myself a challenge of staying up all night before my secret flight out of the UK, so to keep me going I’ve decided to catch up while I fight off fatigue. My little netbook is currently reporting that it has five hours before it dies, and that’s perfect to get me up to the point where I can check in. Well it’s oddly been an eventful four months without feeling like much has happened.

I got back in December from Ireland and checked into the Art Roch hostel. Late November saw a cold snap across the UK and Ireland, so I returned to Edinburgh covered in snow. It’s the first time I really experienced snow, for a prolonged spell anyway. At first it was pretty awesome. I always thought that winter suited a city like Edinburgh, and under snow it definitely did. Snow is so much better than rain because when snow falls on you it can be wiped off, when it rains you just get soaked. But after a while when the snow turns to slush it becomes pretty annoying to have to trudge through it and when it’s been compressed it’s almost impossible. Though it can be quite amusing to watch people slipping and sliding around the city. So I came back to Edinburgh, and started seeing Jen as well as making a few new friends at the hostel. It was here that a few people put me in touch with an agency that offered temp work in hospitality. So I did that for a little while, doing a few shifts here and there before I got knocked down by tonsillitis. It left me bed ridden for two weeks and I missed Christmas. I at least recovered enough to be able to enjoy New Year’s, and Jen was lovely enough to give me the key to the roof top terrace from her flat building. So I rounded up people from the hostel and brought them all up and drank and watched the fireworks right underneath the castle.
Fast forward a few weeks and I was no longer getting any shifts from the agency, I fulfilled one of my dreams and went to watch Manchester United beat Liverpool at Old Trafford, Jen and I took a trip to Tallinn (Estonia), we’d gotten incredibly cheap return tickets for 28 pounds each and the snow stopped. In fact after we got back from Tallinn all the snow had melted and it was a beautiful eight degrees and sunny. With not much money coming in Jen offered to let me stay with her rent free, which I had taken up. From there I decided I would volunteer somewhere, considering that Jen was going back to her nursing course and having to do placement and the fact that it wasn’t too long before I left for a six week adventure. So by the end of January I started volunteering at the British Heart Foundation, in the furniture and electrical shop. I basically moved furniture around all day, so it was good to help me get a little fit and build up some strength after being sick for quite a while.

I also started cooking quite a lot, basically because in exchange for rent I was buying the groceries (well, at least most of it). So I started making stews and curries, and of course my famous marinated pork chops. And also because we had no internet we lacked a bit of entertainment, so turned to frequent visits to Blockbuster to grab movies.

Thanks to Jen, I’d also taken to exploring around Edinburgh a little more. We’d wandered out to the Pentlands, a group of mountains on the outskirts of Edinburgh where you can get a clear view of the city. Unfortunately the day we went it was pretty atrocious weather and a fog rolled in and blanketed the city. We visited a little town called Ratho, where the canals that wander through the UK run through. There’s a great little pub there that serves awesome food. There’s also an action and sports center, where you can do indoor rock climbing and something called aerial assault. Aerial assault is basically a course where you can run and zipline around the ceiling all at about forty metres off the ground. We didn’t try it out, basically because we didn’t wear appropriate clothes on account of not knowing the place existed, but it’s on the list of things to do. We took a day trip to Stirling, famous for the Battle of Stirling where William Wallace defeated the English despite being overwhelmed in numbers. And also to a small town in the shadows of Arthur’s Seat called Duddingston which had been founded in the 12th Century and has kept some of its culture. There’s also a pub called the Sheep Heid, where there is a skittle alley that dates back to 1903. It’s a great little place to have some beers and play some skittles in the back, but also quite a cosy little place in its own right. The downside is that its popularity means that the drinks are quite expensive, but it is definitely worth a visit.

I also lost a friend that I shared a dorm with in the hostel. Andy was one of the first friends I made there, and he tragically died late January in a fire. See Andy unfortunately wasn’t getting much work at all, and couldn’t afford to pay the hostel at all. He did a pretty bad thing at the turn of the year, coming in and telling everyone his father had passed away. He naturally got a lot of sympathy from everyone, and leniency from the managers at the hostel. He eventually left for the funeral in London sometime after I moved in with Jen and his phone became disconnected so there was no way for anyone to contact him. It led to his sister calling the hostel to try and get in touch with him, and as it turns out this is when we found out that he lied about his father dying. Before he disappeared he also borrowed a fair bit cash from one of the other guys at the hostel. So needless to say he lost a lot of friends and support from everyone around. And though I don’t condone what he had done, I’ve never been in a position where I’ve nowhere to live and no money, so I can understand it as an act of desperation and not of malice but he obviously burned a few people by doing what he did. It turns out that he moved to a protest camp site in Edinburgh, where people are staying for free. It was here that he died when his hut caught fire. I didn’t really know Andy all that long, but it wasn’t hard to tell he was a pretty nice guy and I could have seen us becoming pretty good friends. It’s pretty cruel that his circumstance led to his untimely death.

So that’s four months in a nutshell. There will be a few more blogs that will elaborate on my experiences of Tallinn and going to see Manchester United. They’ll all probably come out at the same time thinking about it. It’s just turned 3am and I still have six hours before my flight and my netbook battery is saying I’ve got four hours and twenty minutes left. But for now I’m getting hungry so I’m off to try and find a vending machine.

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