Bug Unit

*gasp* And suddenly a new post appears! Yes, we finally have a broadband connection and luckily enough it’s in the hostel that we’re staying in. We have taken so much flak from all ya’ll Saffer’s for not posting new entries! Shoo. Now I feel like there’s so much pressure on me to do well… ooh, performance anxiety

I plan on laying this entire entry out like a back-to-the-future-kind episode. It’ll start with the present and work it’s way back to before France.

We’re finally in Scotland, Edinburgh. The journey has been long. We arrived yesterday afternoon, walked to our hostel (which is only about 2 minutes walk from the train station), climbed the 74 or something stairs to get to the place, dumped our bags down and headed off to meet a potential flatmate at the flatshare that they’re trying to fill. The place turned out to be really awesome, new age, nicely fitted and very central. There are a couple areas in Edinburgh that are really new and modern, and then you get the opposite end of the scale. This was in the nice and new category. It’s a 2 bedroom flat which has an aussie couple living in it, and they’re looking to let out the second room. They’re both 25, and are pretty rad people. We got on well with the girl (Eisha), but didn’t really meet the guy (Jack), but either way, we were happy with the place, and the people who we’d live with. The only drawback is the fact that it’s available only from the 1st of March. Thats two weeks time, and I don’t know if we can survive/afford to live in the hostel till then. The hostel is £8/night weekdays, and £10/night weekends. Decisions will most probably be made today when we look at a couple other places. The main decision we have to make, is whether we want to live with students or professionals. Now it’s also made difficult by the fact that something called council tax exists here in Edinburgh, and students don’t pay any of it. Well, depending on whether the property is HMO registered or something. Basically, if you’re a professional living in a student-registered house, you’ll pay the full council tax of the entire house on your own, and if you’re a student wanting to live in a professional-registered house, then they’ll have to pay council tax. I dunno. Maybe I’m a bit off with some of these details… it’s all very confusing for a bug. Either way… it’s complicated.

Edinburgh is amazing. You can’t actually explain in words the difference between places like this and London. I know, because I myself had the same perceptions, that most people think of the UK, and they think of London being the standard and everything else just varying a little bit off of that mark. It’s not the case. London is shite compared to places like this. The entire vibe of the city changes. It’s the little changes that you notice the most. It’s the dirty looks and gloomy outlook on life that most of the London population have, cussing you for being in their space (as a tourist) and making you feel ashamed of your backpack everytime you step onto a train. Edinburgh is far from this. You walk off the train, up this big flight of stairs, are suddenly hit with this amazing sense of *bleh* as you see the main street for the first time, massive old buildings with architecture that you can see took decades to design and construct, statues on every corner commemorating a whole smartie-bag full of events over the last ten, or so, centuries, the happy bustling people in the streets below, and most of all, the smiling faces of the passers-by as they realise another tourist has hit their streets with their jaws dragging along the floor. It truly is amazing. Last night we spent an hour or two doing some more searching on the net for places to look at today, whilst chilling out in the kitchen amongst some Americans, British, and a couple other nationalities, who drank wine and beer and plotted on going out. We had been travelling now for 2 days solid, so we took a walk down to Burger King, where I had two chicken burgers and chips, then stopped off at a Sainsbury’s to purchase two chocolate milkshakes, drank them, complained about walking in the wind and rain, climbed up onto our top-bunk-beds… slept.

Rewind a day.

We had to wake up at 6:30am to make sure we were up in time to: Get ready; pack our bags for the (hopefully) final time; catch the nearest bus to the nearest station; dump the stuff and leave Jen with it whilst I ran three blocks to Tam’s place to collect the bank cards that we had applied for; jump on the next train towards Vauxhall; change-over at Vauxhall and grab the next north-bound Victoria line train towards Kings-Cross station; connect to the internet in the departures area and get the directions to the hostel in Edinburgh before we leave; climb on the 9am GNER train to Glasgow, calling at Edinburgh; stuff our bags into the overhead locker and spend the rest of the journey worrying if they’ll fall off and kill the people below them; get to our pre-booked seats; unload our hand-luggage onto the table in front of us; relax for four and a half hours.

Rewind a day.

We woke up just after 8am and gathered our stuff that had been messed around the room over the last twelve days that we were staying there, and started stuffing it into our bags. We had accumulated more stuff. This was a problem, because when we left SA, we packed our bags to the max, which was a bit of a dorkish thing to do because you always end up gathering more stuff along your journey and thus have no where to put it. The bags were bursting. The bags were bursting with a lot of possibly unnecessary things, including three bottles of French wine that I had bought the day before we left. Airport security is a nightmare. It’s not joke over here. Liquids are treated as guilty until proven innocent, and the checkpoints are riddled with redundancy and thoroughness. They check everything, and then check it again. From your shoes, to your hand-luggage, to your jackets. It’s thorough, which means that you can’t take wine bottles on board with you, which means that you have to put them through with main luggage, which means that you have to slap large fragile tags on them, which means that your luggage has to be dumped on a separate carousel for fragile items, which means that you question the Europeans as to whether your luggage will in fact tail behind you, or if it will end up in Russia. It means a lot.

We said our goodbyes to “Uncle Tony” and headed off on the road with “Auntie Maggie” who drove us along the one hour long road to Pau Pyrenees airport. We checked our luggage in (10kg over weight, but I now know how helpful it is to have a good-looking girlfriend with me, who can bat her eyelids at the counter dude and apologize profusely about it, stopping him from charging us the 80 euro’s that he wanted to charge us, and letting it slide), grabbed the last fresh French baguette that we’ll have for a while, and headed to the boarding gates and found some cozy seats on the plane before taking off in the most hectic wind that I’ve felt since Port Elizabeth An 80 degree take-off tilt, and we were up in the clouds in no time… floating towards London, Stanstead. Which brings me to my next point… Arriving at a place like Stanstead, compared to Heathrow, is awesome. Theres no crazy passport control people who want to take your blood, give you a quick session of 50 questions, and anal-probe you to check for drugs. There’s just a nice lady sitting there who wants to check to see if you’re welcome there, and stamp your passport. Well, mostly harmless. She did try to make me feel bad about not having a job yet in the UK. Upon asking me if I have a job yet, and me replying, “no, I’ve only been here for a few weeks”, she said, “Actually, it’s just about a *month*”, implying that I’m a freeloader, I guess. Oh well. We don’t care for these shenanigans, and by we, I mean the people.

Rewind a couple days…

South France is radness. It’s the kind of place that you can easily retire and settle down in. It’s quiet. It has amazing bread and pastries. It has a small market place on Saturday mornings. It has baguettes that turn into cultural weapons the morning after you bought them.

Snowboarding was amazing. In total, we spent 6 days on the slopes, falling a lot for the first part, and enjoying it a little more for the second. It’s so much harder than it looks. No one must ever say that snowboarding is easy to learn… especially when you’ve only touched snow twice in your life before you start. We fell a lot in the first couple days, and when you fall, all you have to stop you is your butt. This hurts. It hurts in a way that you can’t really describe. It’s like describing the taste of a colour. It’s not possible. Both of us lost our coccyges (Yes, thats the plural of Coccyx, which, yes, is the correct spelling for the word defining your “tail bone”) somewhere on that mountain, but we came out okay. We decided that if we could merge into one person, we’d be a pretty good snowboarder, whose ideal name would, of course, be Ken Ken the snowboarder. Phneagh. By the end of it we could both turn pretty well, and go down the slopes without falling and actually look reasonably cool doing it. I’m very keen to do it again in the near future. There are ski slopes up here in Scotland, so we’ll maybe try hitting them sometime after our first paycheck.

Rewind a couple more days…

Living in a neat little French house is awesome. Having two “parental” figures to take care of you whilst you’re travelling is also really awesome. You get nice cooked dinners, countless bottles of wine at your disposal, and tasty treats every morning before you head up the mountain. We were really spoilt when we stayed there and we both owe Maggie and Tony a HUGE thank you and biggie-up for everything that they did for us whilst we were there. We not only had our own bedroom to ourselves, we had our own entire floor! From afternoons at the local hot baths, soaking up some jacuzzi time with some other random frenchmen, to dinner parties on occasion, we were given the best treatment traveling bugs could get.

Rewind a couple days… again.

Arriving in France was wicked. Tony fetched us from the airport and took us straight to their house in Bagneres de Bigorre. It’s a quaint little village, which even the footage may not do justice. We dumped our bags and headed straight for the bed to get some shuteye for a couple hours before facing humanity head on. The next morning we were taken down to the local market, where we selected all the fruit and meat that we would be requiring for the next couple days. When I say “local market” I don’t think you quite understand… we’re talking like maybe 30 or 40 stands on a Saturday morning, selling local wares that isn’t just your usual market crap, it’s all the essentials that the locals pretty much live off whilst they’re there. We bought ear-muffs… the things that we’ve decided could possibly take first prize in the “Most Important Things to Travel With to Cold Countries” competition. Later on we were driven out to the local ski shop to get fitted with some new ski pants, boots, and snowboards. Ski pants are k-rad. They have suspenders and everything… you feel invincible in them. Invincible!

Rewind two days…

Woke up at the crack of dawn. I mean, the *crack* of dawn. Jen decided on times that we needed to leave, much to my disapproval, and we walked off into the dawn towards the South Wimbledon station. Neil directed us there, paid for our single fare to get to Liverpool Street (where the Stanstead Express leaves from) and threw us on to the next northbound Northern line train. From there, you arrive at Liverpool Street, purchase the £25 return tickets that will get you to and from the Stanstead Airport (airport that all the cheap airlines fly from near London) and hop on the next outbound express train. It takes about 45 minutes and then you’ve arrived. We were still 2 hours early for our flight, which I was commenting on the entire time we were missioning towards the checking in counters. Secured our luggage and checked them onto the London to Pau Pyrenees flight. Then, you arrive at the security check point.

1 hour 45 minutes later you arrive at the boarding gates, shovel your way to the front and find an empty seat on the flight.

Rewind 1 hour 45 minutes….

The security checkpoints are madness. As I described earlier, they check you for everything and anything. They also make you bundle everything into different piles and packets, which means that when you get to the other side of the checkpoint, you have to do a checklist of all the things that you had on you going into it. Jen had to forfeit a R150 bottle of sunscreen. I left my jacket there for twenty minutes before remembering it. I lost the last key that I had to the travel locks on my main bag. Security, keh keh keh.

Fast forward two weeks, almost to the hour…

I now sit in an Edinburgh hostel, Jen on one side, reading a magazine, and two Spaniards (I think it’s Spanish) sitting on the other side, chomping away at some toast, in the local communal area of the kitchen.

It’s almost poetic.