Portent of things to come

The weather this week in Edinburgh has been beautiful enough to warrant a blog post. Every day has been sunny and between 50 and 60 degrees. I hope this week is a taste of what awaits as spring officially begins TODAY! All hail spring. Spring time in D.C. was the best time of year in my opinion because of the cherry trees and the return of color after a long dreary, drab, winter gray. I heard somebody say this week that the next month in Scotland is going to be beautiful as color returns to the trees and flowers start blooming. I am beyond excited to see it all. Trust me, more pictures to come documenting it all.

There are flowers blooming all over. Instead of being relegated to very distinct flower beds, it looks as if somebody just walked around sprinkling flower seeds, the flowers grow up through the grass.


The other great thing, the days are definitely getting longer. We have not yet started daylight savings, so right now it begins to get light at around 6:00 a.m. and is not dark until 7:00 p.m. I took this picture last night on the way to meet a friend. Just though the silhouette of the church's steeple and the sun in the trees was too good to pass up.

St. Andrews - the home of golf

I went to St. Andrews this past Saturday with some friends. The town is tiny, tiny, easily walkable and obviously survives off the golf course and university. It was a bit cold with the wind blowing, but luckily, it only rained either while were eating or in the car so we really lucked out.

There are actually several different courses at St. Andrews and I didn't get the chance to see all of them or to walk all of the courses, perhaps on another trip. St. Andrews is a public course, so you are allowed to walk around without having to pay for a round of golf.

The shoreline

St. Andrews is on the other side of these sand dunes

Looking towards St. Andrews from the beach

Me touching the North Sea - it was too cold to wade in

The Old Course Hotel

some bushes for your golf ball to avoid

This is supposedly the famous stone bridge, and after looking at the St. Andrews golf website I can see that it is. To get to this bridge we walked in front of a group that was playing the hole where this bridge is located. Luckily, they walked up to the tee at about the same time as we were walking towards the bridge.

A courtyard for one of the University of St. Andrews set of buildings. The university is kinds of spread all over the town instead of being located in one place.

What is left of St. Andrews castle. There is a set of tunnels that run underneath the castle, but we didn't go through them.

Cemetery at the old St. Andrews cathedral. Like the castle there was really only ruins left to see.

More cathedral

and more cathedral

just a cool bridge

one last view before leaving

interlopers

London

Here are a bunch of photos from my days in London. Most of my readers may have already seen these, but here is a collection of the ones I liked the most. They are in chronological order of what we say for the two days we were in London. Some photos have captions, some photos just don't need it, or I just can't think of anything to say about it.

The first place we went upon arriving in London was Camden Market, an area I would invite any and all to visit. This donut cart was probably the best part of the market. Camden Market is packed with places to shop and several outdoor markets. The outdoor markets almost felt like Madagascar to me, a place where you could buy practically anything you needed, although the outdoor Camden market didn't have open sewage drains, and there was a shocking lack of purses for sale made from Fanta soda bottle tops.

London Tower Bridge, like so many edifices in London, it was too big to get a really good picture with my camera.

Taken because of the lighting. This is St. James Cathedral which didn't allow photography or recording inside, but I got some video of the inside, before being told no cameras were allowed. I also recorded a portion of the evensong concert, and if you read my post about Cambridge and listened the to the evensong video posted there then you have pretty much heard the evensong concert at St. Giles. I didn't think it was necessary to post again, because it is also a video of my feet since I was hiding my camera.

Taken because of the parallel jet streams

This picture and the next are examples taken during my night bridges period.

Brittany, my partner in crime...or traveling, because we are law fearing folk. Getting arrested is not a good way to start your international law career, even though, had I been arrested I do know the rights due to me as a foreign citizen.

This the first picture where I figured out how to use the black and white feature on my camera. The point and shoot cameras are for people like me. I don't really take the time to figure out what my camera can do, but traveling with Brittany changed that, because she is artistic and knows exactly what her camera can do. Needless to say, I employed the black and white feature, along with the aperture and exposure features on my camera after that, not that I know what they are or what they do just wanted to use the word aperture in this post.

You might be wondering how I got outside the NY Public Library, but this is really Trafalgar Square. There were 4 of these large beasts being crawled all over by small children and large adults.

Buckingham Palace, and no those are not the peasants rising up against the queen, but rather people there to watch the changing of the guard. Hopefully not much goes on here, because it took a rather long time to change the guards, meaning it would be a perfect time to attack Buckingham palace, if you are into that type of thing.

First glimpse of Big Ben

Just liked the image of the Underground, Big Ben and the other building on the corner.

This is the closest you can get to 10 Downing Street, a big gate guarded by men with guns don't let you get any closer.

Looking through the gate. On a funny side note, I have a friend that works in the movie theatre just north of Edinburgh in the city of Dumfurline, which is where Gordon Brown is from, yes he is Scottish. Anyway, last week who should pop into the theatre to see Slumdog Millionare than Mr. Brown himself. I can't imagine President Obama being able to do that. But if the rumors are true, Mr. Brown is on his way out anyway because of the financial disaster that is the British economy.

Part of the parliament building. The building is so massively long I don't know how you can get a picture of the entire thing.

Just liked the way the windows are arranged with the extremely straight pole to the side.

The all seeing eye of London, obviously erected after the destruction of Tolkien's all seeing eye because of Frodo's success in destroying the one ring that ruled them all and saving Middle Earth.

Parliament in black and white

Westminster Abby, not open to the public on Sunday, sheesh, you would think people actually worship there. I took a lot of photos in black and white here because I didn't really see a big difference between photos of the Abby with color and those without.

Westminster Abby in color

After Westminster we were off to church and then we headed walked through the Soho neighborhood, sorry it was pretty much dark at that point so there are no photos. After that we hightailed it back to the train station to catch our ride home. Along the way we stopped at every town between London and Edinburgh, at least it felt like we did. Hope you enjoyed the photos as much as I did taking them.

Europe is just a channel away

Scotland's rugby team played yesterday against Italy's in the Six Nations Rugby tournament. Walking down the Royal Mile yesterday I realized once again just how close to other countries I am.

As I walked I was surrounded by Italians, and those who were not Italians, were Scots in their kilts. Nothing like a rugby match to bring out the national pride. I was thinking that it is not often that the US plays against other country's teams, really only in the Olympics and the World Cup.


BTW, Scotland schooled Italy 26-6.