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Trip to England and Scotland

It all started with me going to Bath University to do my presentation about what I’ve been up to and I had just 10 minutes to explain everything...so you can imagine how hard that was for me! Lol! The chatterbox..........

I travelled on Wednesday 3rd of March from Barcelona to Bristol with easyjet. The trip didn't start very well once I had reached the airport, because to my surprise, my airplane was leaving at 14:10 rather than at 15:30, which was when I thought, it was going! But since the weather had been so bad in Spain a few days before I left, I decided to come extra early to Barcelona, and so was at the airport at 13:00 allowing me time to still check in with time to spare. But then, when boarding, the passport controller looked at my picture in my passport and didn’t believe it was I! I had to argue with them for like 15 min and basically just made it! Pfew! But then I arrived in my hotel the university had organised for me and enjoyed the lovely british weather (yeah whatever!!!!!!!!)

Thursday I did my presentation, and it was such a relief when I finished, because we had to listen to everyone else’s , so I could sit back and relax! I think it went quite well. That evening, I went to Harvester’s with Cat, Hannah, May, Lorna, Paul and Charlotte to celebrate. After all, only two of us still had a presentation to go the next day!

Friday was a good day too, and that evening we went to the Chemistry Ball. We were sat at a table with three professors, and boy oh boy can they gossip! It was quite surprising! It’s amazing to learn about your chemistry mates via your professors! Really strange way of hearing about things! Lol! Also, I heard many strange stories about accidents they have had or experienced in the lab…some really morbid but funny accidents too!

The next morning, I met up with Paul, Hannah and Charlotte for some time, because my train left for Ormskirk (town close to Liverpool where my sister is studying) midday. There I met with my dad and sister. It was so good to see them both. We had organised it that my dad would also come over from Holland. I didn’t do anything particularly interesting, but had a great time just catching up with everything and see my sister’s friends. I went to Southport to see the sea, and I went to Liverpool and took a look at the old part of town…quite beautiful really! (Though I still haven’t gone to see the place where it all began for the Beatles! Oops!)

I left Ormskirk on Thursday, and went to Edinburgh where I was picked up by Pedro and Mareike. Mareike is a flat mate here in Spain and she had flown in the day before, so we could visit Pedro (an ex-flatmate) together in Edinburgh. They had rented a car and immediately we started our journey up north. It was quite funny because it was quite funny because it was Pedro’s first time driving on the left! Lol! We did have some incidences, that when there was no other traffic on the road, he’d automatically pull up onto the road and start driving on the right hand side! Lol! And I would always just say: “Pedro, we’re in England right now and here we drive on the left!” It was also in the car that we heard about the bombings in Madrid, and poor Pedro felt so upset!

That day we travelled all the way to Inverness (albeit painstakingly slow! With the driving limits set at 60 miles per hour - about 90 kilometres per hour – for most of the way!), taking a quick look at Perth. We didn’t have a map of Inverness so when we saw a B&B (bed and breakfast) we asked how much it would cost and I let slip that we were actually looking for a hostel but couldn’t find one. It turned out to be just 100m away from where we were! Once we settled in, we paid a visit to a lot of pubs, and settled in one when we saw they were going to play live music. It turned out to be Gallic Scottish music and it was great….

The next morning we made our way to the famous lake of Loch Ness and made it all the way to Fort Augusta (the town situated on the end of Loch Ness) and then went on to Fort William. All I can say is that the scenery was just stunning. The weather was reasonable, just that the wind was very cold. We also took an alternative route, and came to quite a desolate area, which made the smaller lakes we saw actually more impressive! It was a shame we never had the chance to see old NESSY (the monster).

The second night in Inverness we went to the pubs once again and generally just relaxed. We went back to the hostel quite early because we needed to get up really early! The way back to Edinburgh we decided to take another route and go check out Sterling. Perhaps it was the weather or maybe we were just tired of being tourists, but we didn’t really see much and we didn’t think it was quite that impressive. Instead we just had some breakfast there, and made our way back to Edinburgh. Once back in Edinburgh, we relaxed a bit in Pedro’s house, and then drove into town to return the car. We decided to go site seeing, and once again I saw a lot of Edinburgh I had seen two years before, and it amazed me to see how little had actually changed! We finished the sightseeing by visiting the pubs (AGAIN!!!!:)

We walked all the way back to Pedro’s house at like 2am in the morning…which actually was a nice walk…but when considering that Mareike had to get up at 6 (to get her plane back to Spain), we all hurried home to get so much sleep as possible! It was Sunday and I used this day to go visit Jill and Steve (Jill is a friend from my school in Holland and Steve her boyfriend) since Jill is very busy with her final year at Uni.

That was the end of my two week trip to the UK. I flew back to spain on the Monday. I had a good time and my trip back to Spain was quite good. I had to fly via Luton, and here I saw an offer on digital cameras I couldn’t resist! So I bought one! So the pictures you see here on the web are actually pictures taken with my digital camera of the original ones!

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