All work and less play makes Rory a boring boy...

In the last ten days Scotland has banned smoking in all enclosed public places. The pubs and clubs are now smoke free! Now when you pass any pub in Edinburgh there is a small crowd of people outside having a smoke. Even the train station is clear of smoke. Since the ban is brand new and the amount of smokers in Scotland is much higher then North America, it's quite startling how many people are gathered outside in the rain for a little "break". In Canada the only time you get that many people gathered outside the front of a building in such weather is if there is a fire drill or power cut.

Also during my bloggy black out, Graham Robertson, a friend of mine from High School turned up to terrorize Edinburgh. He's on one of those "see everyone I know in X" tours with X being the UK. In a few weeks Graham is getting himself loaded onto a cruise ship as a member of staff for Six-Eight months, so he's making the best of dry land while he can. Graham, I, and some Scots he met while in New Zealand got up to some serious mischief while visiting a few pubs and going on a "Ghost Tour" whose only scary element was the group of Canadians and Scots that kept getting lost and then finding the tour again while ridding ourselves of all the beer we had drunk before the tour.

At some point I managed to win my weeks laundry tokens in a Pool tournament in which I sank two balls off the break, sank two more in a row, and then my opponent sank the eight ball on his first shot of the game.

I'm sure a lot more then that has happened over the last ten days, but the only thing that comes to mind is that some guy walked into work who looked just like Chuck Norris. If you don't know why that's relevant then go here.

PS: Jess if you read this thing, Happy Birthday. Don't worry, the Hunt for Red Oct-Toby continues.

Sorry about my ten days of silence. For me it's been ten days of noise :)

I'll cook something up soon.

Lazy Sunday

St. Patricks day was not crazy enough to explain my lack of keyboard use over the weekend, but it was a lot of fun. In fact, it was almost mellow in a "wow, I've had a few pints but everyone else is WAY drunker then me.." kind of way. We bar hoped for a bit until we found the hostel crew at the Black Bull pub. The Bull is a pretty fun place 'cus it's such a generic pub that you have to make your own fun.

Oh, and I had a "the world is a small place" encounters. It turns out that Mark, our kilted Spanish hero, well his girlfriend is Canadian, and her previous boyfriend was Adam Schnarr, a guy who I went to highscool with. That's right, I've met someone in Edinburgh who not only has herd of Sooke, She's been there!

Speaking of Mark, he's asked me to shoot a picture for the cover of his song "Aberdeen", which he half seriously intends to sell to Aberdeens city council and/or tourist board. I have a few vague ideas of shooting the letter "A" made up from stupid objects, or a bunch of people holding up the letters Aberdeen.

Sunday was a strange day, but it requires a little back story, or at least, a confession:

I have become addicted to F1 racing recently.

It all started when I was living in London, working five days a week, and partying over the weekend. Sunday was recovery day, and the effects of the previous two to three nights antics meant that all one felt like doing was lying on the couch and watching TV. Guess what is on TV on a Sunday at midday? F1 racing. F1, like cricket, is very very complex, and also, like cricket, appears completely boring unless you know what's going on. I'd say it takes about half a season, roughly six or seven races for one to even care who wins. At about race eight interest swings in the other direction. Observations like "Oh, the red car won again", turns into excitement that Rikion was fourth in qualifying with a heavy full load. By race ten or eleven the post race press conference is required viewing. After that watching just the race is not an option, the hour long pre-race show (this, for a nearly two hour long race) is part of the gospel, with highly paid commentators dissecting even the smallest "pit lane rumors" for possibly usefull info. I know the tactical reasons for a one stop vs a two stop strategy's, I hate engine penalties and I still think of Team Honda as B.A.R

I tell you all this in the hope that it may help you understand the reason why I even thought about getting up at seven a.m. on Sunday morning to watch a car race. Which I did. I was even happy that the race was four hours early (due to the fact that it was the Malaysian GP, i.e time difference between Europe and Asia) 'cus I was supposed to work at midday and otherwise would have missed it.

After the race was finished I started to get ready for work, only to discover all my work shirts were still wet. I was running late, underdressed, and out of breath when I reached work. Or the front door anyway. The windows were still shuttered! The door was locked, and no one was there! Little did I know that my boss had been detained by UK Customs due to "issues" with his VISA. I waited twenty mins. until I decided that I had the day off.

I spent most of it split between taking pictures and hanging out in bookstores.

When I got back to the hostel they offered Shannon and I a better room, so we spent part of the evening moving all are stuff. Shan felt a little un-well, so crashed while I tried to watch a British horror movie in the dining room. Five minutes before the end, The Soccer locusts appeared. The Soccer Locusts are eighteen strong troop of 15-18 year olds from Alabama, USA. As you may have guessed, they are over here for a Soccer tournament, and they travel in packs. The older girls have taken full advantage of the UK's more relaxed liquor laws, and thus most of the girls are drunk and are trying to avoid their chaperones at all costs. It was funny to watch the first night, but by day four the sight America's youth running into walls is no longer the highlight of my Sunday. I's rather watch F1.


Wow, if you got this far I'm impressed.

St. Patrick's Day black out

As in media black out, not the drinking kind :)

Just a quick note to thank everyone that sent my a Happy birthday e-mail, I'll reply to you all as soon as the ekffects of tonights festivites were off.

iPod is the new garlic!

Guess what I got for my birthday? Thanks to my Parental Units I am now the proud owner of an iPod Nano!

Despite being a tech addict since I was very young (family lore has it that my first word was not mommy or daddy, but "Radio!"), I don't think that I've ever been this close to the cutting edge before. The Nano is so small I'm afraid of loosing it constently. Despite black being the new black, I'm glad I got a white one. I think this is the real reason Apple now makes a black version as well, so that they will get repeat sales from everyone who misplaces their tiny black music player, in their stylishly black apartment. On the other hand ninjas have not been able to carry iPods while on a missions for fear of thier glaring white apperance revealing their position to the Enemy. Probelme solved. Conversely, I wonder if the original iPods are disportionally popular with the Inuit?

Following this line of logic, I have hit a upon a market that Apple is needlessly ignoring, dare I say rejecting. If anyone from apple is reading this, I, as someone with more then a keen interest in photography, have in mind a demographic that hangs in the neutral zone between the White Pod and the Black Pod: The Grey Pod. To be more specific, the 18% Grey Pod. Not only will this bring all the fence sitters, and those with aversions to extreme expression into the Apple fold, it will finally allow all photographers (myself included) to stop compensating for the effects of either iPod on ones exposure calculations. If you think I'm a little off the mark, I'd like to advance another little theory of mine: iPods fight the paparazzi.

Have you noticed how celebrities were very quick at adopting the original iPod? For the same reason the iPod is mirrored on the back: To screw up exposures! Wearing a super white chunk of reflective plastic has the same effect on photographers as garlic does on vampires. All that reflected light or super deep black from the iPod screws up the auto-exposure systems that paparazzi are forced to use since they only have seconds in which to snap their victims. Upon checking their "take" after ambushing Ms. Hilton and co., zee paparazi would find all their valuable photos with either massive halo reflections, or a mix of really bright and really dark exposures.

So Apple, for the sake of tabloid readers everywhere, I beg you for an 18% grey iPod! However my favorite sudo fruit company, don't be too hasty in ordering those extra shifts in the factory, I'm not going to be this close to the cutting edge again for a very long time.

Beware the ides of March...

Sorry I have not posted in a while, I've been a busy with my new job. I had my coffee training last week. A dude from Illy Coffee came in to teach me how to make cappuccinos and Lattes, oh my! As you can tell, the place is a little serious about their coffee when they insist on teaching everyone how to make it themselves.

Coffee Master: "So how much experience have you had making cappuccinos and such?
Me: "None."
Coffee Master: "Ok,but how do you like your coffee?"
Me: "I can't stand the stuff, I don't even drink tea."
Coffee Master: (with a little too much glee) "Ah, a blank slate then."

He then proceeded to give me a whirlwind course in Coffee and all it's various forms. Nothing was left out, water temperature, bean selection, grinding, and the evils of Starbucks (or in his words "Those who we shall not name.") Having a guy dressed in all black with a Scottish accent explaining the intricacies of a complex Italian bedvradge was almost like having Sean Connery teaching me how to make Martinis. I was constantly waiting for the next sentence to be "Shaken, not stirred." This guy new everything about beans, oil and trade practices. His pure excitement for coffee was only briefly threatened when I burnt the milk during my first attempt at frothing. With in an hour I had produced a few decent Lattes and such which passed muster. With that, The Coffee Master left, muttering something about his parking meter running out. I however was not fooled, I knew he was off to fight against his one true enemy, Fliter Coffee.

From Coffee we now move to the death of Julius Caesar. How you ask? Read and learn (please forgive the 24 style narration):

"Happy birthday to me! Twenty Three. Yipee."

I was born on March the 15th, 1983. Julius Caesar was Murdered on this date in 44 BC, after being warned by a Soothsayer: "Beware the Ides of March."

For said birthday, we went to the movie Lucky Number Slevin. Not bad really, but a little too aware of itself as a movie in my opinion.

Royal Flush

Well I finely got a job. Despite my lack of phone number typing skills, I am now working in an Internet Cafe in the center of downtown Edinburgh. I'm going to keep the exact name and location a little vague, just so I can write about work with a little plausible deniability, to take a page from the US Government.

What I can reveal is that it's run by a guy who is, drum roll please, from Quebec and an insanely good businessmen. The shop is a little "different" from other 'net cafes, as in high class. I'm still getting to grips with a till that everyone claims is "normal", but since I've only used strange custom bar tills before, it's taking some getting used to. At least all my previous cash handling experience is with British money, so making change ect. is the easy part.

In my so far brief time with the company, I've already had an "incident" or two. On my first full day, I received a frantic phone call from Michele, a friend from the hostel. Michele, who had dropped her mobile phone in the toilet the night before, had tracked me down at work because she had lost all her phone numbers in her phones aquatic adventure, and was begging me to pick up a replacement phone from the store across the street from my work. My boss (who during my first training shift nipped out to fix a fellow entrepreneurs plumbing, and who would be the sort of guy to take charge during a disaster or a reality TV show) was momentarily confused when the phone was for me. "Rory...Rory who?...Oh the guy I just hired?!"

It has been a busy few days: Saturday was my first training/test shift and my ex-flatmate (as in apartment, not vertically challenged) from London came up to Edinburgh for the weekend with two friends from Oz. Shan and I showed them what we knew of the town, before we left them to dance it up at "The World Famous Frankinstines", as we had been out the night before with the Hostel's new group pub crawl. Sunday was training shift two. Monday was my first normal shift plus Open Mic night at Whistle Binkies! Spanish Mark, the guy who runs both the free tours and the free pub crawl for the hostel, went up. Our kilted hero from Barcelona played two songs, and managed to have the entire place in stitches the whole time. Quote of the night (in a thick Spanish accent): "I am not a good singer, but I enjoy singing, so your going to enjoy it too!"

Snow, with a chance of photos.

It's snowing! It has been since I got up and saw the flakes floating to the ground in their happy kamikaze spirals. The Australians working in the hostel ran around like little kids for the first hour, grinning in the same way most tourists do when seeing kangaroos for the first time. With in a few minutes a snow ball fight started, INSIDE the hostel! After being kicked back outside, one of the ozzys almost got hit by a double decker bus trying to avoid one of my snowballs.

With the snow day and all I've decided to take a day off from the job hunt. I have a trial shift at a Internet cafe on Saturday anyway. Oh, and I discovered that all the resumes I've been handing out so far have had the wrong phone number! Classic Rory maneuver. I'm now camped out in the dining room on my laptop, as the library 'net connections were messed up, and not allowing me to post to my blog. With full control of the CD player and central heating it is going to take some very tasty food to lure me out of my new den.

In other developments, Shan and I finally did the free walking tour yesterday, even though we have been here close to three weeks already, and know must of the stuff on it. The guy who dose the tour is from Barcelona, and the chance to go on a tour through the Scottish capital led by a Spanish guy in a kilt was too good to pass up :) We still learned some interesting facts as well, such as Greyfriers Bobby, a dog who upon his masters death, stood on his grave for fourteen years! There is a statue to him, and his grave site is now the most popular one in the whole cemetery. A cemetery, I should point out, that has the most poulterygist (sounds like a Latin word for intelligent chicken, doesn't it?) activity in all of Europe. What else...ummmm...A yes, the free way to get drunk. On the royal mile their are a lot of whisky shops, all of them will let you have two free shots if you seem genuinely interested in buying their wares. The trick is to stay sober enough to be convincing buy the third or fourth shop. No one knows what the record is, as they are too drunk by that point.

Well I need some brunch and then I'm going to take some pictures of all the snow before it melts. To use a cliche, Edinburgh castle looks as if it's been dusted with icing sugar. Or dandruff.


UPDATE: I've posted a bunch of photos from the whole trip so far. Just click HERE or on the photo at the top of the post. All the photos are captioned as well, it's amazing what I get done when the weather gets crappy.