A New Day

September 11, 2009

It’s 7:45 in the morning. Angela and I wake up to a knock on the door. It’s Ross. Man he’s a nice guy.

“Here you go guys, here’s your breakfast. By the way, I fixed the shower for you. All you have to do is pull the chord to turn it on, and pick your preference. Don’t bother with the stop button, it isn’t working.” He says.

I figure his wife probably wants to kill me so I apologize for last night. He says “Don’t even worry about it, it’s okay.”

Sweet.

The continental breakfast in bed consists of a raspberry shake, muesli cereal with milk, warm croissants, butter, jelly, fresh ham, and new kind of cheeses that we’ve never seen before. It was going to be a good day.

After the best shower ever, we start on a little 5-minute walk to the Merchiston campus to see if I can register. Luckily, the professor I need to see is there and not busy so we head on upstairs to see him. His name is Les. He’s a little shorter than me, not skinny, but not chubby either (right in between), looks as though to be in his late 40’s lower 50’s, with long white and black hair to his shoulders. He hooks me up with registration, it takes about 10 minutes, and we’re on our way.

The plan for today was to get me registered in the morning, meet up with a lender to see a flat at 2:00, buy a phone somewhere in between, and get Angela registered somewhere in between. From talking to that kid Blair, we know that most of the phone companies in Edinburgh have shops in City Centre on Princes Street, so we figure it’s our next stop.

We buy an all day pass, get on (what we think and hope) is the right bus, and find a seat in the way back. We’re sitting next to these two young looking guys that are having a pretty in depth conversation about something. Don’t get me wrong, I love to eavesdrop, but I can’t understand a darn word their saying!

The way that streets are set up in Edinburgh is really confusing. First of all, we’re on the completely wrong side of the street. It’s a little nauseating at first to be taking all these turns into the left lane. Plus there are these things called turnarounds and geez…I get pretty dizzy. In the states I’m used to seeing colored street signs above my head with the lights right beside them wrapped in yellow. Nope. Here the lights are wrapped in black and on the street corners. And the street signs are nowhere to be found.

I come to the realization that we know where we want to go (Princes Street), but we have no idea of how to know when we’re there. I interrupt the guys next to us…

“Excuse me guys, I’m really sorry to bother you, but um…we’re pretty new to this so how do we know when we get to Princes Street?”

The gentleman next to me says “It’s alright mate. I’m getting of near there so just get off when I do.”

Awesomeness, this guy is an angel sent from the almighty heavens above!!!!!!!

The bus stops, the kid gets up and we follow him right on out. He turns to us outside and says “So you’re just going to follow this street here and turn right when you get to the end. Princes will be the street you see. You can’t miss it.”

I say “Man thanks so much we really appreciate it. By the way, how the heck do you know what street you’re on?? I mean in the states we have signs but…I don’t see any around?”

“Just look at the edge of the buildings a wee bit up, you’ll find ‘em there.”

We look up and there’s the stupid signs staring us right in the face. Haha who knew we’d take little green signs for granted one day.

Walking down Princes street is like walking on Broadway in New York city. It’s PACKED with people and shops. It’s a feeding frenzy down there. But, oh man, it’s so beautiful. It’s parallel to Edinburgh Castle that sits so peacefully on top of a hill and the surrounding architecture is in this old medieval style. Of course, there’s still green everywhere.

We find the Carphone Warehouse and buy the cheapest phones and plans we can find. While there, the guy helping us out (he reminded me of that kid Jesse in the first Fast and Furious movie, the one with A.D.D) told us exactly how to get to our flat, which was supposedly about a 10 minute walk away. We look at the clock and it’s 1:20. 40 minutes should be more than enough time, so we head out there.

We come across a little fork (or should I say Square) in the road called Charles Square. We turn right…but we don’t feel too good about it. Maybe we should’ve turned left. Ok. We turn around and start heading along that side of the square. Ehh…this doesn’t feel right either. We look at the map, turns out the yellow brick road is a little more complicated.

They are building a Tramway in City Centre, so there is crazy construction everywhere. Because of this, like half of Princes street is closed. We now have 30 minutes. We make our way through construction, but have a hard time because you have to be perpendicular to a building to know what street it is. Running out of time, we Usain Bolt our way through traffic and streets and barely make it with 2 minutes to spare to our flat appointment.

The flat wasn’t too great at all. It was in a “nice” neighborhood I guess. There was graffiti on all the buildings and inside of ours. Construction is going on across the street. The flat was a good size, and had everything we wanted, but reminded me of a broken down place you see in movies where a starving actress is staying in New York while she’s waiting tables and trying to make it big. Then the guy tells us “By the way, it’ll be available the 27^th.”

“Oh…okay…welp, see you later.” Haha we just take off, pretty disappointed.

It’s now 2:30 and we’re kind of running out of time to find a flat. Tomorrow is our last day in the B&B so if we can’t do it by then…we’re SOL. We stop into this lending company place and start making all sorts of calls to everyone, everywhere that’s selling a flat.

“No, sorry it’s just been let.” “Oh sorry, the owner backed out just now.” “My apologies, that flat is no longer available.” “Ohhh it just got rented, really sorry about that.” “The office is closed, please leave a message and we’ll get back to you after the weekend.” “No students allowed, sorry.” “It won’t be available till the 20^th.”

Call after call, and sweet female accent after sweet female accent, we were denied. We learned at that moment that all…ALL lending companies operate during the week and are closed on weekends. It’s Friday. The end of the week. Our B&B time runs out on Sunday. Tomorrow’s Saturday, and there’s officially nothing we can do at this point. Tired, hungry, and a wrong bus later (we went pretty far north, and we live pretty far south ha) we return to our room. We extended our stay in the B&B till next Thursday which, surprisingly, was actually really cheap to do.

It’s close to 5:00 now and I’m starving and could probably slay a baby calf by chewing it to death, but we’re more tired than hungry. Feeling pretty defeated from the day, and with only breakfast in our stomachs, we give each other a little foot massage (I could’ve died at that moment) and try to take a little nap. Jet lag. Ended up being the longest nap of my life. We woke up the next morning at about 6:00 am.