What tourist's do in Edinburgh

The internet in my room was down since Friday, so no posts.

Following on from the title...
... Go to the castle, walk down the royal mile, go to the Mary King's Close ghost tour and walk up Arthur's seat. What I did: castle, Mary King's, Salisbury Crags (just in front of Arthur's seat). Being the castle aficionado that I am, I wouldn't rate Edinburgh castle as a must-see - it doesn't have the same "castleness" as others I've been to, but it has some museums that certainly made it worthwhile visiting.
This gargoyle is a ripper though!
Proof that I was actually there:
I didn't get to the Scottish museum, which I'll do if I find myself back there, perhaps during the festival.
Mary King's - a good, not expensive way of getting a small dose of history, delivered in an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek, way. Salisbury Crags is a quick, slightly sweat-inducing, puffing, walk up to a great view. That's Arthur's seat at the back there:
And finally, Napier, inventor of the original vacuum coffee maker, was a Glaswegian, as the Kelvingrove museum attests:

Thursday already

It feels like I haven't achieved much since my last post, but outside of study I've watched a bit of the Euro cup, been out pubbing with the other PhD students here, and started learning Blender. I saw more squirrels and a fox. There's another Melbournite in the place I'm staying; a retiree from Brunswick over here on a genealogy quest. The showers here have there light switches outside the rooms and this morning, inevitably, someone switched the light off, leaving me in (the almost) complete dark.

As for study, it looks like I'll have to learn Labview (Habib, are you reading this?) if I don't want to reinvent the many wheels that the Glasgow group have wrighted (is that a word?). We're coming up with experiment/investigation ideas and I've been working on an idea I had whilst still in Oz, which is looking unlikely to go far. My paper was accepted and I spent some time doing a kind-of press release thingy for it.

I haven't used the camera for a few days - I've switched off my photo-mind until the weekend - these shots are from last weekend. I'm thinking of seeing more of Glasgow this weekend before venturing further out on future weekends, but I'll see how things turn out.

Haggis breath

I forgot to mention in the last post that I ate a deep fried haggis. Apart from having more salt than the salt mines of Saltavia, it reminded me of something I'd had before which I can't place but is probably just some generic sausage thing minus the salt. Now I'm told that I need to try one that's not deep fried.


Why are pac-men marching in the streets? They were chasing these ghosts of course.

Moving Day

Today I went for a walk down along the Kelvin river to the Clyde, stopping in at the transport museum, where I snapped some car pics for Danny. Here's one to whet your appetite bro'.

You'd probably prefer one of these though:

Then I found myself at the Glasgow Science Centre. I felt it was my duty to go in, as a former Scienceworks-er. It's kind of expensive to get in, but they have some interesting interactives in addition to the standard interactive science museum fare.

I also stopped by another local museum, but the main thing I did was to move in to Cairncross House. The room is about twice the size of the hotel room I was in, and the shared kitchen and bathroom facilities are a few metres away. The internet access letting me do this is included, but it doesn't allow VOIP! For that I have to pay 45 pounds for the 3 months I'm here, just to let me use VOIP (and some other stuff that I'm not fussed about), which isn't worth it, so I'll probably stick to VOIPing from the office during the week.

Squirrel hunting

One of the biggest groups in the physics department here is heavily involved in gravitational wave detection. There's this old resonant bar detector sitting in the entry area of the building that I thought was interesting in a kind of nostalgic way.


So last night I went on a mission to find a squirrel. I had been surprised not to have seen any - I thought it was something to do with the climate, but I was assured they're all over the place. Anyway, since the botanic gardens are just near my hotel, I decided to buy some dinner and go there to eat it. On the edge of the gardens is what is presumably David Tennant's house. Actually I'm told they sell "coppucino's" out of it.



Then there are the gardens themselves which are very different to Melbourne's, being largely indoors in a series of glasshouses.
Anyway, the squirrel I found (just one) was on a bin, which is a common place to find squirrels in my limited experience.


And I had to laugh when I saw that they actually cultivate a thistle as a demonstration of a native plant. Tomorrow I move from the hotel to Cairncross House - the longer-term student accommodation.


Since the last post I received an acceptance for my BEC paper and I kind of started to think about what I'll be doing for the next 3 months. I still haven't settled on anything, but I'm tinkering with a few things.

The members of the optics group here have all made me feel very welcome. Look, I made the people page. I'm in an office with Jonathan Leach and Kevin O'Holleran. I'm currently staying about a 5 minute walk from the university and I haven't yet made it nor have I needed to make it beyond the local environs. I'm not set up to use voice-over-IP yet - I'll have to wait until I move accommodation this weekend to see whether that is possible. Until then, I've got a local mobile phone card now, so I'm contactable on 07503334863, presumably at exhorbitant expense from Australia.

So I'm staying in a little loft-room, which is tiny and fine as long as I don't want to do any work in it, since the two chairs are both wonky and could apparently collapse at any second. Breakfast is included and very good, with friendly staff.





This is one of the offices down the hall at the university:

Arrival

So I've arrived in Glasgow, after some delays and mechanical hiccups with the flights, but I nevertheless caught all my flights and managed to get some sleep on the way too, so I'm functioning pretty well. So far I've experienced lots of sandstone (I think) buildings and lots of helpful Glaswegians. I've discovered that the Kelvin building, which is what the physics building is called, is a multi-level maze of disconnected sections containing many physicists doing different things to those we do at Monash, such as working on gravitational wave detectors and particle detectors. Kevin O'Holleran, who I met at the Rochester conference, has given me a lab tour. I can't post any images yet because I left my card reader back in the hotel room, but maybe tomorrow. Everyone else that I've been introduced to so far are postgraduate students, except I think for a couple of Research Assistants. The hotel I'm in for the next few days is just a short walk from the university. It doesn't have internet access so for my family who may be wondering about whether I'll have voip set up, I'll just rely on email for the next few days until I move into the student accomodation. I'll also try to get a mobile phone card tomorrow.