We are tourists for a day

Saturday (P-day): A rare beautiful day. The weather predicted rain and snow, and these happened, but only while we were indoors and focused on other things. While we were outside it gave us mostly sunshine with fluffy clouds. The wind blew, but we were prepared with woolly hats, scarves, gloves, and several layers with long sleeves, as well as zipped up coats. As we said, a rare, beautiful day. We did the ultimate touristy thing, hopping onto a tour bus, (one of the hop on and off whenever you feel like it sort) and cruising around the city with an audio guide explaining stuff. This is a great way to get to know the general layout of downtown, and to make a list of places we want to go back and visit. The audio tour was available in several languages—we selected British English which came with a nice Scottish accent. After awhile we found an alternate soundtrack, “Horrible History” aimed at kids. Lots of fun and G-rated ghoulishness, including some real history. All very interesting and made us want to learn more. 

Around the middle of the day we were assailed by pangs of hunger, so hopped off at an open-air market and sniffed and sample-tasted a few foods. They boasted not only local stuff but also Greek, Japanese, and Spanish, and others.  And what did they almost all have in common? Haggis! There were haggis pies, and haggis sandwich opportunities, and at the Kenyan food stall they served Haggis Gumba - fried pastries which smelled quite delicious despite being stuffed with the Scottish national dish which most true Scotsmen eat once a year and offload onto tourists on any and every occasion.  We say "almost all" because there was no sign of Haggis at the nut-brittle stall. And in the spirit of full disclosure, the gluten-free, vegan cupcakes were not frosted with haggis, not even the vegetarian sort. We settled in the end on a largish sausage roll each for lunch, which were available in many traditional British flavors (beef, venison, lamb) and some more exotic ones—and yes they had haggis, both normal and vegetarian.  Neither of us finished our sausage roll at the time, but tucked them into our coat pockets and heated the last of them for dinner tonight.  We did some rambling through the touristy areas, window shopping (cashmere, woolens, kilts, and a tailor who makes tweed suits—quite tempting). A second short trip on the bus and then off at Holyrood palace for the tour. Quite fascinating, and as they repeatedly reminded us, a real working palace. When we ran out of energy we took a brief stroll through Holyrood park to get home. We will definitely go back to the palace to look some more. Our tickets are good for a year, but we are only good for a couple of hours at a time.

Our flat is to be known as “palais des planchers craquantes” (look it up in Google Translate). The level of noise is quite phenomenal, but we don’t think we will persuade the landlord to do anything about it, since it would involve re-laying the whole floor. 

I don’t think anyone’s really interested in a tour of our flat but here’s a couple of shots that may be mildly interesting. Here’s our living room. 

The glass penguin on the table says hi. The TV (and printer) were inherited from earlier missionaries. The table is from IKEA. 

It’s a cosy table for two to eat breakfast, but has two drop-sides and opens into an oval table large enough to seat six. We have plans to invite a few people.

The rest of the flat is compact. It does have two bedrooms, which we have quite filled. The second bedroom is storage and where we open up our drying racks for laundry (We have a nice wee washing machine but no drier.)

 A nice feature is the neighborhood. Here’s the view from the lounge/living room window

That’s Holyrood Park, with Arthur’s seat almost visible.

We then took a death defying trip to Costco, where we chatted with the member service people about the problems we are having paying for goods in their emporium. They only accept American Express and debit cards (and cash of course) but we don't have Amex, and our US debit cards simply do not work in their store. This is not too serious - we just pay cash - but there is no way to pay cash for fuel, so we cannot take advantage of their very attractive fuel price, which is is about 50c (US) cheaper per (US) gallon than the next cheapest place we have found. The only Costco-petrol-accessible solution would be to join the UK Costco and apply for an Amex card, but that has wrinkles too. We'll see.

Every time we go shopping our kitchen gets a little bit better equipped and our storage space dilemma gets a little more critical. We have finally achieved that balance point where we can prepare most dishes we desire and still close all the kitchen cupboards and drawers.  We have not yet purchased a microwave, We decided that the first time one of us starts (figuratively) tearing our hair out and (literally) wailing "Why, oh why do we not have a microwave oven?" we will go buy one and sacrifice the counter space it will take up. Till then we will do without.

Tomorrow we will be teaching sharing time in Primary. It should be fun.