Slainte Mhath! (Cheers, or Good Health)

Just Carli-Ann here typing away because Mike is at his first shift tonight! Yay! A couple things have come through for him job wise, as we knew they would. He is catering at an Indian wedding tonight, that also includes bagpipes. And on Monday he starts a month long job in a cafe on the college campus. Again, the whole recruitment agency thing, but as long as the jobs with them keep rolling in, we are happy! And his agent said he might have to wear a bow tie to some of his shifts! Mike plans to create one out of cardboard if the situation presents itself.

We have mostly just been keeping our noses to the grind stone on the job search and being totally available for whatever shifts come up. Carli-Ann's had a good few shifts and enjoys the places she has been placed in. We currently have our second Hospitality Club guest, a tennis player from Belgium here for a tourament. And we have a few other people lined up for the next couple weeks, so that keeps it all interesting. Finnish, New Zealander, Scot, Japanese...

Couple other interesting bits: Mike discovered Freecycle, which is a website with branches all over the world where people post whatever they want to give away. Anything from furniture to books to electronics to pets. Mike posted that we were looking for a coffee maker, and we thought we would be lucky to get a coffee press. But he got an email the next day from an old lady, and he swung by her house to pick up this big, heavy espresso/cappuccino maker! She said she never uses it, and Mike is in his glory whipping us up fancy coffees with frothed milk toppings! The only sad part will be parting with it when we have to leave Scotland. We have worked it every way we can think of and have come to the conclusion that there is no taking an espresso machine on a cycling trip.

We are absolutely thrilled to have our bikes back from their London storage over the last 6+months. Cycling, or getting lost cycling, is by far the very best way to get to know a city, and we feel so much more liberated now being able to zip around town. There is a surprisingly good network of cycle paths that go from our place all over the country, and Google Earth has been indispensible in assisting us in finding job interview locations and other essential services in our new home city. Mike was GoogleEarth-studying where he starts on Monday and how to get there, and spied something that looked suspiciously like a stone circle on an overgrown hill beside a motorway right in the busy centre of Glasgow. We cycled over the other day, and sure enough it was an impressive ring of standing stones tucked away in between a whiskey distillery and apartment towers! And none of our Glaswegian friends had ever heard of it! Check it out on Google Earth at: 55°52'14.20"N, 4°14'38.11"W. The River Clyde is visible from our fourth story flat window, as we have finally figured out what the odd looking tower just beyond it is: possibly the world's largest windvane! 440 feet high, and sinking, so the rumour goes. And cycling back from work on Wednesday, Carli-Ann discovered a mountain bike park not far from us! We tried it out today, and were well impressed. It has 3 circuits through a wooded park, each sign-posted in colours for the skill level of the biker. The difficult route has lots of...sweet jumps, but the most challenging bit was deep mud, which shows no sign of drying up in this damp climate. Every other biker appeared to be fixing a flat, so we were grateful to have survived with air pressure intact, as we had forgotten our tools and were over 5kms from home. And within visable distance of the park was an active riding stables, lawn bowling green, and a vicious rugby game going on. And we thought mountain biking was rough and dirty!

Tomorrow night we are going to a gig here, and a funny story it is too. We were in a vegan cafe/bar for lunch the other day to celebrate our successful employment, and I looked at a gig poster on the wall and recognized a name. Closer examination revealed that it was a friend of Mike's from Edmonton who is playing a gig in that very bar in four days time! We were so surprised to find a friend's name on a poster in a little bar on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean! So, we are pretty stoked to check it out! (A well-timed email got us on the guest list) www.shuylerjansen.com

And this is great too: http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html

Congrats to Lisa and Tom on the new addition to their family: a big, white, fluffy polar bear of an akita puppy named Jasper!

Slainte Mhath!

Back to the Grind

More good news to report: Carli-Ann starts work on Monday morning! She is doing relief work at two or three agencies (they love recruitment agencies over here) mostly working as a nursery nurse (which we assume means a day care worker, but will confirm that when she shows up for the shift), in a senior citizen’s home with dementia patients, perhaps some nannying, and maybe some in a program for homeless youth. So it should prove to be a varied experience if it can all be balanced, and the beauty of relief work is that we can patch together as much or as little work as desired (a lot for the next couple months hopefully!) and the agency doesn’t mind that we only have a little over 6 months here. And we are very confident that a lot of work is going to come through in the next few days for Mike through similar recruitment veins, it is just the initial waiting game that proves to be tedious. Too bad he has never driven a 7.5 ton truck or he would have been gainfully employed already!

But we have wasted no time here: we got library cards and opened up bank accounts, and went to 9 interviews between the two of us. We still have no flatmates, so we have been enjoying the luxury of having a whole house to ourselves for this precious short time.

We also did the first leg (20km) of the stunning West Highland Way hill walk last weekend, a 152 km walk from Glasgow up into the highlands, much of it running along Scotland's famously beautiful lochs. We weren’t sure what we were getting our selves into when we first headed out, whether we would be isolated in the far reaches of boggy Neverland for 9 hours of tromping until we stumbled our way back to our new city, but I am not sure it you can really call it a hike if you can stop for cappuccino and Mexican food at a pub halfway through! No fear of getting stranded on this little island!

And Carli-Ann went with a herbal medicine student friend, Anais, to join the Royal Botanist Society on a mushroom foray on the seaside near Edinburgh . It was as odd as it sounded, us and a dozen or so 65 to 70 year old botanists in funny woolen hats and special mushrooming foraging equipment (one with her walker) poking about in the woodlands and oohing over each other’s fungal finds with long biological explanations that mostly went over my head. But it made for some great memories, and I did retain a bit of the knowledge so readily shared: who knew you could keep fire in a dried puffball mushroom in your pocket until you throw it onto your tinder box to light your hearth?

And thinking that we should take advantage of our few remaining unemployed days, we made the 9 hour journey on the bus down to London on Wednesday. Of course as soon as we boarded the bus, confident in the assumption that there is no way we will be offered work before Monday, we each got a call to begin working asap. But we could postpone them a little to accommodate our final trip. We visited Kathryn for our first and then our final night, thoroughly enjoying our excursion to the Polish Club in London for perogies (a rare and almost unheard of delicacy in London) and had the “opportunity” to listen to a regional Rotary Club meeting: we were the only restaurant table in the corner of their banquet hall. We figured Ken and Grandpa John would be proud of us. And we made the absurdly difficult journey once again to Matt’s castle at Herstmonceux. Our last visit three weeks ago involved us taking 4 buses and walking for 2.5 hours through the fields to reach our destination from London . We were determined to find a more convenient course this time, and some failed hitchhiking attempts, 4 trains, a bus that wouldn’t take our Scottish pounds sterling notes and a taxi ride finally brought us to Matt, and the conclusion that it is his turn to visit us next time. But the castle residents put on a good show for us as it was “Dress Up as Your Favourite Musician Night” at the pub, and we were entertained by Freddie Mercury, several Britney Spears and Avril Lavignes, Kid Rock, Elton John, and a plethora of others, us having the honour of a Matt as Johnny Cash at our table. The next day the three of us did another lengthy hill walking excursion through the rolling green hills and marshy sheep fields of southeast England, the footpaths eluding us far too often on our 25km trek, to arrive at the seaside and to dine on the best fish and chips ever at a 16^th century pub.

And today we accomplished the purpose of our visit to London: visiting Jim and Jean again, greasing up our hands by assembling our 6 month abandoned bicycles, proving our bravery by cycling (and taking a train a bit) through the centre of London to catch our three trains that would deliver us back to Glasgow . The connections were way too tight when dealing with gear and bikes and elevators and whatnot, but we survived, each of us in one tremblingly sore-muscled piece.

So, work begins again day after tomorrow, but its all interesting when its in a new country, so we are taking in as much as we can! We'll let you know what Mike will be spending his time at as soon as we know!