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!