I forgot to mention few funny little things about Edinburgh yesterday, but I cannot leave it like that!

The first thing you see when you arrive to Edinburgh Haymarket is the Scottish Gaelic name of the station: Margadh an Fheòir. This is a little warning that Scottish people are independent and will not be oppressed by the English.

Then, you learn a lot about Walter Scott. Everywhere you go, you learn the opinions of Sir Walter Scott. Anything that is shown or presented to you, there is also a small inscription about what Walter Scott thought about it.

Edinburgh Waverley - the main train station - is named after a novel. Guess who was the author! :-)

There are bagpipe players in the streets, and there are people in kilts. They have knives in their socks. They were kilts for every possible occasion. If you are male and want to dress formally in Scotland, you wear a white shirt, a jacket (a bit shorter than an ordinary suit jacket) and kilt. With formal shoes of course. If you are male and work for the castle, you wear a kilt and windstopper (and hiking shoes because there are rocks everywhere). And so on.

If you go into an ordinary shop (like Tesco or Sainsbury's), you can tell  that you are in Scotland, because they have huge shelves dedicated to Scottish stuff. Everything from milk to chocolate, from beer to meat, from potatoes to tomatoes. Everything is available in Scottish version (OK, maybe not tomatoes).

Scottish flags are everywhere and on everything. Tartan patterns as well.

Some shops offer deep fried Mars bar. I will say no more. (I have not gathered enough courage to try it, yet.)

There are few things that I really don't like about Manchester. They are listed below.

• The public transport. This topic is really complex. The following p**es me off n particular:
• The traffic jams. Solution of which is priority for no one, and certainly not for the city council.
• The absolutely ridiculous tram system. And the fact that 'expansion of the tram system' really means approx. 200 m of new track in the city (useless) and a brand new line in the Quays (where there are two lines already). I guess that about a half of the Greater Manchester area has no access to the trams and is stuck in the traffic jams instead, and this bothers no one.
• The absurd ticket system. The tram tickets work only for one line. The bus tickets work only for one operator. Well, you can have bus tickets for all operators, but that is more expensive than it should be. There is one ticket which covers both all buses and all trams, but it is very expensive.
• No night buses to our place from Sunday to Thursday. Therefore, if we ever decide to go out (to pub, theater, cinema, anything), we need to either decide not to go, or hurry back before the last day bus leaves, or use private-hire (which is not that expensive, but it is too expensive to do it often).
• The absolute inability of the bus drivers (or rather their bosses?) to wait a bit to prevent arriving in packs. What use is it if 7 buses arrive at once, and then there is 45 min wait for the next 7 buses?
• The total unpredictability of the bus arrival times. Yes, there is a schedule, but that is no more than a piece of useless paper. You just cannot rely on the schedule, which means that you are usually either really early or really late. The first case is just a terrible loss of time; the latter case can have serious consequences if you miss a train, a plane, etc.
• No trees. Or almost. In the city centre, there is some grass (not much of it!), but hardly any trees.
• No sakura trees. (If there are some, please tell me where they are.)
• No proper green spaces. There are some parks, but they are scarce, and not really accessible if you don't have a car (which we do not have).
• No cultural summary available. There is no single place where you could find interesting events. In practice, you have to check all the websites of all cultural venues if you do not want to miss something. Half the times you still miss something, mostly because some events are 'intellectuals-only', and 'ordinary' people (us) never learn about them.

I think that's the stuff which I find the worst at the moment.

There are also few things that I don't like about life in the UK which are not Manchester-specific:

• Stupid and absurd bank account rules (mentioned and explained extensively before).
• The auto-censoring everyone has to perform every day in order not to commit a hate crime.
• The idea of hate-crime, I think that you should be allowed to say what you think, even if a particular group of people finds the stuff offensive. If you say stupid nonsense or absolute bulls*t (e.g. that some people are worse than other people based only on their race or gender), you deserve condemnation and you deserve disrespect - but you should not be sent into prison for that. Sending people to prison for their opinions interferes with free speech.
• CCTV everywhere. Why?
• Silly inconsistent rules about guns and weapons. I am theoretically not allowed to have anything that could be used as a weapon. This is nonsense. Even a beer in a glass bottle can be easily used as a weapon. And, on the other hand, the bad guys don't care about such bans that much, so why am I not entitled to defend myself (in a reasonable way)?

Of course there are many positive things. I guess that half of these things only really make me angry because I am used to something better, and would leave no impression if I'd come from elsewhere. But hey, of course this is Western Europe, and I've expected everything to be better here than back home in the East!

I really like Edinburgh.

It is a city which looks very ancient. There is a castle (a big one, and pretty old, too), there are old stone houses, there are narrow streets. The city looks like it has several levels, with at least three big hills and stairs and steep streets. (The hills are most likely ancient volcanos.)

On Friday, my arrival was smooth, without a problem. However, there was a guy who could not say the same. He was a member of a bigger group (probably a stag party), and they were drinking a lot in the train already (when I came, they had had probably 2-3 beers, and since Preston, they have emptied maybe another 4 cans (0.5 l) each. They were loud, making stupid jokes, talking randomly to people (me included), and acting like drunk people in a train. The funny thing was, they wanted to alight on Edinburgh Haymarket, and one of them forgot his stuff in the train (?!), so he had to go back, running through the car like crazy, and then the train just closed the door and left with this guy in it. Thinking about it now, he was actually kinda lucky. If they had wanted to leave the train in, say, Carlisle, and he wouldn't make it, then that would be a problem. But Haymarket is maybe a mile from Edinburgh Waverley. Not a big deal, just a funny start of an undoubtedly difficult drinking weekend.

On Saturday, not much happened. We just wandered the city, and then watched some rugby in a pub. Mind you, the game makes absolutely no sense. People are fighting pointlessly over a weird ball and running into each other all the time. I thought that the point was to bring the ball somewhere, which is better done if you do not run into other people all the time, but who am I to tell English people how to play rugby...

Today, we went for a long walk which almost turned into a mountain hike. There is a 'mountain' in Edinburgh, called Artur's Seat. It is not high, so it is probably only a hill, but it seems impressive, it's relatively high and with some steep cliff-like stones and things. We wanted to go to the top of this mountain (hill). We did not know that behind this hill, there are other hills / mountains hidden, which are even bigger. We've decided to climb the highest one, and found that a) there was an incredible amount of mud, b) there was an incredible amount of people, c) it was not the best idea to climb a muddy mountain in our not-so-sporty shoes.

It seems that these hills are very popular destination, there were many people - students, families, tourists, dog-owners. And once we got there, we immediately understood why - the view is stunning. You can see everything, the sea, the city, the castle, everything.

It was all very nice.... but then, the way down, well, that was a bit more adventurous. On our way up, at least half of the mud was still frozen so it was possible to walk (the possibility was limited but it was there). On our way down, 80% of mud was really mud (the finest Scottish mud), and the rest was grass covered in morning frost. Guess what is more slippery!

Anyway, we survived. When we came down the mountains, we immediately noticed something very Scottish. It was maybe 4 C today, but the sun was shining, and for the Scottish Highlanders from Edinburgh, it was probably too hot.... because there was an ice-cream van, selling ice cream, and there was a queue, and people (some of them in T-shirts) were buying and actually eating the ice cream. O_o

In the afternoon, we went to Scottish National Gallery to see some paintings. That was also very good, and very high culture, and the space is nice, and while the collection is not as huge as in Paris or Munich, the paintings are still stunning.

But honestly, I just wonder they let us in. We were not exactly covered in mud after the mountain hike, but we were not exactly in our Sunday best either!

Happy birthday to me!

Right now, I am in a Virgin pendolino train to Edinburgh - this is my birthday trip, to celebrate, erm, an important birthday. As my boss has put it, I am 25 + VAT.

I don't like Virgin pendolinos. They make noises which cause me migraine, and they have suspension which is so sophisticated that it causes me motion sickness. Which I consider a scandal, because trains are just not supposed to cause motion sickness!

Anyway. My journey today is one with a change in Preston. To get to Preston, I had to take a 12.46 train from Manchester Piccadilly. However, my itinerary did not say where does that train terminate. (I think you see where this is going.) As the trains here do not have numbers or anything like that, you have to distinguish them by departure time and end station. Well, what a fun if you only have departure time and there are four different trains at 12.46!

I was lucky this time, I asked a guy in the 'information' window and he actually knew. And he was nice!

In Preston, they have quite nice train station. And I've seen some interesting WW1 'memorial' - apparently, there has been a volunteer buffet which used to feed soldiers on their way to the front. It seems that this was pretty quick - men just got a letter and in 24-36 hrs, they were supposed to be in Europe. They had to travel the whole day by trains, and in Preston, they were given some food and hot drinks.

I observe the landscape as we run through it in the train. There are many very English villages, with stone / brick houses and things. I have noticed that churches look different here. We have lots of gothic and baroque churches in the Czech Republic, but we do not have the tall, spiky towers, and we do not have the square towers with four small tower-like objects in the corners on the top of the big tower. (Hope this description is sufficient. If not, just imagine a typical English castle architecture, you'll get the idea.)

Undoubtedly as a part of my birthday present, I have learned few new English expressions today:
* a senior moment: when you are old (or 'old') and suddenly don' remember ordinary things
* throw mud and see if some of it sticks: self-explaining, means that you can say things about somebody / something and hope that people will believe you, or take into account at least part of what you say (in the legal context, it means making submissions and hope that even if most of it is rejected, some of it will be accepted and will form base of favourable decision)
* with blazing guns: stating your arguments with all the confidence and energy available, even if you feel they are not 100% right - you say the stuff anyway and pretend that it's all cool
* ball in a china shop: causing more harm than benefit

My husband's bank account is still in existence, and every day it exists, it is less likely that it would be cancelled. In other words - I see the light at the end of the tunnel my new shoes coming.

Birthday-related customs here are different from those in my country. For a start, in the Czech Republic, we wish each other lots of health, happiness, and so on. People here do not use similar expressions, they usually wish you happy birthday and that's that. But to do so, they use the cards. I got three already, and my birthday is not today but tomorrow!

Also, when we wish someone all the above mentioned things, we usually shake hands. People here apparently love hugging, and so they do it when wishing each other happy birthday. (We hardly ever hug each other in the Czech Republic. Or, to be more accurate, we didn't used to do so. These days, many people have seen hugging in the TV, on the internet etc., and started doing it!)

The most amazing part is that here, it appears to be ok to wish someone happy birthday in advance. In the Czech Republic, this is sometimes seen as bringing bad luck (the origin being that the elves and evil spirits learn about your birthday and start doing bad things to you), so people often don't feel comfortable doing such things. But here... no one seems disturbed.

Anyway. Few new English expressions:

• send someone on wild geese chase = send him to find and/or fetch something that the person cannot find
• it comes like buses = this familiar work related situation when one day, you do pretty much nothing, and the next day you are crazy because 2000 things need to be done right now (this comes from real life - buses here work like this, you wait for 3/4 hr and then 8 buses come at once)
• the best of a bad lot = nothing's good but of these not good things, this one is the least bad

And one thing which is a bit personal. I have realized that it's been an entire year since I've taken probably the most difficult exams in my life. It was a truly life-changing experience.