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About meArchives for July, 2006
Tomoya’s castle
This is Framlingham Castle. It’s across the way from the school where Tomoya went for the past several years. He’s graduated now, and is waiting on his final test scores to see whether he will go to the University of Edinburgh this fall. (They’ve invited him to come, but the scores still matter. I don’t understand the system very well. A-levels and sixth form and all that stuff.)
There really are a lot of castles on that island. Must have been a dangerous place to live, lo those many years ago. Dangerous and brutal, if you were one of the poor saps living on the outside of the castle and being dragged off to haul fresh rocks for a new rampart every once in a while. Ah, the sacrifices of the past! And today we enjoy these lovely heaps of photogenic boulders as a result. Thank you past people.
Photo set
Just spent some sleepless minutes on the Flickr site putting the recently uploaded pics into a set of UK photos. See them all in one place!
Jet lag exists. I thought maybe it didn’t, but here it is, 2:20 in the morning, and I’m wide awake and doing ‘net things. Go to bed already! I’ll correct a few more papers and do just that. Have a meeting with some people at Nissan tomorrow morning . . . maybe I’ll load up the espresso machine before I turn in.
Why we went.
Me and Minoru in a pub near our hotel in London. We went to a few of these during the time in England and Scotland. Good beer (and yes, it was a bit warm from time to time) and I managed to try a few brews I haven’t seen much of before. I wasn’t really up on the whole tipping and/or “have a pint for yourself” system, so I tended just to go with the “keep the change” school of ale-ordering. It seemed to work all right.
In Edinburgh the pubs—and all the restaurants, too—were nice since they’ve all been smoke-free since March this year. Smokers go outside and do their thing on the sidewalks. This also seemed to be working well, but I wonder about the really cold months. The local paper had an article claiming that income was down 2% in some bars and 16% in bingo parlors due to the smoking ban, but as a nonsmoker I can’t say I shed a tear while I sipped my Deuchar’s IPA in the clean air of that one place on the Royal Mile. Mmmmm.
Away in the UK
We’re back in Tokyo now, but for the past week and a half we were in London, Suffolk, York, and Edinburgh. Oh yeah, we were also in a rental car in between those locations.
Beginning with the rental car: After a few short days in London we went over to Russell Square to pick up our Volvo. “The previous renter didn’t return it,” said the woman there. She was nice, though, and made some calls and got us a larger car (a Ford Galaxy or somesuch) that she rented to us for the same amount, even knocking off the extra driver charge by way of apology for our wait that morning. Nice! This almost made up for the rental office’s refusal to find any way to send me the garment bag that got left in its back room after a Hertz employee placed it apart from the other luggage we left in there while we went to drink coffee and wait for the Ford to arrive.
I think the suit is still there. We’ve got a friend working on getting it back, but the Hertz people seem quite convinced that there’s absolutely no way whatsoever to get it sent elsewhere in England. A nation without COD shipping. Imagine that. Stupid inflexible blargh.
Anyway. This photo is of a carving on one of the pillars supporting the vaulted ceiling of the main entrance hall of London’s Museum of Natural History. This was a great place to hang out for a few hours, even if those hours were exhausting ones coming at the end of 16 hours on planes and layovers. We couldn’t check into our hotel and get a shower until two that afternoon. Blargh once again.
I’ll be making short posts and adding photos here for a while. I uploaded a bunch of pictures (not nearly all 600 that we took while there, of course) and you can go peek at them at the Flickr site. Cheers.
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