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Geocaching in Scotland

After I came back to Glasgow on the 27th I did a lot of geocaching with my girlfriend. We experienced Glasgow and Edinburgh by walking from cache to cache. It was a great way of showing her the city.

Today I searched for some caches and more or less I found that by accident: http://www.csft.org.uk/out_and_about/geocaching
It’s so great that these people make the forrest open for geocaching! In germany some owners of forrest remove caches if you don’t got the permission to place it there before. I love the policy of “Central Scotland Forest Trust”. That is the way to go if you want to make the nature an attractive competitor to pc games, televison etc.

And to make you happy, here are some photographs I took while we were on our geocaching tours:

the river Clyde next to Glasgow with fog
nosy squirrel in botanic garden of Glasgow
cow sculpture at cowgate in Edinburgh
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Weather Update

After the university was closed from monday 12:00pm until yesterday(!!!!). Today it is open again.
The tactic to wait until the snow is melting was finally successfull. πŸ˜‰

I’m happy to have more snow and less trouble when I go home next week… visit germany, if you don’t believe me!

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Glasgow and the snow

Glasgow seems to be really scared by snow. It is crazy how a little bit of snow disrupts all the public live. The street in front of my window looks like this:

cathedral street from my room #1

cathedral street from my room #2
cathedral street from my room #3

Yesterday the university cancelled all lectures after 12pm, and the buildings closed 3 or 4pm. Today the university is completely closed and all lectures are cancelled.

Here is the Text of the email we got this morning:
“Due to the adverse weather conditions, the University will be closed today and all classes are cancelled.”

But it seems that Glasgow Airport deals with the snow very good. At least there are no big problems this morning. So I hope my plane to germany next week will be on time πŸ˜‰

Even now I’ve got a further email:
“The snow looks lovely, but please be careful when you go out. Some stairs and pathways are really slippy so please take care.”

WTF???? I’m not blind or a little child! So crazy.

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Visiting more than scotland

This time I want to show you some pictures from Stirling and London.

The weather was not the best when we were going to Stirling, but It was a nice day nevertheless. It was quite stressfull to me because my sickness got worse the days before. But the day after this trip I felt better again. Maybe it was a good idea to go out of Glasgow to get a breath of fresh air.

Panoramic view down from stirling castle with wallace monument in the center
The UK has many memorial for their soldiers. This one is for those who lost their lives in the south african war 1899 to 1902.
Statue of William Wallace at the monument
Panoramic view down from the Wallace Monument - you can see the castle somewhere in the fog
Robert the Bruce - King of Scots (1306-1329) at the battlefields next to stirling.

Some days later I went to London. It was just a short trip, so I haven’t seen much, but refresht my memories of London and I have got some new impressions by geocaching. Londons city-caches are really difficult to find. I just found 4 out of 10. Maybe I just had bad luck or I just got used to the easy Glasgow-caches too much.

German bars are everywhere πŸ˜‰
somewhere at the southbank of the thames
Did you know George Peabody?
London Eye, Parliament and the Clock Tower by night.
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what’s up next

There are just 4 weeks left until I come back to germany for christmas. But in the meantime there is a lot up:

Tickets for the Pub Crawl and the trips to Blair Atholl and Edinburgh

So there are already 3 of 4 left weekends with plans for trips. Maybe we will use the only left weekend for a squash competition, since a lot of people I know here are playing squash. I will report about that later πŸ˜‰

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Glasgow Firework Display

Glasgow has a big firework each year. It seemed like everyone goes there or at least watches it from his windows at home. I expected some kind of a really big firework. But the only thing I got was a really long and quite nice firework. Nothing incredibly big or exciting. But I will stop complaining now. It was a nice evening. After the fireworks we went to eat burgers at one of our favorite restaurants here. On theΒ  way to it I took some more pictures.

Glasgow illuminates almost every brigde - I like it.
another bridge

St. Enoch Shopping Mall
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Visiting Scotland

After some people called for pictures of my trips around scotland, here they are finally πŸ˜‰

The first batch of photos were taken in the first days I’ve been to Glasgow. In this time we visited the City a little bit.

Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC) and an old crane of a wharf

Glasgow Botanic Garden
Glasgow Science Centre

The next few pictures are from our trip to loch lomond and (another trip) to ben lomond:

Some information about loch lomond and ben lomond could be found here:

(german) Loch Lomond Ben Lomond

(english) Loch Lomond Ben Lomond

Loch Lomond
View from south end of loch lomond
View from westbank of loch lomond
Ben Lomond and the rising sun
scotish cows on the way up to ben lomond
Loch Lomond with some of it's islands
panoramic view of loch lomond
This was the group of students who were going to ben lomond with me.

Some more photographs will follow in the next days. It’s too much for one blog post πŸ˜‰

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weird security on campus

I’d like to tell you about the security in the UK in this blog. For me the whole stuff is a little bit surprising, because I don’t know that from germany. But it seems like some students really need these advises I write about:

The village office of Strathclyde University seems to be very concerned about the students security. There was a “welcome meeting” where we wereΒ  told how to behave in our flats to be secure regarding the fire and the personal security.

Just watch the videos (sorry, I had to split them, since youtube did not allow me to upload it as one video) – espacially from minute 10 of the first video:

There were also some fire fighters in our flat to explain how the smoke and fire detectors work. It is great to know, that there is somebody worrying about our safety, but sometime it is too much.

Next goodie ist the weekly fire alarm test. We have 3 tests in our lectures in each week. And additionally on wednesday morning, the only day I can stay in bed longer in the week, they test the alarm in our flat. Great job!

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settling down in student accommodation

After some sightseeing in Glasgow we got our rooms on campus on saturday, September 18th. There was no way for us to get it earlier, but if you contact the student accommodation team early it’s possible to get the rooms before that date.

As i read on facebook before the accommodation I am in (called Birkbeck Court), was considered to be the worst one on campus. It’s also the biggest and oldest one. Because it is situated between Glasgow city centre and the other campus-buildings everyone passes it when coming back from parties – so you shouldn’t be the first who wants to sleep πŸ˜‰

To get an idea on how it looks, I’ve made a short video:

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traveling to Glasgow

We were travelling to glasgow in 3 steps. The first step was to fly to London-Standstead with Ryanair. Then we went to London, Victoria Station, where our bus to Glasgow started.

Everything was fine about the flight. Afterwards we took an Airportbus from London-Stanstead to Victoria Station. After more than one hour we arrived somewhere around the bus station. There we had to wait for about 2 hours for the bus to Glasgow. The part to get to London was ok, but the further way wasn’t.
When the Glasgow-Bus started in London there was no air-condition but the bus was completely full of people. So we couldn’t sleep there. After a short stop somewhere on our way the air condition was turned on. Since then it was freezing cold inside the bus. These busses are cheap, but it’s very uncomfortable. The name of the bus-company is Megabus. Someone told us that it’s one of the cheapest in britain.

Arrived in Glasgow we had a lot of time to walk to our hotel and to get well again. So we went to a small restaurant to get breakfast. It was really britisch with bacon, eggs and toast, so quite hard for me as I am used to eat sweet for breakfast.

If you plan to do the same journey, consider taking another plane from London to Glasgow. It’s much more comfortable and not that much more expensive.