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Drymen and West Highland Way

After the exams are over we wanted to do a little one-day trip. After some brainstorming we ended up in planning a trip to drymen, what is next to the trossachs national park. The weather was quite good on this day, but the fog was really heavy. But fortunately we were lucky to have a great view.

conic hill coming from east
conic hill and in front a small bridge over a ditch
ben lomond as seen from conic hill
on top of the "Highland Boundary Fault"

One interesting thing about this area is that it is the Highland Boundary Fault. Thanks to geocaching and wikipedia I know a bit more about this part of the scottish history now.

I recorded our route, so you can see exactly where we have been:

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integration to facebook

as I am quite unmotivated to study for the exam tomorrow, I played a little with my website.

First of all I moved it to another server that finally supports php5, because most plugins for wordpress do not work with php4.

After that I installed a plugin named SFC – simple facebook connect. This is not only one plugin, it is a whole bunch of them.

First of all I had to create a new application on facebook to use it, thats an easy step and now there is an application called “c-aurich.de”.

After creating the application you get some kes that are saved to the settings of SFC. Now you can enable several functions of it. Most important to me was the possibility to automatically publish my posts on facebook. This post ist the first try to do that, but as you see on facebook it already works for manually publishing previous posts.

Other nice features are the share button and the function that lets facebook users post comments to my website with using the fb-account.

I will play further on that topic and report, but I should start studying now πŸ˜‰

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Edinburgh

As I mentioned before I joined a trip to Edinburgh. It was the first day of snow in scotland in this winter. Looking back we were quite lucky that the trip was not canceled as the other one to Blair Atholl which was blown off at the time when the trip should start.

When we were in Edinburgh we visited the Castle and joined a guided tour through the old town. Despite I like castles, this one was much overrated in my opinion. There are a lot of museums dedicated to the wars scotland has been involved in. The castle is also home of the scotish crown jewels, but we had to stand in the queue for a long time to see them. All in all I was a little bit dissapointed about the castle.

The highlight of that day was the guided tour around the old town. If anyone goes to Edinburgh, you should check their website before: http://www.newedinburghtours.com/ The tour is free, but they ask you for a donation after they finish it.

Finally here are the pictures you waited for πŸ˜‰

Edinburgh Castle Entrance
Edinburgh Castle

panoramic view facing north, shot at the castle
panoramic view facing west, shot at the castle
backpipe player at the royal mile
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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˜‰