The general gist of today was very similar to yesterday (as the title of the post suggests). More hanging out in Edinburgh, with fun times had, interesting things seen, but not a lot of excitement by way of ‘things that will be exciting for other people to read about’. But read on, and I will do my best to pick out the best sub-stories of the day!
The fish-tank. There is a fish-tank in Berian’s apartment. It was leaking. Quite badly. His flatmates have spent quite a lot of time while we’ve been here fiddling around with trying different ideas to try to get it fixed.
They had a quite ingenious setup involving pieces of wood, buckets and various absorbent items to catch the water as it leaked, but it still required the tank to be topped up every now and then. There was concern last night that the bucket would not be enough to hold a whole nights worth of leakage and would start spilling onto the carpet before people were up and about in the morning.
With the tank being in the living room, where us visitors are sleeping, they eventually decided that “It should be fine, but you are guys are on bucket duty during the night”. Fortunately, the first splashes of water onto the carpet occurred about 10 minutes after we were awake. The fish have now been moved to a new tank.
This morning we spent a few hours in the National Museum of Scotland, increasing our knowledge of the history of Scotland. The most important thing Owen and I learned was that telepathy is the quickest way to communicate with aliens if they are ever approaching Earth. There was also a video explaining the geological history of Scotland – the phrase “England is sinking, while Scotland is still rising” was taken by some to be some kind of thinly-veiled propaganda, leading to larger conspiracy theories that the entire museum had some kind of sinister hidden purpose.
There was a fire truck in place when we came out of the museum - they were putting out a fire in a rubbish bin. (That was a short-lived and ultimately failed attempt to find something that a reader might find exciting)
Lunch today was at the Mosque Kitchen – which is just what it sounds like, a cheap little cafeteria thing at a local mosque. They serve curries, rice, dal, and the like. Xavier’s experience was plagued with broken things; the pull ring thing on the can of drink broke, forcing him to MacGyver his way into the can before it could be consumed; then in a separate incident, broke his high quality plastic spoon. But the food was good, cheap and plentiful, and the curry hot.
Lunch was followed by random lounging around back at Berian’s place until Leela departed for her plane home and we headed to Berian’s girlfriend’s (or “partner”, as he said, for all those of you I know who so enjoy the use of that word) house for dinner, various card games, and demonstrations of her flatmate’s robot.
Tomorrow morning we have a hire car to pick up which we will take down to Oxford over the next 3 days. The wedding approaches. As does the cricket match.
"When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health." - J.P. Donleavy
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