Paid to visit Ben Nevis!

Fieldwork has its plusses and minuses, but it's pretty cool getting paid to visit some cool places. This week I've been up to Fort William (at the foot of Ben Nevis) on Tuesday and then to Ballumbie, north of Dundee, on Wednesday for a spot of bush bashing. Apparently the upper slopes of Ben Nevis are shrouded in cloud for four days our of five but, as you can see, it was a nice day there.

And where else would you come upon a crumbling castle in the midst of a housing development?

Big Brother is in town

After an epic aiport hopping session, Julian arrived into a cold, rainy Edinburgh at 1am. He was with us for 5 days and Charles Jackson joined us for 2 of those. We did our best to show him all the cool points of Edinburgh despite a shocking bout of grey, rainy weather (completely unexpected in sunny Scotland).

Firstly, we (Anthony and girlfriend Michelle, Jo, Steve, Mark, Sylvia) took him up the Pentland hills to the dry ski slope and beyond. The ski slope is an intriguing idea - apparently it hurts a lot when you fall over though. Count me out! Julian reckons he's going to make his fortune putting one on the Port Hills.

As well as extreme mountain walks, we included the tourist thing in his itinerary - castle, double decker bus, museum - and of course, the free fudge on the Royal Mile... Julian calculated that the fudge being made on the table in this photo is worth NZ$700! If the ski slope doesn't work out this could be a good backup option.

We culminated the action-packed schedule of social appointments with a traditional Scottish dinner - Charles & Julian piled down haggis and black pudding with nae a complaint, and even asked for seconds.

Life in Edinburgh

Hi there! Well so far all our posts have been about places we've been, but it's time you all heard what we've been up to when we haven't been doing cool stuff. Yeah I'm talking about work ;-)

We've both got jobs and have been working for a few weeks. We've even both been paid now! Sylvia is working at Enviros, an environmental consultancy in Leith. I'm working at Scott Wilson, which is another international consultancy based in the UK. Both of them are quite large companies with offices all over the UK and a variety of work so we shouldn't be bored. I've found things a little slow to start off with (lots of reading semi-revelant documents and time put down to the "admin" code) but I have no doubt that I'll be busy soon enough.

Sylvia even gets a car with her job. We hadn't planned on getting a car (at least not straight away) but she'll need one lots for work so it's more convenient to have her own. It seems to be taking a while, at first I thought that maybe they had to make it once she placed her order, but now I think they are probably mining all the raw materials for it too. The funny thing is, the more senior you are, the more carbon emissions you are allowed to produce, and this is a restriction on the types of car you can get. Yep, the more senior you are in this environmental consultancy, the more you can pollute?!?

Edinburgh is still fun - we've caught up with a couple of friends from Christchurch lately. Isla was (is) in Scotland visiting her family (really trying to find a scotsman) and Chris was over here competing in (and winning) the world adventure racing champs!

The days are getting ever longer and it is weird coming out of a pub at 10 pm and it's still bright outside. There have been cool days but not much rain, and some real stunners too. We visited Glasgow during one of these and climbed our first munro - perhaps this will be a future blog with some photos.

A couple of weeks ago we took part in a one-day touch tournament with ad-hoc teams at Murrayfield Stadium, the home of Edinburgh Rugby. It was the same weekend as the Edinburgh Sevens, so we got to go along to that as well and see NZ kick some butt. Sylvia's touch team even came second so she got a medal presented to her by the Scottish rugby captain! Shame she wasn't paying attention and didn't realise this, and didn't get a kiss like some of the other girls...perhaps she didn't look star-struck enough.