Boring Weekend (Days 27 & 28)

(A quick update for:)
JANUARY 28 - 29, 2011

Well, it's Sunday night and not much is going on; I thought I'd post a quick update while I watch an episode of Dexter. Speaking of Dexter, I'm on episode 11 (second to last) of the third season and it's so good. I mean, not as good as the first two seasons, which were exceptional, but this season has been a bit of a let down so far - up and down as far as pacing and story-line goes. Finally, as the end of the season is winding down, it's getting really good again.

Anyway, yesterday and today were pretty much the same: nothing really going on, so a lot of hanging out, organizing/getting work done, and time-wasting. Actually, I spent a lot of time looking at stuff for my trip to Italy over my spring break. I'm thinking do like a week, April 11 - 18, catching early flights out on both those days. Fly into Venice and spend a couple days there, fly down to either Florence or Naples (still deciding which one to do..) for another two days, then take a train to Rome and hang around there for three days, leaving the Monday after. I've read reviews on both sides of the whole Florence vs. Naples debate, and it seems to sway in favor of Florence. Naples looks really pretty, right on the water, but Florence has a ton of history and art, and is supposedly cleaner and nicer in the reviews. Any thoughts?

Played some guitar and actually started writing a new song - didn't get very far on lyrics, I've just hit writer's block. The music sounds real good though, so we'll see where that goes. I'm keeping my eyes open for a venue to play at sometime.

Watched 'Blade Runner' last night - 90s sci-fi flick with harrison Ford. It's been at the top of a couple lists for greatest sci-fi films, so I thought I'd check it out. It was pretty good! Although my online stream was pretty fuzzy, so I'd like to watch it again on a TV rather than my computer. I liked it though - had a futuristic film noir kind of feel to it. Good stuff. And Harrison Ford is fantastic, as always.
Lights out

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Today was more sleeping in and more lounging. Nothing going on tonight, other than some basketball game that I didn't feel like watching - and I wouldn't even be drinking because I don't want to spend any more money today. The reason for that is that I bought a ticket to go see the show Wicked with some friends - it was real cheap through our program, and I've been meaning to see a show here, so I said 'What the hell!' Did some work the rest of the afternoon for my operating systems class, then cleaned a bit.

Oh, and it was a pretty nice day out today, so I took some pictures of the view from my window:

To the right, towards east London

To the left - London Eye on the horizon! That's one of the libraries across the street

I don't feel too bad about not doing much this weekend - I've got plans for tomorrow and Tuesday nights already, so that should be a good time. Also, I'm trying to conserve some money to take to Dublin next weekend. That's what I'm REALLY excited for. 

Plans for the rest of the night: finish this episode of Dexter, skype with the parents and the girlfriend, maybe watch a bit of 'Dark City', the next scifi movie that I've heard is pretty good and wanted to check out. We'll see. I've got 9am lecture tomorrow morning, and I'm setting three alarms so as not to miss it this time.

I was hoping to catch a bit of the All-Star Game tonight, but I don't know if there will be a good feed I can pick up from here. Winter olympics is also going on and I've been trying to catch the highlights. I miss having a TV and American television!

Good music of the moment:

Wilco - "Jesus, etc.", off their album "Yankee, Hotel, Foxtrot"

Fantastic song and album. Great hanging-out music.

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Can't believe I've almost been here a month - it's going too fast! Although I do miss everyone back home.. better be a big shindig when I get back in June!

Cheers!

Another Busy Friday (Day 26)

(Being the events of yesterday:)
JANUARY 28, 2011

London, UK

I hope constant updates don't annoy you guys - to get to the good ones, just use use the list on the right side of the page and I'll try make the titles relevant. This is more for my sake anyway, so I can look back and have all these pictures and memories. It's like a less-lame version of a journal. Anyway..

Friday is, sadly, my busiest day of the week lecture-wise. 9-12pm Software Engineering lectures, 4-5pm Thermo lecture, and 5-6pm Abstract Algebra lecture. The break in between is nice I guess; I'll probably turn that into nap time as the semester progresses. At this point, while there isn't much to do, I usually just hang around and do anything that needs to get done. Or reevaluate my budget. For like the 40th time. Geez. London is expensive, even at a £10 per day budget - which is actually pretty cheap, considering I'm on my own for all meals and other expenses.

Although, I guess I did do some walking around between lectures today - I needed a pencil-sharpener and a mini stapler so I went over to Fleet Street to a Ryman, which is like a mini Office Depot. Pics of the day:

Some neat old buildings

I liked this clock tower

Yup, that's a dragon on top

So yeah, that's over on Fleet Street, which connects to Strand (the street my campus is on) on the east end. Neat place - a mix of old architecture and modern shops/restaurants. Over near there is a pub called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which I really want to go to - it's been around since the 17th century and is said to have held the likes of Mark Twain, Alfred Tennyson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! So we'll see when I can find time to get over to there.

Last night, a bunch of us stopped at the liquor store around the corner and bought a bunch of cheap wine and cider and just hung out in one of our kitchens for the night. It was a pretty good time - very laid back and fun! I called it a night around 12:30am and came back to my place, but watched an episode of Dexter before I hit the sack. Excellent show, although the 3rd season is a bit slow (I'm almost through it though). The first two seasons were fantastics though, so I highly recommend it.

I got a text this afternoon from my football club's captain - the match tomorrow morning had been cancelled. I was a little bummed, but I guess it will be nice to sleep in! Oh well..

Goodnight!

Good music of the moment:

Radical Face - "Welcome Home", off their album "Ghost"

A very unheard-of indie Florida group I picked up on last year. I love this song, and the album is slowly growing on me. Good stuff, pretty mellow indie/folk sound, but somehow different from the norm.

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Not much else to say, just a pretty boring/normal daily update. NHL All-Star Game this weekend, maybe I'll be able to catch a bit of it, even if Crosby and Malkin aren't playing.

Cheers!

Chinese and Waffles

(Being the summary of yesterday:)
JANUARY 27, 2011

After an uneventful beginning to my week, I was hopeful that, with the weekend in sight, there would be a little more excitement for my schedule. Thursday started off with little sense of urgency: a 10am lecture, followed by an hour break before my next lecture at noon. During the hour, I went over to Tesco and grabbed a chocolate baguette for breakfast, which was pretty good actually. After the second, and last,  lecture of the day, it was another boring afternoon. However, whereas my plan was originally to spend the majority of the day studying for my Thermo exam on Friday, my professor announced this morning that he had cancelled it! There was something about us not having learned enough yet.. but all I heard was "Exam" and "Cancelled", so I just kind of assumed the rest was irrelevant.

So now that I had nothing to study for, I decided I'd finish off the math worksheet from the night before and then just lounge around. So that's what I did. The whole time, however, I was trying to organize dinner, with a focus on heading up to Chinatown - I'd been meaning to go up there since I've heard a lot of good things. Eventually I rounded up a group and we made our way up there - it's only like a 25 minute walk, a little west of Covent Garden and right next to Leicester Square. Here's some pics of the area:

Sorry about the blurriness..

Loved all the decorations. Really neat

It was a pretty cool area, and larger than I thought. I think their site says there's a little under 80 restaurants, and from what I saw, that's probably true. The prices ranged from cheap buffet-style to upscale and classy. One of Elana's English flat-mates, Dylan, came with us and used his experience to show us the good places. Skipping past the buffets, which we heard were actually pretty bad, we went to a cool place called Lido:

Yum!

It was pretty good! Although we probably could have found more authentic places if we tries, this place was great and decent price-wise. I'll probably head back to Chinatown at some point to see try a couple more of the places, it seemed like there was just so much going on.

Anyways, after that, Dylan led us to a place called Ed's Diner that was fashioned like a 1950's American diner for dessert. It was pretty awesome!

Complete with little mini-jukeboxes!

Cool place!

Their milkshakes looked real good, but I was all about the waffles with chocolate syrup and vanilla ice cream:

Heaven on a plate

After two delicious and filling meals, I needed the long walk home - we took a different way that took us over the Jubilee Bridge. It's a pretty neat pedestrian suspension bridge:

The Jubilee Bridge. Bid Ben is to the right, but there's another bridge for the rail so you can't see it.

We ended the night by watching a couple episodes of 30 Rock and then hanging out with more of Elana's flat-mates and neighbors!

I called it a night around midnight (or 00:00 here..) so as to get home and get some sleep before my 9am lecture in the morning.. yikes.. 

Goodnight!

Good music that I'm listening to right now:

Grizzly Bear - "Central And Remote", from their album "Yellow House"

A pretty good experimental/indie band with an interesting sound. Pretty chill stuff.

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Not much else to say. On days when nothing's going on, I may try to keep with like a 'photo-per-day' feature where I explain a picture of something cool in my area or a place where I went that day. Who knows? Getting ready for more lectures this afternoon..

Cheers!

Possibly The Final Catch-Up Post?!

(Being the summary of:)
JANUARY 24 - 26, 2011

SO. After a nice weekend reprieve up in the mountains of Edinburgh, Scotland, the 8am wake-up call on Monday morning was not very welcome. Actually, it didn't even come. Whoops. Woke up to a mistakenly-entered 9am alarm.. for a 9am lecture. Oh no! Good thing I've got newly-acquired Harry Potter powers courtesy of J.K. Rowling's influence in Edinburgh! I wish.. anyway, the way lectures work over here is that each lasts around an hour - usually only around 50 minutes, actually. So when I say that I have lectures from 9 - 12pm on Mondays and Fridays, that actually means that I have three separate hour-long lectures in a row on Monday and Friday mornings. I establish this point so as to make myself feel better about missing the first of the three lectures this Monday morning was currently challenging me with. Anyway, they don't keep attendance, and I slipped into the 10am one while they were taking a break between lectures. No harm done. Anyway, I was done for the day after noon, so I took the opportunity to go explore a new cheap grocery store that I heard about called Iceland.

Oh man, this place was awesome. It was like if the Dollar Store sold food.. and then started using the Pound Sterling for some reason.. and had to change it's name to the Pound Store.. but then didn't like the name, so it picked a random country and called itself Iceland. Yeah. Like That. So while this place didn't have everything (I'll still have to get stuff like toiletries and bagels from other places..), it had a ton of stuff that a cheap college kid can buy: frozen meals, multipacks of snack foods, deals on almost everything. It was great, and I'm probably going to do the majority of my food shopping there so I can get cheap frozen dinners. After that, I came back and just kind of hung around. There wasn't anything going on so I think I just worked on getting everything organized for the week ahead and getting Edinburgh pictures loaded onto my computer. Literally, nothing going on. I think I played some Starcraft with Tom later that evening, talked to Brittney and my mum, then popped in a movie I'd been meaning to see: "Road to Perdition". It was pretty good: Tom Hanks as a Depression-era mob enforcer who travels and searches for revenge with his remaining son after another mobster who murdered the rest of his family. Jude Law, Daniel Craig, and Paul Newman are some other big names. I liked it - the reason that I was turned onto it is that the music score was written by the same guy who did Shawshank Redemption's: Thomas Newman. One of my all-time favorite composers. Just brilliant stuff.
Goodnight!

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I got to sleep in on Tuesday since I don't have lecture until 5pm. I woke up around 1230pm, and just bummed around. Started working on the Edinburgh post after lunch and decided that it was finally time to do laundry. It wasn't too bad, although I didn't have any small coins and the machines didn't give you change back so I wasted about 50p.. Oh well. I figure that at this rate (I made it three weeks, which is pretty good in my opinion), I'll maybe only have to do laundry once a month haha! Anyway, finished with that and went to lecture.. then came back and ate dinner and did more hanging around and blog-updating.. Another pretty boring evening. Although I got to watch the pens play, which was good. I'll take a win over the Islanders right before the All-Star break wooooo
Shut-eye..

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On Wednesday morning, I correctly woke up at 9am for my 10am math lecture. An hour later, I was back and doing more hanging around. Seriously, after the excitement of Edinburgh, the beginning of my week was really boring. Ate lunch, worked on the Edinburgh posts some more, and bought one of my books off AmazonUK for pretty cheap. At this point, I'll have 2/3 of the books I'll need this term, since I was able to find an online copy of one of my other ones (shhhh..). The last one looks like it's going to be a chunk out of my wallet, no matter what way I look at it. It was written by the professor himself, and pretty recently, so it'll be rough trying to find a cheap one.. Oh well.

At some point, I realized that I never showed you guys my room!

From the door

Yup that's a Bookdock Saints poster. Guitar and fridge as well

Let's go pens.

From the bed

My tiny little bathroom unit

Complete with tiny shower area (to the left)!

Yup, that's it. It's pretty tiny, but it's big enough for me - it's not like I brought a ton of stuff. I'll get around to taking pictures of my view at some point as well. The apartment complex is generally a mix of first-year students and international kids, so it's pretty similar to how larger American schools do first year housing. Although having the single and my own bathroom is nice. My flat consists of 7 rooms (I'm in E) along a hallway that also has a kitchen; there's 5 girls and 2 guys, including myself, so we're a little outnumbered. Actually, I still have yet to meet one of the girls - I swear that she's either nocturnal or never leaves her room because I leave my door open most of the time and never hear her. Huh.

Anyway, Wednesday continued on. I made some frozen dinner (it actually wasn't bad, hooray Iceland!) and hung around, studying a bit for my upcoming Thermo exam on Friday. Shouldn't be too bad, and I know my stuff pretty well. Worked on a little bit of the exercise worksheet for my Abstract Algebra class as well, even though I think it might be due next week. Then I talked with some people back home, and finished the Edinburgh updates (which took forever. seriously, so many pictures. you better look at all of them.). Eventually I headed towards bed, and so ended a pretty boring beginning to my week. At least I made it over hump day..

Good music to lounge around to:

In honor of the release of his new album!

Iron And Wine - "Weary Memory", off his fantastic album "The Creek Drank The Cradle"

Great song (I could've picked any though!) and album. His new album "Kiss Each Other Clean" just came out yesterday, but I'll have to give it a few more listens before I decide how good it is!

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Well, that's it! I'll pretty much try to get into the swing of things now - if I don't keep up with doing a post each day, I'll at least get the big ones up. Hope everyone back home is enjoying all the snow - I can't believe it's all coming now that I'm gone! Ahh!

Cheers!

A Weekend In Edinburgh, Scotland (Part 2)

Finishing the Tour, Enjoying a Scottish Pub Crawl, and Getting Great Views of the City

(Being the continued adventures of:)
JANUARY 22 - 23, 2011

When I last left off, we were still continuing onward through the Old Town portion of our tour through Edinburgh. Here's the rest of it!

Deacon Brodie was supposedly the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde"

By daylight, was a very popular guy who did things like fashion furniture and make keys for people. However, by night he used his insider knowledge and locksmith abilities to break into the rich houses that he was actually hired to work for! Another fun part of the tale is that he was actually nominated to lead the search for the burglar! Eventually, after stealing thousands of pounds and having five illegitimate children with two different mistresses while still maintaining the life of a businessman by day, he was caught and hanged - supposedly by a gallows he himself built! Talk about irony..

St. Giles again

The Scott Monument across the way

Such neat architecture, and blue skies finally!

Mountains off in the distance

Part of the University of Edinburgh

Scottish Statue of Liberty..? Nah, just some famous guy. Nice beard though.

Have I mentioned that Edinburgh used to be known as "The Athens of the North"? Pretty cool.

Another statue

A neat walkway along the West Princes Street Gardens

Edinburgh Castle, with it's cliffs towering over the garden

Another statue

A cool fountain, with Edinburgh Castle rising behing

A church, on the outskirts of the New Town portion of Edinburgh

More churchs

New Town

Reminds me of a smaller, less busy London

Neat clocktower

Definitely a change from the old buildings of the Old Town

The Vat and Fiddle, where I enjoyed a very delicious fish and chips lunch and tried Haggis! (there's no way I can explain what it is, here's the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis)

Wasn't bad, even though it sounds kind of gross. Tasted a little bit like mushier meatloaf

Looking up the castle cliff-face 

The panoramic from up on the castle wall. Amazing.

UPDATED: I just realized how crappy that quality is (it's the site, not me!) so here's a couple good shots in photo form:

There ya go!

Oh hello there. George Heriot's school in the background

Love those mountains

Edinburgh Castle! The construction kind of dampens the effect

Scottish army men. I liked their little hats

The entrance

Coat of arms

Inside the castle walls!

View over New Town from up high

KABOOM!

Before I get chastised.. no we didn't actually go into the main portion of the castle. They wanted £12, and that was with the student discount! Ridiculous.

Heading back from the castle, there were so many people playing music along the Royal Mile. Here we have a harpist and violinist. Not far down the road were several guitarists, each enough apart that their music could be distinguished from the others. Then there was the bagpiper from before! It was pretty neat

Oh yeah, here's the inside lobby of our hostel

I went out for a little walk before dinner and saw some cool places. I think this building is part of the University of Edinburgh

The Surgeon's Museum

A massive theatre called the Festival Theatre. I think. Pretty cool-looking from the outside.

The Royal McGregor, where we ate a good Scottish dinner! I had some sort of bacon and haggis-stuffed chicken breast with potatoes and veggies. A good hearty meal before a night out

So after dinner, we gathered ourselves and headed to the Bank Hotel pub to meet up with the tour guides for a pub crawl! It was a lot of fun! Plus, after paying the initial £11, you either got a free pint or shot at each of the stops, which was a great deal considering how many places we went! Here's how it played out:

Stop 1: The Bank Hotel.

Cool place, we grabbed our beers (I tried some Scottish cream ale that was pretty good - I wish I was better with beer names..) and hung around watching some football until we moved onto the next place.

Stop 2: Belushi's

A free shot of something blue at the door that tasted like kool-aid greeted us. After that, a train of Jagerbombs was set and you could join in for £2. My wallet was already feeling pretty light so I didn't, but they asked Jenny to start up the domino effect by knocking in the first shot - it was actually pretty cool to watch!

Live music was also a plus! I can't remember what these guys were called (it was something like "Ham and the Meatwads" or something ridiculous like that..) but they weren't bad. Singer/guitarist seemed like the only one who was into it. They played some decent covers. Love the Trainspotting wall poster in the back. Cool place.

Stop 3: Whistle Binkies

Looked a little shady from the entrance, but this place was pretty cool inside. Sweet music venue too:

Guitarist was insane. Chick lead singer was pretty crazy - sort of hoarse, scream-y voice when she sang, but she had like the highest squeaky voice when she talked. Weird. They were pretty good though

The bar. It was cheap to get mixed drinks so I had a Whiskey & Coke. As we left, we were handed our free shot of Scottish whiskey. That stuff will put hair on your chest, kids. Woah.

Stop 4: The Globe

HUGE projector screen for football matches. Love it.

Looking towards the bar from the side room with the huge projector. On our way out, we were handed another colorful shot. I think I got some green apple stuff. Pretty good

Stop 5: Frankenstein's

This place was nuts. We were handed a shot, in a test tube mind you, of some lemon vodka-y stuff as we walked in the door.

The bar

The dance floor

The random Frankenstein robot thing that they brought out and lowered towards the dancefloor. Pretty crazy! We grooved there for a bit before we, sadly, left for our last destination.

Stop 6: City

It was a club. And it was pretty bad. I don't even think I got a picture of it. We were curious about the Scottish club scene so we checked it out. Plus it was part of the pub crawl cover charge so what the hell. We get in and this place is a little under half full (I'm an optimist, I guess) of a mixture of teens and middle aged guys. The generic club music is pumping, then they bust out some random smoke machine and the whole place is engulfed. Needless to say, we lasted about three songs before we gave it up as a bad job and headed home.

By this point, I had gained two more roommates, and they were both American, from Minneapolis! Anyway, they were asleep, so I snuck in and hit the sack. So ended our first long day in Edinburgh.

Saw this on the way home - Dropkick Murphy's pub/club! I wonder if they got the name from the band or vice-versa or what. Crazy.

..

We had agreed to get an early start Sunday morning, so I was up and ready around 9. With the girls dragging a little, we got out around 930/945ish and decided on breakfast at our new favorite place: The Edinburgh Larder. Ahhh so delicious. I'm not usually a breakfast-eater, but if I had the money to do so, I'd eat tea (or in my case, hot chocolate!) and scones all the time. I had a scone with butter and jam and it was fantastic. We were all so happy afterwards, so we headed towards our first destination of the day: the Holyrood Palace. It's this huge mansion that serves as the place of residence for the monarch in Scotland. As we walked further east, away from the Castle, along the Royal Mile, here's some more of what we saw:

Some tower off in the distance

Love these streets

Neat clocktower

Another old, cool building

I think this is part of the Scottish Parliament..?

More of the Scottish Parliament. What a weird-looking building.

'The Queens Gallery' (no idea)

The starting point for a hike up to "Arthur's Seat". I would have done it, but we didn't have a lot of time, and I don't think the girls would have made it anyway haha!

The gates to the Palace

Pretty cool-looking place. Another rip-off though: £10 to get inside and see it. Unreal.

So once we decided we weren't paying that much for a tour, we made our way towards Calton Hill, a pretty awesome park/hill that overlooks the entire city.

On the way up the hill, another Robert Burns monument. They love this guy.

"The Athens of the North" indeed. The Scottish version of The Parthenon

Almost at the top! This thing reminded me of those torches that get lit on the mountains in the third Lord of the Rings movie. Pretty awesome!

The Nelson Monument

Then, one of the most amazing panoramas I've ever seen:

Amazing. From the start: I pan around from Arthur's Seat (that huge cliff on the left), over Old Town and Edinburgh Castle, cross over into New Town, pan across the city, and towards the Forth of Firth (Edinburgh's link to the ocean!). Simply awesome.

UPDATED: Again, sorry for the quality. Here's some of the good ones in photo form:

There ya go!

Also on the hill, the National Observatory

And the National Monument. This thing was actually pretty huge.

I'm on top of the world (read: Edinburgh)!

A last view of Edinburgh Castle before we head down

And this thing.

Oh, and this cannon too. Nice.

Once we were back down, we made our way through a bit of New Town before finding a bridge to take us back towards home.

Another awesome clock tower

More cool buildings

A different view of the Scott Monument (still no idea who Scott is and why he got a monument..)

From the bridge: aren't those buildings just amazing?! So old and cool!

We decided it wasn't quite time for lunch yet, so we took advantage of the free National Museum for a little bit.

Jackie Stewart's race car

Some mini cannons

Some of the Lewis Chessmen. There are more of them in the British Museum, but I guess I missed them when I was there..

Neat gold bird statue thing

Cast of the casket of Mary Queen of Scots

Some neat swords

A guillotine. I should be executed for how blurry this picture is, geez.

Napier's Bones. OK, these things were actually really sweet. They were like a 17-century calculator and could do multiplication and division. It was pretty neat, but I don't think I could explain how it worked. Google it.

So after our brief stint at the museum (we only saw 1/4 of it, it was pretty huge!), we went across the street to grab a snack at The Elephant House, the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book!

Inside! Hmm I suddenly feel like writing.. something about wizards.. and a scar..

Well! After that, we decided we could catch the early train at 2:50pm - we had already checked out of the hostel, but stopped there to pick up our bags and made our way to the train station. Waiting around for our train, I grabbed some lunch and just reflected on the awesome trip and what a neat city Edinburgh was. Then our train was there, and once I was finally seated in an available seat (our tickets didn't have seat numbers, but apparently other peoples' did..? It was confusing, but it all worked out in the end once we just found unoccupied seats), the train streaked out into the cold afternoon, heading south back to England. As the train sped away, I watched Edinburgh fade away on the horizon. What a neat place.

Some farms in the pretty Scottish countryside. Goodbye Edinburgh!

And so I tucked in for the long train back to London - back to the busy streets, the loud people, and the crazy nights. Edinburgh was a nice reprieve, but maybe a bit TOO quiet for my taste. I like the excitement of the city - maybe not on the scale that London is, but something in between. Looks like I'll have to do some more exploring around Europe to see the kind of place I could see myself in down the road!

Good music to pub crawl to:

The Fratellis - "Flathead", off their album "Costello Music"

I love these guys. Totally thought they were from London until I saw they were from Glasgow! Great band

Good music for standing on Calton Hill, looking out over Edinburgh and towards the sea:

Frightened Rabbit - "Living in Colour", off their newer album "The Winter of Mixed Drinks"

I think I still like their first album better, but I need to listen to this one more. Still great stuff from one of my new favorite Scottish bands!

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Whew! That was a big update. Well, I'm almost caught up entirely. Not much else going on since then, so we'll see what happens!

Cheers!