Ok, so those asiduous visitors to this site will have already figured from the photo album 'Belgium, London and Edinburgh' (the one with pictures of our room in Edinburgh) will know that somethings up. Yes, after doing Brugge and Brussels we did fly back to London and spent a lovely (*slightly sarcastic) ten days trying to find somewhere to live and line up jobs etc. The things was, after lining up an interview (there was a typo in my last post... it was only an interview not a job) with a forensics lab in London, Marisa got a call asking if she had been a resident of the UK for 3 of the past 5 years. Apparently this is required to pass the anti-terrorism checks to be a forensic scientist. Well, okay, they can make whatever (stupid) rules they want, but it would be nice if somewhere or someone raised this wrinkle before it got to the arranging of interview times from a sofa in Canary Wharf.

Anyway, we made a semi-informed decision to go to Edinburgh and check it out, and if we liked it, we'd find a place to stay and get jobs. From London we knew that the cost of living up North was cheaper, though the wages are less, but when you calculate the costs (time and money) on the daily commute, Edinburgh looked favourable. So we caught a Virgin Train (well, 2 actually, one to Lancaster, another through the Lakes District and to Edinburgh, which took 5 hours all up) and arrived in the centre of Edinburgh and quickly found another reason to be here: it's beautiful. I mean, when you come out of the train station you are on Princes Street, one side of which is the main shopping drag, the other side is a green dell (which used to be a bog until it was drained), beyond which is the Castle, sitting atop its extinct volcano. You can also see the monuments on Calton Hill, the Scott monument, and lots of churches, domes etc... I'm glad I ended up in Edinburgh after spending 2 months going through Europe because I feel semi-informed when I say "It's an amazing city."

So we got a room in a backpackers which is in a renovated church, and started looking for a room or a flat. We saw a couple of things which were suitable, and within our budget, but kinda got infatuated with this big room in a flat just of Princes Street. I think the flat screen LCD tv had something to do with my infatuation... The new kitchen may well have had the same effect on Marisa... Oh, and the bar fridge in our room was a nice touch. The price was a bit more London-like, but we managed to justify it all sorts of ways, and here we are (again, those who've already seen the photos are a step ahead).

Now we are head down, bum up, applying for jobs. It looks like I'm going to stay with the dark side of the force and get a job with my commerce credentials. Marisa is staying true to science whilst skirting around the anti-terrorism thing.

So to everyone who said, half-heartedly, that they may make it to London in the next year or so, I have two things to say: Edinburgh's only 5hrs away by train and our couch is EXTREMELY comfortable (I don't know if furniture can be "morish", but if it can, our couch is).

All that remains is a few administrative points:
Now that we have the internet, I've uploaded about ten videos onto this site. And for the earlybirds, there are some more photos in the Belgium, London and Edinburgh photo album.

I'm sure there'll be something else to blog about soon... but I'm pretty sure we'll be where we should be this time.

Craig