The trip to Scotland, aka. My dear Sir, welcome to Scotland, may I introduce you to Snow?
Today started at 6am, when I left the apartment to walk to Statione Centrale, in order to bus to Bergamo, to fly to Glasgow, to bus to Inverness. It is now afer midnight Milan time, and I am knackered.
The walk went fine; Milan is definitely into winter, and there was snow over quite a substantial area of the ground, which was fun to walk on. There was also a bit of ice, which is not so much fun to walk on, but luckily my balance proved superior to gravity.
The bus ride was the typical Milan-Bergamo bus ride, although this bus had a thermometer display, so I was able to watch the temperature dropping to -6 degrees (c). Once into the airport, there were the usual fun and games with the bag drop off desk being switched at almost the last minute, but that was expected, so not a big problem. Wandering through immigration (even though the UK is part of the EU, it isn't part of the Schengen zone, so you have to go through immigration), I was evidently the first person on my flight to try to go through. Therefore, they decided to do a full bomb swab search on my bag. Luckily I hadn't been carrying fertilizer, so I passed without problems.
Now, however, the problems began. As I got to the gate, it was stating that the flight, due to leave at 10:15am, was now leaving at 11am. Sigh. Time to sit, read a book, twiddle thumbs, and hope the flight doesn't get later, as I only had a couple of hours wiggle room before I would miss the bus from Glasgow to Inverness. After sitting for a bit, the estimated departure time changed to 11:45am. Crappity crap crap. More thumb twiddling, until we finally hopped on the bus to drive the 20m to the plane, and then jumping on the plane. Gotta live little airports.
Europe, especially the UK, looks quite different when covered in snow. Rather pretty actually. We landed at Glasgow Prestwick, which, like 95% of Rynair airports, is only vaguely near the city. Interestingly, the immigration guy asked me if I was dual Australian-UK citizen; I guess he heard my accent. No problems, just interesting.
As it turns out, I did miss my bus, which required buying a new ticket, for 2.5 times the price of the original ticket. Ryanair being Ryanair, and their special disclaimer that they don't actually have to fulfill their side of the contract and get you to your destination on time, it isn't even worth thinking about trying to get the money back.
I did manage to spend a couple of hours wandering around Glasgow, and it lead me to conclude that the Milanese are wimps when it comes to the cold. It was just as cold in Glasgow as it has been in Milan, and the Glaswegians were barely rugged up at all.
The Bus trip should have taken roughly 4 hours. My bus left at 4:40pm, and a rather surreal trip began. The trip was in two parts, first to Perth, where I changed buses, and then to Inverness. The trip to Perth was calm enough, until we were almost there, and the bus started having issues with the snow and ice - grinding, slowing down, stopping, grinding, and wheezing up the hill. At this point I should probably mention just how much snow and ice there was.
The entire landscape is white. Houses look like perfect winter houses, white all over. The road is white, except for major roads, which have blackish lines where cars drive. Traffic, therefore, was slow, cautious, and slow.
So, after the (quite new) bus wheezed and limped its way into Perth, I gratefully changed onto another bus to head along to Inverness. It is about this point that tiredness crept up on me, leading to the entire trip seeming rather surreal. To start with, I was listening to music for much of it, with noise cancelling headphones. Therefore, I couldn't really hear the bus, which was nice. I ended up napping several times, while the music was playing, which led to several songs being incorporated into dreams (including a rather strange one with a james bond/robin hood cross character doing martial arts moves on generic MovieBadGuys(tm) while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs...). Adding to the surrealness was the complete darkness outside, except for the little bit of snow visible from the lights of the bus, and headlights of other cars. The bus had a digital clock up front, and I was situated such that I could see it, its first (backwards) reflection in the window, and also its second (correctly oriented) reflection in the window. Very odd when you glance at the clock, and it says 25:15.
Another reflection was a couple of signs up the front of the bus (rules, terms & conditions, etc.). At one point, looking to see if there were any street signs ahead to find out where we were, I saw these two large white signs hovering there, and watched them closely, only to find they were not getting any closer. To make matters worse, I did this not once, but a few times.
Very very surreal was occasionally looking out fowards and seeing the long line of red lights of the cars ahead. As they were going the same speed as the bus, they appeared stationary, and as it was pitch black, it looked just like a line of red lights hovering in the night.
Eventually, after a long slow busride, we arrived in Inverness. It is snowing. It is snowing a lot. There was 4 inches of snow last night. The entire town is white. There is something about Snow that is almost unreal.
The walk went fine; Milan is definitely into winter, and there was snow over quite a substantial area of the ground, which was fun to walk on. There was also a bit of ice, which is not so much fun to walk on, but luckily my balance proved superior to gravity.
The bus ride was the typical Milan-Bergamo bus ride, although this bus had a thermometer display, so I was able to watch the temperature dropping to -6 degrees (c). Once into the airport, there were the usual fun and games with the bag drop off desk being switched at almost the last minute, but that was expected, so not a big problem. Wandering through immigration (even though the UK is part of the EU, it isn't part of the Schengen zone, so you have to go through immigration), I was evidently the first person on my flight to try to go through. Therefore, they decided to do a full bomb swab search on my bag. Luckily I hadn't been carrying fertilizer, so I passed without problems.
Now, however, the problems began. As I got to the gate, it was stating that the flight, due to leave at 10:15am, was now leaving at 11am. Sigh. Time to sit, read a book, twiddle thumbs, and hope the flight doesn't get later, as I only had a couple of hours wiggle room before I would miss the bus from Glasgow to Inverness. After sitting for a bit, the estimated departure time changed to 11:45am. Crappity crap crap. More thumb twiddling, until we finally hopped on the bus to drive the 20m to the plane, and then jumping on the plane. Gotta live little airports.
Europe, especially the UK, looks quite different when covered in snow. Rather pretty actually. We landed at Glasgow Prestwick, which, like 95% of Rynair airports, is only vaguely near the city. Interestingly, the immigration guy asked me if I was dual Australian-UK citizen; I guess he heard my accent. No problems, just interesting.
As it turns out, I did miss my bus, which required buying a new ticket, for 2.5 times the price of the original ticket. Ryanair being Ryanair, and their special disclaimer that they don't actually have to fulfill their side of the contract and get you to your destination on time, it isn't even worth thinking about trying to get the money back.
I did manage to spend a couple of hours wandering around Glasgow, and it lead me to conclude that the Milanese are wimps when it comes to the cold. It was just as cold in Glasgow as it has been in Milan, and the Glaswegians were barely rugged up at all.
The Bus trip should have taken roughly 4 hours. My bus left at 4:40pm, and a rather surreal trip began. The trip was in two parts, first to Perth, where I changed buses, and then to Inverness. The trip to Perth was calm enough, until we were almost there, and the bus started having issues with the snow and ice - grinding, slowing down, stopping, grinding, and wheezing up the hill. At this point I should probably mention just how much snow and ice there was.
The entire landscape is white. Houses look like perfect winter houses, white all over. The road is white, except for major roads, which have blackish lines where cars drive. Traffic, therefore, was slow, cautious, and slow.
So, after the (quite new) bus wheezed and limped its way into Perth, I gratefully changed onto another bus to head along to Inverness. It is about this point that tiredness crept up on me, leading to the entire trip seeming rather surreal. To start with, I was listening to music for much of it, with noise cancelling headphones. Therefore, I couldn't really hear the bus, which was nice. I ended up napping several times, while the music was playing, which led to several songs being incorporated into dreams (including a rather strange one with a james bond/robin hood cross character doing martial arts moves on generic MovieBadGuys(tm) while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs...). Adding to the surrealness was the complete darkness outside, except for the little bit of snow visible from the lights of the bus, and headlights of other cars. The bus had a digital clock up front, and I was situated such that I could see it, its first (backwards) reflection in the window, and also its second (correctly oriented) reflection in the window. Very odd when you glance at the clock, and it says 25:15.
Another reflection was a couple of signs up the front of the bus (rules, terms & conditions, etc.). At one point, looking to see if there were any street signs ahead to find out where we were, I saw these two large white signs hovering there, and watched them closely, only to find they were not getting any closer. To make matters worse, I did this not once, but a few times.
Very very surreal was occasionally looking out fowards and seeing the long line of red lights of the cars ahead. As they were going the same speed as the bus, they appeared stationary, and as it was pitch black, it looked just like a line of red lights hovering in the night.
Eventually, after a long slow busride, we arrived in Inverness. It is snowing. It is snowing a lot. There was 4 inches of snow last night. The entire town is white. There is something about Snow that is almost unreal.