Robot Claw – Page 606 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

London Calling

July 29, 2010

JBF’s off on another all-day train safari today, this time to Cardiff. KLS and I had shopping to take care of, since we’d managed to gather precisely almost zero souvenirs. With checklist in hand, we traipsed out into London.

By the way I have sent a total of 34 postcards this trip! I think/hope most of you reading this got one (if I have your address) and some of you many more than one. Hopefully they gave you a smile 🙂

^ Ghastly stuff! The overall quality of the trash in 99% of the souvenir stores is truly appalling, and for some reason we’ve really struggled finding stuff this trip (by comparison, it’s usually tough not to find appropriate items for people in Tokyo). I can assure you all though, that nothing in the above image was purchased 😉

Anyway we traipsed and traipsed, and at one point found ourselves in Forbidden Planet, a really friggin’ big sci-fi and fantasy store. Here’s a photo…

… and everything in it is Doctor Who (except for me, of course)! It was Doctor Who merchandise heaven! I bought a CD drama (“Plague Of The Daleks”, chosen based on the companion and not the Doctor) and a few other items, and spent a lot of time wishing a similar selection was available in some store closer to home.

< Bobby

We stumbled across a vast multi-story arcade named Funland near Picadilly Circus. It had a mind-boggling selection of games and was actually a very good arcade, but for some reason I gravitated toward and played the hopping game “Hopping Road”

Yes it’s a racing game based around hopping using a pogo stick controller. I hopped and hopped like a madman and won the race easily but at the cost of almost-death. It was torturous, boring and embarassing since people were watching. Why I played it I have no idea!

We just had dinner (shown above), and are both bone-tired so it’s time to crash and eat junk (cheese & onion chips, mars bars and lemonade), watch TV and play DS.

But I’ll leave with a certain photo, deliberately without description or explanation. Go on AW, comment on this one!

Go South

July 29, 2010

The train trip back to London was beloved by 66.6% of the travellers. One of them however was motion sick for most of the trip:

I just sat quietly, tried not to look out the window and played Dragon Quest 9 on the DS 🙂

Jim was of course in hog heaven, as he always is in any station:

And KLS was in a good mood since she’d just purchased vittles in a M&S Simply Food store:

Edinburgh

July 29, 2010

We must be getting tired. Each day we’re taking fewer and fewer photos.

On our full day in Edinburgh we went and visited some of the tourist attractions of the city while JBF took a full day train trip to Inverness.

Our first stop was Edinburgh castle, which is built on the rocky cliff overlooking the city:

This was the fourth castle of our trip and was different from the others. For a start a good portion (maybe one half) of it is still used by the military. Secondly much of the castle was restored within the last hundred years or so making it a more modern attraction than the others we’d seen.

Even so it was well done, in particular the exhibits on the Scottish crown jewels (called ‘The Honours’) and the exhibit on the history and use of the prisons underneath the castle.

In addition, we were intrigued by this:

It’s a ‘time gun’, fired every day at 1pm so the populace can set their clocks. Obviously it is not necessary now, but tradition holds that the gun remains in use. There was a good history on the whys and hows of such guns, and I was surprised to see that Sydney still has a functioning time gun as well…

After the castle we took a guided tour into the vaults below one of the larger bridges in the city. These bridges do not span water – rather they span the glacial valleys carved into the bedrock of the city aeons ago. One such bridge (the South bridge) was built with an extensive network of vaults underneath it, which for a few hundred years were used as homes, shops, pubs, storage and hives of scum and villians. The tour was very good and I recommend it if anyone visits Edinburgh.

Here’s lunch:

Yep, a sausage roll 🙂

In the afternoon I solo climbed the Scott Monument which is on Princess Street opposite the castle:

287 sometimes very narrow spiral stone stairs allow the brave to climb through four separate levels to reach nearly the very top. It’s a bit scary and a lot claustrophobic, but provides great views of the entire city and well out across the bay. I was dead tired after, but I’m glad I did the climb. KLS waited below and took a snap of me on the lowest level… can you see me in this picture?

I had a kebab for dinner which was delicious but would come back to haunt me the next day…