1. water pressure — there is no water pressure. some americans really love high-pressure shower violence when they come home from their runs/rides. i am one of those americans.

2. eco-laundry space saving washer/dryers — i thought i was going to love this little washing machine contraption; it’s one unit; it fits under the kitchen counter; everyone has one; it. takes. forever. the obvious downside is that you can’t wash one load while the other load is drying. you might be asking yourself why i have so much laundry. i don’t, in american terms. but euro eco-laundry contraption (which is both handsome and high-tech) only takes 10lbs of laundry to wash at a time and then 5lbs of laundry to dry. at home, some americans do one load of laundry every two weeks and it takes an hour and a half. i’ll be doing two loads of laundry today and it will take four hours. i can imagine that some americans wouldn’t like this. me? i don’t care — my knee is busted and i have work to do.

3. the hours — things are closed on sundays, which i think is incredibly civilized (if somewhat christian), but i can see some americans getting crabby about the inconvenience.

4. the prices — i can imagine that some americans would have some form of sticker-shock when they see that everything costs double here. me? i’m keeping my receipts and expensing all my food to amzn. organic fruits and veggies are about the same price here as they are in the co-op (which is kind of expensive). i hope that accounts payable understands the weak dollar and accepts my expense report. i am cautiously optimistic.

after years of running i finally have my first knee problem, which has been painful and frustrating in equal parts. it doesn’t bother me when i ride or walk, but when i run it becomes completely debilitating after maybe two miles. it’s been like that for about a month. i suppose i’ll have to find a sports doc when i get home.

running in a new city is one of my favorite things, as i feel like i can cover a ton of ground really quickly. with the residual knee stiffness from last weekend finally subsiding, i went to run around holyrood park. the good news is that holyrood park and arthur’s seat are gorgeous, the bad news is that my knee started acting up and almost locked up when i stopped to ask directions.

it probably didn’t help that there was a cross-country team of 13-year-olds who i decided to race up the hill. but don’t you worry, i brought one home for the usa and for old people with knee problems everywhere.

i’m paying for it now — laid up on the couch, ice on my knee, watching the football report on bbc2. no running until i get home. all cycling all the time.

my first week of work in scotland has drawn to a close. i was able to ride into the office four days this week, most of it not in the rain, for a total of 80 miles. it has worked out well. i ride in with a dude named jeremy who lives about two blocks from my flat.

a fair part of our ride is on a bike path that runs through the housing estates, which are, in case you don’t know, what they call the projects. only they look maybe 20x nicer than any housing projects i’ve ever seen.

every day as we ride the path, there’s a family that walks toward us three-across. they don’t leave us much room, so jeremy and i ride two-up so as not to run them down. every day they yell at us to slow down (we’re not traveling quickly). today when they yelled at us, jeremy called the woman a fucking idiot. (it’s true, she is a fucking idiot. though the only proof i have of this is that she uses her 8-year-old as a traffic-calming device.) the fucking idiot was not pleased at being called out.

then jeremy did something that i probably wouldn’t have done — he went back to a) apologize and b) have a reasonable discourse about proper use of a shared bike/pedestrian path. i thought he was gonna get himself punched. nope, just a lot of yelling, culminating with the fucking idiot taking out a copy of highway code from her bag and waving it at jeremy.

during lunch, when jeremy recounted this story, i learned a new word: knack (more specifically: fucking knack) — [from urban-dictionary.com] rough young people living in cities and towns in certain ares of Ireland wearing burberry hats tracksuit pant/short jeans and celtic jerseys with a few bulldog tattoos.

turns out they’re not only limited to ireland.

later that afternoon on the ride home, a different set of fucking knacks threw a plastic bottle at me from a car window, giving me opportunity to use the latest addition to my vocabulary.

jeremy has jury service on monday, leaving me to deal with the fucking knacks on my own. thanks, dude.

i maybe don’t. when i found out that the lads from work were headed down to the cinema tonight to see rambo tonight at half eight, i didn’t hesitate to accept their offer. i wanted some violence and some american english. or i thought i did. i wanted violence, but then i always want violence. it turns out that i didn’t want sylvester stallone’s american.

i was in a small panic that i was losing my taste for american and that i’m getting used to scottish now but when we went down to the pub for a pint and i realized that i couldn’t understand anything that the patrons in there were saying, i breathed a sigh of relief. it’s just sylvester stallone. it’s not american in general, which i probably should have suspected.

rambo holds up a second time, btw.

i tried to settle in last night and do some cooking but i was thwarted by the veggie grocery store near my house, which claimed to be open from 9am ’till late, but in reality is only open ’till 7pm. i’m trying to figure out under what circumstances does 7pm constitute ‘late’. sux.

unfortunately, i had no plan b, because i had to put all of my effort into plan a (going out, finding the one store i set out to find, coming home). it was also dumping rain, as it is wont to do in edinburgh in march, so i ducked into a conveniently-located thai restaurant.

i know less than 10 phrases in thai, one of which gets some use: i am vegan. it is phonetically written something like ‘ahan jay’, which in english is three syllables at most but in thai is something like seven and contains the queen mother of all diphthongs. usually when i mangle this phrase, thai people look at me like i just meowed at them, but last night the waitress said, ‘you’re vegetarian? me too.’ this was only funny to me because i went to the superstore (supermarket) yesterday at lunch and had to repeat myself three times when speaking english to the cashier.

yesterday was my first bike commute. it’s 10 miles each way, some of which is on wet cobblestones. i can’t believe that they hold bike races over those things. butchers. the rest is on really potholed rural roads and nicely-paved bike paths, which i think were old railroad lines. it was gorgeously sunny on the way in and wet at the start of the ride home but quickly dried out. the countryside here is even more lush than i thought it would be and is full of the old-world charm. i saw an incredibly bright double rainbow, a pack of shetland ponies, and heard some farmer scaring crows off with what sounded like a small canon.

it’s pretty cool here. i’m glad i got some sun yesterday. i was kind of worried that i wasn’t going to see any until i got back to seattle.

ok, i’m a little more awake now that i have seven consecutive hours of sleep behind me.

there was some debate whether to get a car or not. i am somewhat anxious about driving on the other side of the street, so i bailed on the car even before i got here. i think this was the right decision. if this city was laid out like phoenix or los angeles or even seattle, i don’t think it would be a problem. the thing is, edinburgh seems to be laid out like boston, only with narrower streets that seem to change names four times over the course of a half mile. also, they have charming point-of-interest street signs that read ’superstore police hq’ and ‘crematorium’.

the thing about working in scotland is that it isn’t like being on vacation in scotland, which is something i didn’t really consider. i don’t think i’m going to get a chance to see edinburgh during the day until weekend, though i may try to sneak out early every now and again and hit a museum or two.

today is my first bike ride to work. a lot of the streets are cobblestone. in seattle when a street still has the original cobblestones, they call it ‘old world charm’. here in the old world, they just call it ‘charm’.

that last sentence was a lie.

i heard bagpipes last night while i was hanging out at dominic’s. i looked over at him and he said, ‘i swear that i’ve never heard bagpipes from this apartment.’ i called bullshit. everyone here plays bagpipes and the whole world knows it.

i saw scottish window washers today. they were washing the windows of a four-story building. in the america, they’d be on a scaffold. in scotland, they stand on the ground and use a 40′ long stick with a squeegee on the end that takes three dudes to operate. i got pictures but forgot the cable required to get pictures onto this machine. i’ll have mia bring it next week.

i built up my bike tonight, in the hopes that it’ll be nice enough to ride tomorrow. scotland is making me miss the relative dry climate of seattle. the upside is that i am getting good pictures for my series of rain pictures.

i went to the ’superstore’ today to get fruit for lunch. the ’superstore’ has a fishmonger. i know this because there’s a giant sign on the wall that read ‘fishmonger’. i got pictures of that, too. you’ll see them next week.

ok, jetlag is setting in. i’m not loving it. and i’m unable to begin a paragraph that doesn’t begin with i.

the flight was long. i was sitting next to your indian gramma. she was nice but was hanging over my seat and i had a hard time dislodging her when i needed to get in or out. she wouldn’t get up and wanted me to squeeze past/over her. yeah, no. get up, gramma. i think that transport is maybe done differently in india, if i may extrapolate from that one data point and a bunch of hearsay. but i’m in scotland now so i’ll get on with a scotland anecdote…

a very nice fellow, dominic, from the amazon office (it’s called s9 here, in case you hear me referring to it as such) very graciously picked me (and my bike) up at the airport, took me to my flat, drove me to his flat where his wife cooked dinner, and then sent me home with some fruit for morning. so far, so good.

in the airport carpark, as i was trying to get in the passenger side of dominic’s car, i saw a six-year-old girl getting into the driver side of the car next to us. i thought to myself, ‘whoa. it’s kinda fucked up that they let six-year-olds drive here, but i should respect our cultural differences because i am a guest in their country.’ then i realized that it was me who was on the wrong side of the car. everyone else was fine. i am glad i am only riding a bike here, this way i can only really hurt myself.

oh, and i learned something today: don’t try to get through passport control at heathrow by telling them that you’re here to ‘work’ and that you have no idea where you’re staying, it raises a flag.

on saturday, i leave for scotland. i’ll be there for a month, working on a top secret project. work is sending me. though scotland is not a country i’ve ever really considered visiting, i’m excited to be going. i don’t think i ever considered visiting because it’s not warm and it’s kind of expensive, re: weak dollar. so to my mind, there were already two strikes against it. oh, and the hard-to-decipher accent was the third. the scottish mouth and the american ear don’t seem to line up, or at least their mouths don’t line up with my ear. though pc mentioned that if i can understand them, they’re from edinburgh; if i can’t, they’re from glasgow. i’m considering myself lucky that i’ll be in the former.

so over the next few days i’ll be boxing up my bike, getting my computers together, and putting some clothes in a bag (hiking, biking, running, regular). and then gone. i’ll let you know how it goes. there will be blogging.