I thought I was done...

... with explosions when I left Iraq. But no, there was a 'suspicious package' at Edinburgh airport today that caused the evacuation of the entire facility, out into the literally freezing (ice pockets in places) parking area for about 3 hours whjile they did a controlled detonation and investigation of said package.

I hope the idiot whose luggage got blown up has nothing to change into.

The UK has been great, and I couldn't have asked for a better time than I had in Scotland, particularly considering I was traveling alone to a place I've never been and essentially had no knowledge or contacts of, traveling with too much crap in addition to my rucksack (just my guitar, but I'm heartily sick of carrying it by now). It would have been nice to spend more time with my friend Harbal in Glasgow, but again, with such an off-the-cuff schedule and visiting during the week, we were fortunate to have gotten together at all. In both Edinburgh and Glasgow, people I met in pubs just took me under their wing and showed me around, unwilling to chance the possibility that I might not have a good time. Londoners were pretty friendly as well, but the Scots went out of their way and then some. A couple guys took me around Edinburgh after hours telling everyone "Our mate's just back from the Gulf, give him some respect" and I couldn't get them to stop, lol. There's at l;east a couple kick-ass clubs in Edinburgh.

Got hit up by a hooker in Soho while I was in London. That was pretty funny. She wouldn't have been bad-looking if she'd at least had half of her teeth. She grabbed my ass before I knew what was going on and I just know she was going for my wallet when I put a stop to it. But I couldn't help but laugh anyway.

Feck! London is possibly the most expensive place I have ever been in my life. Maybe more than Tokyo was. Unbelievable. You choke a bit over the doubled prices, but it's not too bad until you think "oh yeah, and that's in pounds too!" (Which is about $1.95 to the pound right now.) So it works out about 4 times as much for almost everything as I would pay at home.

I'm killing time in an Internet cafe in Kensington right now, waiting for my hotel reservation for tonight (my last night) to show up in my email, because I got put pretty far behind schedule on the tasks I'd planned for today, by spending most of the afternoon freezing my ass off in the parking lot at Edinburgh airport. I was so chilled by the time they finally let us back in to the building, that it's taken me about 4 hours to warm back up, and I'm just worn out tonight.

Well, I'm off to try to get checked into a hotel, I don't think I've even got it in me to go out to a pub tonight, which is a shame.