Fringe festival?

Well I'm up here in Edinburgh at the moment, but first let me tell you about my last week or so...

I've never really been all that keen on visiting London, but seeing as I was there already I decided to do see some of the sights. I did all the usual touristy things; the tower of London, Tower bridge, Buckingham palace, Big Ben... the list goes on. But while I was there I did catch up with a couple of friends. There was a girl I met at last years barn-dance, Gemma. She was originally from Scotland but had shifted to London a while back. It turns out she works at Gilwell Park (which is the headquarters of Scouting) so she took me on a bit of a tour of the place. It was quite cool, especially as world jamboree was on at the time and they had tons of activities set up for all the kids. My friend Rachael lives a couple of hours out of London, but she came in on the train and spent a day showing me around. It was quite good to have someone to talk to after spending the last few days wandering around by myself. We went up the London eye together. It's quite a good view from up there, London as far as you can see in all directions. I also caught up with an old rover from New Zealand who had shifted over a few years back and had a nice home cooked meal. Thanks Kerryn.
So I basically spent my last day in London milling around killing time till I caught my 11:00 overnight bus trip up here to Edinburgh. Funny story there. Everyone was queued up waiting to get on the bus, but the driver only let on about 12 people before he told the rest of us to go back inside and then took off leaving more than half the passengers behind. I was a bit worried there for a while, the people at the bus station didn't really seem to know what was going on. In the end they found another bus for us, but I'm sure not everyone got on that one either.
I got into Edinburgh at about 7:30 the next morning to find Cathy there waiting for me, which was all good. So after not much sleep and the hike back to her place, she dragged me up a huge hill called Arthur's seat. It was worth it though, views all round of Edinburgh. Quite spectacular really. It turns out that I got here just in time for the Fringe festival, so on Sunday we went down to the main street and watched the parade they put on. Not even the rain could put a damper on the afternoon. It's been quite good here, with the festival on there have been loads of street performers wandering about. We went to one of the fringe shows last night called 'break out' A bunch of Japanese break dancers. It was definitely good for a laugh. Cathy managed to get us tickets to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo tonight so I'm really looking forward to that and over the next few days we'll be seeing a couple more fringe shows and going to the Scotland vs. Ireland rugby game. So lots to do here in Edinburgh.
I've booked a mini tour round the rest of Scotland for next week, but I've still got a couple of Weeks to fill in after that. Looks like today I'm going to be looking at how to fill them in.

catch ya.