Fox Visit

We had a fox in our neighbour's backyard the other day so I thought I'd put some pictures up on Picasa. Click on the photo to see the rest of the album. (Apologies for the lack of focus, but I guess I'll never be a wildlife photographer.)

Finally. A Bank Account.

After 57 days in the UK I have finally been afforded the privilege of a bank account. Faithful readers will no doubt recall my earlier rant, and I have since found a sympathetic story in The Independent. Though despite the semi-positive trend noted in the article I still had to rely upon a little luck.

For clarification, the difficulty had to do with residency, not citizenship. So, even if I were a citizen of the UK, I would still have difficultly getting a bank account. Fortunately for me, I was able to find a bank that accepted the documentation I already had, namely our leasing agreement for our current flat as 'proof of address' (residency), as well as my job contract with the university. The university branch of the Halifax Bank of Scotland has a deal with the university to allow new staff to open bank accounts there. Till now, I'd been waiting for a utility bill to arrive at our house. The other day I discovered that our first electricity bill won't arrive till early December, so I was happy to discover another plan.

Now I'll be able to get paid, get a mobile phone plan, enroll with City Car Club, and possibly even get a library card, none of which were possible without a debit account. Though in visiting the mobile phone store today, it seems my options are limited until I establish a little more credit history here. But I'll leave that discussion to another day.

Some related articles for curious readers:

- How do you live without a bank account?

- Are high-street banks getting lax on security as they rush to sign up migrants?

Dalmeny and the Winds of Edinburgh

For our weekly walk, Alette and I ventured to the west end of Edinburgh, to South Queensferry, and walked about 11km back to Cramond. The trail is mostly paved though muddy in parts, and took us along the north shore with some nice views of the water. The walk begins at the Forth bridges, and then proceeds to Dalmeny House and the surrounding estate before reaching Cramond.

Unfortunately, Saturday was quite a cold and rainy day. We knew to expect such weather, even before we left Ottawa, so were relatively well prepared in general. What we weren't prepared for was the strength of the wind. Well, our friends Janet and David had told us to expect Fall to last about one day in Edinburgh with the leaves taking about that long to fall. It turns out to be a relatively accurate statement. Except that the wind has stayed around, perhaps to make sure the leaves stay down.

In trying to get a sense for how windy it actually was, and whether it was expected, I took a look at some of the previous weather forecasts. According to one forecast (cached by Google) from last Wednesday, we were to expect winds of about 43 mph on Saturday. For the young 'uns that grew up with metric, that's about 70 km/h. And yes, it felt that windy, especially near the water. Enough to stop us in our tracks several times. Needless to say, we were quite wet and tired by end. So much so, that we didn't even stop for a pint at the Cramond Brig at the end of our walk!

The View from Above

I was looking around for some interesting overhead pictures of our new neighbourhood and came up with the following. St. Mary's Cathedral is in the centre, and we're just off to the left. We have a large garden area in the centre of our block where we sometimes take Japhur for walks. Though mostly we walk around the ground of the cathedral.

You'll notice that the homes are all connected, and that some streets (like ours) have an oval shape rather than, well, a 'block.'

Photos of Our New Flat on Picasa

We're still waiting for a broadband connection at home, but Bert's Bar's WiFi zone has pulled through for us again and I've managed to upload a few photos of our new flat onto Picasa. So far just the outside of the place, some photos taken from the shared garden in the centre of the crescent.

We look forward to having faster, quieter broadband access sometime next week (Burt's Bar is loud at the moment).

In the Broadband Deadzone

Observant readers will have noted the recent, significant decrease in posts. Suffice to say that it has not been due to a lack of interesting Scottish adventures or ales. An unfortunate side-effect of our move to a new flat on October 1st has been our inability to get either a land-line or broadband hooked up. Today we discovered that our letting agent was only responsible for cancelling the previous tenant's phone service, but not starting ours (contrary to our reading of our letting agreement). In any case, we're keeping our fingers crossed for access at our flat within a week.

So tonight I ventured to Bert's bar for a pint and some blogging. Tonight I'm sampling Peter's Well from the Houston Brewing Company. (We actually came last night as well, where I had a pint of Landlord Ale from Timothy Taylor - and I'd have to say that I fancied the Landlord Ale.)

Hope to have some pics of the new flat, and have permanent Internet access, soon.