Happy 2007!

Happy New Year!
Christmas went by without a hitch - we had a fantastic dinner of roast chicken, potatoes and veggies, thanks to Kye. Jack gave me an ipod shuffle (one of the cool new ones that are about the size of your watch face...so cool!) and I got him a jumper - of which he was seriously lacking considering we are in Scotland for winter!

During the week we went out a few times, worked, enjoyed the wonderful winter weather and prepared for New Year's. Edinburgh is famous for its Hogmanay celebrations. It boasts the biggest street party in Europe (according to Vincent at my work). Tickets cost AU$50 a head but we got FREE tickets from Vincent at my work. On the night itself we made pancakes for dinner and got all rugged up to go out at about 9:30. There was going to be music, stalls, dancing, bars, 100,000 people! So here we were...all ready to go...we said goodbye and left the house only to be assaulted by ice cold wind and rain, we made it about 15 meters. After returning home again vowing to give it another hour, we turned on the news to find out that the street party was CANCELLED!!!!!! Honestly, who's idea was it to have New Year's in winter??

You can imagine our disappointment (along with the other 100,000 people who had tickets). So we cracked open a bottle of vodka and watched 'the top 20 celebs of 2006'. Riveting. By midnight however, the sky had cleared and they put on a fantastic show of fireworks (as did the family in the lot across from us and about 10 other families in the suburb - fireworks really should be legalised in Canberra). We decided to go for a walk and ended up at a house party of Gary from the kitchen at Jack's work.

A few hours later, ironically having a debate about whether muggings and rapes actually occur as frequently as they tell us, Jack and I encountered a man and woman struggling on the footpath. After asking what the problem was the woman accused the man of stealing her handbag. He shouted a stream of abuse and then threw her handbag on the road. He shouted at Jack and sort of attempted to fight him but kept running away again, then he tried to grab my handbag and I did my best 'gauging out eyes' attempt possible but he gave up pretty fast (I'm sure if he made any real effort he could have taken it but he was just trying to scare me - he did a pretty good job!). THEN he ran after the woman (who had taken her handbag back again) and started kicking her and abusing her again (it turned out she was his wife...). To cut a long story short, Jack held him off for a while whilst the woman ran away and I stopped a bunch of drunken Italian boys to help. In the end nobody (except maybe the woman...) was hurt and we got home safely. I would not have been happy if someone had stolen my phone again!

On new years day we ate nachos and watched movies all day. A good way to start the year.

At the moment we are planning on leaving Edinburgh towards the end of January and taking a road trip around the highlands before touring some more of Europe for a few weeks and then NY, San Francisco and HOME by March.

Happy New Year everyone!