Can I put my tuppence worth in?
It is my experience (and seems to be a consensus view) that travelling West to East is far worse than East to West in terms of jetlag. Your decision however may be based on purely practical considerations to do with flight times.
As far as where to go is concerned I would put a good word in for Canada; we had wonderful holiday there. It is a beautiful country, with friendly welcoming people. The rockies are very impressive if young mountains are your thing. One thing though - just don’t try the tea!
Inevitably perhaps, I want to say a word for Scotland. Maybe because it is such a wee place in global terms, it tends to be overlooked to some extent in favour of bigger European countries. (We sometimes get the impression that foreigners visit London and think that they’ve “done” Scotland!!). However Scotland punches well above it’s weight in terms of what it offers to visitors.
We have scenery that rivals anything in the world (unless you're looking for desert - we don’t do desert). There are rolling hills and gentle farmland, straths and glens and mountains, rivers and waterfalls and lochs, shoreline (more miles of it than the USA or Canada) of every description from long, long sandy beaches to wild cliffs where the land is broken by a ravaging sea. Come in the late spring and smell the coconut/vanilla perfume of hillsides of wild gorse in full bloom. Come in September when the air is crisp and the sky takes on that very particular blue and look at the scarlet rowans and the heather which, for all that it has become a cliché, is a magnificent purple.
We have a wonderful amount of history; for instance Callanish although not as well known, is older than Stonehenge and many people would argue much more atmospheric. This is the only country in the world where you will see Brochs. We have castles and mansions and battlefields enough to satisfy the most ardent historian.
If ‘Culture’ is your thing, we’ve got it in spades. Museums, libraries, galleries, exhibitions we have in abundance . Visit Edinburgh during the Festival. I used to live in Edinburgh and I still miss that special Festival atmosphere. There’ just so much going on and so many street performers around and people advertising fringe events - it’s vibrant. The fireworks Concert in Princes Street Gardens is not to be missed, if you don’t mind being in a crowd of up to a quarter of a million people Can I include sport with culture? Come over here in the early spring and come to Murrayfield; we have Ireland and Wales at home next year and the atmosphere at those two games is especially good. If you’re here the following year you can cheer us on to winning the Calcutta cup again!! If you're here in November there’s the Autumn Internationals and there’s a fair chance that we will be playing your lot. In fact there’s a chance we might beat you now.
Wherever you choose to go my main piece of advice would be to spend time
away from the big cities. Wonderful as they can be, you get to know a country and its people so much better if you go to small quiet places and go where the locals go.
I’ll look forward to hearing of your adventures and if you decide to head this way, PM me.
Elfstone.
Edit: I added a few photos to whet you appetite. (Compressed this time
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Edit 2: oops - 1.4MB?? I've taken them off. (I thought compressing was supposed to make things smaller!?
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Winner of: Novice Architect Excellence 2006.
FAPCA - Technical Design Excellence in Layout and Aesthetics
[Last edited by Elfstone at 07-09-2006 11:55 AM]
I spent what was probably the most expensive long weekend of my life hanging around New York doing touristy stuff and going to shows, but it was well worth it.
I studied it for 5 years (high school), and by the end I knew enough to carry on a decent conversation, but even at the end of year 12 we only had to be able to read and write about 150 kanji characters (on top of the hiragana and katakana alphabets). That's about 1800 less than a Japanese student at the same age...
/dy
