The first farewells.

My certified driving record did come in the mail in a timely manner, so I faxed it in for good measure.  Now I'm back to trying not to think about my visa, because I'll just start worrying about it again.  I got my student ID form in the mail yesterday, so I'll get to put my other passport photo to use, it seems.

The farewells have started.  Yesterday was my last day at work, and I was a lot sadder to leave than I expected to be.  I printed out a few of my pictures of various places in Scotland and gave them to my coworkers as farewell gifts; they, in turn, took me out for beer and nachos. 

Three weeks to go...

Scotland Fun Facts!

I faxed my driving record to the consulate on Friday morning.  I was wigging out all Thursday night because it says "Non-Certified" and does not include the fines I had to pay, and the certified copy I ordered is not going to be here in anything like a timely manner.  But surely they'll email me again if what I faxed is not good enough, right?  Right, guys?  RIGHT???

Enough anxious nonsense.  It's time for SCOTLAND FUN FACTS!!!  :D

- Population: approximately 5.2 million.  More people live in London than in all of Scotland.
- Patron saint: St. Andrew.  That's his cross you'll find on the blue and white Scottish flag, or Saltire.
- Edinburgh's population is 486,000, making it slightly larger than Raleigh, NC.  Edinburgh is the second largest city in Scotland (next to Glasgow) and the seventh-largest in the United Kingdom.
- There are only four cities in Scotland with populations over 100,000: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Dundee.
- Highest point: Ben Nevis, at 1,343 meters, or not as high as Mt. Mitchell.  More people die each year trying to climb Ben Nevis than Mt. Everest.
- Much of Scotland was once volcanic, which is what makes the scenery so spectacular.  Edinburgh itself is built on several volcanic hills, the most recognizable of which include Castle Rock, Arthur's Seat, and Calton Hill.
- Scotland has 790 islands, which can be roughly divided into Shetland, Orkney, and the Inner and Outer Hebrides.  130 of them are inhabited.
- The Orkney and Shetland Islands once belonged to Norway; you will therefore find a lot of Norse and Viking influences there, from architecture to family names.
- The official flower is the thistle and the official animal is the unicorn.  Scotland is the only country I know of which has a fictional creature for its official animal.
- Scotland has no official national anthem, but it does have an unofficial one: "Flower of Scotland," written by Roy Williamson of The Corries.
- Most widely spoken languages: English and Scots Gaelic (pronounced "gallic").  You'll mostly find Scots Gaelic spoken in the western highlands and islands.  All the road signs are bilingual in that part of the country, as well.  Some of my Scottish friends would have my head if I didn't also mention Lowland Scots...which is more of an English dialect than a separate language.
- It is technically correct to call a Scottish person British, because "Britain" is the name for the island which England, Scotland, and Wales comprise.  It is technically incorrect to call a Scottish person Scotch - Scotch is whisky.  (I have tried to explain this to my 84-year-old English grandmother several times, to no avail.)  And for the love of God, whatever you do, do NOT call a Scottish person English!

A minor moment of panic.

I got an email today saying that my visa application is now being reviewed by an immigration officer.

:D

Eight minutes later, I got an email with the subject line "UK VISA - URGENT."

D:

They need my DMV record.  The International Office Guy at the university told me they would NOT need my DMV record, even though I DID need to list the three minor traffic violations I have accrued over seven years of having my driver's license.

LIES.  ALL OF IT.

Luckily, a job I applied for several months ago wanted my driving record, so I have it handy and can fax it to the embassy tomorrow.  I am not going to say anything else concerning minor heart attacks, because that would be tempting fate.

My brain, it is gone.

I think today will go down in history as the day I officially checked out at work.  Things went well until a little before noon, and then I (literally) went out to lunch and (figuratively) never came back.  And I still have seven days left to muddle through.

In other news, I got an email from the embassy in New York yesterday, saying that they got my package and have opened it and organized the contents in preparation for review by an immigration officer.  I will get another email when an immigration officer actually starts reviewing it, and when a decision has been made.

I have taken it into my head to learn how to cook properly, so that is this weekend's big project.  I'm starting with eggs (fried, scrambled, and omelets) and an easy- and yummy-looking Thai noodle recipe I found online.  When I lived alone during my last year of undergrad, I subsisted mainly on frozen dinners, instant rice, packaged tuna, and corn muffins.  I'm sure I'll still be eating those things in Edinburgh (minus the corn muffins, as I'm quite sure they don't sell Jiffy cornbread mix in the UK), but I figure if I can learn to cook four or five additional meals, I'll be able to eat fairly well.

Flights and hostels ahoy!

THE FLIGHT IS BOOKED.

I am leaving August 20, arriving in Edinburgh August 21.  I'm flying Continental Airlines, with a lengthy stopover in Newark.  This is the time of year for afternoon thunderstorms, so I'm taking no chances with weather delays.

I have also booked accommodation for the nine nights I will be in Edinburgh before my trip to the highlands and islands leaves.  The first 5 nights I'll be at Art Roch, which is where I stayed when I visited in January, and which is my favorite hostel in Edinburgh.  It's in the Grassmarket, just south of the castle, and it's got lots of character - lots of stone walls and candles, and the rooms are quite homey and spacious for a hostel.  The last 4 nights I'm booked at Caledonian Backpackers, which is at the western end of Princes Street.  I've never been there before, so I don't know what it'll be like.  Really, I'm hoping that I'll be able to land a flat in the first five days that I'm in Edinburgh, and I'll be able to just cancel that booking.

Let the official countdown begin!

Giving notice, appointments, and flat-hunting.

I gave notice at work on July 5, and my last day will be July 29.  At the moment, I work at a well-known hospital in Durham, NC as an admin assistant, but I have also been an appointment-scheduler at a psych office, and an intern and occasional beer-slinger at a local record company in previous lives.  My supervisor is incredibly difficult to work for, and on the whole I won't be sorry to leave.

I have a GYN appointment on August 1 and an eye doctor appointment on August 2, to make sure everything is in good working order and to stockpile meds and contact lenses before I leave.  Health insurance is something I haven't researched yet, but I'm not counting on being able to get those things for cheap over there.

I've spent the last several weeks flat-hunting online.  My (naive) hope was that I could get a place lined up before I left, go straight there after getting off the plane, have a look and make sure it wasn't a total dive, and sign the lease, pay the deposit and move in straight away.  But this is proving to be impractical, the fact that I can't view any places for a month or so is proving to be a stumbling block.  My plan at the moment is to suspend the search until a week or two before I leave, and then start contacting people and places again to make actual viewing appointments.  However, I have been in contact with one landlady, and a girl who is interested in the same place (it's a 4-bedroom flat) and is in the same boat as me arrival-date wise, and this looks like it might be promising.

Speaking of arrival dates, I still don't have a firm one.  The Border Agency tells you not to book your flight until your visa's been approved, but I'm going to anyway (as I suspect everyone does).  The date I'm looking to leave is August 19, arriving in Edinburgh August 20.  I may end up pushing this back a day, leaving August 20 and arriving August 21 instead, because I will be arriving in the middle of the Edinburgh Festival AND the Military Tattoo, and in the hostels which aren't completely booked up already on August 20, the only beds available are in the cattle-stall dorms (dorms with 12 or more beds).  I'm going to be booking my flight and a hostel this week, because if I wait much longer, even the cattle-stall hostels are going to fill up, and then the dream I had a few weeks ago about arriving in Edinburgh with absolutely no place to stay will come true!  AHHHHH!!!

Good news and bad news.

Good news: The July bank statement finally appeared, so I (or rather, my mom - thanks Mom!) SHIPPED ALL THE THINGS today.  This includes my VAF-9 application, Appendix 8, my diploma and transcript from UNC, my appointment sheet from the biometrics people, the bank statement, a letter from my parents, my birth certificate, my passport, and a passport photo.  I paid the extra $12 with my application fee to get everything shipped back, but I found a little footnote on the immigration website that was all "MAIL COPIES OR YOU WON'T GET ANYTHING BACK!!one!!!" so I made copies of everything and sent those too, just to be safe.  So, my visa application should be in the hands of the British Consulate in New York tomorrow!

Bad news: I did not get the Saltire Scholarship.  Wah.  Also, I am having trouble finding a flat in Edinburgh.  But I'll go into that next time.

"Relax your fingers and don't press down."

I went and got my biometrics taken yesterday.  I went to the local immigration office, which is an immaculately clean and terribly official building near Research Triangle Park.  Also, ruthlessly efficient: I was in and out in fifteen minutes, including the time it took me to run back out to my car to put my digital camera away (NO CAMERAS ALLOWED).  A very nice lady scanned all ten of my fingerprints and took my picture, they stamped my appointment print-out to prove that I'd been there and done that, and I was done.

Then I drove back to work and got caught in a torrential downpour on the way from the parking lot to my building, and had to spend the rest of the afternoon in wet clothes.

This morning I went to my bank to talk about transferring funds to a foreign bank, and possibly getting a loan.  As far as transferring funds goes, it looks like I'm going to have to carry a cashier's check and/or large amount of cash with me on the airplane, because a wire transfer can only be accomplished if I am physically at the bank in the US.  Looks like that money-belt I used on my backpacking trip two years ago will be put to use again!

Then I went to my parents' bank to try to get the last piece of documentation I need for my visa: a bank statement.  This has not been as easy as it sounds.  The most recent online statement is from the beginning of June, which is not recent enough.  Based on the dates of the previous statements, the July statement should be there, but it's not.  So I went to the bank to get them to print me one, and what they printed me looks...not quite right.  It's got the account numbers and the amounts and such, but it doesn't really show the transaction history, which is the critical bit.  So I'm very nervous about sending it off, because if it's not right, I don't get a polite phone call from the immigration office saying, "Could you please send us such-and-such, kthxbye," I get a big old REJECTED stamp and then have to start over. 

The long and short of it is that I'm going to wait a few more days for the online statement to appear (or the paper statement to come in the mail), and then send everything.  This is just incredibly annoying because I wanted to get it done today, and every delay in sending the stuff means a delay in me actually getting the visa.  Besides which, now that I've enrolled my biometrics, I have an actual deadline by which my documents must be in New York: July 22.

Everything is ready to go except this one last piece, and it's aggravating.

Money makes the world go round; or how I am going to strangle everyone at Wells Fargo.

There are certain purchases I wish to make before I actually arrive in the UK - purchases which must perforce be made in British pounds.  In anticipation of this, I called my bank about a week and a half ago to get a notice put on my bank account, because usually when transactions in foreign currency show up on a person's bank account, that bank freaks out and locks the account down (and rightfully so, in most cases).  I called again this evening, just to make sure this had been done.  What I gathered from the customer service rep I spoke to was that everything was ready for my anticipated arrival in Scotland on August 20, but not before.  I tried to explain that I need transactions in British pounds to start clearing now, before I actually get there.

I may as well have been asking for the goddamn moon.

The customer service rep assured me somewhat tepidly that if I tried to make a purchase on a British website now, it would go through, no problem.  So I went on Wild In Scotland's website to try to book a seat on their 10-day trip to the Hebrides and Orkney (among other places) leaving at the end of August.  Quelle grande surprise, my card was declined.

After about 20 minutes on hold with the bank again, I talked to someone else who told me that there was no way to put this kind of notice on my card over the phone, and I'd have to go to my local branch to get it sorted out.  I think the branch down the street from my house is open until 6pm on Thursdays, so I guess I'll just have to go there after work tomorrow and argue with someone in person.  Meanwhile, every other one of this tour leaving in August is already sold out, and I'm petrified that this one will become sold out within the next 24 hours as well.

I really don't understand why "I am going to be making transactions in both American dollars AND British pounds over the next six weeks and I need them all to go through" is so difficult for my bank to comprehend.  -_-

Quick update: Let the apartment-hunting begin!

I got new passport photos taken yesterday, so just about everything is ready to be sent off.  My plan is to send it on Friday, after I get my biometrics done.  And now I'm looking online for furnished flats in Edinburgh!  More on that anon...