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Yesterday I took a bus tour of Edinburgh. It took about an hour and covered the major sights in a topless double-decker bus. Pretty fun, and a good way of getting an idea of the layout of the city in real life, outside of my little map book.

I then hopped a city bus to Ikea, which made for a crazy trip. I had looked up the instructions ahead of time for getting to Ikea, and knew that it was located behind a shopping mall. As the bus turned in front of the shopping mall, I went to the front and asked the driver if that was the Ikea stop. He said “oh no, that’s not for another 10 or 15 stops.” Believing him, I stayed on the bus as it wound its way through a tiny Edinburgh suburb, coming around again through farm land. When the driver announced “Ikea stop”, I got off and followed his instructions of heading down a farm road for “2 – 3 minutes”. This turned into a smelly (cow shit) 15 minute trek which took me to the back of the Ikea building, so I had to circle it through the loading docks until I got to the front. It turned out, of course, that once I finished my Ikea shopping and crossed through the parking lot, I found myself at the original shopping mall. That will teach me for trusting bus drivers!

And finally: Thank you to Eva and Pat for the nice postcard from Athens!!