アサミの旅の始まり
Welcome back to Asami's world tour bracket tm uh part five
yeah i think um now we're in uh london slash scotland so this was like a nice break um
since i started this travel because up until this point i'm solo traveling uh well except for the
hajimemashite people at mongolia where we had the same kind of itinerary but um yeah so like you
know for a solid two and a half weeks or so i've been solo traveling and then um but in london i'm
meeting my friend from high school so it's nice to see her and her husband and um also one more
friend from my grad school um who was a postdoc when i was a grad student and now he wrapped up
his postdoc in the u.s and is back in his hometown in um like a town near liverpool so my plan was
to land in london um go visit this former postdoc friend of mine in liverpool and meet my friends in
london again in edinburgh and then we take the car from edinburgh to explore the scottish highlands
um so if you have never really thought about going to scotland
i am also a newbie and i feel like i was not doing it justice by just kind of zipping through
in only maybe two days and uh no two nights three days even though um it was very short
thank you to the summers in high latitude area the sun gets still bright out at 11 p.m or something
so um even though it's only three days it was three very long days so i feel like we packed a
lot of action in there that was a very nice little break but let's just maybe go back to
the town near liverpool i stayed in um my postdoc friend's uh you know basically and
it's uh in a town called nantwich and if you look up there's probably a very
brief description of the town and i think that's pretty much it
it it's like just lovely little countryside town in north of england is what it is and
my main sort of you know mission for visiting that town was to see my friend um this is what
happens when you have friends scattered all over the world quite literally what you would do is
if you find yourself in the same country and if the country is like a reasonable size like uk and
not a massive country like canada or america you you know ring them up and try and meet with them
while you're still in the same country because those moments are few and far between and
and yeah very grateful for him and his parents for hosting me and you know showing me around
sort of like a classic um historic towns and we had a lot to catch up uh so at that point i had
i had graduated from my phd in what 2023 in may so it's been about two years
since i left and boy did a lot happen in those two years for my parent like for my friend
personally but also in the lab as well so um i just you know had to catch up on the lab gossip
um you know hearing things about where people ended up what sort of new faces are in the lab
and so that was nice and getting to catch up with him was also nice um we're kind of in a similar
stage of life in that uh we're both postdocs who are in between jobs i guess um can talk more about
it later but yeah with lots of free time and you know thinking about what should we do for the next
move but kind of i guess we're both kind of in the limbo for a different reason um and so it was nice
to you know see and talk to people who are more or less on the same boat as you and you know just
kind of be comforting to each other um just like hey when you are pursuing academic or semi-academic
research especially in a climate that is a current us of a it's not smooth sailing it's
no job security is not the reason why we do research so um there can be sort of those
more uncertain moments um but i think we both know that we have what it takes to continue
doing research it's just a matter of you know picking the right opportunity and um
see where it takes i think we're both more than ready to take on the new opportunities but also
don't want to take a random one because that can sort of stray you in a wrong direction
and i think we're a little bit too smart to not let us do that so that's what it is um
スコットランドの旅の始まり
and so back so i left there and then took another train to meet my friends in london slash my high
school friends uh in edinburgh edinburgh uh it was funny because as soon as i stepped off
from the train station i hear bagpipes it's like wow it's like everything so stereotypically
edinburgh about it but i do wish i visited edinburgh maybe like four or five years ago
because i would have had a group of friends there who went to uni there or who were my
former collaborators uh during grad school time um they would have been there to sort of like you
know show me around the town but edinburgh was not the main point of us visiting edinburgh
it was merely a starting point of our journey so that's fine we uh took off and so our sort of
quick speedy itinerary to the scottish highlands was to drive from edinburgh to glencoe
and then on the first sort of afternoon stayed the night in glencoe and then from glencoe we
went to isle of sky the next day spent most of our time in the sky and then um
then we will come back to fort william for the night so you know back to the mainland
main island and then um the last day we just you know made our way back uh from
fort william back to edinburgh um and what i would have done differently maybe is to
sprinkle hiking here and there because there were many majestic truly majestic looking
sites in scotland like picture this um you're driving through a scenery of lakes and mountains
that keeps on going and going and the best soundtrack that you can think of is like
either lord of the rings uh movie soundtrack or maybe how to train dragon um the test drive
sound effect the sudden music um yeah it's like that kind of like super just like amazing
vistas and views rock formations green and blue and everything in between so that was
really really amazing um little drive that we did and basically once you get close to glencoe
there are like new viewpoints you know every kilo or two meters so um yeah just like drive
stop at the viewpoint look around and absorb the scenery then get back on a car and move two more
kilometers for yet another majestic viewpoint and so on and so forth um so i think yeah by the time
we like even though the actual drive from edinburgh glencoe is maybe four hours uh think
with all the stops that we took took us maybe like five or six hours uh but we did not mind because
that was kind of the whole point also very lucky of us is that the first two days we were blessed
with like a rare amount of sunshine like even the locals were like wow we don't usually see
this much sunlight um in scotland um you know famously known for kind of like misty dark
cloudy very temperamental weather so we had beautiful days almost too hot even but um nothing
compared to tokyo of course but it was nice very very sunny and um yeah just talking and good
companies um along the way and yeah um so i think you know if i were to sprinkle in hikes i would
need to factor in maybe you know a few hours a day so maybe i'll extend it to maybe three four
days we only explored like a part of the isle of sky like a western part of the
isle of sky so if you wanted to see the whole of the isle of the sky uh you probably needed maybe
yeah a week to do what we did basically but i think we did take everything i did eat haggis
スコットランドの風景と動物
which google what it is i just don't want to explain it because it sounds very unappetizing
but my impression at least flavor-wise was that it's just like a very dense and oily sausage
is how i felt like it was um what else oh we saw the adorable adorable highland cows or they say
coos uh as they say in scottish um they're really cute you know those like smallish cows with shorter
legs and fringes in on their face like they look like they have just been head banging to some
epic rock music for the past 10 minutes and their hair is just all disheveled and everything um
yeah they're just like hanging by the roadside farm so we took some photos of them very cute
very adorable um and yeah so lots of goats sheeps i think they were just like everywhere
cows um and i would explain or sort of share more about what sort of places we were at except i just
have zero clue how to pronounce it like scottish is just so unintuitive in terms of the pronunciation
and how it's spelled so i am not even going to try just western half of isle of sky is all you
need to know yeah um if you are in london slash anywhere near the scottish highlands really really
nice drive and uh make sure you have enough time for hiking you just have this amazing views um
again very different from the majestic open expansive field of mongolia but more rocky and
mountainous but still not like too much forest going on you can still see grass mostly covering
some waterfalls and things like that um yeah i think these are the reasons i really would
like to travel you know see the sceneries um that you can only really see and experience
there so yes um scottish highlands that was it um and then yeah just like came back spent a couple
of days uh in london to see my other friends in london and uh went to museums and stuff
モントリオールでの短い滞在
the usual spiel and then off i went to montreal but this is this is a chaotic little leg so let
me explain uh because i extended my stay in barcelona and vienna my time in montreal got
shortened to about 15 hours and you know when all is taken in from all of the time it takes to get
out of the airport and whatnot it's maybe like 10 hours and just like went to bed and sleep
at the airport hotel so i really didn't do justice to montreal even though um i went there before
yeah this was in this was when i was still in new york so a while ago um but i went there
in the dead of winter you know like actually two days or so after a giant snowstorm so
don't have much to share about montreal right now uh because i only spent 10 hours in dark
pretty much in there but uh now we're off to the final destination of this trip which is
seattle washington in united states of america okay thank you that's it for the show today
thanks for listening and find us on x at egode science that is e-i-g-o-d-e-s-c-i-e-n-c-e see you
next time
