Last Weeks in Oban

After coming back from Edinburgh, I had about a week and a half left of my time in Oban. I continued to go to the Sea Life Sanctuary everyday and loved it. By this time I had most of the routines and tasks down.

Somedays I still got stuck on seaweed duty. (They used the seaweed from the loch in the exhibits, everynow and then they changed it out. So some lucky person got to go wade through the loch edges and pick up rocks with appropriately sized seaweed clumps.)

Another task I became very good at was food prep. As mentioned before, there were lots of fish to cut for various animals (don't forget the seahorses!). Occasionally I was asked to prepare food for the otters. They got chunks of fish in addition to baby chicks cut in half. We had to cut them in half in order to remove the yolk sac because it can give the otters gall stones or something.

Chicks pre-chop

Everynow and then I'd help out Ceri with the touchpool. She was in charge of interacting with the guests and talking about various exhibits and maintaining the health of the touchpool creatures.

One special thing each volunteer gets to do on his or her last day is participate in the seal training and feeding. You get to give commands and stroke them and it's pretty cool.

Thats the sign for no more!

I really enjoyed my experience at Oban's Sea Life Center and if I'm ever around there in the future I will definitely stop by again! 

Short Trip to Edinburgh

Edinburgh (or as it's pronounced Edinburra) is one of my absolute favorite cities!!

I had about 4 days off in the middle of my time in Scotland and I love the history and nightlife of Edinburgh so I hopped back on the bus and booked a hostel near High Street.

My first night I went on a ghost tour of the city. There are so many of them around and quite a few rely on cheap thrills. They'll tell you ridiculous ghost stories and have dudes in masks waiting around to jump at you. I went on one like that the last time I was there and wasn't that impressed. This time I went on a Sandemans Tour (I love that tour company and have been on many of their free walking tours around other European cities.) The Sandeman Tours like to stick to historical atrocities and more plausible ghost stories. Think Burke and Hare and body snatchers and such. There is so much history (and most of it is so violent) that its still a thrill.

The next day, I walked up the Royal Mile and window shopped and poked around. I went into the Optical Illusion Museum and really enjoyed it. Its about 5 crampt floors of all kinds of random illusions. I've got a few pictures of me as a dude. (handsome, i think, but I don't know why my face got soooo skinny) and a creepy baby thing. The last part at the tippy top of the Museum is a camera obscura which is basically a very old device that uses a mirror and a dark room to project a moving image of whats going on outside and you can move the mirror around to point it at different things. It's basically a peeping tom's wet dream.

View from the top of the optical illusion museum

The actual camera obscura. The image was projected on the white table and you moved it around with the stick thing. 

Me as a dude, hot right?

Me as a creepy baby

fun!

Later that night I did one of the Sandeman pup crawls and had a fantastic time! I hung out most of the night with a really cool group of people. There was a dude from Germany and a few girls from Sweden and a random smattering of other nationalities. We got pretty drunkkk and I'm quite happy that we all walked back to our hostels together because after visiting 5 bars that night I might have had some trouble locating mine....

The next morning, while feeling a bit under the weather, I visited Edinburgh Castle again. It has so much history and is quite large. I spent the majority of an afternoon exploring around. The day was kind of meh and rainy but that happens.

 

This is inside the museum-y part. I'm not sure that I was allowed to take this picture, but hey, I'm a rebel.  

This is the room where Mary Queen of Scots (that woman fascinates me) gave birth to King James of Scotland and England

Look what I found in one of the Scottish gift shops! Shark teeth! You better believe I hit up this thing quite a few times! In this same shop is the Scottish Textile Museum which was quite interesting. I bought a bag of tartan scraps that I plan to use for various projects in the future....

I also spent some time puttering about some more on the Royal Mile and went down to Princes Street to do some shopping. I also wandered around to Grassmarket Street and found the coolest vintage shop. Basically I spent a bunch of money.

Later I met some guys (Dave and Kevin) staying in my hostel and we hung out and grabbed dinner and later went out on the town for some karaoke and ciders/beers. I busted out my Whitney Houston with "I Just Wanna Dance With Somebody" I didn'y quite know all the words in the middle bits but the DJ seemed to really like me anyway. (I might have fluffed my afro at him, haha) There were some questionable vending machines in the bar bathrooms....yikes. On this night a good time was had by all and nobody went overboard with the dranks so it was all good.

Who doesn't love a little karaoke? Sing it, Dave!

The next day was my last day and in the morning I headed over to The Edinburgh Dungeon which is basically like a walk through Edinburgh/Scotland's history and tall tales. You go through various themed rooms where actors interact with you and in some you go on rides. It was super awesome and I highly recommend it, but it's not for the faint hearted. At one point we were on a boat ride and the lights go off and a creepy actress playing the part of an urban legend of Sawney Bean jumped on the boat and touches you and whispers things at you and it's quite terrifying. On the tour was only me and a couple. The girl was so terrified at one point that she almost left in the middle of the tour. I don't know if I would have been able to go it alone, so I'm glad she stuck it out.

Eventually my time in Edinburgh was over and I caught my bus back to Oban and the aquarium! 

Savin' Baby Seals!

Every now and then, during the season when the pups are being born, one will be found left on the beach. Most of the time these pups are just left for a little while as the mother seal goes hunting. These pups will be perfectly fine and the Sea Life Sanctuary doesn't get involved. Very rarely, the seal mother can't get back to her baby or she has abandoned the pup for whatever reason. This is when Sea Life Sanctuary will come to collect the seal, hopefully nurse it back to health, and then release it back into the wild.

One day we got a call about a pup that had been abandoned. The pup had been laying on the beach for a few days and no mother had been seen. Anna decided to drive out to the loch and take Millie and I along to assess the situation. We drove out to the loch and then had to take a motorboat to the place where the pup was stranded.

Here we are in the motorboat. Right after I took this pic, a massive wave splashed us all. 

 Here  is the tiny pup laying on the rocks where we found her. She was so skinny that you could see her hipbones through her fur. Her little body looked like a deflated beachball. We covered her in a towel and placed her in the plastic tub we'd brought. She was not particularly happy about that and cried the whole way back to the boat and across the loch.

 Here is Anna checking on her as well pull into the dock.

After picking up the seal, Anna dropped me and Millie off in town and then took the seal to the vet. Any incoming animals have to be checked out by the vet before coming into the Sanctuary. Then "Bobbie" as we called the seal was moved into a pen next to Boo in the seal nursery. Bobbie was not as charismatic as Boo and didn't move around and engage with those around her as much as him. She spent a lot of time crying. Poor thing.

More Scottish Sanctuary!

I don't really have a linear story to tell about my first two weeks in Scotland. Like I said, my days became pretty routine. Wake up early, bus to the Scottish Sanctuary, do all kinds of random jobs, bus back to the hostel, treat myself to an ice cream, make dinner and hang out in the common room doing work for my Sharks and Rays class, then to bed and do it all again!

 When I first got there there was one seal pup in the nursery. His unofficial name was Boo and he was a character. He would get soo excited when he saw people come in and he loved having his little pen washed out. When you pulled out the drain he would sit on top of it, trying to block the water. He would then try to fight with the water hose as you sprayed him and pen with it. Irritatingly, he also would wait for us to finish filling his pen with water and then shit in it, which means that we would have to drain it again and refill it, 

Silly creature. 

The aquarium uses water pumped in from the loch for most of the tanks. They also try to include many examples of local animals from the loch. The touchpool is mostly stocked with starfish, crabs and snails taken right from the shores of the loch. To capture them, the aquarium leaves out traps and checks them every week or so. One morning I helped. The moss that coats the rocks on the shore is incredibly beautiful. I had to pay careful attention to what I was doing, though, because the traps mostly caught crabs and they have large claws!

To be continued.....