2 1/2 Days Left In Edinburgh

First of all I want to say thanks to my best pal Cheryl for giving my blog a new look. The pictures are actual pics from our trip. She's the best!!

So we have 3 days left in Edinburgh, well 2 1/2 days left. Yesterday I went out and took the plunge...I cut my hair!! I got it cut the shortest that I have had it cut in like ten years, which for me is just below my shoulders. I also decided to catch up with the times and get it layered (I actually got it layered before but not as much as this time). I got it 'thinned' to. Very exciting! I must admit that it is a very different look for me, but I really like it!

In other preparations, we've packed up suitcases to ship home. It is hard to leave somewhere for a year and not accumulate some stuff. After a lot of thought and some research we found that the best way to ship things home was actually easier than we thought, and cheaper. We can just send our suitcases home through Mailboxes Etc. for 75 quid! Some shipping companies were going to take 8 weeks (this will only take a week) and they were going to cost like 200! We decided that we didn't want ot drag around our suitcases through Europe, but they are still in good condition so we went out and got real backpacker backpacks, and fortunately we can still send home our suitcases (to use for the next trip).


**Warning, Rant Alert**

Despite sending stuff home, obviously we have a lot more stuff than we can ever consider keeping. To combat this we made the decision to donate our things to a chairty shop, checking that they would pick it up, because we have quite a bit. We decided to donate our things to the PSDA, which is an animal chairty. We went into the store a week ago and arranged for them to come by and pick the stuff up. We were told the driver would call us some time this week to arrange a time for pick up no later than Wednesday, but probably earlier. For those of you who don't know, today is Wednesday, and in my land it is now just after 5pm. When we hadn't heard from them by yesterday we gave them a quick call to check that they were still coming, I hate to wait around all day for nothing. They told me that the driver would call us first thing in the morning to arrange what time he would be here today.
I woke up somewhat early to make sure we wouldn't miss his call and to make sure everything was ready for him to take. When we hadn't heard from him by 10:30 I called the PSDA again to make sure that he was in fact coming today, once again I was told he would be calling me and that he would be in the shop in the next 1/2 hour so I would hear from him than. By 12:00 we still hadn't heard anything. By now I was getting edgy, I just wanted to know whether or not this guy was coming today, because I HATE WAITING AROUND, and ummm, I did think that we were doing them a favour donating our stuff.
So at 12:30 Cheryl calls this time to see if he will be coming today and the woman becomes very curt and tells us that she has no idea and that he will call us. She was so rude it was like they are doing us a favour!!! There is at least 200 pounds worth of stuff, it's not like a couple bags of clothes and a few books. You know if they didn't want it they could have just said no thanks, and we could have arranged to give it to someone else. Now we leave in a few days and I'm not willing to get burned again waiting around for a shop to come and pick it up.
So now it's five o'clock, we haven't heard a word from them and we've got a bunch of stuff that we are going to have too sort through AGAIN, and we are going to carry it to the nearest charity shop, which isn't that near. We don't want it to go in the bin when someone can use the stuff, it would be such a waste, not to mention my wasted day! Argh the rage!