...and I'll suffer excruciating muscle pain before ye...

When I woke up on Sunday, I was dismayed to find that my legs had almost completely stopped working. Russia had whipped them into more or less reasonable shape, but in the months following my return academia, that enemy of all things muscle, caused them to atrophy from disuse. Now, after three straight days of walking up and down hills, over cobblestone streets and around a large banquet hall with nary a rest, it was if they were saying, "You want me to WHAT?!"
So I wandered aimlessly around the city center for the afternoon, taking lengthy sitting breaks on park benches. I noticed that Edinburgh is currently hosting the Cow Parade--you know, that thing where a major world city has a bunch of customized cows in its center for a while. The whole concept annoys me. It represents just another step in the insidious process of global cultural homogenization, and the cutesy-looking cows take away from the impressiveness and historical significance of all those wonderful places, and--aww, look at that one! It thinks it's Braveheart! "They can take our milk, but they can never take our FREEDOM! MOOOO!"
I'm moving into a room in a flat on Friday, and am currently staying in a spare room in the flat owner's old apartment. The new place isn't the alignment-of-planets-vortex-of-perfection that the first one I visited was, but it's good-sized, cute, and fairly central. I checked the cow that had Edinburgh center painted on it, and my flat's somewhere in the area of the left hind leg. Not ideal, but at least I made it onto the cow. At any rate, I'm not at the hostel anymore, and that's something to celebrate. It was fun meeting people from around the world, but less fun sleeping in the same room with them.
Job-wise, I worked one-off catering gigs on Saturday and Monday, and spent today following up various meetings with various office temp agencies. Turns out I can type almost 60 words per minute--thank you, AIM--and although I didn't get offered anything straight away, I'm going to annoy every agency I've signed with until that happens. That is, when I'm not walking around looking for pubs near my flat that are hiring.