Hi All!

I’m back after a “long winter”… You can read “winter” as my nice adventure of having to attend to 5 MSc. exams in just one week.

I don’t know why, but I really felt extremely stressed. Maybe is the fact that I am not doing anything else but the masters, or just the fact that they were very hard and covered a broad range of the Information Security subject.

Yesterday one of our friends fainted and gave up. She will have to come back next year to resit the exam as she didn’t have any conditions to attend to it. I felt like when I was running the Rio half marathon. The last 3 kilometres I was really exhausted, but I pushed a little bit because I knew how good is the feeling of completing something as hard and as challenging as the course in Royal Holloway.

One of our friends even had champagne waiting for us to celebrate!

After that we went to a beer in Crosslands, one of Royal Holloway’s pubs in Founder’s south quadrangle. It was a nice sunny day and we relaxed sitting down on the grass. As you can see on the pic it is no Rio beach, but it was good enough + the fact that you cannot have a 18th century Victorian castle at the beach… :)

Well, never mind. It’s done and gone and I am now in route to Glasgow, where tomorrow I will catch a flight to Kirkwall (Orkney). YES! I AM GOING TO SCUBA DIVE IN SCAPA FLOW!!!!

I’m so excited about that! I’ve been reading about this place since before I came to England. The nice thing about Scapa Flow is that it was a Royal Navy base in both the first and second word wars. This mean that a lot of ships were sunk in those waters and they are shallow enough so I can scuba dive!

There is also this story about the German High Seas Fleet, which was as big as the Royal Navy fleet in the end of the First World War. The Royal Navy intended to incorporate the captured ships into their fleet, and the German Admiral was not very happy about it. One day, when the British were doing exercise on the North Sea, the admiral ordered the sailors to scuttle the ships. Can you imagine dozens of ships being scuttled on a small lagoon? Diver’s paradise! :)

Of course most of the ships were savaged but 8 of them still remain under and are accessible for divers. The complete story about Scapa Flow and its wrecks can be read here: http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/jralston/rk/scapa/

I will be staying in a live aboard. I have reserved everything through the Internet and at this time I am not sure about what I am going to find. But I am prepared for everything. As long as they have a power socket for me to plug in the notebook and start working on my project, lot’s of wrecks to dive, food to eat and a bed to sleep I will be more than happy. This is the page of the operator I will be using if any of you is interested: http://www.scapa-flow.co.uk/ . I hope Mr. Invincible is alright... :P

I will be posting more info (like a trip report) as this trip goes on, especially since my notebook was FINALY fixed properly (well… there is a small problem that I found just 1 minute ago, but let’s not talk about it since this topic is really up to give me ulcers). So please watch this space! :D

By the way, I am now in route to Glasgow, where I will take the plane tomorrow to Orkney. I am in the train and I am using wireless internet access. Of course all is unencrypted and I could eavesdrop on which pages that nice blond girl that is sat two seats back is surfing, but I prefer to go talking to her when she goes up for a coffee… One of the things I’ve learned in my like is that geek talk does not impress women very much… :D

So let me go get a coffee now, as I think this might be the time to make a move! ;)

See ya!