A visit to Scotland

Right. So you have two and a half days to visit Scotland. Not very long, is it? Um, and I suggest the first day stay in Edinburgh and in the morning go on a coach tour of the city, just for, for half a day, just for the morning, and on the coach tour you will see the castle, Edinburgh castle, which is very beautiful indeed, very impressive, and then from there you’ll go past the cathedral, St Giles cathedral, and then on down to the palace, Holyrood Palace. So that’d be the castle, the cathedral and the palace, just from the coach. And then the coach goes through the what we call the New Town, on the north side of Edinburgh, that, it’s not new, it was built in the eighteenth century, but anyway it’s called the New Town. Then from there the coach goes to the zoo and, it’ll just pass the zoo, and it goes outside the city in fact to two bridges that are over the River Forth, that’s about ten miles from Edinburgh, two bridges, one is a road bridge and the other is a rail bridge, for trains. And then the coach will come back from the bridges, back into the city and it will leave you in the city centre. So that’s the morning. And I suggest in the afternoon that you go back to the castle and you spend the afternoon walking around the castle, there’s a lot to visit in it and er the view also is wonderful, you have a wonderful view and in fact the view, in the view you’ll see the New Town that you saw in the morning and you can just see one of the bridges also that you will have seen in the morning from the coach, on the coach tour. So that’s the first day.

The second day I suggest you take a coach tour outside the city, a whole day coach tour, and there’s a lovely one that goes, it leaves about nine in the morning I think, half past eight or nine, we’ll check on that, and it goes right across Scotland to the west coast to a town called Oban, that’s O-B-A-N, Oban, and the journey is beautiful, it goes through lovely countryside so, if the weather’s nice, you’ll have lovely views, and in Oban you then take a boat and a boat, there’s a boat that goes to an island called Shiel Island and um, it’s just very nice you know to get out of the coach, have a bit of sea air and if you’re lucky on the boat trip you should be able to see some seals as well. And then the coach will get back to Edinburgh about nine o’clock in the evening. So it’s, it’s quite a long day but well worth it. And then on the third day, well you’ll only have the morning, so I suggest you spend the morning shopping, er, you can buy lots of woolens of course in Edinburgh, sweaters and things like that, tartans, if you want to buy some Scottish tartans, um and any souvenirs that you that you want to get, so I suggest you spend the morning shopping. And then the train back to London leaves at two o’clock in the afternoon and that’s about a five-hour journey so you’ll be back in London about seven o’clock in the evening. So I hope you have a very good trip indeed.

(from Advanced Conversation, by M.Geddes, G.Sturtridge, Sh.Been. Unit 3;2.4)

UNIT 2

Lesson A

Journey to Namur

I had to go to Namur in Belgium on business. I was supposed to be there on a Saturday at 4.30, so instead of taking the plane on Friday evening and wasting a lot of Friday afternoon getting there I thought I’d leave very early on Saturday morning and arrive in Brussels at half past ten which will give me plenty of time to get to Namur by 4.30. So very early in the morning on Saturday the taxi arrived on time and I took the taxi to the local station. I was in plenty of time for the train. In fact I was early for the train and when I got to the station, a slow train to Reading where I was to catch the coach was waiting on the platform. I thought about taking the slow train but although it left before the fast train it arrived in Reading after the fast train. So I thought that I’d go and wait for the fast train which I did for a very long time, past the time it was supposed to arrive. About 10 minutes after the train was supposed to be in the station an announcement came over that there were floods in Woodenbasit which were delaying this train. And we waited, and we waited, and we waited. The train finally got there but because the train was late, I had missed my coach at Reading and had to wait another. In fact I missed two coaches and I had to wait for another 20 minutes or so before the next coach which should still have gotten me to the station, I mean to the airport just barely in time. Unfortunately there were roadworks on the motorway between Reading and Heathrow and the coach was delayed quite a bit. I hadn’t really worried up to now but I was starting to get worried now that I was gonna miss my plane. When I stepped out of the coach at Heathrow, it was 19 minutes to take off time. So I stepped out of the coach, fortunately I only had hand-baggage, I grabbed my bags and ran to the departure area. I put my bag through the X-ray machine and then found a short passport line and got into line and had my passport checked and ran to the gate. When I was almost at the departure gate, I realized that I had my hand baggage but I’d left my hand-bag back at the X-ray machine. So I turned around and ran back towards the X-ray machine, being screamed at on the way by a couple of security guards because you are not supposed to go back the same way that you come in. I did get my hand-bag. I ran back through passport control. Fortunately the man at passport control had recognized me, and got to the gate only to find out that the plane was late. So we waited and we waited and the plane finally took off. And we were almost an hour late getting to Brussels but I figured this would still probably be O.K. We did have to wait a while to land at Brussels, because we were late, because we weren’t scheduled to arrive then and we had to circle the airport for a few minutes. So we did land at Brussels and I hurried out and found the longest lines for passport control I had ever seen in my life. They just snaked all over the arrival area. It turned out that that weekend the Pope was in Brussels or in Belgium and the Passport officers were being very, very careful trying to keep the terrorists out of Brussels and so the passport control took ages and ages. I was really getting worried about this time but when I got out of the passport control, out into the main airport, our representative, our local representative was waiting for me and told me we were O.K. and we could make the train. We jumped into a taxi and rushed off to the train station and our local representative was wonderful. She’d realized that things were gonna like they were, that we wouldn’t have time to eat lunch. She had lunch, bought for me, she had everything, all arranged. We got to the train station and the train fortunately was on time. It was a real sigh of relief that we sat down in the train and I applied myself to the yoghurt and apple that she’d brought along as a snack. So we were on our way to Namur and I thought everything was O.K. Halfway to Namur an announcement came over the speaker system on the train that there was a bomb scare. The train stopped and we all had to get off the train and waited at the station indefinitely. So we got off the train and waited about 30 minutes before they found another train to take us on to Namur. And we finally got to Namur about 10 or 15 minutes before I was supposed to begin talking to these people. But I must say it was a really heroine experience.

(from The Cambridge English Course 3, by M.Swan, C.Walter. Unit 30. Less. A)

UNIT 2

Lesson B

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1305