Aberdeen Life

In the upcoming weeks my wife and I may well be deciding to move to one of three possible locations in the United Kingdom. In the next few days I'll have a post listing the attractions to each. We may end up staying home, but if we move, these are the options, in alphabetical order. First:

Aberdeen, Scotland

This is the skyline of Old Aberdeen, I think. In other words, I imagine there would be the historical part of the city and the more modern looking part. My impression is that this is facing south-east, but I could be wrong.

Apparently the University of Aberdeen is 15 minutes walk from the ocean. One peice of propaganda claimed you could see dolphins from the shore sometimes. That would be something. I guess there are castles and parks and highlands to check out too.

As you can see from the map, Aberdeen is actually pretty far north. Further north than Edmonton, Alberta, where I live now. I mean, look at it, its almost Norway for goodness sakes!

But word on the street is that the 5 1/2 hours of daylight in the winter is a bigger deal than the cold. You get frigid winds but none of this sub-arctic -40 stuff like in northern Canada. I guess you'd be wearing hoodies and jackets all year though. I don't mind that.

One other interesting thing I just found out is that my Coutts family roots go back to McDuff, Scotland (which is right about where the "O" in Scotland lands on the map there). So that's kind of cool. Maybe we'd get there and find we had long-lost wealthy relatives with a parcel of land they want to give us in the highlands.

Anyway, here's the legendary part of the school I'd be attending. Its officially King's College, Aberdeen, in the University of Aberdeen.

Personally, Aberdeen has a lot going for it. It is a bit cheaper than the other front-runner, it seems to have more inroads to community life for families of students (although it is hard to tell), it is in a cool part of the world, and it seems like the primary school system would be pretty good and accessible for my kids.

That's the city and the school. Tomorrow I'll post about the teacher and the topic.