Soliciting in the dark

OK, so the title is a bit misleading. I saw a solicitor (a lawyer in American) this afternoon to talk about buying a flat. The UK doesn't have real estate agents or title companies. They have special property lawyers who handle the whole thing. Scotland in particular makes you use them to put in a bid on a house, so there's no "for sale by owner" here. Basically she told me pretty much what I had already read up on, but it was reassuring to have our thoughts confirmed by a pro. Basically, we want to buy in the city and in an old building, as the more modern buildings (which we just think are ugly for the most part) don't appreciate in prices over time.
As of today all of our US $ are being transferred over here and into UK £. So now I just need to talk to a bank and see about the loan portion. Loans are also totally different here. There are no "fixed rate" loans here. They all fluctuate with the Bank of England (similar to the Fed in the US) rates. There are also a lot of things we need to be wary of, like penalties for paying the loan off sooner than the time period. So, hopefully the whole process won't be too confusing. But we bought a book on the subject, called "Buying a home in Scotland," and we have grilled just about everyone we have ever met about the subject. So, I feel fairly comfortable with the process. It's not quite as stressful as our first home buying adventure in Tallahassee.... Oh, I still miss our old garden there! We sure as heck won't have anywhere the size that we had in that little house. We won't have a house for one thing.... Oh well, it's exciting European living! That's what I'm trying to tell myself!
Perhaps you're still wondering about the whole dark thing. Well today at 5:30 the power went off on our whole block, perhaps more, but I looked out the window and didn't see any lights anywhere on our block at least (although Simon had power at the university so it wasn't a huge outage or anything). Since it's already totally dark here by then, I had to make it to my bedroom where thankfully I had just placed a flash light this weekend. What luck! I would never have found the matches without it. The power was out for an hour, and Marius was starting to freak out a bit without the lights. He didn't even settle down much when I lit a bunch of candles. (Thanks for the X-mas present Paula! Thankfully I opened it early and could use it easily.) You know, perhaps it's because I now have a little one, or perhaps it's because I am still not 100% comfortable here yet, but I had a little nervousness during the whole outage that I never used to get when the power would go out in the states. My first reaction, was "Oh no, I have no clue what's going on, and no clue how to find out what's going on." I guess I could have walked downstairs and turned on our car radio if I had really thought about it, but that didn't occur to me and my nerves were calmed once I called Simon and heard that he was all light up and working at the university just fine. In the states I just figure that the power will be up and running soon enough and never worry. But things here never run as smoothly as I think they ought to, and I half expected to find out that if the power goes off after hours, then they don't fix it until the morning. I don't know, how am I supposed to know how things operate here? The light bulbs don't even freaking screw in, so you never know. Luckily that's not the case, which would have been terrible since we have an electric water heater and our radiators wouldn't have worked.