You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2009.
Edinburgh was awash in more tartan than usual this weekend.
This being Scotland’s Homecoming year – Robbie Burns’ 250th birthday – Scottish descendents from around the world have come back to various events, particularly The Gathering, that took place Saturday and Sunday.
The event consisted of Highland games, dancing, music, clan tents and Scottish food at Holyrood park (behind the palace and parliament at the bottom of the Royal Mile). Saturday night the clans gathered at the palace and began a march to the castle, and we stood outside our pub to watch over 8,000 of them go past, a mile of tartan and bagpipes. When the McGregor clan passed, they stopped to point and cheer and take pictures of the pub.
They all (it seemed) returned later, after the parade, and we were (shock) still there drinking. We made friends with lots of American McGregors, mostly with fantabulous beards.
On Sunday we headed to the festivities. We watched women do a poor job of caber-tossing, large men with spiked boots chucking long hammers. We got free samples from every food stall (Arran Cheese, fresh bread, chicken pie, strawberry ice cream, lots of shortbread, cider, and haggis crisps? which pretty much just taste like pepper).
We stopped by the MacGregor tent, and the man in charge tried to convince us of his clan marketing prowess and how it can benefit our Mcgregor pub. We discovered the (mostly) American brand of enthusiasm towards their clan heritage when an old man from Colorado would spontaneously tell us the entire history of his clan, or MacGregor man would pile clan newsletters and flyers into our hands.
Last night, when we were at work and the festivities at the park had shut down, the McGregors descended upon the pub once again. They were from the States, from Germany, from South Africa, and had dubbed our pub ‘HQ’. They bought t-shirts in droves. When another ‘clansman’ would arrive, the entire back section would erupt in a loud ‘MCGREGOR!’.
The Montana McGregors (one of whom looks like Santa) have invited us to their lake cabin whenever we’re in North America. Jase has their email address.
I’m planning.
Though it makes me sad to know that in about two months I’ll no longer live in Edinburgh, I’m getting excited about The Next Thing. The plans are starting to come together. I’ll work until mid-September, at which point I’ll pack up and head to London for a few days (and possibly Bristol and/or Guildford), and then to Munich. That’s right kids, I’m going to Oktoberfest, and Andrea’s going to meet me there. We’re hoping to find accomodation that doesn’t include sleeping in Julia’s car, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Then! After three or four days of drinking GIANT BEER, I’ll head to Vienna, and then from Austria to Prague, and from there the plan is to not really have a plan, but to wander around Eastern Europe until I’m low on cash, and then cross my fingers and hope to find another job back in the UK.
I don’t know exactly how much money I’ll have at the end of the summer, but I’m saving like mad. To help stretch my money further as I travel, I’m planning to do some Couchsurfing. I think it’ll be a great way not only to save cash, but to get to know the places I visit better – it’s always great to have a local tour guide. I’ll offer knitting lessons or proofreading services to anyone willing to take me in (I have a limited list of skills, it seems).
This prospect will probably make my family nervous, but rest assured guys, I’ll be safe about this. And Jeff, relax, you’ve seen Taken way too many times.
August is about to hit and with it a population explosion in Edinburgh. August = festival season, which means the Royal Mile fills with slow-moving tourists and flyer-distributing-performers and sword-swallowers and machete-jugglers and other forms of general chaos. We’re going to work our asses off, and party far too hard.
(PS – Yes, in the picture is a copy of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, his epic tome on bullfighting, because yes, I am planning to attend the Running of the Bulls festival in Pamplona, Spain, next year. That’s not until next July, but I have a habit of getting ahead of myself).
Ryan Air, the king of cheap-ass flights, is thinking about charging people less if they’re willing to sit on stools rather than actual seats during flights.
Dudes, Ryan Air is already as cheap and bare-bones as it gets. I flew from Bristol to Dublin for FREE. I had to pay a fee to check a bag, but if I’d flown with only carry-on baggage, the whole thing would have cost me £0.00. No taxes. Nada.
Jenny and I flew Ryan Air from Dublin to Berlin in April. The terminal was in the bowels of the airport: it looked more like a bus station. A man in sweatpants tried to stem the flow of queue-jumpers as he checked passports to let us out onto the tarmac to find our plane. Find is the key word in that sentence. It was 5 a.m., and the crowd of weary travelers was let out onto the foggy tarmac with 20 planes lined up into the distance. We walked past one, two, five planes until we saw a man in a yellow vest pointing at one saying ‘Berlin. Berlin.’ The problem was other groups were coming out of the airport/bus terminal at the same time, into the fog, merging with us and trying to find their planes.
When we got on and found seats (no seat numbers, just sit in the first empty one you find), the air steward got on the intercom.
‘This flight goes to Berlin. That’s in Germany. It does not go to Manchester. It does not go to Tenerife. If you are going anywhere other than BERLIN, GERMANY, please disembark now. Again, this plane is going to Berlin…’
He made the announcement about seven times before we took off. When we got off the plane in Berlin, Germany, Jenny looked around and said ‘Wait a minute…THIS ISN’T SPAIN.’
That said, I will soon be traveling around Europe with very little money. Would I be willing to pay less and sit on a stool? Yes. I’ll also be living on a diet of peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches and 39 cent instant noodles, and washing my clothes in the shower, so it’d pretty much be par for the course.
I took the train to Glasgow on my day off this week. Ten months of living in Edinburgh and I’d not been to Glasgow – a 40 minute train ride away.
Unsurprisingly the two cities have a rivalry going, and if ever I mentioned to someone from Edinburgh that I hadn’t been to Glasgow, their reaction was ‘Och! Dinnae bother!’. (Alternatively I learned that Glaswegians – or ‘Weegies’ – have a saying: “The only good thing to come out of Edinburgh is a train to Glasgow”).
Jenny is from Glasgow, and when she met me at the station she suggested we do an open-top tourist bus tour because (being a local), she’d never done one.
I fail at self-photography
Our hilarious tour guide was Mary, who pointed out important architecture and history, but also said things like “In Glasgow, we don’t get arrested, we get ‘lifted’”, and “We knocked down many lovely and historic buildings to build this overpass.”
Glasgow is not like Edinburgh. It’s much more industrial, with it’s ship building yards and whatnot. But it does have some beautiful buildings, and good advice for visiting Glasgow is to spend a lot of time looking up.
We got off the bus in the West End and wandered around, hitting the Kelvingrove Art Gallery:
We got coffee and then went to a Middle Eastern deli, and a crazy used bookshop.
No one's seen the bottom shelf books since 1992.
We had a picnic in a park with our babagaoush and tabouleh, and found the man at the deli had slipped us an extra piece of baklava. We also had Shani, a Middle Eastern softdrink – the can will stab you in the face if you’re not careful. (The surprised shop owner, when we paid for our lunch, said ‘You know Shani?’ Um, no, we just saw an interesting can collecting dust behind the juice in your cooler, that isn’t actually turned on. We loved that shop).
We hit a vintage clothing store and a wee pub down an alley that sold Belgian Raspberry beer.
Much is made of Glasgow’s shopping opportunities (“Second only to London in the UK!”) but as I’m a tightwad who already owns more than will fit in her backpack, there was no need for that. Glasgow also has excellent night life and gets more live music gigs than Edinburgh, so I hope to make it back again for that before I leave Scotland.
So it’s official – I like Glasgow! Just don’t tell anyone from Edinburgh.
I love my life, right now. I’m having fun. I’ve got oodles of options before me and I like not knowing what I’ll be doing three months, six months, a year from now. But sometimes – very rarely, but sometimes – I find myself going “What the HELL are you DOING? You’re almost 29 for crying out loud get a REAL JOB”. I hate those moments.
From now on, when I feel that way, I’m going to refer to this essay:
Growing Up: An Essay from The Immature Traveler
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting a stable job and a family and all those things, and being happy when you have it. I just, occasionally, need to be reminded that it’s also okay to not have that. Phhhew.
Canada Day in Edinburgh was smashing.
A group of ex-pats organize a pub quiz every year, and the pub becomes a sea of red and maple leaves and hockey jerseys. They served Moosehead and poutine made with yellow cheese. My (Scottish) friend Carla came with me, and we joined a quiz team with no Canadians.
We came in second, and won maple flavoured baked beans. (Questions I got wrong included the length of the Trans Canada highway, and being unable to identify a picture of Lester Pearson. I did however know that crosschecking is a minor penalty, and could identify a picture of Steve Yzerman. This surprises exactly no one.)
While standing at the bar getting a drink, I met a guy in a Team Canada jersey from Leader.
‘Holy crap!’ I said. ‘Do you know Elizabeth Huber?’
‘Does she have a sister named Beth?’
Um.
The group sitting next to us was the drunkest group there, and the drunkest guy in the group was from Alberta.
‘Where in Saskatchewan are you from?’ he asked.
‘Kyle’
‘That’s wierd…I was just in Berlin and…’
‘Holy crap, you know Andrea don’t you?!’
We texted her immediately to share the wierd news.
At the end of the quiz we got to two-step to The Hip, which made me all sorts of happy. That, though, after a rousing version of the anthem. (Warning: contains fantastically foul language)
Recent Comments