Sylvia's Journal

We are one week into our Scottish holiday, which means we are halfway. Days always go by faster after the halfway point.  We now actually have to schedule things as opposed to simply doing nothing till midday and then scrambling.

There are several visits on our program: a couple more musea in Edinburgh,  a visit to Glasgow, primarily to see Charles Rennie Mackintosh’ work for ourselves, and then a bunch of people: our artist friend Robin who we met through a common friend back home, our new Quaker friends, and a friend from third grade who I haven’t seen in nearly 50 years.

Yesterday was the first full day of blue sky. We took the car. This convenience comes with the exchange (freeing up more money to use for food!). We traveled south to North Berwick, not to be confused with traveling north to South Berwick which is in Maine, USA.

Despite having driven cars with automatic transmissions for decades, it took us no time to activate the old muscle memory for a stick shift. The driving on the wrong side of the road took a little more getting used to, but we have done it before. It’s easier when there is other traffic, one simply follows. It is a little bit trickier when you are alone on the road and there are cars parked with their noses in the wrong direction. This has occasionally fooled me.  We took turns driving and navgating.

North Berwick, we learned from several plaques placed around the beach area, was called the Biarritz of the North, a popular destination for Edinburghers during the European interbellum years. A few traces from that time are still there.  There were also people living here hundreds of years ago.  One of the places was a pilgrimage site, among other things to enhance the chances of getting pregnant. It worked, said one plaque. It must have, we concluded.

When you enter North Berwick’s Scottish Seabird Centre you could be fooled into thinking it is just a fundraising ploy to get you to buy lunch and trinkets.  After a thorough search of the premises we found, in a poorly lit corner, a set of stairs going down to the actual center. We were greeted by a screeching bird when we stepped on a wired stair tread. This must be to announce the rare visitor to the young naturalist who happily took our money.  We get a discount because we are old (it’s called a concession here, presumably a concession to our seniority). 

Having no other cash register duties, we benefitted from her considerable knowledge about the seabirds that are nesting on the volcanic islands in front of the coast. On one such rock several 100s of thousands of Northern Gannets (the biggest in the world!) are nesting.

Wired cameras are set up on several of the volcanic outcroppings. You can zoom in and out and change the angle of the camera so you can see, on big screens, what the gannets, puffins and other seabirds are up to.  

From a distance it looks like the Gannet rock (Bass Rock) is covered in snow, but when you zoom in the whiteness is explained: all bird and all poop. It wasn’t always white. Our guide showed us pictures from earlier days. Now that the birds are no longer hunted, there are too many. It’s just like New York City, or Lagos, Bangladesh or Shanghai. In one of the views we could see that personal space is jealously guarded – encroach at your own risk – you can get a good lashing or a bite in the neck. 

We ended our beach day with another dinner splurge – a seafood platter for two. In the US we avoid seafood platters since they are always stacked with fried things, dripping with fat. Not here. Like our first seafood platter on the Leith Waterfront, this one too was stacked with identifiable, healthy and colorful things: lobster, mussels, smoked salmon, crab and salad greens.