Sylvia's Journal

While the US east coast is suffering from a heat wave, here in Scotland I could be fooled into thinking it is already fall. People wear woolen caps and down jackets. It is cold, rainy and windy. I am sure that in two days, back home in the heatwave, we will wish that we were back here. But right now, I could do with some sun and warm weather. 

Yesterday, we woke up to a blue sky and sun, a teaser that didn’t last long as the clouds moved in fast. The weather app on my phone now only shows cloud and rain icons for our last two days here (and beyond). I lost my vacation mood for a moment, but what else can you do than pack your umbrella and clothes for three seasons.  The spring and fall jacket I brought that, back home, I never wear between  June and late September, is on duty most every day.

On the bus to the city we found ourselves surrounded by foreigners: Germans, French, Canadians, and Italians. I suspect this was a fresh batch of visitors who completed their workweek or school year last Friday and flew in on Saturday. 

We went to our second Quaker meeting, but his time we picked the later meeting, the one that starts at 11AM.  As we were racing up to the Old Town against the clock – it was nearly  11 – we saw a Quaker we met last week coming down (having completed the early meeting). We said hello but she didn’t recognize me with my new Glasgow hairdo. She apologized profusely and then told us that, although we were late, there is a grace period of 10 minutes for latecomers.  We slowed down our pace and then climbed the stairs that provide a shortcut to the Quaker House; narrow little alleyways and steps seemingly cut out of the medieval stone in between and underneath the enormous stone buildings of the old city.

The late meeting for worship is better attended than the early one. I counted some 30 people. The last 15 minutes a Jesuit Priest was invited to talk about how Catholics use silence in their worship. He will be followed by representatives from other faiths the next few months after the Edinburgh Festival is over and life returns to normal in September. 

It was an interesting talk and I would have liked to attend the other talks. At the end visitors were asked to introduce themselves and so we learned we were not the only foreigners (3 other people from the US and one Swede). Again, everyone greeting us warmly.

We lingered a bit, Quakers love to talk after an hour of silence, but did not partake in the communal soup and bread lunch. We had a lunch date with our friend R. who lives on the west side of the city. She had visited us last week in Portobello but this time the visit was on her turf, an Art Nouveau style flat that reminded us of the flats where Hercule Poirot searches for clues. Unlike Mackintosh’s designs, this one was all curves, except for the door and window frames, no hard rectangles. 

After lunch we took a short and slow walk (her aging cairn terrier and us all with our arthritic joints and tight muscles). The walk led us through the gardens around a large castle-like estate with a splendid view of the Forth and some very tall and unusual trees one doesn’t usually see in landscapes here.

We ended the cool drizzly day looking for a restaurant that would take us without a reservation. We had good luck at our second try and found a restaurant on Rose Street that served us the mussels, scallops and salmon we craved.  Back home we cared for our sore legs while watching the Scottish version of Antique Roadshow. Outside a storm was raging and the sky was practically touching the earth.

We finally visited one of Edinburgh’s biggest tourist attractions, the Castle. The fog over our understanding of what the fighting was all about is lifting: the castle of course, but more importantly its riches: immeasurable riches, those already in hand (the Honours, the name given to the Royal Paraphernalia) and riches to be had from all the lands and the taxpayers living off it and any other loot available to the winners. 

We had also been curious about The Stone, the place on which Scottish kings had been crowned for hundreds of years and which the English had kept until not very long ago. Both the Honours and the Stone are back inside the castle after being lost or carted off to England, centuries ago. We lined up with people from all over the world and waited patiently to have a fleeting glimpse of the these symbols of royalty, encased in glass in a tiny windowless room with metal doors of the bank vault type, impregnable and unstealable.

There must have been thousands of people traipsing up and down pathways and worming their way through narrow entrances into small rooms not made for such crowds. Although the audio guide told us we were in for a good 3 hours, we decided not to stay that long as the crowds were getting to us.

We returned to the café to have our smoked salmon for lunch. The Quakers who had gone to the later meeting as well streamed out just as we were served our lunch and bloody maries (Mary’s?)

[Sidebar: I had wondered whether the drink was named after Mary Queen of Scotts, because of her bloody death but later learned from Wikipedia (right or wrong) that it was named after the Tudor Mary because of all the bloodshed she caused.]

We chatted some more with our new friends, making firmer commitments this time.

We finished our lunch just in time to catch the start of the Carnival Parade on the Mound below us. The sun came out (and miraculously stayed out for the rest of the day) doing justice to all the glitter and colors. At least three quarters of the parade was made up of Asian groups, some dancing (the Chinese and Thai) and some not (the Nepali and the Tibetans and their supporters) but everyone was making music on drums, with bells, with trumpets.  Unlike the more serious Carnival Parades I have seen in other parts of the world, this was more of a home-made one and for that very reason very charming.

From the frivolous and the raucous we went to the hushed rooms in the National Gallery since we were standing right in front of it. We admired many great portraits and landscapes until my legs said ‘enough!’ It was the cocktail hour anyway. We landed in an old pub and had our pints. I also sampled a whiskey and learned, from a friendly Polish bartender, how to drink it properly: a drop of water trasnferred via straw from a water glass to the bottom of the whiskey glass. This apparently creates a chemical reaction that enhances the drink (and who figured that out I wondered). Axel’s mother splashed her whiskey with water, doing it all wrong all her life!

I pitied the bartenders being inside on such a lovely day but they didn’t want my pity as they thought it was much too warm. It seems that Poles and Scotts alike think that 65F is warm enough. It must have been in the mid seventies on the terrace outside, lovely!

We finished our day with a bus ride to the Leith waterfront and splurged again on a seafood extravaganza: oysters, mussels, salmon, crab and shrimp, all locally sourced.

Because we started the day so late, by the time we were done with Holyrood everything was closing, except of course the pubs and the restaurants. The free concerts were breaking up and wherever we went stages and market stands were being dismantled. The good thing was that the rain never came and the sun was out. We sat for a while on a small grassy hill overlooking the Grassmarket with some 50 other people who were not waiting for anything, just having a good time talking with each other and drinking their beers out of plastic cups.

We took the bus back to Portobello and had a meal in the quirky Espy restaurant on the promenade where we had our first meal the day we arrived. We sat in the dog friendly section of the restaurant and were served by the American wife of the Australian waiter we met the first time there. Dogs were everywhere, something Boards of Health in our neck of the woods would definitely not approve of. I sent a picture to Tessa – she’d like this place. Dogs were even stretching out on couches. A sign warned owners that only well behaved dogs were allowed in: no barking, no biting and no humping.  

Unlike in Manchester, dogs are allowed on the beach here, presumably all year round. In Manchester by the sea dogs are not allowed on the beach between May and October for obvious reasons – our beaches are small, narrow and thus crowded in summer compared to the very long and wide beach here. Not allowing dogs in the restaurant would limit patronage. Staff served small liver cakes and bowls of water to the pooches alongside the meals ordered by their owners. 

By the time we had finished our meal the temperature had dropped to 59 degrees (F) and a strong wind gusted along the beach. People were dressed in woolen hats, boots and down coats – none of which he had with us. Axel always says there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing, how true! We shivered as we walked back to the bus stop rather than walking the last mile home. We are on a summer holiday but this felt like fall. I checked the temperature back home: 77F and sunny. I wondered what the winters must be like here.  Back at the house we filled the bathtub with very hot water to get our temperatures up and relax our tired legs.

Today was for history. We had intended to rise early and get as much bang for the many bucks we paid for the tourist hop on and off buses. Alas, we didn’t get out of the house until past 12 and the ticket expired at 3:45 PM. We just got in a tour of the old city, see the Grassmarket with the free part of the Jazz Festival in full swing (3 different stages, one at each end and one in the middle). I wished I had been more forceful about getting off – it was after all a hop on/off bus, but Axel prevailed and I waffled, so we ended up at the palace of Holyrood while the sun was trying to get out from behind the thick cloud cover. Rain was predicted at 4PM and I figured that at 2PM we should be listening to jazz ‘en plein air.’ But we didn’t. A mistake.

An excellent audioguide took us from room to room and explained what we saw before us. We were reminded off our tour through Versailles where the sequence of rooms also led, eventually, to the monarch’s bedroom where a few very important people could see him going to bed and waking up. What a strange arrangement this now seems to us. 

We tried to keep track of all the Davids and Charleses and Jameses, Stuarts and Tudors, but the (en)tangled history of the English and Scotts remains hard for us to get our heads around. This evening, when I read the history section in one of the guide books I understood my confusion: James VI and James I are one and the same person (as are James VII and James II), the higher number is what he was for the Scotts and the lower one what the English called him. I also learned more about the intertwining of the Stuarts and Tudors, who was catholic and who was protestant, the Hanoverians, the Jacobites, and who was angry about what with whom, etc. 

We keep finding it strange, now being a tad more familiar with the history of both countries, that they are together. To me Scotland and England seem two very different countries. How a monarch who resides most of the time in one country can show up one week a year (and for special occasions) in Edinburgh and be the people’s monarch here, strikes me as odd, unless you call both countries together the United Kingdom. But shouldn’t kingdom be plural then?

There are many meanings of the word pound. They are all part of our Scottish experience: the money, a measure of weight (these two related of course) and the manner in which rain sometimes comes down. I’ll explain.

We start each day late, catching up on sleep I suppose, but also because we are on a steep and tiring learning curve regarding getting around Edinburgh on not too much money.  We want to spend our money on food, not transport. Our first mistake was to pay nearly 4 pound Sterling (per person) for a train ride into Edinburgh which turned out to be the next stop, five minutes after getting on. 

The parking attendant at the local supermarket is giving us advice on getting around for as little money as possible, very Scottish of course. He offered to give us his cell phone number but I can hardly understand him when face to face so I declined before Axel could say yes.  He told us we should have asked him about the train (a rip off, said with a hard rolling ‘r’). The bus system is excellent and easy if you have the right apps, difficult when you don’t have that nor exact change and a dour bus driver to boot.  It took some time to get all the verifications completed for our online registrations but now I can simply show my electronic ticket to the bus driver, and check out where to get on what bus via my phone. 

Yesterday we visited the  Royal Botanical Gardens (nearly everything on the ‘have-to-see list has the adjective ‘royal’ attached to it). We were lucky because the sun was shining during most of our visit, and even when it was not, it was dry. When we boarded the bus to the next attraction it started to rain. First a sprinkle and then a downpour that lasted throughout dinner and during our mad dash to get to the bus to take us home. 

We picked an indoor attraction to stay (mostly) out of the rain: a visit to the Royal Britannica. The ship has been retired here (berthed being the opposite of birthed) and been pressed into tourist duty.

Axel was most impressed by the picture of the Review of the entire Royal fleet in 1953 (imagine that, all of the ships around the entire world being summoned to this review – the empire unguarded!). The bedrooms were surprisingly simple and basic – the royals’ (separate) bedrooms resembling more a 3 star hotel room than a royal suite.

I kept trying to imagine life on the ship with the royals on board, helped a bit by the many pictures of family members smiling at the camera. I am not sure it was actually a very happy place.  The ship must have been yet another gilded cage, with several hundred people around to serve their every wish and watch over them, no picking your nose without anyone noticing! 

Despite the relative simplicity of the personal quarters (except for the state dining room), the ship is a relic of a bygone era, a time when excessive spending and showing their wealth was what royals did.

I suppose the major means of transportation is now the Royal Airplane, which cannot take on all that silver and crystal, the 5 tons of personal items, food and drink -to feed hundreds for at least a month-, and the royal means of transport (Rolls and Jeeps). I also believe that such display of wealth is no longer cool, at least not in this part of the world. Nor is the display of gifts that required rare species of animals to die or give up body parts and paying respect to dignitaries whose wealth came partially or wholly from destroying these animals’ natural habitat.

By the time we reached the fourth of the five levels – the ground level where the Royal Rolls and the Royal speedboat are parked – it was raining cats and dogs. We skipped the last stop (the engine room) to catch a bus back to the center.

Since we had not spent any money on flying (Delta miles) and lodging (Home Exchange), we decided to ignore the prices on the menu of the seafood tapas place (The White Horse) – yes, click on it and see for yourself). We splurged on exquisite oysters, sampling three Scottish and one Irish variety , scallops, smoked salmon, and razor clams, seaweed salad and white wine (the latter recommended by our Polish waiter).

We briefly discussed Brexit with the waiter who doesn’t think it (Brexit) is going to happen – I suppose this is a matter of self-preservation. He told us that if EU citizens become foreigners, the hospitality sector will find itself very short handed. So far most of our waiters have come from the mainland.

Because we have reserved most of our money for food I am steadily gaining weight – I know this because there is a scale in the house. It is not surprising because nearly everything we eat and drink here is of very high caloric content. And since my daily exercise regimen has stopped altogether (walking doesn’t get the job done), I am afraid I will come back with a lot of extra pounds, these not of the Sterling kind.

Axel is in ancestral lands. I am in the neighborhood of mine, now buried deep beneath the North Sea but that was thousands of years ago. Axel’s link with Scotland is closer. His maternal grandfather was a red-haired Scott who passed that gene to his mom (recessive) who passed it to him (red beard only) who passed it to Tessa with her copper tresses.

We expected to see many redheads when we first arrived on Tuesday but we saw none. We started to count. By the end of Tuesday, when we tumbled exhausted in our bed, the tally was only 1. By then, all we had seen was the airport and the Portobello section of Edinburgh.

On Wednesday we continued the count as we made our way in to Edinburgh. During those moments that the sun shines, the redheads stand out. Our lunch waitress was red. By the time we were done with lunch we had counted about 15 redheads who had passed us as we were sitting in one of the rare moments of sun on an outside terrace. Once we started walking around we stopped counting because they were everywhere. 

Our waitress told us that 34% of Scotts have red hair. It turns out she got that slightly wrong:  DNA research on the British isles, and particularly the south east of Scotland, has found that about 40% of the population has the gene for red hair, though  that doesn’t mean they have it.  The numbers of actual red heads differ. There is a lot of boasting between Ireland and Scotland about who has the most redheads – one or the other claims to have 10% of the population, the loser with only 6%. A quick search on Google however,  indicates that most agree that Edinburgh is the red head capital of the world.