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.