Scotland 1995 Journal (Part 3)
Aug. 22nd, 1995 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperAdded as a backdated Livejournal entry 5/15/03 -- herein being the description of the side trip to Edinburgh
Tuesday, August 22, 1995: Visiting Edinburgh Or, Miles 'n' Miles o' Tartan
This morning we got quite a bit more of an alarm clock than we were expecting, when the hotel's fire alarm went off. We stumbled through getting dressed, grabbed our passports and other important items, and blundered our way down the stairs. I'm not sure whether the alarm we heard could be considered more obnoxious or less than the F-sharp blaster back at Forrer Hall at Transy!
It was raining as we crossed the street to the evacuation point. Dar asked someone what time it was, and it took a couple of times to parse "quarter to nine" out of the fellow's reply. I had my Scottish Accent Parser Circuits kick in on "nain" for "nine," though, before Dar did.
Saw a few folks in the guest crowd who looked and sounded Indian, but I don't remember anyone else notable except for the fireman-types all in fluorescent yellow-green vests. I looked up at the hotel but didn't see any smoke - nor had I smelled any on the way out. We figured someone's hot shower set off the alarm, as had been warned about with the safety notice we'd seen.
We got back into our rooms with little fuss, though, though we wound up trying our key on room #323, instead of #310 - the fire stairs opened out on a different point on our floor, and Dar got thrown off by this. I didn't have my contacts on, so I was just following her.
Back in our room we decided to get cleaned up for the morning, before breakfast. Dar had a shower - fortunately, without setting off the alarm - but she did trip a circruit breaker when she tried to plug in our hair dryer from home with the adapter we'd bought for UK outlets. So we had to call the front desk, who said they'd have a maintenance man deal with it, and Dar had to let her hair just dry - which made it rather more unkempt than she liked.
Niall finally ended the phone tag by catching us on the phone right about then. Dar answered it, thinking it'd be the maintenance man, then turned it over to me; Niall and I chatted and made plans to meet at the con.
We caught a bit of the news on BBC1; they did a piece about debtor's prison, and a woman who was jailed for watching TV without paying for the license for it. This, I think, was one of the more truly foreign concepts I encountered on my trip - I can barely imagine having to pay to watch TV, at least, aside from the cost of the set itself, or if you want cable or satellite stations.
Then we caught an episode of a children's show called Smart, which did things like art tips (how to make a paper bee), call-in questions about art (one girl was told about watercolor pencils, when she asked how to get painting effects without paint - I have some of these :) ), and a call-in game which required participants to direct a little figure around into traffic-cone-shaped obstacles. You had to avoid the little monster which also wandered around the screen and tried to eat your figure, and you made yours move simply by repeating the various directions in which you wanted to go. The show's hosts gave out different prizes depending on how well you did in the game. And they did a segment on interesting photography tricks, including how to make shots of really large or unusual things by photographing different overlapping parts and then combining them. This same trick was used on making photos with multiple copies of the same person in one location, or copies of their arms or legs or hands.
After Smart they showed an episode of the X-Men cartoon which struck me as basically lame, though I recognized the visiting guest character "Lady Deathstrike." I think I saw her in one of the Marvel Who's Who editions. I also rather liked the erudite Beast, since he reminded me of the Beast in Robin McKinley's novel Beauty.
After that we grabbed a quick breakfast in the hotel, and then dropped off our room key at the front desk, and went to catch the train for Edinburgh. This proved to be quick and painless; the Charing Cross station was right by our hotel, and we took the train over to the Queens Street station, where we caught the one to Edinburgh.
Once there, we saw that Edinburgh was quite a bit more impressive-looking than Glasgow - granted, Edinburgh was wearing its tourist face for the Festival, so this probably has a LOT to do with it, but then again, it was still quite an impressive sight. :) There was bagpipe music everywhere, unsurprisingly; it seemed like there was a bagpipe player on every corner. There was a lovely view of a wide, open park near where we came up out of the train station (the Waverly Station, like the boat), and we found out the appropriate details on the city tour buses. I spotted a tour poster for the Highlands, which had a caption reading "Highland Splendour" - and had to have Dar take a picture of me by this poster, just for my family back in Kentucky.
The buses, too, were quick and painless, and we caught an open-top, double-decker bus for our tour. The way the tours worked was that your ticket was good for the whole day, and you could get on or off the buses at any time you wanted. The ride was quite fascinating; we saw statues of important personas ranging from Prime Ministers and Dukes all the way down to a cute little dog who became famous for always staying near his master's grave, after the man died. Walt Disney apparently made a film about this dog. Many familiar names were mentioned as the guide told us about who had once lived in Edinburgh: Sir Walter Scott (author of Ivanhoe and the Waverly books and Rob Roy), Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Graham Bell, and the author of Robinson Crusoe (whose name escapes me). We saw the residence of the Scottish Secretary of State when he is in Edinburgh, and the kirk the Queen attends when she's there. We saw Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano visible overlooking the city - which is not called Arthur's Seat because King Arthur was supposed to have sat there, but rather because the name derives from old Gaelic about the hill being as high as archers could shoot. We saw the various views of Edinburgh Castle, and a site of royal proclamations and public executions, which had a tall pillar topped with a unicorn and cross figure, and we saw other sites as well.
I was amused by the tour guide, who played up his Scottish burr. I noticed that when he said "building" it came out sounding like "boden," and he kept dropping the f's off words like "itself." He also liked to make jokes about how the tourists should get Scottish whiskey, and how he'd be happy to sample it for us to assure us of its quality.
Dar and I took the second lap of the tour around to the castle, and got off to go up and check that out. First we detoured down the Royal Mile - the road leading up to the castle - to get film and food, and so that I could check out flutes I saw someone selling, though I didn't wind up buying any. Most of the Royal Mile was covered with vendors selling lots of kitzchy souvenirs - assuring us that the US doesn't have a monopoly on cheap things to sell to tourists. :)
Edinburgh Castle is full of history and, on our visit, was full of tourists. But it wasn't oppressively full, and it was a truly impressive sight overlooking the city. Inside the castle itself, we saw the view out to the Firth of Forth (which reminded us of Puget Sound), the huge cannon Mons Meg, the tiny chamber were Mary, Queen of Scots, gave birth, and - most impressively - the Honours of Scotland, which include a Sword and a Crown and a Sceptre, along with some other pieces which are not part of the Honours but which are displayed with them. A thorough and fascinating exhibit led into the vault where the Honours are kept; this exhibit described the history of the Honours, and which included lifelike wax figures of craftsmen at work on them, as well as royal figures being ordained with them.
And there were recorded readings of famous speeches about the union of Scotland and English in 1707. I thought of a booth I'd seen out on the tour earlier - which had signs proclaiming "Vigil for a Scottish Parliament" - when I read about the Scottish Parliament voting itself out of existence. (Apparently, now, the Scottish National Party wants an independent Scotland out from under England... )
We also saw, while in the castle, some vaults which had been used as storerooms and barracks; cells where prisoners of war were kept; bread ovens; royal apartments with tapestries, paintings of vairous royal types, furnishings which were very clearly marked "Please Do Not Sit"; St. Margaret's Chapel; a tiny little cemetery for the dogs of army officers; and the old dining hall where diplomatic functions are now held.
Dar took lots and lots of pictures of course, but pictures were not allowed in the exhibit of the Honours. Considering that they are the oldest royal regalia in Europe, I was not particularly surprised by this.
Near the castle were several stands of bleachers which had been set up for the Edinburgh Military Tattoo - which we didn't see - but on the way out we did catch the tail end of the changing of the guard. It was all very formal and precise, of course. They didn't have those tall, fuzzy black hats the royal guards would have in Britain, though.
Coming back down off the Royal Mile, we stopped for soft ice cream, which had the added neat touch of a stick of chocolate stuck into the side of the ice cream. The chocolate in question was not nearly as sweet as American chocolate, but was quite good; it was rather papery in thickness, then compressed into a bar which you could easily bite through.
It was also during this afternoon that we tried Lilt, a local soda which I found to be quite tasty and somewhat similar to Koalas here at home, as they're multiple fruit flavors combined into one drink, and carbonated.
We caught a third circuit of the tour buses back to the Waverly Bridge - and on the way were startled to hear our guide mention a statue of Abraham Lincoln. The three guides we heard didn't give quite exactly the same narration for the tour, and neither of the previous two had mentioned this statue. Neither Dar nor I got a good look at the statue - I didn't see it at all, and Dar only managed a glimpse without being able to see who the statue depicted.
Back at Waverly Bridge, we went into the shopping center - which was mostly underground, due to the city rule forbidding anything to be built which would obstruct the view of the Old Town on one side - to look for a pay phone and try to call Euan, Blythe's player. Down in the food court, the first place we looked for a phone, there was a sign with the word "Spudulike" - which Dar immediately photographed, for Paul, since he's a Devo fan.
Our first attempt with Euan's work number was unsuccessful; calling his home number got us his mother, who said he wasn't home because he was going to meet "some friends from the States." These, of course, were us; I asked her to let him know, if he called home, that we were at the Waverly Shopping Center, and then hung up.
To kill a bit of time Dar and I went to a record store - Coda - so that we could see if they had Morten Harket's new album Wild Seed, which I have been looking for. They didn't, which disappointed me, but they did at least know who I was talking about when I mentioned looking for it. Dar wound up getting the last two albums by Blur and Oasis.
Upon trying Euan's work number again we got someone who informed us he had left already, so we called his home once more, and his mother said he intended to meet us at the tourist center. This turned out to be right by the shopping center, so we made a sign proclaiming we were looking for Euan Robertson and sat back to wait.
Euan showed up not long at all after, and proved to be tall, angular, blond, and rather more British-sounding of voice than Scottish, but I already knew that. :) After making the appropriate greeting noises at one another, we went down to the shopping center's food court; I had a steak pie, Dar had haggis (which turned out not badly, though it was obviously of fast-food quality), and Euan had a veggie pizza.
Afterwards we set off to just randomly wander around, and it started to rain - which startled Euan, since up until that day Scotland had been having a very warm summer. I expected Dar and I had brought the rain with us.
We wandered down Princes Street to find other record stores, so I could try to get the Morten Harket album. I wound up not with the album but with the single, "Burning Out Again," which also has two more songs on it, "Change is Gonna Come" and "Lay Me Down Tonight." Got this at HMV, which had a credibly large Elvis section as well. :) Dar got an old Culture Club album and an old Arcadia album, since she hadn't had these on CD before.
We made a stop at the public toilets - a convenience we don't have in the States, and which I could definitely support. Then we sat briefly on some museum steps, before deciding to go find a pub to sit in, which we did.
We had a pleasant time at the Royal Archer, talking about music, politics, Two Moons MUSH, the differences between US and British money, and whatever else came to mind. The pub seemed to not mind playing out-of-date American music - I was quite surprised to hear Michael Jackson's "Beat It," which, of course, led into a discussion of how Michael Jackson has gotten progressively whiter over the years.
Euan walked with us back to the train station and even waited after we'd gotten on the train, until it pulled out. And with that, we rode back to Glasgow.
Tuesday, August 22, 1995: Visiting Edinburgh Or, Miles 'n' Miles o' Tartan
This morning we got quite a bit more of an alarm clock than we were expecting, when the hotel's fire alarm went off. We stumbled through getting dressed, grabbed our passports and other important items, and blundered our way down the stairs. I'm not sure whether the alarm we heard could be considered more obnoxious or less than the F-sharp blaster back at Forrer Hall at Transy!
It was raining as we crossed the street to the evacuation point. Dar asked someone what time it was, and it took a couple of times to parse "quarter to nine" out of the fellow's reply. I had my Scottish Accent Parser Circuits kick in on "nain" for "nine," though, before Dar did.
Saw a few folks in the guest crowd who looked and sounded Indian, but I don't remember anyone else notable except for the fireman-types all in fluorescent yellow-green vests. I looked up at the hotel but didn't see any smoke - nor had I smelled any on the way out. We figured someone's hot shower set off the alarm, as had been warned about with the safety notice we'd seen.
We got back into our rooms with little fuss, though, though we wound up trying our key on room #323, instead of #310 - the fire stairs opened out on a different point on our floor, and Dar got thrown off by this. I didn't have my contacts on, so I was just following her.
Back in our room we decided to get cleaned up for the morning, before breakfast. Dar had a shower - fortunately, without setting off the alarm - but she did trip a circruit breaker when she tried to plug in our hair dryer from home with the adapter we'd bought for UK outlets. So we had to call the front desk, who said they'd have a maintenance man deal with it, and Dar had to let her hair just dry - which made it rather more unkempt than she liked.
Niall finally ended the phone tag by catching us on the phone right about then. Dar answered it, thinking it'd be the maintenance man, then turned it over to me; Niall and I chatted and made plans to meet at the con.
We caught a bit of the news on BBC1; they did a piece about debtor's prison, and a woman who was jailed for watching TV without paying for the license for it. This, I think, was one of the more truly foreign concepts I encountered on my trip - I can barely imagine having to pay to watch TV, at least, aside from the cost of the set itself, or if you want cable or satellite stations.
Then we caught an episode of a children's show called Smart, which did things like art tips (how to make a paper bee), call-in questions about art (one girl was told about watercolor pencils, when she asked how to get painting effects without paint - I have some of these :) ), and a call-in game which required participants to direct a little figure around into traffic-cone-shaped obstacles. You had to avoid the little monster which also wandered around the screen and tried to eat your figure, and you made yours move simply by repeating the various directions in which you wanted to go. The show's hosts gave out different prizes depending on how well you did in the game. And they did a segment on interesting photography tricks, including how to make shots of really large or unusual things by photographing different overlapping parts and then combining them. This same trick was used on making photos with multiple copies of the same person in one location, or copies of their arms or legs or hands.
After Smart they showed an episode of the X-Men cartoon which struck me as basically lame, though I recognized the visiting guest character "Lady Deathstrike." I think I saw her in one of the Marvel Who's Who editions. I also rather liked the erudite Beast, since he reminded me of the Beast in Robin McKinley's novel Beauty.
After that we grabbed a quick breakfast in the hotel, and then dropped off our room key at the front desk, and went to catch the train for Edinburgh. This proved to be quick and painless; the Charing Cross station was right by our hotel, and we took the train over to the Queens Street station, where we caught the one to Edinburgh.
Once there, we saw that Edinburgh was quite a bit more impressive-looking than Glasgow - granted, Edinburgh was wearing its tourist face for the Festival, so this probably has a LOT to do with it, but then again, it was still quite an impressive sight. :) There was bagpipe music everywhere, unsurprisingly; it seemed like there was a bagpipe player on every corner. There was a lovely view of a wide, open park near where we came up out of the train station (the Waverly Station, like the boat), and we found out the appropriate details on the city tour buses. I spotted a tour poster for the Highlands, which had a caption reading "Highland Splendour" - and had to have Dar take a picture of me by this poster, just for my family back in Kentucky.
The buses, too, were quick and painless, and we caught an open-top, double-decker bus for our tour. The way the tours worked was that your ticket was good for the whole day, and you could get on or off the buses at any time you wanted. The ride was quite fascinating; we saw statues of important personas ranging from Prime Ministers and Dukes all the way down to a cute little dog who became famous for always staying near his master's grave, after the man died. Walt Disney apparently made a film about this dog. Many familiar names were mentioned as the guide told us about who had once lived in Edinburgh: Sir Walter Scott (author of Ivanhoe and the Waverly books and Rob Roy), Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Graham Bell, and the author of Robinson Crusoe (whose name escapes me). We saw the residence of the Scottish Secretary of State when he is in Edinburgh, and the kirk the Queen attends when she's there. We saw Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano visible overlooking the city - which is not called Arthur's Seat because King Arthur was supposed to have sat there, but rather because the name derives from old Gaelic about the hill being as high as archers could shoot. We saw the various views of Edinburgh Castle, and a site of royal proclamations and public executions, which had a tall pillar topped with a unicorn and cross figure, and we saw other sites as well.
I was amused by the tour guide, who played up his Scottish burr. I noticed that when he said "building" it came out sounding like "boden," and he kept dropping the f's off words like "itself." He also liked to make jokes about how the tourists should get Scottish whiskey, and how he'd be happy to sample it for us to assure us of its quality.
Dar and I took the second lap of the tour around to the castle, and got off to go up and check that out. First we detoured down the Royal Mile - the road leading up to the castle - to get film and food, and so that I could check out flutes I saw someone selling, though I didn't wind up buying any. Most of the Royal Mile was covered with vendors selling lots of kitzchy souvenirs - assuring us that the US doesn't have a monopoly on cheap things to sell to tourists. :)
Edinburgh Castle is full of history and, on our visit, was full of tourists. But it wasn't oppressively full, and it was a truly impressive sight overlooking the city. Inside the castle itself, we saw the view out to the Firth of Forth (which reminded us of Puget Sound), the huge cannon Mons Meg, the tiny chamber were Mary, Queen of Scots, gave birth, and - most impressively - the Honours of Scotland, which include a Sword and a Crown and a Sceptre, along with some other pieces which are not part of the Honours but which are displayed with them. A thorough and fascinating exhibit led into the vault where the Honours are kept; this exhibit described the history of the Honours, and which included lifelike wax figures of craftsmen at work on them, as well as royal figures being ordained with them.
And there were recorded readings of famous speeches about the union of Scotland and English in 1707. I thought of a booth I'd seen out on the tour earlier - which had signs proclaiming "Vigil for a Scottish Parliament" - when I read about the Scottish Parliament voting itself out of existence. (Apparently, now, the Scottish National Party wants an independent Scotland out from under England... )
We also saw, while in the castle, some vaults which had been used as storerooms and barracks; cells where prisoners of war were kept; bread ovens; royal apartments with tapestries, paintings of vairous royal types, furnishings which were very clearly marked "Please Do Not Sit"; St. Margaret's Chapel; a tiny little cemetery for the dogs of army officers; and the old dining hall where diplomatic functions are now held.
Dar took lots and lots of pictures of course, but pictures were not allowed in the exhibit of the Honours. Considering that they are the oldest royal regalia in Europe, I was not particularly surprised by this.
Near the castle were several stands of bleachers which had been set up for the Edinburgh Military Tattoo - which we didn't see - but on the way out we did catch the tail end of the changing of the guard. It was all very formal and precise, of course. They didn't have those tall, fuzzy black hats the royal guards would have in Britain, though.
Coming back down off the Royal Mile, we stopped for soft ice cream, which had the added neat touch of a stick of chocolate stuck into the side of the ice cream. The chocolate in question was not nearly as sweet as American chocolate, but was quite good; it was rather papery in thickness, then compressed into a bar which you could easily bite through.
It was also during this afternoon that we tried Lilt, a local soda which I found to be quite tasty and somewhat similar to Koalas here at home, as they're multiple fruit flavors combined into one drink, and carbonated.
We caught a third circuit of the tour buses back to the Waverly Bridge - and on the way were startled to hear our guide mention a statue of Abraham Lincoln. The three guides we heard didn't give quite exactly the same narration for the tour, and neither of the previous two had mentioned this statue. Neither Dar nor I got a good look at the statue - I didn't see it at all, and Dar only managed a glimpse without being able to see who the statue depicted.
Back at Waverly Bridge, we went into the shopping center - which was mostly underground, due to the city rule forbidding anything to be built which would obstruct the view of the Old Town on one side - to look for a pay phone and try to call Euan, Blythe's player. Down in the food court, the first place we looked for a phone, there was a sign with the word "Spudulike" - which Dar immediately photographed, for Paul, since he's a Devo fan.
Our first attempt with Euan's work number was unsuccessful; calling his home number got us his mother, who said he wasn't home because he was going to meet "some friends from the States." These, of course, were us; I asked her to let him know, if he called home, that we were at the Waverly Shopping Center, and then hung up.
To kill a bit of time Dar and I went to a record store - Coda - so that we could see if they had Morten Harket's new album Wild Seed, which I have been looking for. They didn't, which disappointed me, but they did at least know who I was talking about when I mentioned looking for it. Dar wound up getting the last two albums by Blur and Oasis.
Upon trying Euan's work number again we got someone who informed us he had left already, so we called his home once more, and his mother said he intended to meet us at the tourist center. This turned out to be right by the shopping center, so we made a sign proclaiming we were looking for Euan Robertson and sat back to wait.
Euan showed up not long at all after, and proved to be tall, angular, blond, and rather more British-sounding of voice than Scottish, but I already knew that. :) After making the appropriate greeting noises at one another, we went down to the shopping center's food court; I had a steak pie, Dar had haggis (which turned out not badly, though it was obviously of fast-food quality), and Euan had a veggie pizza.
Afterwards we set off to just randomly wander around, and it started to rain - which startled Euan, since up until that day Scotland had been having a very warm summer. I expected Dar and I had brought the rain with us.
We wandered down Princes Street to find other record stores, so I could try to get the Morten Harket album. I wound up not with the album but with the single, "Burning Out Again," which also has two more songs on it, "Change is Gonna Come" and "Lay Me Down Tonight." Got this at HMV, which had a credibly large Elvis section as well. :) Dar got an old Culture Club album and an old Arcadia album, since she hadn't had these on CD before.
We made a stop at the public toilets - a convenience we don't have in the States, and which I could definitely support. Then we sat briefly on some museum steps, before deciding to go find a pub to sit in, which we did.
We had a pleasant time at the Royal Archer, talking about music, politics, Two Moons MUSH, the differences between US and British money, and whatever else came to mind. The pub seemed to not mind playing out-of-date American music - I was quite surprised to hear Michael Jackson's "Beat It," which, of course, led into a discussion of how Michael Jackson has gotten progressively whiter over the years.
Euan walked with us back to the train station and even waited after we'd gotten on the train, until it pulled out. And with that, we rode back to Glasgow.