Sore Roots Trip Log--Day 11: Dancing on an empty stomach
Robert & Laura
Wed, Apr 18, 2012
We've scoped out a Scottish Country Dance class and decide to avail ourselves of the local bus system to head to the Morningside neighborhood. The class starts at 8:00 pm (or 2000, as they quaintly say here), so we leave at 6:00 pm, figuring two hours should be enough time for us to get lost and found again.
The class is at a place called Cluny Gardens (no relation to George) and there's a bus stop just up the street. At the appointed time (which is not the time that our bus schedule said) a double-decker bus rumbles along, we clamber on board and get seated and start watching Edinburgh unroll around us.
We head south of the city, which is a direction we've not been before. Passing several blocks of older buildings gradually getting newer, we're now driving through more residential areas, and large parks full of soccer ("cricket") playing lads.
After about 20 minutes, with the help of the bus driver, we alight at what we're told is the right stop (and it's a good thing we're told it, because there's nothing very distinctive about it). We see a sign that says "Cluny Center" in front of a church, and Laura knocks on the window to get somebody's attention.
When the nice lady comes to the door and we ask after the dancing, she says, ""Oh, it's the next church up the road!" Sure enough, there's another church four houses down and that turns out to be the right church.
7:00 pm
Because we're an hour early, we decide to have a look around. There's a road that's lined with small shops and Laura would like to find some aspirin to help her sore throat. Unfortunately, it seems that around these parts, all the shops closed up at 5:00 pm, even though we're only about two miles from the city center(!).
This is like being in Ballard at 7:00 pm and finding the sidewalks rolled up. There is an Italian coffee shop that's open (yay for the hard-working Italians!) and Robert heads off to see if he can find something else that's open. There's a Vet shop (which Robert holds as a last-ditch resort; he figures he can claim it's for his dog's arthritis), but finally he finds a Scotsman shop and scores some aspirin.
And--oh look!--it's Kirkland brand aspirin, which is the brand made by Costco, which is headquartered about ten miles from where we live. Talk about buying local…
7:15 pm
Another good thing about Italians is that they understand that coffee should have cream in it, and they cheerfully provide some cream for our cups of coffee. So we idle away the time there, contemplating the toilet situation.
If you are in a wheelchair and you visit the UK, be sure not to drink anything while you are here, because you will never be able to go to the toilet. The toilets are always downstairs--even when the entrance is easily handicap accessible. And when we say "downstairs," we don't mean "down a nice wide staircase with hand rails on either side." We mean, "down a steep, narrow staircase that was new around the time that Ben Franklin was a babe."
The other hazard is the ceiling height. Normally, Robert isn't the tallest guy in the room. In fact, at five foot eleven, he's exactly average height. Except that this trip he's added another inch or so from the bumps arising from whacking his head on various low ceilings. Apparently, the British are descended from a race of elves who liked to see taller folk suffer.
8:00 pm
We're finally at dance class, and there's a couple dozen people there (12 couples, which is a perfect number for Scottish dancing). Everybody is nice and at least half a dozen people stop by and chat with us as we're getting our shoes on.
The class itself is taught by a wee Scottish lady, who never bumps her head on the ceiling. She's even-tempered and gives clear instructions and shows us some extra steps we can do if we get bored doing the regular steps.
There's even live music for the class--it's an accordion player who is so good he can play the dance music and it doesn't sound like a polka! We make our way through the dances and have a good time and end up pretty exhausted.
9:30 pm
It might seem like sometimes we're nimrods (and sometimes we are), but both of us used to be full-time bus riders, and we know to check to see when the last bus runs. According to the schedule at the bus stop where we caught the bus, the last bus was at about 11:00 pm (14 C).
The schedule at this bus stop, however, says that we caught the last bus out, and there are no more buses after 7:00 pm (50 KPH). We're not sure who to believe, and we're at least two miles away from home (these might be some sort of Imperial mile, because it seems like the bus covered at least 10 miles getting us here).
Because we just finished dancing for an hour and a half, we're reluctant to walk home, so we decide to wait around to see if a bus shows up. After about 20 minutes of waiting, a taxi drives by and apparently we look so forlorn and lost, he stops and asks us if we'd like a ride and we decide that we're tired of being cold and yes we would.
He's a nice chap, and we explain that we haven't had dinner yet, so he drives real fast to get us to a place near our hotel that's still open. This puzzles us. Still open? It's only 10:00 pm.
10:03 pm
Okay, technically, it's three minutes past ten, but--wait, your kitchen closed at ten? Surely there's--wait, ALL the 8,000 cafes and restaurants and bars on the Royal Mile are closed? Oh, not the bars, just any place that's still serving food.
Listen up, Edinburgh: ten at night is not late. People in New York are just starting their evenings. Even in Bellevue where we live (a suburb of Seattle) there's dozens of places to eat at ten at night. Heck, there's more places to eat than there are places to drink. Please get a Denny's.
We do finally find a pizza place (Pizza Express: where you go when every other bloody place in town is closed) and they're not closed (yet) and we're able to get some dinner that's not served in a pint glass.
8:55 am
And at the other end of the spectrum, we try finding a place that serves coffee before nine in the morning (besides, oh look, the American-owned Starbucks). Fortunately, we're perfecting the "forlorn and lost, but kindly looking older people" look and St. Gile's Coffee and Wine Bar lets Robert in early to snag a couple of cups of coffee to take up to the room. (Our room has a refrigerator which is stocked with: OMG! Half-and-half, only here they call it "Single Cream.")
10:20 am
So, for breakfast we decide to go back and reward them for being the only people in the capital city interested in making a buck.
Robert orders the speciality of the house: a waffle with bacon and brie covered in maple syrup. And a side salad, also covered in maple syrup. The waffle, bacon, and brie are quite tasty, although the syrup is a bit weird. The salad is beyond weird, and if you're thinking about using maple syrup as a salad dressing, don't. It doesn't work.
11:00 am
Laura is interested in finding some medication for her cold, particularly some antihistamine since we'll be flying in a few days. Seems that shops here specialize and the only places that carry cold drugs are Pharmacies, but fortunately there's one of those on the Royal Mile (guess even Queens get the sniffles, eh?).
While Laura is sorting out which Scottish brands will provide a proper dose, Robert looks through the products and notices that not only can you get Sudafed without a prescription (hard to do in Washington because you can use it to make Methamphetamine), you can also get Codeine over the counter (prescription required in Washington). He's about to inquire as to the availability of opium, when Laura drags him off.
11:20 am
We're at the bottom end of the Royal Mile, going into the Scottish Parliament. This building was finished in 2004 and is chock-a-block full of symbolism--which means it looks weird until you understand why they did what they did. For example, all the windows are decorated on the outside with patterns that are supposed to symbolize drapes being pulled back, to show the transparency of the system.
And the whole building has a recurring tree motif that shows that the Parliament is full of saps, or something like that.
It's all very modern and new and we pop in to give them a few tips about getting away from the British (Tip #1: only allow five-day campaign periods for elections). We go through security and everybody is very polite when they discover Robert's Swiss Army knife and they give him a receipt for it, and lock it up in a safe.
Our favorite quote on one of the displays inside: "The Scottish Parliament, which adjourned on 25 March, 1707, is hereby reconvened," by Winnie Ewing, 12 May 1999. Talk about a heck of a recess! The U. S. was still fighting bears on the beaches when they last convened.
The members of the Scottish Parliament are off in committee rooms doing hearings and such, so they're not actually in session. We head up anyway and look out over the general assembly area. It's very modern and stylish and pretty amazing architecture.
Next year the Scottish people are voting on whether to throw out the British bums once and for all and everybody has an opinion on it. (Our opinion: "We'll hold the door for you"). Some folks think that it's too late, that the economies are too intertwined for independence to really work.
There's an article every day in the paper arguing for or against. Today's newspaper is freaking out because Scotland will be on the hook for decommissioning all the North Sea oil rigs, which will cost 30 billion pounds.
11:55 am
We stop at Holyrood House, where The Queen stays when she's in town. She's got her own gallery, which for a mere 20 pounds each ($30) we could go and look at her paintings. Since we went to some trouble to throw the bums out of our country, we're not much inclined to give them our money and we move on to…
12:10 pm
…Our Dynamic Earth
This is a pretty nifty science museum that focuses on the Earth (where many humans live). In fact, there's a clock that tells us that at this moment, there are 6,856,190,219 people on earth (if you count Bernie).
We arrive just after a busload of third and fourth graders show up, and one of the staff advise us to hang out a bit "or you won't hear a word for the entire rest of the exhibit, and possibly for a day or two afterwards."
After waiting a bit, we jump into a time machine and head back to the big bang, move forward through volcanoes and then spend some time in the Ice Age. Then there's an exhibit on evolution, where we learn that the magnolia is the oldest surviving flower.
It's a bit hokey, but it does a reasonable job of conveying science and geology and biology and social theory in a way that even kids can understand. There's some exhibits that involve watching a video, but they jazz it up by putting the viewing holes into tree trunks and you have to spin a crank to make them advance.
The room that's all about the polar regions has a giant frozen ball of ice in the center (our favorite room, because most of the rest of the place is a bit overheated).
We then go into a big theatre for a trip through some various types of environments and the animals that live there. We're given 3-D goggles to watch the show, but pretty soon, we've advanced to 4-D, because there's Smell-O-Vision (the wind wafts the smell of pine trees to us) and then we're in 5-D as snow falls from the ceiling when we visit Antarctica! We're glad we're not there with the school kids because they probably went insane at this point.
Finally, we end up at a "Dome Show," which is like IMAX on steroids, as it covers the entire top half of a dome. It's a movie about the wildest weather in the solar system and it's pretty well done (except that they show the asteroid belt teeming with asteroids, and not one of their eight science advisors smacked them upside the head about that). We find out that it hails diamonds on Neptune (ouch!) and that Jupiter has giant lightning storms that are tough to sleep through.
2:30 pm
We wander about the city looking for a place to eat lunch (when you sleep in, you tend to eat meals at off times, which isn't always bad in a city popular with tourists).
Laura remembers a place she wanted to try and we end up at the Potato Shop. All they serve is potatoes. You can get a regular, medium or large potato, and you have a choice of toppings, which include:
- cottage cheese
- coleslaw
- tuna salad
- egg, cheese mayo
- Cajun chicken
Laura goes with pepperoni, mozzarella, jalapeños and tomato sauce while Robert opts for the more staid chili con carne topping. Despite the weirdness of it (invented by the Irish perhaps?), they're actually quite tasty and filling (one potato will pretty much do it for you).
3:00 pm
One thing we haven't mentioned yet is that in this part of town, all the sewage pipes run along the outside of the building. When they were originally built, indoor plumbing was a distant future dream, so when the future arrived there was no place to put the pipes. The solution was to run them on the outside of the buildings, which still involves some drilling holes into foot thick walls, but not as much as doing proper plumbing.
So if you're thinking about using the pipes on the outside of the buildings to climb up, don't. Really, truly, don't.
That's it for today (whose weather has featured blazing sunshine and torrential downpours). We have a line on some live folk music tonight (we've checked with three different sources and they all assure us that Blind Hamish McHaggis will NOT be there).
Tomorrow we're headed back into London, which means we'll be spending most of the day on a train and then schlepping our bags across one of the world's largest cities. And we're hoping that there'll be someplace to eat after ten.
We'll let you know how it turns out.
Robert & Laura
Sore Roots Tour