Sore Roots Trip Log--Day 10: Brown Sauce Obscura

[Robert & Laura]

Tue, Apr 17, 2012

The advantage of doing unplanned, spontaneous things in a strange foreign city is that sometimes you end up dancing with Danes and singing to Scottish versions of American songs. 

The downside to this approach is that sometimes you end up listening to blind guys play random chords while telling incomprehensible stories in too-small pubs. Last night was more like the latter than the former. 

We started by hunting down a Spanish Tapas bar at the other end of the street we're staying just off of. The street is called the "Royal Mile" because at each end is a Royal thingy. At one end is Edinburgh castle, which contains the Scottish Crown Jewels. At the other end is Holyrood castle, which is where the Queen hangs out when she's up in these parts. 

In between is a melange of small shops and old buildings, where your can purchase souvenir cotton kilts ("fun kilts"), scarves, shot glasses and every other bit of tick-tacky souvenir (the locals call it "tartan tat") you can imagine. There are restaurants and cafes and bars and whisky bars and Irish bars and Genuine Scottish Bars. 

We find the Spanish Tapas bar near the Queenly end of the Royal Mile. Like almost every other bar and restaurant we've been in, it has multiple levels (and the toilets are never on the same level as you are). 

It was probably a mistake to order the tapas platter of meat, both because tapas are supposed to consist of a variety of things, and because, well, preserved meat doesn't seem to be something this part of the world is very good at. It's easy to get good, fresh meat--whether fish or beef or sheep. 

Sure enough, our tapas meat platter is about five types of highly preserved meat that's mostly tasteless and full of gristle. 

Ah well, we console ourselves, we'll just nip round to the pub down the street that had a sign out front saying "Music jam on Monday. Musicians welcome!"

The sign should have been a warning to us as an explicit plea for some kind of musician, please Dear God, send us a musician. 

When we stepped in, there was an old guy sitting in the corner with a battered guitar. He had long gray wild hair, and an equally long and wild beard. He seemed carved from aged oak and a moment's inspection revealed that he was blind. "Greet!" we thought (this is what Scottish people say when they think something is pretty good), "we've stumbled on one of the great blind folk singers of Scottish tradition, much like Blind Lemon Jefferson in American country blues.

Alas, Blind Hamish McHaggis (not his real name) was rather at the other end of the spectrum (har!) from blind musicians with talent. The entire time we were there he never played more than eight bars at once, and most of them were off-key. In between, he talked to the four or five people who were there in Mumblese that was mostly incomprehensible (the Scottish equivalent of Genuine Frontier Gibberish). 

There was one musical moment, when one of the visitors to the bar sang a song, but that was it and Blind Hamish McHaggis was so impressed, he bought the guy a drink (or he didn't want the competition). 

Fortunately for all concerned, since McHaggis had apparently been drinking since sun-up, the bar closed early (11:00 pm) and so around 10:30, the process of packing up McHaggis' banjo ("Oh darn," said Robert, "We missed that."). It only took four or five women and 15 minutes to get his stuff back into its various cases and pointed more or less at the door for the taxi. 

But at least we weren't up past midnight dancing with Danes...

9:00 am

We try not to eat the same place twice, but this turns out to be something of a mistake when it comes to coffee. Once again, we find a lovely little coffee place that looks at us as though we are from another planet when we ask about cream for our coffee. 

How did this happen? How is it that it's perfectly acceptable to put milk into tea, but that nobody has thought, "Hey, let's try something that's not as, you know, milky, for our coffee. Maybe we could take some of this cream we're drowning our donuts in, and try a bit in our coffee?" 

Still, the place has a pretty good latte, so we eat a bacon roll (it's exactly what it sounds like: slices of bacon in the middle of a roll) and move on. 

10:00 am

There's a music shop around the corner from our hotel that says it's the headquarters for Scottish folk music. Ever since bass-player Peter talked about Jimmy Shand (not "Jimmy Shandling" as Robert misreported earlier; Hey, I got three of the four syllables right and that's a 75% success rate right there, that is!), we've been looking around trying to find a recording. 

Even RSCDS headquarters couldn't point us at anything (he was in the database, but according to them there weren't any CDs with him on it). Everybody there knew who he was ("Oh, he was everywhere in the 50's!"), but couldn't give us a line on how to hear what he played. 

Well, Coda Music (www.codamusic.co.uk) may not be the official headquarters of Scottish folk music, but they're sure crackers at it. They had a whole Jimmy Shand section and we had our pick of CDs to get (apparently, "Gay Gordons" was his signature tune, because it was on every one of the eight CDs the store had). 

We merrily browsed and bought some other stuff and happily parted with another chunk of our money.

10:30 am

Camera Obscura 

Right next to Edinburgh Castle is Camera Obscura (www.camera-obscura.co.uk), which is a science museum about vision and optical effects cleverly disguised as a tourist attraction. 

The namesake attraction is a "camera obscura," which is a mirror mounted on a pole that reflects and image down through some lenses and then focuses it on a big white parabolic surface. Because the building is tall, it provides a view over all of Edinburgh and inside the camera obscure, you can see all around Edinburgh. 

They don't let the riffraff run the mirror (partly because it has to be done in complete darkness), but the fellow running the tour is very knowledgable and takes us on a brief tour of Edinburgh by pointing out various places around town and giving us the stories behind them. 

The George Herriot School, for example, which looks like a castle of its own, is partly the inspiration for Hogwarts School of Wizardry. Apparently, the cafe where Ms. Rowling used to write looked out on the school and therefore--yeah, we thought it was a bit tenuous, too. It's not like Edinburgh has any shortage of castles. 

The Princes Garden (note that this is not the Princess Garden, as Robert initially thought, but the garden of many male-type Princes) was originally a loch ("lake"). When they drained it, they found over 300 bodies at the bottom. In the U. S., this would indicate that it was popular spot with the mob, but here it indicates that it was a popular place for the traditional witchcraft test during the Edinburgh witchcraft trials. 

In the U. S., we feel bad because we burned a couple of poor women at the stake after they were accused of being witches. In England, Scotland and Europe they went witch crazy and reduced the population by thousands of women. 

And the traditional test was to bind your hands and feet and toss you in the water. You float, you're a witch and get burned at the stake. You sink--whoops, sorry about that, guess you weren't a witch. We're actually kind of glad we didn't know about this bit of history when we were tramping around the gardens. 

St. Margaret's chapel inside Edinburgh castle is the oldest building in the whole city, dating back to the twelfth century. And you can still get married in it! (According to Sean Connery sound-alike tour guide Nigel, it's quite popular with the father of the bride, as it can only fit about a dozen people.)

Finally, there's the National Monument. This is patterned on the Parthenon in Greece (we've been there!), which has 48 columns. After building the first column, the city council had a big party to celebrate. As each column was completed, they had a big party to celebrate. After twelve columns, they were out of money to do any more columns (or parties) so they stopped. It remains unfinished to this day (they're now spending their party money on the tram system). 

The rest of the five-story building is jam-packed with holograms, and optical illusions, and things for kids to play with, but that still interest grown-ups. It's very well done (and we've been to a bunch of science museums) and everything works and is well-maintained. Definitely worth seeing. 

12:40 pm

Between the Camera Obscura and Edinburgh Castle is the Tartan Weaving Mill, which is an actual working weaving mill that's also a museum. Oh, and there's a couple of gift shops in there, too. They have a good selection of kilt stuff, and we manage to find a good pair of kilt hose for Robert (he's got "shapely" calfs that need extra long socks). 

12:55 pm

We're wandering around looking at various weaving things, and exhibits and--hey, it's almost time for the one o'clock Edinburgh Castle cannon! Since we're right next to the castle, it'd be a shame to miss it. So we start looking for the exit. 

At this point, the Tartan Weaving Mill plan of operation is revealed: the only way out of the place is to follow a tortuous path that takes you through EVERY SINGLE ONE of the ten different gift shops ("Perhaps a Scottish chess set would suit you?"). 

We're racing through the shops and..

1:00 pm

Whew! We just make it. 

Frankly, it's a bit anti-climactic. Robert was expecting a big, earth-shaking boom that would cause people to cringe and birds to fall out of the sky. It's more a "pop" than a boom, but at least we hear it. And we set our watches. 

1:10 pm

Laura notes that we haven't said anything about "brown sauce" in our trip logs, so here we go. We've stopped for lunch at a place that serves burgers (Robert is having American food withdrawal) and Laura orders up some fish and chips and notices that, once again, there are packets of brown sauce. 

When we first ran into this in Kingham at the school, we thought it was BBQ sauce, but it turns out it's not. It's brown sauce. It's sort of a cross between steak sauce and BBQ sauce, only not as tasty as either one. Apparently, it's the go-to condiment for British and Scottish food, because it's always there. 

Sifting through the condiment packets on the table, Robert runs across "Salad Cream." Great. You can get cream for your salad, but not for your coffee. 

1:30 pm

We're grumpy, which means we're getting tired and overwhelmed by too many things, plus Laura is on the edge of a cold. Our supply of clean clothes is getting low as well. 

Which creates a perfect storm of: back to the hotel for a nap and laundry (the hotel has washers and dryers and even provides laundry soap). 

6:00 pm

Okay, for this evening, our plan is to make it to a dance class. We know where it is and what bus to catch. We know what the bus fare was in 2009 (travel tip: check the copyright date when you buy a travel guide), and with any luck we'll make it there and back without ending up in a pub with Blind Hamish McHaggis. 

Wish us luck! 

  Robert & Laura

  Sore Roots Tour