Sore Roots Trip Log--Day 8: Exploring Old Reeky
Robert & Laura
Sore Roots Trip Log--Day 8: Exploring Old Reeky
Sun, Apr 15, 2012
Last night we had to wrestle with the local internet to figure out how to make it take our American electrons. Still, it wasn't like we had to hike a mile-and-a-half into the local village to find WiFi. We just had to rejigger our routing table and DNS servers and give our credit card number to a large multinational corporation. Easy peasy.
Afterwards, we were too tuckered to head up (or down) hill, so we got as far as the hotel restaurant where we stopped for dinner.
Traveling with Robert is something of an exercise in random surrealism. He'll go for hours behaving like a seemingly normal person, getting on fine with everybody and then reality will take a sideways turn.
For dinner last night, he ordered the haggis appetizer (haggis is a traditional Scottish dish made by mixing oats and chopped up meat and then cooking them in a sheep stomach). The waitress comes by to ask how it was.
"Well," says Robert, "It was good, but it was nae as good as Edna MacKinnon's haggis."
The waitress looks baffled for a moment and then says, "Edna MacKinnon?"
"Oh, aye, she's been making haggis longer than your fellow has, I'm sure, and it's greet. It's a fine haggis and if he works at it, your chap could one day make haggis almost as good as Edna's!"
All of which is true. Edna MacKinnon does make a fine haggis, but the chances are that this young lady has no idea who Edna is, and has probably never tasted Edna's haggis.
We notice that she doesn't stop by again (there's three rotating wait staff who take turns delivering food and interrupting meals to ask if everything is okay).
8:00 am
We sleep in! All the way to seven in the AM. Sadly, our five star hotel provides us with hot chocolate, three types of tea, and even cream in the refrigerator, but only instant coffee for us to drink.
So we're out the door heading for one of the 52 cute little coffee shops we passed on the way in.
Now, we don't know how you feel about Starbucks. Personally, we hardly ever go there, because it's a giant corporation that produces a standard processed product.
But they are a hard-working bunch, and after walking a long block down the Royal Mile with a closed store every ten feet, we discover that at eight AM on a Sunday morning, not only are they open, but they offer free WiFi, which even our hotel doesn't.
We were a little nervous when we went to use our gift card. After all, our gift card (a present for some hard work Laura did for a group at St. Thomas) is filled with American dollars. Would the computers at Starbucks HQ be able to translate from one continent to another? Or would we crash the entire cash register and earn the enmity of a whole bunch of coffee-craving Scots in downtown Edinburgh?
Yay for large multinational corporations! It took our gift card without a hiccup and we had a proper (okay, close to a proper) cup of coffee. And we were able to check our mail and send out our next set of moves in "Words With Friends" (and we still haven't been kicked out of anywhere for playing it).
And Robert could even get breakfast, and discover our new most favorite juice company in England (and probably the world). It's called "innocent juice" and the best thing about the orange juice is that on the back of the label is this text:
"It's because our orange juice is squeezed from four hand-picked oranges that it's so very, very juicy and very, very refreshing.
But rather than banging on about it, we thought we'd show you a picture of a prairie dog eating a healthy slice of carrot."
And there's a picture of a prairie dog eating a carrot with the caption, "I wish it was a biscuit."
11:00 am
Old St. Paul's Church
We're at church services at Old St. Paul's church, which is old. Older than the U. S. , in fact, although there's been a few improvements since then, notably the installation of central heating (and even with that, most people keep their coats on).
We almost walked past it, because we were expecting something like an American big old church: it's big and imposing and in a square by itself. Old St. Paul's is big and imposing, but it's also jammed in between a whole row of buildings going up the hillside (you take the stairs halfway down the hill to enter the sanctuary).
It is also "high" church. This means that if you object to people wearing too much cologne during church, you will go absolutely batshit crazy during a high church service, because there's this thing called a "thurible" and it's chock full of incense. And the incense is smoldering among coals and emitting prodigious amounts of smoke
And the "thurifer" is the person who swings the thurible around and she walks before the procession like an old DDT truck spewing smoke in the wake of the priests and choir. You can tell who shows up here regularly because they're seated well away from the aisle.
Not only are we on the aisle (*cough*), but when they bring the gospel out among the people (us), we are smack dab next to where they stop. We can almost see the priest through the layers of smoke and we're pretty sure that our clothes are going to smell like incense for the next couple of months.
It's a lovely church, though, and a lovely service, even if the hymnals don't include the music for the hymns (they only have the words; apparently, it's considered a bit crass not to have the tunes memorized). But we've spent the last week with musicians who mostly learn music by ear, so we're ready. Plus we're sitting in front of a strong alto who cued us into the melody lines.
12:30 pm
We stay for coffee, and one of the lovely ladies in the church, Elspeth comes over and chats with us, asking about why we've come to Scotland. We explain about the music and that we're also into Scottish Country Dancing, and hoo boy, we have a new friend!
Seems Elspeth and her husband used to do Scottish Dancing all the time, and he grew up with it, and was a splendid traditional Scottish dancer. She says that adding extra twirls to dances is very, very traditional among the best dancers, and that "ghosting" (one non-active dancer following exactly behind an active dancer just for the fun of it) is particularly traditional.
We chat with her about places to go in Edinburgh (and we've forgotten to mention that "Edinburgh" is pronounced "Edinborough" for reasons that would probably hurt our heads if we explored them).
1:00 pm
We're headed back towards the train station, which is where a bunch of tour buses hang out and our tummies remind us that we've been a bit remiss in seeing to their needs.
As it happens, we pass a place called "Belushi's" (no relation), which is a hostel and bar and cafe. It's full of scruffy young folks, so we won't look out of place (since we're scruffy, too). It also has free WiFi and excellent pork and a bar full of soccer (or "football" as they call it here) fans who are cheering like crazy because the guys in the red shirts (the Celtics) have just scored a goal against the guys in the black and white striped shirts (the Hearts).
It's a nicely chaotic place, everybody is everybody else's best mate and our Sunday pork roast special with apples and steamed icky vegetables is pretty good (despite the broccoli and cauliflower).
2:00 pm
We get tickets for one of those "Hop-and-Stop" tour buses. We like them because they'll give us an overview of the city, and if we're particularly inspired, we can hop off and visit someplace in detail.
So here's the deal on Edinburgh:
There's an "Old Town" part, which is where we're staying. This bit dates back to like 900 years ago (although there was no free WiFi then). There's a big castle on top of a big hill that was never taken by force called, appropriately enough, Edinburgh Castle. Gradually, the rest of the town grew up in the shadow of the military-industrial complex (which would have consisted of club and shield makers).
There were town walls, so as more and more people showed up, they had to build upwards, resulting in lots of six and eight story buildings. And every room had a fireplace that was used a whole bunch, especially in the winter. And since there was no Clean Air Act back then, they were smoky chimneys. As a result, all the nice tan-colored stone has been stained by centuries of soot to a sort of black tan.
That's how you spot the Old City, and is also how Edinburgh got its nickname of "Old Reeky."
Then there's the "New Town" part, which was mostly built up in the 1800's and consists of nice, wide roads and pavements (sidewalks) with proper sanitation and big houses and parks and very few pubs and bars. This section is much nicer looking (although quite a bit duller).
2:30 pm
So it used to be that the pay rate for priests was determined by their congregation. Wealthy congregations paid priests a good wage. Poor congregations paid not such a good wage (and probably paid part of the salary in sheep).
This worked out pretty good for the priests with the wealthy congregations, but the poor priests thought that all priests should be paid union scale (that is, everybody got paid the same, regardless of the net worth of the individual souls).
And as usually happens in matters of this sort (although more usually over doctrine rather than clergy compensation), this lead to a split within the church with all the poor priests forming their own churches. Which meant that a bunch of new churches were needed, which was a good deal for the architects, masons, and builders.
The two sides finally reconciled in 1923 (probably by forming the Scottish Union of Priests, or SUP), but they left a whole bunch of amazing churches scattered all over the landscape.
4:00 pm
We've wandered past the Scott Memorial (to Sir Walter) and past the BBC science demonstration fair (where soap bubbles got frozen above dry ice and people measured the decibels of their shouts) to the Scottish National Gallery.
This is a big old (naturally) building that's chock-a-block full of paintings. Best of all, it's free! No charge to get in, apparently from some delusion that art should be accessible to everybody and that it's a good thing for the government to spend money on.
So we while away the afternoon gazing at paintings by Monet, Cezanne, and Titian until they toss us out at 5:00 pm.
6:00 pm
We're back at our hotel, resting our feet from all the hill-climbing and walking. We plan to head down to a pub on Grassmarket street later tonight and we'll tell you all about it tomorrow.
Robert & Laura
Sore Roots Tour