Week Four, Scotland

Ana, Edinburgh and Glasgow

Week four in Scotland was a very busy week. My friend Ana Sanchez arrived on the previous Friday, and we started her tour of Edinburgh on Saturday by climbing the Salisbury Crags. Then, we attended the Easter festival, in terrible weather, on Sunday. We never looked back the rest of the week, going somewhere every day and even making a trip to Glasgow. I will have lots of pictures and lots of pubs this week. You can guess that Ana is in a lot of the pictures. I think I may send out two mailings of photos because there are so many. Unfortunately, I cannot crop them on this machine, and they are not quite as nice as I usually try to make them.

On Monday morning we purchased two all-day passes on the Lothian Bus System and rode around town for a couple of hours. The passes only cost two quid thirty, or about four dollars and sixty cents, and we never had to wait for a bus over five minutes. I have gotten to know the city well enough to be a passable tour guide. We stopped for a beer in The Hebrides Pub and Ana discovered Guinness for the first time. It was love at first quaff! She drank no other beer for the rest of the week. Sometimes she drank two to my one. How she does that and stays so slim, I don’t know. There was a Scotsman in the pub who possessed a nose that can only be described as monumental. I regret not buying him a beer and getting a picture of him, but I only thought of not wanting to hurt his feelings by drawing attention to it. The bartender shorted my change by nearly eight dollars and when I took it up with him he shorted it again. He was pretty flustered and explained to me that it was his first day. Then he gave me too much change. I gave it back to him as a tip.

We left there and made our way back down to Leith by bus and ate at a pub on the water called The Waterline. It had a large menu of reasonably priced foods. I ordered a broccoli soup, while Ana had a seafood chowder, both of which were delicious. We then made our way across town and shopped at a large grocery store called Sainsbury’s. One strange thing about the store is that the shopping center that it is in only has parking for maybe one hundred cars. The Center, Texas Brookshire Brothers Grocery has more spaces than that. Ana and I got the ingredients, and she made a mushroom risotto for the family. I was so exhausted that I slept through the preparations. Even riding the bus so much, we walked five or six miles that day.

On Tuesday, we walked to town and went to Greyfriar’s Bobby, the pub. It is just in front of the graveyard where the little terrier is buried (the one that supposedly stayed by its master’s grave for so many years). The Queen ordered the dog buried in the cemetery when it died, and as the pictures show, people still honor the grave with flowers. The statue of Bobby is out on the street in front of the pub. Ana had another Guinness and I tried a Deuchars Indian Pale Ale. It is quite different from Guinness, but a style of beer that I like very much. After Greyfriar’s, we met Tasca at the Elephant house, whose main claim to fame is that J.K. Rowling wrote the first part of Harry Potter there. I had found a plaque for the burial of a Professor and Poet named McGonagall on the back wall of the Greyfriar’s cemetery, and there is an old, turreted school just beyond the wall called Heriots School: (Hogwarts?) It is very close to where she wrote.

On our stroll back, we found a small writer’s museum that featured Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson, all Scottish. It was quaint and interesting to see their furniture. It was another free attraction, like many museums and gardens in Edinburgh. From there we went to the Scotch Whisky Museum and saw a presentation of the history and techniques of making Scotch Whisky. I had been there before, and was pleased to see that they now gave the wee dram that is part of the show before you have to sit through the information. But you can imagine my disappointment when I found that they had discontinued the dram after the presentation. I asked for my money back, but they just said that they didn’t know I was Scottish, and no money was forthcoming. We walked all the way back to the B and B. I was really dragging by the time we got there, and even Ana, who does five K. marathons in an hour and fifteen minutes, was tired.

Wednesday was something of a day off because we were both tired and my knee was hurting. We took a bus down Nicholson Street and had dinner at the Auld Hoose, which is my favorite and hers also. While we were there, Jim and Tasca happened by, but they couldn’t bring Bo in because the pub doesn’t allow babies. We went from there to the Festival Theater, which is a stainless-steel-and-glass edifice with the “Johnny Walker” bar on the second level. We went to see a presentation of “Oh, What a Feeling,” a two-hour-and-thirty-minute revue of show tunes of the last twenty years. Think ‘I Had the Time of My Life,’ from ‘Dirty Dancing.’ The ladies all seemed to love it, and were dancing in the aisles, including Ana.

Thursday, we took a bus trip to Glasgow. It is the largest city in Scotland, and the third largest in the United Kingdom. I am including three pictures of the road to Glasgow and you can see the weather change. The sixty-mile round trip only cost three pounds each, a real bargain, and the buses ran every fifteen minutes, (every ten minutes during peak hours). Both directions, our bus was completely full. It was raining almost the whole time that we were there. A Scottish friend said later that it always rains in Glasgow. We walked many miles through Glasgow. We went to Sauchiehall Street, which is the most famous shopping street in Scotland, even surpassing Princes St. in Edinburgh, some say. We walked down Hope Street to the river Clyde, and then along the Clyde until we turned back up to George Square. George Square is the center of Glasgow. There is a statue of Sir Walter Scott atop a tall pillar, and a mounted horseman whose name I forget but who, as you can see in the photograph, was honored with a traffic cone on his head. The hooligans do this to any statue that they can climb in a drunken state and find it most humorous. I think it is childish and dangerous. I nearly fell off that thing trying to get that traffic cone up there. (Not really.)

From George Square,. we walked to the medieval section of Glasgow, took a wrong turn, and went nearly a mile out of the way. It was a steep downhill while we were going, but strangely the reverse on the way back. We made our way to St. Mungo’s and the Glasgow Neocropolis, or ‘City of the Dead.’ The City of the Dead was mostly an uphill walk, so I skipped it. From there the walk back to the Buchannan Bus Center seemed a short distance, over nearly level ground and through the environs of Strathclyde University. It was a large university that I didn’t know existed until that day.

Friday we went to Edinburgh Castle, which is the center of Edinburgh. We witnessed the changing of the guard at the Scottish War Memorial, a twenty-one gun salute to the Queen on the event of her eightieth birthday, ( God save the old girl), and a fine small marching band. The Scottish Crown Jewels and the Stone of Scone are on display in the castle with a good diorama of Scottish history and a recounting of how Sir Walter Scott reopened the relics after they had been hidden away for one hundred and seventeen years. The crown, septure, and sword are not particularly interesting to me, but the Stone of Scone, or the Stone of Destiny, is something else. A common stone by all appearances, but the stuff of legend. Google it!

Ken and Linda Paterson came to Jim and Tasca’s that evening and we got to see them briefly. They were closing their shoe store in Elgin, and moving the inventory down to Glasgow, and just came in for the night. They are lovely people. She is Jim’s sister, and a naturalized British citizen now.

Saturday was Ana’s last day in Scotland and we took it very easy. We did a little shopping and had the pleasure of meeting Jayne (Hudson) Papworth, who was Tasca’s pen pal since Tasca was seven years old. Jayne is a lovely young woman with a three-year-old son named Willy, and another, to be named Joe, on the way. Her husband works for Social Services near Stockton-on-Tees, where Jayne lived when she and Tasca were children. They just popped up to Edinburgh for a day visit, since she and Tasca hadn’t seen each other in about fifteen years. For Ana’s last night, Jim, Tasca, Ana, Bo and I went to an upscale restaurant called Thai Lemongrass. After a week of eating in pubs, it was a pleasure to splurge a little, and Thai food is a favorite of Jim, Tasca and Ana. I much appreciated the place, with its calming music and a large golden statue of the Buddha just over our table. I had chicken satay and spring rolls to start with, then stir fried duck with chilies, and egg fried rice and prawn cakes. We drank a very nice bottle of white wine. After dinner we strolled the length of The Meadows in the eight p.m. twilight and watched all the people enjoying the good weather.

We got up at six-thirty to get Ana to the airport. Everything was uneventful until we said good-bye, and she started her check-in. I took a last photo and was standing there watching Ana, when this guy who must be described as more chubby than burly walked up to me and flashed an ID card like it was a badge.

“Security,” he said. “Someone has just taken a photo in this area.”

“It was me,” I said.

“I’ll have to see it,” he intoned with some seriousness.

“Ok,” I said and started showing him our travel photos of the week. “And this is Bo, trying to stand on her head.”

“No, no,” he said. “I just need to see the one you took here.”

I showed him that one, and was still showing more when he walked away saying, “Just don’t take any more, please.”

I guess he meant at the airport.

Mac