It is becoming increasingly inescapable that my adventure is running thin. I already have less than a week left in this lovely country. I would be willing to swear that I've only been here a month; time has passed so ridiculously quickly. I've seen so many beautiful things, met so many wonderful people, and had so many extraordinary experiences. But I suppose all good things must come to an end.
As I write this, I am sitting on a train on a four hour return ride from Inverness to Edinburgh, passing by forests and mountains coated with the only snow I've seen here. It looks so much like Narnia that I'm half expecting to speed past Mr Tumnus with his red umbrella (or, I suppose, in this case, Mr Tum-Ness). I'm going to have to get used to the snow though, this time next week I'll be trading the Scottish winter rains for four solid months of harsh wind and snow. Shockingly, I'm not overly excited.
To backtrack a little bit, I spent last weekend in London with one of my friends (my first time leaving Scotland since arriving). We travelled by foot a lot to see more of the city, and it was fantastic, although I must say that I still prefer Edinburgh.
We caught a bus to the airport at 5 AM after a solid hour and a half night's sleep and departed on our hour long flight to the Stansted airport, arriving just as the sun was rising around 8:30. Our first mission after our hour and a half bus ride into the city's centre was to find coffee. Thankfully (or oddly, depending on how you look at it), just about every other store along every street is either a Pret-a-Manger, Costa, or Starbucks (all of which are coffee places). After coffee and a stop for hummous, we began our roughly four mile walk to Baker Street to see Sherlock Holmes's house, still lugging our bags. We didn't actually go in, but it was neat to walk by and on our way to the hostel we were staying at, another mile and a half beyond Baker Street. Reconnected to wifi, we decided at the spur of the moment to go see a play at West End that we had seen posters for around the city: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. We got cheap tickets about an hour before the show started that were described as being 'restricted view,' which, as it turns out, means that you get to sit off to the side in the balcony and have to lean over the edge to see the stage. We arrived, underdressed, after our first adventure navigating the Tube and took our seats in the nosebleeds and it was amazing. The show was great, the stage was empty except for a few boxes and the set consisted of extra cast members and an amazing display of lights and projections. I actually thought leaning over the balcony was more comfortable than politely trying to stay within my own space among the regular theatre-goers in their normal, high-priced seats. When the show ended, we decided to continue the evening with a rambling wander. We found an Italian ice cream shop that said they would put as many flavours of ice cream on a cone as I wanted (naturally, I picked seven), walked through Little China, found a Christmas market (which is almost exactly the same as Edinburgh's and Glasgow's), and, much to our surprise and delight, organically stumbled upon the London Eye, the Thames, Big Ben, and Westminster around 11 PM. Snapping a myriad photos, we continued our walk until almost 12:30, at which point we had to scramble back to the Tube before it stopped running for the day to get back to our hostel.
The second day started off with a train ride to St Pancras King's Cross Station to visit Platform 9 3/4 and make the journey to Hogwarts. I'm going to attempt to keep my dignity in tact and not mention how long the line to get a picture at the platform was, but we did both get our pictures taken as well as befriend the employees there. Our King's Cross stop also included a Greek brunch, a walk along a small river, and zero sightings of Alan Rickman. As the light began to fade, we headed off to a stop of my particular choosing: the Museum of Brands, Packaging, and Advertising. Unfortunately, we had gotten there so late that we weren't able to get through even half of it before being told that they were closing and being swept out. So we continued the trend of aimless walking and found a street market that we walked the length of and got street crepes from a clearly not French woman wearing a beret. Unable to find any benches, we sat on the ground in front of a shoe store near an employee giving us a wary look while on his smoke break and ate our leaky crepes. When we sat down somewhere to connect to wifi, we discovered that we could have gone to see a stage version of Edward Scissorhands or The Prisoner's Dilemma if we had only checked listings half an hour earlier. As it was, we ended up going to see a circus show with 'death-defying feats' at a Christmas market in Hyde Park that was about a mile walk away. It was a pretty good show, there was a contortionist who shot a bow and arrow with her feet while doing a handstand, a large man who juggled car tires, and a 'mad scientist' who ran around with large hair doing nothing of any particular skill. When it ended, we just started walking and ended up in the fashion district where we got to see all of the big name designers' Christmas window displays and continued back to the Thames and across Chelsea Bridge. On our expedition to locate an underground station to ride back (it was getting close to midnight again), we ended up by a sketchy looking building on the other side of the Thames, which was the Battersea Power Station. We figured we could go around it, but it just kept going on and on with no way to circumnavigate it in sight, so we turned around and went back the way we had come, only to coincidentally find out the next day that the Battersea Power Station is, in fact, the largest brick building in all of Europe. Go figure.
Our third and final day was dedicated to doing more standard tourist things. We checked out of our hostel and hopped on a train that took us to London Bridge, which we crossed to get breakfast (okay, it was a bit after noon, but I'm still counting it as breakfast) at one of London's millions of Pret-a-Mangers where I got free coffee. I've actually gotten free coffee two of the three times I've been to a Pret; Pret has been good to me. We walked by London Tower and went up into the exhibition, which included a hokey movie about its design and building, walked across its glass floors, and stopped by the room that now hosts the old Victorian-era engines that raised and lowered the bridge for ships. On our way back to Westminster, we stopped by Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, the residence of Prime Minister David Cameron, which is, much to our dismay, entirely blocked off and guarded with well-armed police officers, putting a damper on our ability to demand of Cameron a more speedy deliverance of the powers promised to Scotland in the Vow. Stopping to see the London Eye, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey in the light, we headed over the the peers entrance to the House of Lords. The friend I was traveling with had met a lord at a political event she had attended and he offered her a tour of the House of Lords if she were ever to come to London. Of course she took him up and we arrived half an hour early for our four o'clock appointment, grossly underdressed, in the most luxurious coatroom I had even seen. Not that I've actually seen a lot of coatrooms. He gave us a nice tour, we got to sit in the balcony for a portion of a debate, and had tea and biscuits (or, in my case, cappuccino and cheesecake) in the room that Guy Fawkes had tried to blow up in the Gunpowder Plot. In speaking to the lord, he seemed entirely unenthused about Scotland's referendum. We left the Lords just in time to bolt to the nearest train station for a ride to the station to catch our bus (which proved to be more problematic and stressful than need be) and end up at the airport just in time to make it to our gate just as it was supposed to close at a dead sprint. Only to find that we had to wait in line to get on our plane for over half an hour. But we made it back safely, which should be the main takeaway.
A three day week at Parliament ensued, due to me being in London on Monday and leaving for the constituency on Friday. A lot of hard work began to pay off as the Land Reform Scotland Bill was passed, a champion cause of Rob Gibson, the MSP I work for. Other than that, it was a pretty quiet week. The clock is ticking down on the time I have left to finish my research project. I still have about 2,000 words left to write. I can do this.
This weekend has been completely lovely though as I accompanied Rob on a visit to his constituency of Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross (the far north of mainland Scotland). I sat in for his open meetings with constituents (known as surgeries, nothing medical about them though), visited some small businesses, stood on the world's shortest street Ebenezer Place in Wick, had lunch and meetings with important professional people, a stop to see Highland cows, and a night spent at Rob's house. He played us a few Scottish folk songs on his guitar, which he also sang, and told me all about the book he had written (it's called Highland Cowboys, if you'd like to rush off to read it). It was a very nice weekend and I'm glad that I got to make the journey here before I have to leave. I'm also glad I got to spend so much time with Rob my last weekend here; he's a nice, funny man with an acute knowledge of pretty much all things historical.
Which brings me back to me currently sitting on a train, now stopping at Perth where the elderly lady who was sitting across from me is getting out to switch trains to go to Glasgow. She apparently had lived in Canada for 16 years as well as three yeas in Australia, where she stayed with her daughter who married an Australian, but is Scottish herself. She was working on addressing her Christmas cards and likes Narnia, but not Doctor Who.
It's 3:30 PM and already mostly dark. The train should pull back into Edinburgh in a bit under two hours so I can go home.
The past two weekends have been somewhat painful as I see Edinburgh disappear under me from a plane as I can't stop thinking about how next time I fly away, I won't be coming back. At least not soon. And it's horrible.
On an unrelated note though: I have now reached over 2,000 page views, so thank you to everyone who has been following me on this amazing journey and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have.
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This week has been all about Nicola Sturgeon. They say the sun never sets on the British Empire; well it never rises in Scotland. It's been a busy couple of weeks at the parliament. ...but there can be multiple visits.
I love it all. So much happened this week. It was like Christmas, and Scotland woke up to find it had gotten nothing but coal. However, 97% of the Scottish population is now registered to vote and Scotland experienced an 86% overall voter turnout: one of the highest in the democratic history of the world. So Scotland is still a winner. There was also uncertainty when it came to Scotland's future in the the European Union. The EU refused to make any statements on the matter. Would Scotland have had to go through the regular process of being approved, meeting standards, and receiving a unanimous vote to enter (which Spain would have probably rejected due to their similar problems with the Catalonia region)? Or, as current EU citizens already, would they have had a simpler, swifter process of entering since they were just maintaining the rights they already had? This also would have given them the backup of using the Euro if they would have been unable to keep the usage of the pound. A majority of the UK's nuclear weapons are in Scotland, and Scotland would not have let them stay there in the case of independence. The UK would have no where to put them. And how much oil is left in the North Sea? Scotland undeniably would have been able to exist and do at least fairly well as an independent country. The main question was: Would it have been better off? Alex Salmond has also announced that, after the failed move for independence, he will step down as the First Minister of Scotland as well as from being the Scittish National Party leader (the majority-holding party of Scotland). Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is seen as the most likely person to succeed him as SNP leader and First Minister of Scotland for the remainder of the four year term. First thing's first: I brought roughly four pounds of my favorite peanut butter with me here. I love peanut butter. I have been here almost three weeks. All of that peanut butter is now gone. Now I have to eat SCOTTISH peanut butter. They just haven't mastered the art yet. Anyway... A couple of friends and I took the train for a day trip to Glasgow on Sunday. I love Glasgow. Sorry, Edinburgh. (The two cities have an age-old rivalry on which is better.) It felt a lot more Scottish than Edinburgh does and a lot less touristy. It's also actually larger than Edinburgh, despite Edinburgh being the capital of Scotland. I do love Edinburgh too though. Don't think I don't. This week was Freshers Week. All of the freshmen move in a week before classes start and then have a whole week free to participate in as many of the activities that the university has planned for them all day as they want. And did I mention the legal drinking age here is 18? They're all legal. And they are not a quiet bunch. (We live in an otherwise all freshmen building and my bedroom window is on ground level, right next to the main entrance to the building where everyone sits to smoke or stands to drunkenly yell things up to their friends.) This Sunday I will be taking a train with some friends to spend the day in Glasgow. I'm really excited to see more if Scotland. It really puts Scotland's size into perspective; with one 51 minutes train ride, I will have traveled from the East coast to the West coast. Also, this happened In Glasgow when Labour MPs visited to campaign for "Better Together" this week (definitely worth watching): One full week of classes behind me. Already 20% of the way toward working with parliament. |