Edinburgh

Edinburgh was very green, cold, and wet... I learned a Gaelic word: dreich. It's like a combination of dreary and bleak. Edinburgh is dreich, but I liked it. After getting off the plane, I took a bus into town, got off at the wrong stop and wandered around trying to find the right stop. I was meeting my friend Meredith. I finally found her, and we went back to her "flat". In the following days, I got to hear lots of the Scottish dialect: "pants" means underwear, "up the duff" means pregnant, a "bird" is a chick (as in woman), "slaint" means cheers or salut, and "cheers" means thank you or goodbye. "Take away" means to go (as in fast food to go),  "pudding" is dessert, and "tea" is dinner, et cetera.

It was my good fortune that the entire month of August was a city-wide festival in Edinburgh called "The Fringe". My favorite part of it was the arts and crafts. We wandered through a bunch of arts and crafts tents set up in a graveyard and I saw all kinds of amazing woodwork, jewelry, glass, and clothing. Everything was very intricate and seemed very high quality. The Scots appear to take a lot of pride in their work.

Apparently, one of the more popular cuisines in Scotland is Indian food. I don't blame them. Haggis is nasty. I tried it while I was here, and it was better than the haggis I had at my friend Jeremy's "Burns Supper", but it was still haggis. On a partially related note, they have plenty of American cuisine as well: Pizza Hut, Burger King, etc. I generally don't like American cuisine, because it's all cheap meat and molested vegetables and no spice. I smiled a little bit when I walked by a McDonald's that had a window smashed in. I smiled more when I walked by a Starbucks that had workmen out front replacing ALL of the windows because they had been completely demolished by a baseball bat (or more likely a golf club, since this is Scotland). Apparently the Scots don't like shitty capitalist establishments either.

I went on a bike tour of Edinburgh. Andrea and I had planned on going on a bike tour of Munich when we were there, but it was rained out. The tour through Edinburgh was led by a guy named Adrian, and it was pretty interesting. I heard stories about several of the pubs that were named after people that were executed. Read more about Maggie Dickson's, Deacon Brodie's Tavern, and The Last Drop. I drank some Irn Bru, the national Scottish soda - it's kinda like watered down Big Red. And I learned why there were bars over several graves. And also why several windows were bricked up on all the old buildings. Very informative and non-fatal despite the crazy wrong-side-of-the-road traffic.

I also visited the Edinburgh Castle, which was awesome. There was a Prisoners of War exhibit where they held various prisoners including early American "rebels". But even more interesting were the Honours of Scotland (a.k.a. the crown jewels!) Interesting history and very shiny - my kinda exhibit. Another nice bonus was the firing of the cannon. According to tradition, they fire a cannon from the castle at exactly 1 P.M. every day except Sunday so that the ships in the bay can set their clocks. Talk about tickets to the gun show, heh.

After going to the castle, I went to the National Gallery of Scotland. Maybe I was just delirious, but I think this was the best art gallery I've been to on this entire trip. It was a reasonable size - I was able to see the entire gallery in one trip (most galleries are so huge that you end up getting numb to the art and leave because of hunger or boredom.) There were some incredible paintings - the Scottish artists were surprisingly good! I was particularly impressed by some unknown painter called the "Master of Embroidered Foliage". I wasn't able to find any particularly high-resolution images of the piece I saw, but it was amazing - it looked like he  used a needle instead of a paintbrush because the detail was so fine. Also noteworthy was the art of William Dyce and Sir Joseph Noel Paton.

And I'll leave you with that. I need to upload some pictures and then I'm going to bed.