Well, we’re finally making a trip back to the States. It will be for a month, while we visit family and friends and apply to jobs. We also got lucky because we purchased our tickets before airlines started charging for checked luggage, so we each got to bring two, 50 pound suitcases with us, stuffed full of things we didn’t need anymore in Scotland. So we can get a head start on moving back in August. Jonmikel packed up his main computer in a couple of boxes, and I stuffed all my winter things in my suitcases.
The trip went surprisingly smooth, partially because at the Edinburgh airport, you HAVE to talk to a person to check in. There are none of those obnoxious automated check in machines that do way more harm than good. I hate machines. So all of our stuff got in and out on time, we made it to Newark after watching several movies on our very own TV screens (I love 777s), notably The Other Boleyn Girl, which I didn’t think was all that bad, nor all that good.
We arrived in Newark just in time to get on the plane and sit for 3 hours on the tarmac. It was miserable. Storms were coming our way, so the airline determined that the best thing to do was let us sit on a plane. Great, huh? But they started handing out free booze, and a group of business travelers sitting in front of us and also heading to Charleston, WV very slowly got drunker and drunker and more entertaining, so it wasn’t a complete waste. They were awfully friendly and awfully lively. But we made it to Dan and Heather’s in one piece and with all of our luggage, if starving and exhausted.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Wierd British Thing #7
Strange thing about the British, #7: They rob banks with knives. Really, I saw it on the news. Worst problem since WWII, if you could infer importance by the amount of hype.
Above the Law
To steal Jonmikel’s signature title for this entry, today we traveled Above the Law. Clever, I know.
We headed out to North Berwick (pronounces Berrick, why? Because they’re Scottish), which is about 20 miles east of Edinburgh, or a nice half hour by train. Once you get out of Edinburgh, the number of nice, single-family homes increases exponentially. If I were to stay in the area long-term, I would definitely look to living out this was and just commuting by train. It’s quite nice, really.
North Berwick is a cute little seaside town, the kind of place families go on weekends to get out of the city. So, full of small bathing suit clad children running into the cold ocean, squealing, running out, and doing it al again, taking breaks to poke at the dead jellyfish that line the shores. It felt very Cape Codish, with very traditional colonial style architecture, boats everywhere, people in big hats, tall grasses growing up from the sands to give it that particularly New England feel.
The day started off gray, so we took the opportunity to climb up this small, cone-shaped mini-mountain, called a law. The law in question is the North Berwick Law, aptly named, I think. It’s not large, perhaps half the size of Arthur’s Seat, but offered great views of the surrounding coasts and bays and farmland. It riises sharply from the middle of the city, rather like Arthur’s Seat, and is even made from the same geological processes, basically a volcanic plug that was left after lava hardened inside a volcano and then the mountain fell away on the outside, leaving the exposed lava rock. Like Devil’s Tower, only more urban. There are several ruins on top, an old stone chapel, some defense structures from the Napoleonic Wars, some prehistoric stone circles of unknown use, and a fence around what used to be a whale jawbone, removed for posterity’s sake, or something.
It worked us up an appetite, so we headed into town to have some fish and chips at an outdoor eatery, the we meandered around town until it was time to return to Edinburg. We stopped to look at an old church that had been abandoned for some time but that housed several old and creepifying graves. We took some time ourselves to poke dead jellyfish, beautiful little guys entirely clear except for four neon purple rings in their centers. We also marveled at the British version of mini-golf: a large green space with holes in strategic locations. Seriously, that was it. No windmills or waterfalls or creatively placed tunnels or even separate areas for each hole. Entirely unentertaining, if you ask me. Just a big open green space.
One thing I will say for the Scottish, it’s easy to get out of town. The cities may be big and modern, but a 20 minute train or bus ride will take you into the middle of nowhere for a nice day-long mini-vacation. There was nothing about North Berwick that suggested it was commuting distance from Edinburgh.
We headed out to North Berwick (pronounces Berrick, why? Because they’re Scottish), which is about 20 miles east of Edinburgh, or a nice half hour by train. Once you get out of Edinburgh, the number of nice, single-family homes increases exponentially. If I were to stay in the area long-term, I would definitely look to living out this was and just commuting by train. It’s quite nice, really.
North Berwick is a cute little seaside town, the kind of place families go on weekends to get out of the city. So, full of small bathing suit clad children running into the cold ocean, squealing, running out, and doing it al again, taking breaks to poke at the dead jellyfish that line the shores. It felt very Cape Codish, with very traditional colonial style architecture, boats everywhere, people in big hats, tall grasses growing up from the sands to give it that particularly New England feel.
The day started off gray, so we took the opportunity to climb up this small, cone-shaped mini-mountain, called a law. The law in question is the North Berwick Law, aptly named, I think. It’s not large, perhaps half the size of Arthur’s Seat, but offered great views of the surrounding coasts and bays and farmland. It riises sharply from the middle of the city, rather like Arthur’s Seat, and is even made from the same geological processes, basically a volcanic plug that was left after lava hardened inside a volcano and then the mountain fell away on the outside, leaving the exposed lava rock. Like Devil’s Tower, only more urban. There are several ruins on top, an old stone chapel, some defense structures from the Napoleonic Wars, some prehistoric stone circles of unknown use, and a fence around what used to be a whale jawbone, removed for posterity’s sake, or something.
It worked us up an appetite, so we headed into town to have some fish and chips at an outdoor eatery, the we meandered around town until it was time to return to Edinburg. We stopped to look at an old church that had been abandoned for some time but that housed several old and creepifying graves. We took some time ourselves to poke dead jellyfish, beautiful little guys entirely clear except for four neon purple rings in their centers. We also marveled at the British version of mini-golf: a large green space with holes in strategic locations. Seriously, that was it. No windmills or waterfalls or creatively placed tunnels or even separate areas for each hole. Entirely unentertaining, if you ask me. Just a big open green space.
One thing I will say for the Scottish, it’s easy to get out of town. The cities may be big and modern, but a 20 minute train or bus ride will take you into the middle of nowhere for a nice day-long mini-vacation. There was nothing about North Berwick that suggested it was commuting distance from Edinburgh.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Today we said goodbye to Aberdeen and our mini-vacation and took the train home. The train ride back was quite peaceful, as train rides through Scottish countryside are apt to be. It’s nice that they seemed to have reserved pretty countryside and seaside land for farmers and trains, instead of jumping on teh development bandwagon and putting up expensive condos instead. It makes for nice scenary.
We played Uno on the way back, and because we didn’t have any paper to keep score, we used a postcard from Portugal and sent it off to friends Dan and Heather when we got back to Edinburgh.
We played Uno on the way back, and because we didn’t have any paper to keep score, we used a postcard from Portugal and sent it off to friends Dan and Heather when we got back to Edinburgh.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Aberdeen, the Freezing Beach Town
I’m telling you, free room service (the food included with the price of the room) is the way to go. Another breakfast in bed set me up for another nice. This time, though, my brain was at a nice, euphoric mode, because my speech was over and all I had left to do was hang out and listen to other talks. I love going first.
So many people ended up not showing for this conference that many sessions were cancelled. I went to one focusing on travel and stuff, which had some interesting pieces on the new trends of migration. Katie from Ohio but who went to school in St. Andrews and was getting a master’s in creative writing and who wrote a brilliant creative non-fiction piece (think travel writing, Bill Bryson or Pico Iyer-style) on female, American study abroad students in Europe and eating disorders. A later session focused on the media, and one talk did an interesting comparison of Charles Dickens’ works to the Simpsons as social and political commentaries. I do not necessarily agree with some of the woman’s points, especially because print and TV do not reach the same audience, and I do not think that Dickens’ works could ever reach those who cannot read, whereas the Simpsons is designed to do just that. But her idea was quite interesting, especially considering that Dickens published much of his work as serials in weekly papers.
Another piece compared ideas of masculinity in works by Toni Morrison and an anonymously published diary of a German woman in Berlin during WWII. The woman who presented it, a German woman, and a man from Ghana got into an interesting discussion about what it means for a German man to shoot his wife and then kill himself. The woman argued that it was an act of desperation because he wasn’t in control, and the guy countered by saying that killing his wife was an exercise in control because he could control nothing else. They got into what was, essentially, a cultural argument, though neither seemed to realize it. The point was that in southern black culture, such an act could be seen as a last grasp at control and a reach to reclaim masculinity, but in Germany culture this act is seen as a complete loss of masculinity, as a German “man” would never do such a thing. This was the essence of it that the two of them skirted around, unable to find the words to describe it. It was, for me, more of an exercise in cross-cultural communication and miscommunication than anything else.
Because we had such a limited time at the conference, I decided to skip out on the final wine reception and explore the city with Jonmikel, who took me on a mini-tour of some cool places he visited yesterday while I was at the conference. We went into an old cathedral that, like so many Catholic sites, was completely renovated by the reformists in the Church of Scotland however many hundreds of years ago. The result is that most of the stained glass and religious figures, etc. had to be recreated once people remembered how cool they had been before they were all destroyed. It’s now a simple parish of the Church of Scotland.
We also headed down to the shore because, after all, Aberdeen is a beach town. So we took a hike and ended up on rough seas, watching oil rigs roll in from a hard day’s work. We caught a few minutes of sunshine, hit up Footdee (pronounced “Fiddy”), a small fishing village turned summer home locale, and then the docks, where we marveled at the sheer size of the oil rigs and the relative openness of the area. In the US, random people would never be allowed to walk through such industrial and oil-important areas.
It was all fun and games until we got caught in the rain. The day had already been quite chilly, similar to the weather we had gotten all winter. So down to the upper 40s. Getting soaked at sundown in weather like that is probably one of the least fun things in the world, and yet there we were, 2 miles from home, dripping and freezing and not entirely sure how to get back. Looking back, it was quite the little adventure. We got back to our Inn and snuggled under the covers with some éclairs we picked up as a reward for feeling sorry for ourselves.
So many people ended up not showing for this conference that many sessions were cancelled. I went to one focusing on travel and stuff, which had some interesting pieces on the new trends of migration. Katie from Ohio but who went to school in St. Andrews and was getting a master’s in creative writing and who wrote a brilliant creative non-fiction piece (think travel writing, Bill Bryson or Pico Iyer-style) on female, American study abroad students in Europe and eating disorders. A later session focused on the media, and one talk did an interesting comparison of Charles Dickens’ works to the Simpsons as social and political commentaries. I do not necessarily agree with some of the woman’s points, especially because print and TV do not reach the same audience, and I do not think that Dickens’ works could ever reach those who cannot read, whereas the Simpsons is designed to do just that. But her idea was quite interesting, especially considering that Dickens published much of his work as serials in weekly papers.
Another piece compared ideas of masculinity in works by Toni Morrison and an anonymously published diary of a German woman in Berlin during WWII. The woman who presented it, a German woman, and a man from Ghana got into an interesting discussion about what it means for a German man to shoot his wife and then kill himself. The woman argued that it was an act of desperation because he wasn’t in control, and the guy countered by saying that killing his wife was an exercise in control because he could control nothing else. They got into what was, essentially, a cultural argument, though neither seemed to realize it. The point was that in southern black culture, such an act could be seen as a last grasp at control and a reach to reclaim masculinity, but in Germany culture this act is seen as a complete loss of masculinity, as a German “man” would never do such a thing. This was the essence of it that the two of them skirted around, unable to find the words to describe it. It was, for me, more of an exercise in cross-cultural communication and miscommunication than anything else.
Because we had such a limited time at the conference, I decided to skip out on the final wine reception and explore the city with Jonmikel, who took me on a mini-tour of some cool places he visited yesterday while I was at the conference. We went into an old cathedral that, like so many Catholic sites, was completely renovated by the reformists in the Church of Scotland however many hundreds of years ago. The result is that most of the stained glass and religious figures, etc. had to be recreated once people remembered how cool they had been before they were all destroyed. It’s now a simple parish of the Church of Scotland.
We also headed down to the shore because, after all, Aberdeen is a beach town. So we took a hike and ended up on rough seas, watching oil rigs roll in from a hard day’s work. We caught a few minutes of sunshine, hit up Footdee (pronounced “Fiddy”), a small fishing village turned summer home locale, and then the docks, where we marveled at the sheer size of the oil rigs and the relative openness of the area. In the US, random people would never be allowed to walk through such industrial and oil-important areas.
It was all fun and games until we got caught in the rain. The day had already been quite chilly, similar to the weather we had gotten all winter. So down to the upper 40s. Getting soaked at sundown in weather like that is probably one of the least fun things in the world, and yet there we were, 2 miles from home, dripping and freezing and not entirely sure how to get back. Looking back, it was quite the little adventure. We got back to our Inn and snuggled under the covers with some éclairs we picked up as a reward for feeling sorry for ourselves.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Conference Life
It can’t be a bad day when breakfast is delivered to your door and eaten in bed. Even if it is cornflakes.
The Inn does basic breakfasts for it’s guests and, because the pub doesn’t actually open until noon, delivers it to your room before you awake. It’s waiting at your door, for no extra charge.
It’s also worth a note that Aberdeen is a strict oil town, the powerhouse, as it were, of Scotland. This means that 1) the harbor is very industrial and 2) most of the workers are weekly imports. They come for the week, when cheap accommodation is almost impossible to find, to work on the rigs and return to their families on the weekend. At the Inn, you can hear the 5 am shift shuffle awake and leave, heading out to the docks.
So the day started with cornflakes, a croissant, a hot shower, and more rehearsing of my paper. Nothing makes me feel more academic and professional than an academic conference. My topic was the effectiveness of ecotourism in Egypt, and I could fit it all in if I read the paper straight. But seeing as I hate that, I didn’t.
And seeing as I didn’t, I went waaaaay over. It was my first conference, so I suppose I should give myself some credit. While I didn’t give the greatest performance of all time, my topic certainly attracted a great deal of interest, especially among the sea of papers on obscure existential topics and complex Dutch theories of education and proposed by some guy back in the 1960s as a reaction to communism. Whatever. At the evening reception, I was quite popular. Jonmikel (who got special permission to come along as my fiancé, making him a celebrity in his own right) and I found a nice table, thinking we would be alone, and found ourselves in the middle of conversation the whole night. The reception included wine and finger foods, so who can beat a free night out?
There was Katie, a postgrad at Aberdeen from Montana; she was so excited to meet other people from Montana who could confirm all her stories about bison in the front yard, elk-hunting from the porch, and tractors and wide open spaces that she called over everyone she ever met. She studied migration patterns, especially among Eastern European women. There was Lindsey from Ottawa who studied Gaelic language preservation and use in modern Scotland and Wales. Ivan, from the Ukraine, studied rural agricultural development; Boris from Russia who was studying oil engineering and worked on an oil rig and had only studied English for like a year and spoke it more or less fluently. Clancy from Kent State (though he wouldn’t admit it, it was too low class for him; he was one of those pretentious philosophers that usually abound at these kinds of things). James, originally from Crete (or something?) but was more or less British in his mannerisms and accent. A girl whose name escapes me from Sweden. Another woman originally from Jamaica who was a US citizen but had lived in Germany for nine years. They came and went all night, and all we had to was sit and relax. It was actually very cool, and made me feel good about my talk, even if it didn’t go as planned.
The night finished up with us meandering back to our Inn to enjoy a couple more drinks, this time in the company of the Aberdeen A Cappella Choir celebrating the 50th birthday of one of their members by drinking heartily and breaking into song until closing time.
The Inn does basic breakfasts for it’s guests and, because the pub doesn’t actually open until noon, delivers it to your room before you awake. It’s waiting at your door, for no extra charge.
It’s also worth a note that Aberdeen is a strict oil town, the powerhouse, as it were, of Scotland. This means that 1) the harbor is very industrial and 2) most of the workers are weekly imports. They come for the week, when cheap accommodation is almost impossible to find, to work on the rigs and return to their families on the weekend. At the Inn, you can hear the 5 am shift shuffle awake and leave, heading out to the docks.
So the day started with cornflakes, a croissant, a hot shower, and more rehearsing of my paper. Nothing makes me feel more academic and professional than an academic conference. My topic was the effectiveness of ecotourism in Egypt, and I could fit it all in if I read the paper straight. But seeing as I hate that, I didn’t.
And seeing as I didn’t, I went waaaaay over. It was my first conference, so I suppose I should give myself some credit. While I didn’t give the greatest performance of all time, my topic certainly attracted a great deal of interest, especially among the sea of papers on obscure existential topics and complex Dutch theories of education and proposed by some guy back in the 1960s as a reaction to communism. Whatever. At the evening reception, I was quite popular. Jonmikel (who got special permission to come along as my fiancé, making him a celebrity in his own right) and I found a nice table, thinking we would be alone, and found ourselves in the middle of conversation the whole night. The reception included wine and finger foods, so who can beat a free night out?
There was Katie, a postgrad at Aberdeen from Montana; she was so excited to meet other people from Montana who could confirm all her stories about bison in the front yard, elk-hunting from the porch, and tractors and wide open spaces that she called over everyone she ever met. She studied migration patterns, especially among Eastern European women. There was Lindsey from Ottawa who studied Gaelic language preservation and use in modern Scotland and Wales. Ivan, from the Ukraine, studied rural agricultural development; Boris from Russia who was studying oil engineering and worked on an oil rig and had only studied English for like a year and spoke it more or less fluently. Clancy from Kent State (though he wouldn’t admit it, it was too low class for him; he was one of those pretentious philosophers that usually abound at these kinds of things). James, originally from Crete (or something?) but was more or less British in his mannerisms and accent. A girl whose name escapes me from Sweden. Another woman originally from Jamaica who was a US citizen but had lived in Germany for nine years. They came and went all night, and all we had to was sit and relax. It was actually very cool, and made me feel good about my talk, even if it didn’t go as planned.
The night finished up with us meandering back to our Inn to enjoy a couple more drinks, this time in the company of the Aberdeen A Cappella Choir celebrating the 50th birthday of one of their members by drinking heartily and breaking into song until closing time.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Aberdeen; City of Oil Rigs
Note: the next few entries will be about my trip to Aberdeen for a conference from 10-13 of June... sorry for the delay!
Can you get any more traditional than a real life Inn? Nothing conjures up images of highwaymen clad in ruffles and velvet riding noble horses, bar wenches, and medieval debauchery than a duty wooden bar with rooms on top. And that’s just what we got in Aberdeen.
I had never stayed in an Inn before, and The Globe Inn in Aberdeen seems to be an excellent first experience. It IS an old, dusty, wooden bar, with creaky chairs and creaky floors and a creaky manager. The insides are covered with old relics of the real Jazz age – violins and trumpets and records and old-timey music advertisements. A cheerful mural caresses the beer garden out back, bringing out scenes from New Orleans and Nashville and Harlem. Old wooden stairs covered in atmospherically worn creep noiselessly up from a discreet corner of the bar, taking a select number of “residents” to the upper regions of the Inn, housing eight squeaky clean and quaintly faded rooms. A pub that happens to have rooms above, reminiscent of the days of horse travel and before the concept of reservations. It feels like you can walk in, order an ale and a hot meal and, dripping wet or weary with wandering, ask for a place to stay for the night. And stabling for your horse.
Well, today, it’s minus the stabling.
The pub was crowded with football revelers by the time we arrived, and buzzing with Pro-Croatia or Pro-Germany sentiment and the smell of ale and steak pies. Our room was right above the bar, with barely any pub noise passing through the thick Scottish walls. The accommodation itself was truly first rate, with tall windows, plush Victorian furnishings, shortbread biscuits to go with afternoon tea.
Throughout our 3-day trip to Aberdeen, Aberdeenians, all who had heard of the famed Globe Inn, seemed totally in the dark as to the fact that there were actually rooms for rent above it. A hidden gem.
The purpose of our sojourn was for a conference, so we took it easy in the afternoon while I read and rehearsed and shortened and rehearsed again the paper I would be giving tomorrow morning.
Can you get any more traditional than a real life Inn? Nothing conjures up images of highwaymen clad in ruffles and velvet riding noble horses, bar wenches, and medieval debauchery than a duty wooden bar with rooms on top. And that’s just what we got in Aberdeen.
I had never stayed in an Inn before, and The Globe Inn in Aberdeen seems to be an excellent first experience. It IS an old, dusty, wooden bar, with creaky chairs and creaky floors and a creaky manager. The insides are covered with old relics of the real Jazz age – violins and trumpets and records and old-timey music advertisements. A cheerful mural caresses the beer garden out back, bringing out scenes from New Orleans and Nashville and Harlem. Old wooden stairs covered in atmospherically worn creep noiselessly up from a discreet corner of the bar, taking a select number of “residents” to the upper regions of the Inn, housing eight squeaky clean and quaintly faded rooms. A pub that happens to have rooms above, reminiscent of the days of horse travel and before the concept of reservations. It feels like you can walk in, order an ale and a hot meal and, dripping wet or weary with wandering, ask for a place to stay for the night. And stabling for your horse.
Well, today, it’s minus the stabling.
The pub was crowded with football revelers by the time we arrived, and buzzing with Pro-Croatia or Pro-Germany sentiment and the smell of ale and steak pies. Our room was right above the bar, with barely any pub noise passing through the thick Scottish walls. The accommodation itself was truly first rate, with tall windows, plush Victorian furnishings, shortbread biscuits to go with afternoon tea.
Throughout our 3-day trip to Aberdeen, Aberdeenians, all who had heard of the famed Globe Inn, seemed totally in the dark as to the fact that there were actually rooms for rent above it. A hidden gem.
The purpose of our sojourn was for a conference, so we took it easy in the afternoon while I read and rehearsed and shortened and rehearsed again the paper I would be giving tomorrow morning.
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