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.