St Andrews & Glasgow

January 7, 2013:
We stopped for breakfast in Edinburgh at the Patisserie Valerie, a cafe done up in the most kitsch French-style (see the Bridal Shower scene from Bridesmaids) and they served porridge with maple-flavoured syrup. Insulting both my cultures in the same figurative breath!

We took the bus to St Andrews, Talaira's mum's favourite place in the whole world. We visited the Old Course (which claims to be the birthplace of golf), picking up a souvenir for my dad who had just had knee surgery that day, before stepping out onto the beach in the pouring rain.

For once, I was clever enough to bring my umbrella! Our handy Scottish guidebook recommended seeing the castle and cathedral ruins. We couldn't be bothered to pay for them, so we just looked at them over the fence and loitered in their gift shops. We also saw bits of the University which Will and Kate both attended (it's where they met and fell in love). Apparently, it's the oldest Uni in Scotland. To get out of the rain, we spent the remainder of our time in St Andrews at an awesome indie restaurant called Victoria's Cafe.

The decorations were amazing and they even had board games! Our server, Callum, is originally from Edinburgh, but he had the strangest mix of accents I've ever heard. He was the only person we met on entire trip that was actually from Edinburgh. We had fajitas and a cocktail called the Southern Strawberry Jammer or something to that effect and it actually had strawberry jam in it. This was place was totally hipster. The drinks were even served in jam jars. Mmmm.

Back at the hostel in Edinburgh, we met Linda (another Australian) who was casually cross-stitching. We bonded over sudoku, terrible music playing on a loop for hours and how our dorm room smelled like boys. It was such a lovely casual evening.

January 8, 2013:
It was happy days when we arrived in Glasgow the following morning to meet our friend Lauren. Lauren had come to our university two years before this on an exchange and loves Canada (almost as much as Einar, I reckon). She toured us around to see the Necropolis, the Glasgow Cathedral, St Mungo's Museum of Religious Life & Art (which turned out to be an incredibly interesting museum, which was also free) and to see the smallest door in Scotland. The original house was built in 1472, so apparently people were much shorter in those days.

While she was showing us George Square, we were approached by a TV crew and asked to do an interview for their website about changes happening to the square. It was quite funny as we hadn't even had a proper look around at that point, and they were asking us to give an opinion on what we thought of the changes. We made it online here!

We also got to see some Glaswegian icons such as the Nelson Mandella statue with its signature pylon...

... and we visited the Gallery of Modern Art where they had handprints of André Breton and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (all you litterature buffs understand why I find this exciting) and lots of abstract and multi-media art. The only thing about Glasgow is that it's almost impossible to understand the accent. Lauren could moderate hers a bit and some of the other people we'd met who had also spent time in Canada, but there was an incident where we'd gone into a shoe store and one of the retail workers asked us if he could help in any way, but we had no idea what he was saying to us. Talaira and I made it through dinner on our own, though, stopping at a cool place called BLOC+. As good as it was, I was aware that I was really starting to miss French food. Everything was starting to seem really heavy and I was looking forward to getting back to Lyon.

We went out for the night with our other post-exchange friends, Taylor and Nicola, stopping briefly at Lauren's work to play some arcade games. We even won some prizes for being awesome at Deal or No Deal! Taylor's accent was true Glaswegian. He was telling us about a burger joint that sells 2 for 1 burgers for students, but they have more "exotic" types of burger meat, such as "whaled" boar. We were perplexed. Was it a whale or was it a boar? Eventually we realized that he had been saying "wild". Poor guy didn't hear the end of it! We started at a bar called Sleazey's where we met Lauren's friends Alan and John (it was John's birthday) and finished at the first proper night club we'd been to all month, called "Garage" (which you can imagine is pronounced completely differently than Canadian English). When we walked in, they were playing Elvis music upstairs. The reason I know I am now completely obsessed with "rock" music is that I couldn't suppress my excitement and was genuinely disappointed when we went downstairs instead.

Our first impression came courtesy of a very drunk young man groping Talaira's leg. We were then accosted by the sight of another very drunk young man in a kilt trying to pick up girls in the middle of the dancefloor. It was an excellent time in spite of the house music, and we had chosen excellent party-going companions because everyone was a stellar dancer. Happily for me, they played one unbelievably amazing rock song, but I didn't have a chance to write down any of the lyrics. It will remain legendary.

January 9, 2013:
We slept in until forever o'clock. Just intime to catch a gorgeous sunset over the river, it seemed.

The armadillo music hall and the crane (in the photo above) are Glaswegian landmarks. Glasgow is kind of grungy, but I think that's what makes it Glasgow, and it was honestly one of my favourite places on the entire trip. We somehow lucked out with amazing weather for our whole time there.

For dinner at Frankie & Bennie's, I was brave and had fish and chips....

....and it was delicious.

We spent the evening bowling at Lauren's work. I am a terrible bowler, but it was hard to believe myself after I pulled of random spare after random strike to finish with a 106. We played 7 rounds.

 The scores were as follows:
Game 1: 106-72 (Tessa-Talaira)
Game 2: 85-75
Game 3: 54-62
Game 4: 57-98
Game 5: 78-106
Game 6: 56-91
Game 7: 78-89

I was certainly more convinced by the end of the night. I was also convinced, however, that Talaira practices on weekends for just this sort of occasion. It was a last night well spent in Scotland. We watched The Day After Tomorrow with Lauren and then tucked in to get some rest before our flight to Paris!

The Grand Scottish Misadventure

Otherwise known as the "nek minute" trip. See below:

This beauty of a video was introduced to us by Liz and Tim (our famous Australian friends). In case you have trouble understanding his "bogan" New Zealand accent, he is saying that he left his scooter outside the dairy (which I assume is like a convenience store). Feel free to watch this as many times as you want. And if you're ever feeling sad, you can come back and watch it again!

January 3, 2013:
On our train to Inverness we were forced to change train cars. We had been so excited to get a whole table to ourselves, but apparently the heating stopped working and the lights had half gone out. We had arranged for late check-in at the hostel and when we got there, the guy at reception gave us our key and then went to bed. We crept into our room, where the lights were already out and there were many people sleeping. As far as we could tell,  none of the beds were free.

One looked like it might not be occupied and it had a blanket and we managed to find another that didn't have a blanket, but that was definitely not being used. Talaira said that I could take the bed with a blanket and I was getting ready for bed when a guy came in and sat down on it. I awkwardly took my coat off of the bed and looked for something else. Over Talaira's bunk was a bed that was apparently free, but that someone had put all of their stuff on. There was no blanket or pillow. We glanced around trying to see if we could figure out who had taken our blankets, but it was dark and even though everyone should have been woken up by our various shufflings and conversations, everyone was pretending to be asleep.

Talaira didn't realize I didn't have a blanket, and I had already given her my towel to help keep her warm so I slept with no pillow, wearing my only sweater and covering my legs with my coat. Talaira wore her coat and slept under two towels. The heater hadn't been on all night either. It was easily the worst sleep of the trip. It was even worse than the time I had to sleep under the escalators on my way to Barcelona and all those times my pillows were stolen in our hostels on that trip in general.

January 4, 2013:
In turn, Talaira and I went down to reception as soon as we thought it had opened. Each of us asked if there were extra blankets. Talaira, who went first, was refused. I didn't realize she'd gone down already, and thankfully the man at reception felt worse for us the second time. As everyone else was getting up and going out for the day, we finally got to go to sleep. The man offered us a free night at the hostel, which we unfortunately didn't need.

We ate a self-indulgent lunch of mac & cheese, garlic bread, salad and a rocky road dessert with tea to make us feel better about our misfortunes and caught the bus to Loch Ness in order to catch our cruise of the lake at 4pm. The views from the bus were gorgeous and we caught glimpses of the lake, but when we got to the shop where we were supposed to meet for our tour, it was under construction. The man there was perplexed that we had a tour booked. He called in another woman who arrived at 3:30pm to tell us that their boat had broken down and in fact they had emailed all bookings on December 3 to cancel. We hadn't booked our tour until mid-December. At that point, all the other tours had done their last trip for the day and even the exhibition centre was closed for the day. I learned the hard way to always call in advance. To add insult to injury we had to wait two hours in the growing darkness for the next bus and we didn't even have a proper view of the lake while the sun set. Even the restaurants had closed. Our only option to pass the time was to make friends with the convenience store owner. Of course he knew someone who now lives in Toronto.

Back in Inverness, we bought some groceries. The hostel smelled like antisceptic and crackers. There was Big Bang Theory on in the common room so we watched an episode before bed. Surprisingly, Inverness is a noisy city at night time.

January 5, 2013:
At 5am, we left the hostel and made it to our bus just in time. Naturally, the bus broke down. They sent another one and we made it to the airport. Checking in was a catastrophe. I forgot the bottle of Argan Oil that Talaira had given me for Christmas was 110mL and there was a big hullabaloo about it. One of the men from security also felt the need to remove all of my liquids from the bag I have been using since I left Canada (apparently because it was too big) and to repack them into a different bag. We arrived in Stornoway on Isle of Lewis without further problem (except that our breakfast sandwiches from the airport were disgusting), but we couldn't understand a word our taxi driver said once we got there. He got so exasperated as we got out of the cab that he shouted "Take care!" at us.

We almost expected things to go wrong at this point. The bus station didn't open until 10am. It was 8am. We walked around the city for an hour (and saw the whole city), but thankfully there was a bus leaving for the Callanish Standing Stones at 9am. The viewing centre was closed. Reminiscent of Oxford, there was a handwritten sign on the door saying that the centre didn't reopen until January 8th. Talaira had checked the website to ensure it would be open. This was the only reason we had come to Isle of Lewis. I was all for going to see the stones anyway, because really, they're stones. How hard could it be to get to them or at least to get to see them? Talaira insisted this was trespassing and refused to go.

We stood near the bus station and started to worry about the bus schedules. There was one that was expected to come in ten minutes. The following one came four hours later. We cursed the bus driver for leaving two girls, obviously tourists, in the middle of nowhere if he had known the Stones wouldn't be open. We also hoped desperately that the bus we had just gotten off of hadn't just been really early. So, it was happily that we boarded the next bus back to Stornoway and we even caught a glimpse of the stones as we drove past.

When we got back to the city, we realized that in order to get to Isle of Skye (our next destination) by evening, we had to catch a ferry at 11:50am. The next bus leaving to get there left at 12:30pm. As we had to be to Skye by that evening, we opted to call a taxi. Our driver, "Muff" (we couldn't really make out his handwriting), promised to do his best to get us there. Thank goodness he was the most pleasant man in the world. He loved talking and he drove us as quickly as he could. My stomach is not the greatest when it comes to motion sickness, so we didn't get there a minute too soon. In fact, we got there two minutes too late. You know those classic movie scenes where the lover/best friend/random person arrives just as the ferry is pulling away? That pretty much sums it up. We went into the ferry station to see what the deal was. It was 11:48am. The woman told us in a matter-of-fact, you-should-have-known-better voice that the ferry boards 10 minutes before the printed departure. It didn't say this on any of the brochures and we had called and emailed multiple times before coming to the Isles to find out if we could book tickets in advance. We had no idea what the schedule for the ferries because the schedules online are completely incomprehensible. We were outraged because it wasn't even like we had pizza hut or broke any of our superstitious rules... we just have incredibly bad luck. This, we hoped, was our rock bottom.

We decided that we had paid for a £65 scenic tour of the Isle of Harris and Muff gave us a free trip back. We stopped for lunch and things were looking up when they started playing the Black Keys over the radio. We decided we actually felt kind of free. We had been following the plan now for 22 days and now we had no concrete plans. We cancelled all the things between Isle of Skye and Glasgow and opted to go back to Inverness for the night to see if we could cash in on the free stay we'd been offered before returning to Edinburgh (because we loved it so much).

We took the ferry and the bus (which were dangerous, stomach-wise) and "checked in" to the hostel. All the rooms were full, but they offered us the use of the common room and some blankets! We had dinner at a Chinese buffet next to the Ness River, realized how beautiful Inverness and secretly wished we had just stayed and tried to go back to Loch Ness or stayed in Inverness for the day. It's all water under the bridge... we met a Canadian, two "Kiwis" (New Zealanders), a South African and a Swede; had a lovely chat; watched Role Models and fell asleep for one of the best sleeps of the trip.

January 6, 2013:
We were dead, however, on the train in the morning. In our brief momens of wakefulness, we caught glimpses of the beautiful Cairngorm National Park and the Cairngorm mountains.

We checked into the Royal Mile Hostel in Edinburgh. Our room was called "The Fridge" and I got sleep in the bed called "Guinness". We showered, grateful to be lazy for a while, but the showers were quite high up and I got the idea in my head that it would be smart to jump out of the shower over my things and onto the floor. Except, it wasn't my feet that landed on the floor. It was my tailbone. Talaira was there to see it and it was quite funny a part from my bruised ego (and my bruised backside). We decided we had nothing left to lose and went to Pizza Hut for an amazing goat's cheese and pepper pizza. We watched The Hobbit, briefly met our roommates and went to bed. Thankfully, the "nek minute" saga had finished. Somehow, I don't think I will ever have a trip free of "What fresh hell?!" and "nek minute" moments, but that remains to be seen.

Edinburgh

January 1, 2013:
Our train left late in the evening from King's Cross Station in London, and as fate would have it, our train was leaving from platform 9 and 3/4.

On the train, we were lucky enough to get a full table to ourselves and the most delicious ham and cheese sandwich I've ever had in my life. Talaira read Life of Pi and I started a non-fiction called Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women. I haven't finished it yet, but it is about the Mujeres Libres who were an essential part of the revolution in Spain before World War II. I suppose it depends on what interests you, but it was such a compelling book. I was even inspired to write poetry...

When we arrived in Edinburgh, we checked into the Cowgate Tourist Hostel. It was the weirdest hostel I'd ever been to. The reception was in one apartment building and then further down the street there were other apartment buildings that served as the different floors of the hostel. Each floor had about a million doors, only some of which opened. The kitchen was the only common area. We were up four flights of stairs (with no elevator) which had broken glass scattered here and there. Of course wi-fi was only available in reception.

We walked around Edinburgh for a few hours in the dark with a free map and I was in love by the time my head hit my pillow.

January 2, 2013:
We had breakfast at The City Cafe and asked the perplexed waitress if the maple syrup was real maple syrup or just maple-flavoured syrup. It's no fun being a snob, but when it comes to maple syrup, I no longer take chances (especially not following the Amsterdam French Toast incident).

We spent the morning at the National Gallery looking at the Impressionist paintings especially. We also saw the Three Graces sculpture and Reverend Robert Walker (1755 - 1808) Skating on Duddingston Loch, which are supposed to be quite famous. The latter is by a famous Scottish painter called Henry Raeburn.

We climbed up the Royal Mile to Edinburgh Castle, in time for the One O'Clock Guns. We saw the Crown Jewels and the Stone of Destiny (unfortunately you're not allowed to take pictures of them). The Stone of Destiny glittered. After seeing the film about the time it was stolen from Westminster Abbey, cleverly titled Stone of Destiny, I thought it would just be a really plain block of stone, but it's actually a really beautiful (and massive) boulder.

We ducked into the Prisoners of War exhibit and took turns locking each other into the prisons before we stopped for lunch at the Red Coat Cafe. I took a children's portion and it was more than enough. Before heading back down to the Royal Mile, we just admired the views. We'd been really lucky to get amazingly clear skies and not-too-cold weather.

We spent the afternoon strolling along the Royal Mile, stopping in at the High Kirk of St Giles Cathedral (Kirk means church in Gaelic Scottish, which seems redundant to me to then add Cathedral, but what do I know about the church?). I skimmed through a book there about the Martin family and its clan. My mum's maiden name is Martin and my maternal grandfather's family comes from Scotland originally, even though they lived in Canada for generations before I was born. Apparently, the name Martin is linked to Mars, the Roman God of War.

We finished out the daylight hours with a glimpse of the Greyfriar's Bobby statue and Grayfriar's Kirk. Greyfriar's Bobby is the story of a police officer's dog; they never spent a day apart and when the police officer died an untimely death, the dog spent the remainder of his days sitting on his master's grave. The legend is that the ghost of the dog still haunts the graveyard...

One of the only places we felt the need to pilgrimmage to was the Elephant House cafe where Joanne Rowling spent some of her time writing the first few Harry Potter books. We settled in to write our postcards (feeling kind of suave and bohemian as we did so). Rowling obviously loved this place and we could immediately see why. It should be famous in its own right. Talaira, who adores elephants, was overwhelmed by the number of elephant statuettes in the restaurant. She wanted them all (which is not at all surprising). We ordered vegetarian nachos as a starter.

They were the best nachos I have ever had in my life. Our server was Canadian... a teacher candidate like me... who was unable to find work (surprise, surprise) and had been living in Edinburgh for about a year. I ordered After Eight Hot Chocolate and Talaira ordered Fleur's Fantasy Hot Chocolate (wonder if they were inspired by Harry Potter or the other way around!). These were also unbelievably tasty. For our main courses, I ordered a portobello mushroom burger with aioli and Talaira had the vegetarian lasagna.  This is possibly the best meal I've ever had in my life. I couldn't even fathom it's goodness and I wanted it to last forever. Even after we'd left, I kept replaying the flavours in my head over and over again. Thinking about it now, as I write this makes me want to jump on a plane and go there again. Which is what we did for lunch the very next day. The night was still young, however, so we stopped at the Edinburgh Filmhouse (home of the Edinburgh Film Festival) to watch Midnight's Children, a film by a female Indian-Canadian director, Deepa Mehta.

It was exquisite. When we got back to the hostel, we met this older Russian woman who, it turned out, had been the guilty party regarding the colonisation of the bathroom with random objects and who had taken over what seemed like two-thirds of the floor space in our hostel room. She lost her keys and asked us if we'd seen them and then basically put us in a situation where we had to wait until she'd found her keys (in her coat pocket) before we could go to sleep.... you meet some interesting people in hostels.

January 3, 2013:
Our next forray at the Elephant House for brunch included a baked potato with vegetarian chili, carrot cake and cheesecake. Mmmmm.

We stopped at the Holyrood Palace next, which is the Queen's official residence when she is in Scotland. It was really strange to see the rooms where she actually sits down to eat when she has official guests, etc. We also got to see the room of Mary Queen of Scots and several other royal apartments. The best part was the ruins of the Abbey, which are said to have inspired Mendelssohn.

We had an opportunity to see the interior of the Scottish Parliament buildings, but couldn't be bothered due to the need to go through a security check. Instead we explored the area around George Street and Charlotte Square, which unfortunately reminded us of how little spending money we both had. Most of the streets were surrounded by expensive shopping streets and we were afraid to be tempted. The Georgian-style buildings there were reminiscent of the buildings in Bath and were quite beautiful, but it was definitely not the student-friendly area of town.

 

For dinner, we went to Nando's which I originally discovered in Australia. It's a Portuguese/Mozambique-inspired restaurant. Talaira had a delicious bean wrap. I had corn on the cob, a quarter chicken and Pink Elephant wine. It was so strange to be asked for ID again after having spent so long in France. I think what I loved most about Nando's was the African artwork that covered the walls. Fully satisfied by our dinner, we went back to our room, packed our bags and got some rest before our next adventure.



NYE in London

December 31, 2012:
For our second stint in London, I decided to wear my poncho. A man in the London Eye couldn't get over it. I don't know where he was from, but he was North American and he and his wife had hired a tour guide to show them around London. I don't know if he thought I couldn't speak English or if he didn't realize how loud and obnoxious he was, but his wife commented on the rain and he chimed in:
"Well, you could always wear a poncho. That lady is." I think the constant rain must have been getting to me, but all I could think was, "Thank you, sir, for pointing that out! Nobody could tell that this giant blue bag I am wearing is a poncho to protect me from the constant rain in this country." People that talk about other people, in any language, annoy me as a general rule, but I was definitely crankier than usual and I was way more annoyed by this than I should have been.

We went to the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland, which I can see would have been really entertaining and beautiful if it had been snowing instead of raining. We were hunting for souvenirs for Talaira's friends, so we were disciplined enough to go down all of the alleyways until we finally gave up and went to Harrod's. I read "Confessions of a Shopaholic" when I was younger and remembered that the protagonist often went shopping at Harrod's, so I thought it was maybe a reasonably priced department store. Oops! I didn't realize it was a department store of every high-end brand ever. I  felt like I was getting daggers in the back of my head until I took my poncho off near the elevators. We went to a few different floors just to have a quick look and then gave up. We made the mistake of asking the man helping at the door where Primark was. He looked bewildered. Obviously it wouldn't be anywhere near such a fine establishment as Harrod's. Our morale was worn down, so we gave up and called it a day.

When we got back to Mortlake, we stopped for groceries and decided it was time to replace my boots. I told the girl in sales that my only criteria was that they were waterproof. She assured me that they were and I bought a pair (on sale) which still had quite the hefty pricetag. We dedicated the rest of our evening to getting ready for NYE. We met Flo at the Abbey Pub in Kentish Town, London.

After a great night involving misunderstandings with Cockney-accented men, great music, dancing on chairs and great friends.

Unfortunately, we were in for another adventure before we could peacefully fall asleep in the New Year. When we arrived at Waterloo underground station, there was an emergency evacuation. We were sent out into the pouring rain, unsure where exactly we were going, following directions from the police. We didn't know what to do, because the train we needed to get to Mortlake left from Waterloo station. We walked for about a half hour, through a really creepy tunnel that reeked of urine, avoiding an angry young white man shouting about racist oppression, and avoiding men in general (especially those who couldn't fathom that young girls, walking along in heels, would be made to feel uncomfortable at 3am by drunk men asking them how they're doing and then touching their arm to get attention since they've been blatantly ignored), just to end up back at the other side of the same station.

We crammed onto the train cars, sandwiched between people. Two men thought this would be a good time to get into an argument making everyone in the train car uneasy. Slowly, stop after stop, the train cars cleared out, but there was one other incident similar to the one described above, that put everyone on edge: a young woman was harrassed by a man who was clearly drunk. Another woman stood up for her by asking the man to leave her alone because he was making her uncomfortable. He could not handle this. His outrage at being found creepy was such that he and this other woman got into an argument about what kind of behaviour is acceptable and about how feeling uncomfortable is an unwarranted reaction because his intentions were not malicious. He was escorted off the train by another man who may or may not have been a police officer from another country. This, sadly, was not the end of it. The creepy man's friends, or worse, other random men who had been in the vicinity, defended the man's actions saying that because he hadn't intended harm, the woman had no right to feel uncomfortable. They didn't find this to be a sexist way of thinking. Telling women how they should or shouldn't feel about a situation is sexist. It's called "mansplaining".

Also, this:

"There’s a poisonous double standard in our society which says that it’s reverse-sexist and wrong for women to feel threatened by creepy-awkward male behaviour because our fear implies that we hold the negative, stereotypical view that All Men Are Predators, but that if we’re raped or sexually assaulted by any man with whom we’ve had prior social interaction – and particularly if he’s expressed some sexual or romantic interest in us during that time – it’s reasonable for observers to ask what precautions we took to prevent the assault from happening, or to suggest that we maybe led the guy on by not stating our feelings plainly. The result is a situation where women are punished if we reject, avoid or identify creepy men, and then told it’s our fault if we’re assaulted by someone we plainly ought to have rejected, avoided, identified." - http://ialreadysaidno.tumblr.com/ 

This delightful portion of our evening ended with those same mansplaining imbeciles trying to high five all of the girls they met on their way out of the train station saying "Happy New Year" as a way to make them feel better about how slimy and sexist they really are. Barf. Happy New Year! Looks like 2013 is going to be as great as the 1950s!

No, but really, apart from these few incidents, it was a good night. We made it home at 4:30am. ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz