birthday update

went to northumberland to alnwick (aln-ick) to the alnick gardens.
stumbled across a farmers market closing up and bought a homemade mince pie. not so good, but nice to know that from a proper example, rather than the boxed variety from the supermarket. then found the gardens. they have a poison garden, full of, yep, poisonous plants. tour guide was dressed as a witch.
proceeded to the world's largest treehouse. lovely. especially with caramel shortbread and colourful foliage.
ea called while i was waiting for my train. so good to hear from her.
had dinner with felicity at david bann. such good food. ordered a dacqueri (sp?) and made it through about ten sips. alcohol tastes like cough syrup.
bed soon.

candy store update

for those of you hoping that i'd found that store from those bruce coville novels when i said the candy store had disappeared, i have bad news. it has reappeared in the same spot, making it, if i recall correctly, highly unlikely to be that store. but it reappeared in all of its ten foot wide and thirty deep, stuffed literally to the ceiling with candy glory. i went to a. see if it was going to reappear and b. buy a sugar mouse, but ended up, as always, asking the lady at the counter what her favourite was, so i also have a slice of what they called something along the lines of fudge cake, which in true british fashion has nothing to do with cake. i'll let you know what the verdict is later.
side note: when they have it, the confectioners has excellent pain au choco.

eta: fudge cake pretty much like cake-flavoured really-thick fudge, but not as sweet as fudge. not fantastic, but a tasty addition to homework

improving

something profoundly unexpected and rather tragically gratifying happened today: i was not the most useless person in our group meeting. i was still useless, but i was glad to know i wasn't the only useless one, nor indeed the most useless one.
i am also feeling like i actually want to get work done and possess the will to accomplish this feat. fingers crossed that this sticks around at least through next monday.
thank you to everyone who's offered reassurances. they're very much appreciated.

homesickeness, sort of

i haven't been as homesick as i expected so far. i'm homesick for thanksgiving in alabama, and for family and friends, and for open spaces, but i haven't been as homesick for midd the place or dallas as i'd expected. what i'm most homesick for is a time when i wasn't constantly afraid.
i am afraid i'm going to fail and that in failing i will have wasted all this time, and all this money. that i will have misrepresented my school, my classmates, and even the other american students. that i will have disappointed my presentation groups. that i will have disappointed my family, my friends, my school, and myself.
i am afraid that i will always be as lonely as i am in my classes here.
i am afraid that if i can't handle this, i will never manage to write a thesis and thus never graduate.
i am afraid i'm drowning in a system where life preservers have been deliberately eliminated, the better to teach swimming.
i am afraid that i just don't give a damn about academics anymore, and of what that would mean.
i am afraid that by the time i'm so scared of failing i sit down and church out some sorry excuse for work, it will be too late.
i am afraid that i'll never learn to talk to people my own age with anything resembling the ease of talking to people older than my parents.
i am afraid that i'm wasting opportunities.
i am afraid that i've locked myself into a major i'll soon learn to hate.
i am so tired to being so terrified. i am so tired of putting off work for mind-numbing pursuits and cooking in order to put off feeling afraid for awhile. and i have no idea how to fix any of it.

sorry to publish such a negative post, but i'm hoping that maybe saying all of that will somehow help.

discovering my neighbourhood

there's this sixty-something grandmother who's getting her ba who sits next to me in british society. we talk before lecture sometimes, if virginia hasn't gotten to class early. today she was talking to the girl who sits behind her, about locally sourced food. which of course caught my attention and reminded me forcibly of robbie and other local food buyers at weyhaus. but in any case, the passing around of handouts gave me an opportunity to ask whowhatwhenwherewhyhow? she refered me (and the girl behind her) to www.earthy.co.uk.

i've been looking for another pumpkin all weekend. for whatever reason i've only found carvers. and green ones, which creep me out slightly. so anyway, after another ages-long monday, i decided i could do with a bit of a trek in search of local food. luckily, i had checked out vaguely where it was before i left for slavery, so i headed off down my street (called, sequentially from princes street where it starts to asfarasi'vebeen: north bridge, south bridge, nicolson, clerk street (pronounced clark because the brits are insane), south clerk, newington, and minto) i'd never been down past the first block of newington before tonight, but i have now wandered down past the commerical bit to minto, through various back streets, and god only knows where, really, as it now gets dark at five.

among my various discoveries in search of earthy was a patch of edinburgh which smelled, i swear to god, like barbeque. and lots of little antique stores, two of whom are having huge sales - one a refurbishment sale, the other a retirement sale. a tesco express. a gas station. what happens to the potterrow when it goes around that curve below the peartree inn. a really cute ceramics shop. that the confectioners shop i found while looking for something like earthy in the general neighborhood of earthy is apparently a vanishing confectioners shop (must investigate further). neighborhoods which reminded me of kessler canyon, that bit of route 23 out past weybridge, david's neighborhood in chaing mai, and williamsburg all at once. there were echoes of home there - i don't know how to emphasize which home i'm talking about (the almost fictional one that seems cobbled from a million places i've been and as many i haven't found yet) - and echoes of places i didn't expect and couldn't logically explain.

i found earthy about seven minutes before it was supposed to close, so i didn't look around too deeply, but:
i found big, happy broccoli
and Portobello mushrooms (no where else in this city. no where.)
and golden syrup, which i think is british for karo (also no where else in this city)
so i got some portobellos and onions (no sugar pumpkins, alas) and scooted out to explore some more another day.

on the way home i determined that i did not feel like cooking tonight. i started looking for nonamericanfastfood places to eat, but being a total cheapscape and generally disinclined to eat out, i made it pretty much all the way home before i noticed that the jordan valley whole foods market (literally across the street from my house) was still open and ducked in to grab something to go. right. well, the gentleman who owns it offered me some sage (it's basically tea. in fact it may be brewed sage. it's good, regardless) which i accepted. and i fell to listening to him talk to a polish girl he was checking out for a bit, and then we were joined by an english jewish man who also ended up staying for tea while we all discussed first american and then palestinian-israeli politics (the man who owns the shop is palestinian). that topic exhausted us rather quickly, so we were glad to transition to talking about how he got into the business. he owned the nile valley cafe-shop a couple of blocks away. he might still, i'm not sure. he definitely sold it a year after he bought it, but he may have bought it back. in any case, he used to have these dinners at the cafe-shop, where he'd get a bunch of people to book in advance, then serve several courses of delicious-looking (he showed us photos) goodness to the whole group, family-style. the dinners were more like parties, he explained, as he at least nominally knew everyone, but no one knew one another. if he ever owns a restaurant again that's the model he'd like to use. even if economically that's completely untenable as he generally charged about a third of what the dinner cost.

i think it took me half an hour to buy the falafel i came in for. oh! he makes gluten-free, vegan, flavoured falafel. he says they are unique and he's not exaggerating. he has plain, mushroom, spinach, and superberry ones that i know of. i made him tell me which was his favourite, and he said superberry - it has gogi berries and two other kinds of berries in - so i got one of those and a mahmoud to have for dinner. that was one kick-ass falafel. went perfectly with my bioactive plain yoghurt. he asked if i was coming back tomorrow. i said i didn't know about that, but that i'd definitely be back. and that was before the falafel...

in harry's footsteps

just to clarify before we begin, that would be 'potter', not 'of wales'

for those of you not living in the first-ever unesco city of literature, i shall only briefly attempt to explain how lit-centric this city is and tries to be:
1. we have a literary pub crawl which will take willing tourists around to the places where various literary works were written or set
2. our main railway station - at more than 25 acres in area the second largest in britain - is named not after its geographical location or a famous dead guy, but sir walter scott's waverley novels

so it should come as no surprise that everyone here knows where harry potter was written - various coffee shops technically, the elephant house functionally.
the elephant house is a coffeeshop-cum-cafe on george iv bridge (sidenote: george iv came to edinburgh on a visit orchestrated by sir walter scott, during which he appeared in a 'traditional' tartan kilt, so the scots decided to thank him for acknowledging their existence by naming approximately the whole bloody city after him) (further side note: bridges in edinburgh do not cross water. if you want to cross water you'd better head out to queensferry. bridges here cross roads and train stations). it's suprisingly spacious and is decorated as much as possible with: elephants (although the offshoot location, elephants and bagels, has most of the walls covered in laminated drawings of elephants by small school children, so it is technically more elephanty). the back room is high-ceilinged, long, and full of tables with mismatched wooden chairs. were it not for the large elephant posters and the rather pretentious poetry placards on the walls, it would be quite reminscent of the tea room in the view from saturday. regardless, the surprisingly large bank of windows overlooks a churchyard and boasts an excellent view of the castle. and, at least early in the morning before more than four other people are there, it is quite cozy. in short, it's quite a satisfactory place for harry's birth, and hardly a lick like starbucks, thank heavens.
forgot to take my camera, but i promise to return and provide photoage.

north berwick

friday i just needed to get out. i turned in my first paper on thursday and i knew i'd be spending most of saturday (yes, that would be today) writing a presenation (which i really ought to be doing now, that's correct), so decided i wouldn't run away too far. north berwick (pro: barrick, where the a is halfway between an a sound and an e sound) is right about where the north sea meets the firth of forth on the southern side of the forth. it's about 40 minutes away by train and is home to the scottish seabird centre. (seabird.org)

didn't end up catching the 9.40 train, due to a reading-the-boards issue (honestly no clue if i somehow transposed something in my head or if the boards actually directed me to the platform for the train arriving from north berwick rather than that directing me to it) so i spent about an hour hanging around in the train station alternately reading and watching it pour down rain while sunny. somehow this failed to properly impress upon me that schedules should be scrapped (something of which i'm usually quite cogent) but i managed to arrive in north berwick still thinking i was going to see the seabird centre, grab a quick lunch-on-the-run and get my butt back to edinburgh to do work. i even made it from the train station down onto main street before i gave in to my wandering ways.

north berwick is a charming town. or at least the town centre is. it's populated with cute little cafes, pubs, galleries, an antiques/antiquarian book shop, and a few of those ben franklin style stops, charity shops, and some big old churches. this is probably because there's a golf course of some international import nearby, so there are apparently a good number of wives who need distracting during the vast majority of the year when the beaches are just decorative. in any case, i ended up doing some christmas shopping in town en route to the seabird centre. and also having a conversation about american politics, scottish accents, glasgow, and high school musical three with two older folks (sixties i'd guess) at a lovely little candy shop. i also discovered a new kind of yummy candy: berwick cockerels. they're a lot like old fashioned peppermints (but not soft like some come), but much milder in flavour and not bitter. and unlike most things in the shop, they aren't overwhelmingly sugary. they quite make up for the fact that the shop (and the other candy shop on the main street) didn't have lemon drops.

the seabird centre is quite nice. lots of environmentalist propoganda, which made me happy. and about eight live cams projecting onto big screens. the cams are located on the little off-shore islands and are controlled by joysticks in front of each screen. most are nice. there aren't too many birds around this time of year. the isle of may, however, is Wonderful this time of year. why? because there are at present about twenty baby scottish grey seals lolling about on the beach. and with said cam you can zoom way up into their cute little faces. they are adorable. seriously. there's absolutely a reason they're called pups, also. they look an awful lot like puppies. and they're so cute and awkward.

ok, enough melting over cute babies. went grocery shopping in town looking for a place to eat lunch for not a fortune and found some spectacular leeks (which made me cry later last night, as they were so strong). also found the buttercup cafe. it's one of those places that looks so darling from the outside that it must have terrible food. (maybe this is a southern thing, but some places tend to skate on their cuteness and have seriously sub-par grub). i walked past and checked out the menu twice before the lady at the fishermans's wtv where i found my leeks told me that in fact it was as good as it was darling. so in i went, to admire the general scene through a bowl of cauliflower soup before an old lady (seventies, i'd guess) came in and shared my table (there are five packing into a space half the size of a battell dorm room so sharing's necessary). she didn't want to talk much at first, and we pretty much exhausted the weather before i got her talking about halloween.

apparently when she was young they used to go round to friends' houses and recite poetry or sing in exchange for an apple or an orange or a penny or two. and evidently some folks still give out money at halloween, which leads to problems. then she started telling me about bobbing for apples, and tying a paper bag full of nuts to the pulley which hung from the ceiling (for clothes) and basically playing pinata with it, but armed with a wooden spoon instead of a stick. and how they also used to hang a scone from the pulley and smear treacle on their cheeks and have two people try to be the first to get the scone to stick to them while someone else operated the pulley. and how at birthdays and christmas her mother used to bake the birthday kid/ everyone an apple dumpling with threpence and sixpence pieces hidden in it. also, after we'd strayed back to the weather, then environmentalism, then poverty, she told me that when i visit north berwick again, i should come on a thursday because her church (just across the street from the buttercup) has what's called the beacon, which is pretty much a community lunch, serving a bowl of homemade soup, a pack of sandwiches, and a cake with tea or coffee for about three pounds. there's a service after, but she assured me that not everyone goes. we ended up talking so long that i had to hustle to get back to the station for the next train.

New additions

Rather than write my essay due in less than 24 hours, I've decided to monkey around with the settings a bit. Thus to the right you will now find a photo and, below the archive, a slideshow of photos. Theoretically I will one day figure out how to make the slideshow go through all the albums, but for now, welcome to edinburgh will have to do.
I swear I'm going to go write now...

failure to engage

i'm here. i'm doing a good bit of the reading. i'm going through the motions of meeting with groups, attending classes, taking notes, preparing for presentations.
but i'm still half-assing it. somehow i've failed to really realized, to fully comprehend, that this is really happening and that it counts. where 'this' refers to academic pursuits. traveling and cooking/baking, those are real, those are present. but somehow the rest of it feels like a rehearsal, like a walk-through.
i think maybe this is because i'm still terrified of this place. the high-stakes nature of every grade, the different expectations for what should form part of an essay, the anonymous grading, the distance from professors, the utter lack of a safety net, it all scares me into inaction. i can't fix it so i don't try to even ameliorate the situation. i just refuse to engage.
and i have no idea how to make myself engage, how to manufacture excitement. i've tried psyching myself out about how much work i have to do. it's not hard, i do have mountains of work, but it just doesn't motivate me sufficiently. i've tried telling myself that if i get x done, then i can go travel/wander/cook, but i tend to end up either giving up on the pursuit of either or just going ahead and doing the fun bit without accomplishing the tough bit first.
this apathy is kudzu.

on a happier note, there is a whole rainbow presently stradling the sky.

day with sandy

right-o, this is just what i jotted down on the train in a fit of procrastination.

12 oct 08
spent last night at carbisdale castle. got up this morning and went for a bit of a walk. started off down the road after walking a small trail that put me out in the village of culrain. (the spanish couple with whom i shared the key trouble last night stopped me just outside the village to aski if i needed a lift back up to the castle and passed me again on their way out of town) anyway, walked a few miles and got it inot my head to walk to the next rail station. lots of cars passed me along the way (it's a single track road).
just past the farm with the rare poultry and free-range eggs, one of them stopped on his way back down. an older gentleman asked where i was going and said he's seen me on the way up. i said wherever the next stations was. he said he'd give me a lift. so i got in. as i started explaining that i ha ages to the train to while away, he mentioned there wasn't much to do in invershin (which was, as it turned out, one station up from culrain, rather than the other way round). anyway, he started telling me about these two stranded motorists from the states who he'd helped out over the summer, who'd just send him a parcel with a thank-you, two coffee mugs, a jacked, and a dog toy (they're vets who work part-time at the san francisco zoo, as it happens). anyway, he'd taken them to a garage and ordered a part for their car and then taken them around while they waited and he thought that was just the nicest thank you. and anyhow the story ended wiht him inviting me to come to his place for a spot of tea and breakfast and then go see the falls of shin, which he'd told me earlier i ought to have seen.
so we went to his caravan (mobile home thing) for cheese on toast and tea and then went to the falls, to the loch to check on his boat, and up to another set of falls after, where we mad a nice bit of a blether with a woman named lucy who lives just up the way on the way to laird and who's small son loves sandy's christmas decorations.
he loves fishing for salmon in the rivers and going for long walks with his dogs, his three grandkids, his son's dog skye (who was there and is adorable), and taking tourists, including esther, the swiss german primary school teacher voluteering up at the castle for six weeks to learn english better as they've just reversed the order in which swiss german students will learn english and french and with whom i shared the walk up to the castle last night, under his wing. i'm to send him a photo of me in the snow in vermont and something dallas-y. and to visit again.

more pictures

more pictures at picassa.
yesterday i totally blew off homework and cooked all evening. broccoli cheese cornbread and broccoli quiche, both baked in muffin cups and the latter of which frozen. today was apple tarts, presently freezing. can't find any karo syrup yet, so berry tarts are on hold. muffins and/or scones soon, though, as i have milk to use up. damn i am so gonna fail this semester entirely.
i swear i'll get round to writing up this weekend's adventures sometime soon.

stone of destiny, farmers market, plans

i'm a lazy bum, so this is basically the email i accidentally sent to loads of people earlier...

my friend felicity and i decided to go see the stone of destiny movie last night, because we're in scotland and in edinburgh, where the stone lives (when a monarch isn't sitting on it). and we decided to have dinner first, but as both the us and the australian exchange rates are pretty much rubbish, we opted to eat in. as the previous time we had dinner i made paneer-sultana stew and we ate here, felicity brought fresh strawberries and raspberries for dessert. this time we planned to have pizza at her flat, so i decided to bring desert, but pretty much the only sweet thing in my flat was a jar of nutella left over from when my brother was here. at first i thought about making some plain vanilla cupcakes, but cupcakes pretty much require a mixer. then i thought about fairy cakes, which are like cupcakes but, well, basically a bit tougher, having been made by hand, but fairy cakes need icing and i didn't have any powdered sugar and icing them with just straight up nutella didn't occur to me. so i decided to make crepe batter, as it makes a big batch and can be dessert for two, and then my breakfast and lunch. and i decided to try it with flax eggs, just because. and it worked!! totally made my day. anyway, the movie's quite cute. and it has a great colour palette (omg i can't spell). and it was happy and scottish.
this morning, got up, made crepes, threw on some clothes, and headed over to castle terrace to the farmers market for the first time since i've been here. it's lovely. everything's so neat and clean and professional looking. the two veggie stalls were rather haphazard, but most of the stalls sold cheese or meat or eggs or alcohol or hot food. speaking of which, there was a whole stand for porridge. as i'd already had breakfast i didn't try any, but next time i think i will have to. sidenote: it's the world porridge making championships this sunday. i tried to figure out how to go see them, but i wouldn't be able to get back here in time for classes on monday. back to the farmers market. being the total sucker that i am, i left with not only the broccoli i set out to buy, but also a roll, a 400g loaf of pumpkin bread (which here means actual yeasted bread, not a sweet quickbread), four cooking apples for apple tart, a jar of strawberry preserves, and a thing of soft highland cheese. most of which i justified by saying that a. it would last for awhile and b. that damn it i keep wanting to make apple and treacle tarts and it's not like there are cooking apples at the supermarket.
but also c. i can use it for this weekend! because in about two hours i will be on a train bound for the middle of f-ing nowhere in the highlands where i will be spending the night in a castle which was donated to a hostel association to turn into a youth hostel. i'm pretty much thrilled by the prospect of this. and the good news is that if i spend a bazillion hours on a train to get up there, i will have to read for school whilst on the train. so shortly i will have to leave off and go figure out how to fit three meals, two cameras, a change of socks and undies, an extra lens, and warm things (apparently the highlands - i'll be at around 58 degrees north, well within the north sea - are cold. who knew?) into my little school backpack. always an adventure in itself.

edinburgh wandering

i got fed up with not having climbed either of the monuments in the city (long story short, i have a thing about climbing buildings. possibly i will post a list to this effect), so i made plans today to go climb the scott monument right after class, come hell or high water. to that end, i packed my camera and a water bottle and north and south in my bag along with paper and pen (the original plan also involved the elephant house, but that bit got postponed). in my usual fashion, i took a map but didn't use it and headed off on a rather circuitous path towards the monument. the monument is maybe 15 blocks from appleton tower, where i have class. my route, however, ended up circumnavigating castle rock. or basically i went at least three times farther than necessary to get there. it was great. i've discovered a little row of second hand and antiquarian bookshops, the location of the art college, a bakery called the pastor's patisserie, and the lyceum.
there are three major theatres in edinburgh: the playhouse (went to see seven brides for seven brothers there when the fam was here), the festival (literally next door to my flat), and the lyceum. the original plan had been to not find this last one, as the festival provided temptation enough. but i stumbled upon the lyceum in the course of my wanderings today and discovered that that scottish play is up until sunday. wandered in to ask about tickets. as i plan to be out of town saturday night and felicity and i are supposedly going to see the stone of destiny (a movie about the kidnapping of the stone of scone aka the stone of destiny, which is part of the scottish honours and was at the time being held hostage by the english in westminster cathedral under the coronation throne) on friday, i asked about tonight. and there was a seat in the centre section of the front row of the dress circle (the balcony) still available for nine quid. so i'm going to go see that scottish play tonight. i'm rather excited. i've never seen nor read that scottish play and seeing it here for the first time seems appropriate.
oh, i also took loads of pictures of the city which i will get around to posting sometime soon to orient people to the city.

disturbing trend

i am turning into a housewife.
ok, this was already starting last year, but i swear it's getting worse. i had so much rather look up yummy things to bake and cook; or sit around listening to something whilst i do my mending; or even clean the kitchen or do laundry, than actually do my homework. and as i do my reading for british history about women in the early-modern period making their clothes and gleaning after harvest and keeping poultry, those things sound so much better than poring over massive tomes on the history of things.
much of this, i assume - and hope - is just the grass is always greener on the other side syndrome. but even still, i keep polishing away at my castle in the clouds of living on a farm with a big cobbled-together post-modern family, a couple of goats, some chickens, and an orchard. and i keep appending things from places i've been or things i've read to various versions of the dream. the most recent variation is that one or more of the cabins around the edges of the big house could function as a bed-and-breakfast and i could make muffins for guests to my heart's content.
so two questions: what on earth is wrong with me?
and does anyone want to live on a small rambly farm just outside a middleburyish-sized town with me?

Pictures!!!

I finally located my Picasa account, so now I can start uploading any pictures I take on the digital. I think - think - the address is http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marykatherine.mcelroy
Let me know if that doesn't work, bitte.

checklist

i've noticed this doesn't update it's publishing date when i edit it, so i'm just going to have to republish it from time to time

things i've done, places i've been, foods i've tried

eaten vegetarian haggis
visited edinburgh castle
seen stone of scone/destiny
visited culzean castle
visited loch ness and urquhart castle
visited glamis castle
seen hairy cows in real herds
attended and participated in a caleigh
climbed arthur's seat
took ghost tour of edinburgh
visited the museum of scotland
visited stirling castle
climbed wallace monument
took jacobite steam train
went to isle of skye
climbed scott monument
stayed in that castle hostel up north (carbisdale)
visited the scottish sea bird centre

to do, see, try

eat a scotch egg (if vegetarian option exists)
visit orkney islands
visit that triangular castle down south
visit museum of childhood
attend christmas market in princes street
climb nelson monument
visit national gallery
tour hollyrood palace
climb salisbury craigs
pull off scotch accent
learn to caleigh and/or scottish country dance
see a puffin live and up close
visit dynamic earth
visit the world's largest tree house
take decent photos of hairy cows up close
see folk music in concert
see glasvegas (the ofthemoment band in scotland) in concert
attend a wicked-sweet samhain festival
go to excellent bonfire day bonfire

to do, see, try at a later date
visit fort william in summer
wander through glencoe
stay in glenfinnan sleeping car and take good photos of viaduct
visit portree on skye

checklist

i've noticed this doesn't update it's publishing date when i edit it, so i'm just going to have to republish it from time to time

things i've done, places i've been, foods i've tried

eaten vegetarian haggis
visited edinburgh castle
seen stone of scone/destiny
visited culzean castle
visited loch ness and urquhart castle
visited glamis castle
seen hairy cows in real herds
attended and participated in a caleigh
climbed arthur's seat
took ghost tour of edinburgh
visited the museum of scotland
visited stirling castle
climbed wallace monument
took jacobite steam train
went to isle of skye
climbed scott monument

to do, see, try

eat a scotch egg (if vegetarian option exists)
stay in that castle hostel up north (carbisdale)
visit orkney islands
visit that triangular castle down south
visit museum of childhood
attend christmas market in princes street
climb nelson monument
visit national gallery
tour hollyrood palace
climb salisbury craigs
pull off scotch accent
learn to caleigh and/or scottish country dance
see a puffin live and up close
visit dynamic earth
visit the world's largest tree house
take decent photos of hairy cows up close
visit fort william in summer
wander through glencoe
stay in glenfinnan sleeping car and take good photos of viaduct
visit portree on skye
see folk music in concert
see glasvegas (the ofthemoment band in scotland) in concert
attend a wicked-sweet saltain festival
go to excellent bonfire day bonfire

highland adventure the second - hogwarts express

(inverness and loch ness were the first. one day i'll theoretically get around to posting about that)

firstly, alison, i went to piemakers. i got the spinach and cheese and the apple. the spinach and cheese was thoroughly and disappointingly average, but the apple was very good. next time i will have to try the currant-apple one.

right, spent six+ hours on twoandahalf (hang on) trains getting me and my massively heavy backpack (i took both cameras and my barrel lens) to fort william. was a good child and read "many thousands gone" (school book) for the vast majority of this trip, as it was too dark to see out the windows for most of it.

the 18.21 glasgow to oban-mallaig is more than one train. it's four cars which start out together, then it splits in crainlarich and the front two cars run away to the west to oban. the back two wait a couple more minutes and then head off north to fort william and mallaig. so, so confusing if you don't know this, as the whole four cars say they're headed to oban until you get to crainlarich. cheers to conductors who put up with those clueless tourists who get on and panic slightly after pulling out of the station.

anyway, by the time the back two cars make it to fort william, it's about ten o'clock at night and on thursdays at least this means the station is closing as quickly as ever it can get the passengers out the door. which means that my usual tactic of asking someone around the station for directions didn't so much of the work. so i spent a very pleasant if quite chilly half hour wandering quite lost around fort william until i despaired of finding someone on the street to ask who wasn't drunk or headed in that direction and gave up and called the hostel. the directions i received (from an aussie) were quite roundabout, but i did finally make it. if anyone's ever travelling around scotland, the macbackpackers hostel alliance is superb. love them and stay with them. right, got to the hostel, found my bed in the "scottish legends and heroes" room, titled "skiatch the warrior woman," brushed teeth, and went to sleep.

got up yesterday morning, ate my muffins (i packed very nearly all my food with me from edinburgh) and listened to a saffer (south african, for those not familiar with weird scotch denominations for common tourist varieties) and a guy from some germanic country talk about driving sharks and then the same saffer and two indonesian students of a german uni talk about professional diving in nigeria and surfing in bali and headed out to wander around town some more. i really like fort william. i'm now quite desirous of returning in warmer weather to properly enjoy the outdoor capital of britain. who's game?

oh, wandered up and down high street as things opened, looking for someplace to purchase a belt, as i'd forgotten one. consequently was a little late wandering down the footpath near the station which eventually leads to the world cup grounds (didn't make it that far), consequently got to see lots of pretty sunshine on the loch, consequently was only just on time for the jacobite. but the point is, i made it.

the jacobite steam train, for those of you not attune to all things harry potter, was the hogwarts express in one or possibly several of the films. whilst i did not actually ride on a day when the hogwarts express engine was working, i did spend some time wandering through the middle two cabins, which are from the hogwarts express. must say, cabin-style is definitely the way to go, train-travel wise.

the scenery is spectacular. the mountains are all carved up from the glacial retreat and the heather's in its pretty fall colours of red and yellow. and so many lovely views of the sea and of lochs. it reminded me a bit of austria, especially fort william, but also the lochs we passed heading north.

mallaig, the end of the line, is tiny. teeny tiny. it's a fishing village, complete with a fleet of heavily-rigged little boads and a pipeline for conveying the fish from the boats to the ice house. what's odd is that it's on the windward side of things. apparently people used to have more sense and lived in lee, but around the 1700s they moved predominantly to the present village.

caught the ferry over to armadale on skye. (not the other ferry which goes to the small islands; we'll come back to this) there were loads of dogs on the ferry. it was quite nice to get to pet them. and petting two of them got me introduced to a lovely older couple and their friend and these two older brothers. i ended up walking up to the castle with the dogs, the two older people, and their friend. turns out they were in the area staying with the friend, who had decided they needed to go on a outing, so they bought ferry tickets, and only realized after they'd bought them that they were going to skye. anyway, we walked up to the clan donald centre and armadale castle grounds (the castle's a relatively recent ruin) and i lost them at the castle when i got out the cameras.

the grounds are quite nice s'long as the weather holds, which it did for the first two hours or so that i was there. then it started to get cold, which as it turns out makes folks (read: me) rather less keen on taking long nature trails, so i stuck to the slightly sketchy back paths through the wooded bits towards the entrance and then wandered back towards the ferry depot looking into the various shops and artisans studios. there's a nature trail just up the hill from the ferry landing which looks like what would happen if you crossed the organic garden with weybridge and the tam. didn't get to take it - it's not well-advertised, so i didn't find it until just a bit before the ferry was due to depart, but it was very friendly and i've added it to my (staggeringly long) list of things to do when i make it back to the north west coast.

on the way back to the ferry i fell in with the two older brothers and we ended up sitting together and talking about edinburgh back to the mainland. they told me a great story about the medical school here. apparently these two guys back a couple of hundred years or so ago were hired by the (world class) medical school to obtain cadavers for the school. they started out by getting bodies from the hospital, but the school needed more. so then they started exhuming fresh bodies from the cemetaries, but the school needed more. so they started killing prostitutes and homeless people and the like until they were caught and executed. apparently a law was passed after that allowing the families of the deceased to sell bodies to the med school.

got back and "wandered" about two really short blocks until i found the hostel, where i met two lovely swiss-german kindergarten teachers who've been spending their fall break in scotland. they head back to glasgow and then to just outside bern today. the hostel (sheena's backpackers and tea room) is very cosy and homey and i got a bit more reading done before calling it a very early night.

doodaded around the hostel the next morning until time to catch the train and then tried to do more homework on the way home, but spent probably more time just enjoying the view.

next weekend i'm off to carbisdale castle, which is now a youth hostel in the middle of nowhere in the eastern highlands north of inverness. have to go on saturday, as the train signallers will be striking this week.

i think that's it for now

plans for the week-end

ok, lest i be accused of having galavanted off into the countryside alone without having notified people of my whereabouts, here's the plan for the week-end:

take the 17.15 train from edinburgh to fort william tonight.
spend the night at the fort william backpackers hostel.
tomorrow, take the 10.30ish jacobite steam train to mallaig.
catch the 13.30ish ferry to armadale.
visit the museum of the isles, the armadale castle grounds, and the village of armadale.
catch the last ferry back.
stay at the sheena's backpackers hostel in mallaig.
at some point saturday, take the train back to edinburgh.

i will have my phone will me, but have no idea if it will work where i'm going. feel free to phone me, however, should you like to chat.

hope everyone has a lovely week-end!

culture shock

just when things seemed to be getting better, i decide to be responsible and check up on my ryanair reservation from edinburgh to frankfurt as i didn't recieve a confirmation email. oh god. there is no email customer service. there is no freephone for customer service. and as far as i can tell it's not possible to actually connect to an agent from the phone tree menu. so i have no confirmation number, no point of contact for customer service, and no way to log in without a confirmation number. as ruddy terrible as the airlines back home are, they're starting to look well organized and accessible.

real foods and john lewis update

i have been looking for flaxmeal basically since i first got here. i checked in the co-op (not under any circumstances to be at all confused with the us sense of that word) and at tesco. i took about a half second's glance around lidl and farm foods before deciding they definitely didn't have any. i asked at tesco, and just got a highly humourous but decidely unhelpful blank look. i asked at the outdoors store between princes and rose streets. i asked at the cheesemonger in victoria street, where i was told to take a 10, 11, 15, or 17 bus north a good ways and then wander around and i should find some health food stores. i asked at the secondhand bookstore in victoria street and the shopkeeper pulled out a yellow pages to help me look up health food stores. an american vegan tourist and his french vegan girlfriend overheard my dilemma and produced a 26-page print-out of the cruelty free guide to edinburgh, which they decided to give me as they were leaving the next day. according to both the yellow pages and the cruelty free guide, there should be three to four health food stores in nicolson/clerk/south clerk street, which is where i live. so i went on a quest down the street. i found one health-food store which reminded me stongly of eatzies minus the bread counter, the produce section, and the big middle counter (for those of you not from dallas, think shmancy packaged prepared food and really expensive olives). none of the other three stores appeared. and one of them seems to be listed on a nonexistant block, according to the yellow pages and the weird white/yellow pages phone book i have. so having walked probably a mile down this street, past the end of the south clerk section, literally off all standard city maps, i turned around and went into a place more reminiscent of eatzies where i was told to go to real foods.

real foods is of course not in my part of town. there're two locations in edinburgh. one is in marchmont, the non-first-year student part of town accross the meadows from school, to which i've not yet ventured. the other was up in broughton street, close to the playhouse and john lewis.
oh right: john lewis. i discovered today that they also do custom flooring.
in any case, i headed up to the broughton street one, as it's open later and therefore (in my logic) must be larger. it's tiny, in case anyone wondered. but i walked through the door and suddenly this place became so much more like home. it's the moral equivalent of the co-op at midd. lots of funny grains, psuedo-bulk spices, weird supplements, hand-made soaps. they have things like granola and cornmeal and tofu which no one else in the city has heard of. and flaxmeal. granted, none of these things seem to have a whole lot to do with what we'd think of as granola and flaxmeal and cornmeal, but they're close enough.
and to make things even better, they're in a part of town that feels more relaxed. i mean, there're people all over the place, but the streets aren't quite so crowded and the buildings not quite so tall. i passed a couple of pretty churches i'll have to go visit, and broughton street definitely merits proper discovery, but for now i'm just happy to have found a piece of home here.