On Holiday in Scotland – Glasgow

[Again, this is being posted months after the trip–a good portion of it was written while still in Scotland, some upon our return, but Blogger somehow ate several hours of writing, so a lot of this is being reconstructed from memory. Also, procrastination (see earlier blog entry).]

Glasgow street in state of dilapidation

Now we've moved on to Glasgow, to our decidedly more urban flat. At first, when we got here, we had a bit of culture shock; this was not our beloved medieval, picturesque, refined Edinburgh. It is squalid, weedy, trash-strewn, run-down, marred by graffiti and disrepair. The River Clyde, grey and muddy, gives off a distinct odor of sewage in places. The city is riddled with dirt-mounded construction sites and large cranes in preparation for hosting next year's 20th Commonwealth Games. But our very obliging landlord, Mr. Macdonald (yes, really, there are people here named after that fast-food chain), took us on a wee tour of the city when we arrived (Am I overdoing the word "wee"? Possibly, but I think not. It's used whenever the slightest hint of smallness creeps into conversation), before depositing us at our comfortable flat on the south side of Glasgow Green, a large swath of park to the southwest of the center of town. Slowly, as the week has progressed,  we have become more aware of the city's beauties.

Our first move, however, was to hike a mile and a half to the local Tesco (a kind of British A&P or Kroger or Piggly Wiggly–pick whichever American supermarket chain you find to be most ubiquitous) to buy provisions for dinner and the following day. The kids discovered nearly an entire aisle of biscuits (cookies to us Yanks) and, when I told them sternly that we could absolutely not get one package of every variety, agonized for nearly twenty minutes over what kinds to buy. The boys' favorite has turned out to be Jaffa Cakes, a spongey cookie with marmalade inside and a dark chocolate coating on top. My daughter, the sweets fanatic, likes the plain tea biscuits best (they are plain wafers with very little sugar), much to my surprise. Both types of biscuit go very well with Scottish tea. The boys have rationed the Jaffa Cakes–no more than three a day per person, which means a packet lasts two and a half days instead of one. Of such small sacrifices is life compounded.

Immediately following the Tesco excursion, the kids discovered a fantastic playground on the Green, with 20-foot tall slides and amazing climbers, and proved that 15 is still a kid–the boys played just as avidly as my 10-year-old daughter. Also, watching my children scale those vertiginous heights with only a thin layer of sand on top of packed earth below, I theorized that the Scottish are a far less litigious society than the Americans.

The Barras

Kids at a candy stall in the Barras

Our first full day in Glasgow we wandered over to the Barras, a sort of year-round weekend flea market that has been taking place since the 1920s in open stalls and covered malls. "Barra" is the Glaswegian dialect for  "barrow," as goods were originally sold from large wheelbarrows. There were piles of discarded electronics, used clothing, designer handbag knock-offs, kilts, T-shirts, used DVDs and CDs, food of all kinds, and used furniture. The children gravitated toward a stall selling candy. My daughter had a great find–she managed to fish a lovely sterling silver Celtic-knotwork ring out of a bowl of rings (it looked like a serving of metallic spaghetti) and paid only £5 for it.

Later that day I resolved we should have tea at the Willow Tea Room, mentioned in the guidebook as a lovely representation of Glaswegian architect and designer  Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Art Nouveau style. Well, off we set on foot. I figured an afternoon tea would serve us in place of a late lunch. The Tearoom didn't look that far away on the map, but the streets of Glasgow do not meet at right angles, no matter what our charming landlord asserted: "It's the first European city constructed on a grid pattern, ye know." Also, to make things more interesting, the playful city planners leave off street signs at more confusing intersections. After walking for forty-five minutes, turning, turning again, retracing our steps, and staring at the map in frustration, the kids revolted. They sat down on a curb and refused to go another step. "We're hungry!" they moaned. "Our feet hurt! Let's just eat anywhere!" There was a McDonald's close by (no relation to our charming and inaccurate landlord), and I shuddered.

"Come on!" I encouraged. "It can't be more than three blocks from here!" I turned the map again and frowned. "Unless we're here, and then we're eleven blocks away. Or..." I turned the map again and blinked. "Never mind!" I chirped. "We're close!" The children glared at me mutinously. My son delivered the ultimatum: "We'll walk ten more minutes and that's all. Then we have to eat." "Fine, fine!" I hastily agreed. "Ten minutes, then food, no matter what."

Afternoon tea in the Willow Tea Room

After a few more false turns, I started to get desperate. As the minutes ticked away, I finally got up the courage to approach one of the natives. "Um, we're trying to find Sauchiehall Street...." (Trying frantically to figure out how to pronounce it, vacillating between "Soshy-hall Street" and "Sowchee-hall Street," I eventually settled on the latter) "Whaire. loove?" asked the perplexed Glaswegian. "Here!" I said, thrusting the guidebook into his hands and pointing at the word. "Ah!" His face lit up with comprehension, "So-key-hall Street! It's just over thaire!" He gestured, and the murderous looks on the kids' faces softened a little. In the end, it did take us a few more than ten minutes to get there, but we made it. And we had a wonderful afternoon tea there, each of us with our own little pot: Earl Grey for my daugher, Darjeeling for my son, Scottish Breakfast for my son's friend, and the shop's own Willow Tea Blend for me. My son and I ordered the full afternoon tea set, so ours came on a three-tiered platter with crustless sandwiches on the bottom, scones with clotted cream in the middle, and cake on top. Sitting on elegant ladder-back chairs that echoed the designs on the walls, sipping scalding tea and eating those scones dripping with strawberry preserves and clotted cream, we gazed around at the lovely light fixtures and decorations in the Glasgow Style. Bliss, Scottish-style! Also, the triumph of pigheaded determination over whining.

People's Palace

My favorite attraction in Glasgow turned out to the be the People's Palace, which was located on the Green, only ten minutes from our flat. In addition to the over-the-top fountain crowned by a statue of Queen Victoria outside, it featured room after room of recreations of moments in time in the working class and bourgeois history of Glasgow from the 18th century until about the 1970's. There was the Single End, a model of a single-room family apartment from the 1930's, where an entire family ate, slept, and lived. There was the Steamie, a public building where women would go to bathe and to wash clothes and gossip. And there was a World War II family bomb shelter, where the family would go during the air raids. I stood rapt in front of exhibits on contraception, the temperance movement, and dancehalls, only to look up at the end and find the children camped out on the staircase, moaning, "Can we go now?" The plaintive cry of the modern 21st-century child with the 140-character attention span.

View from ferry of unknown castle on banks of Loch Lomond

Two days before we were scheduled to fly home, we took a day trip to Loch Lomond, the largest loch in Scotland, but the day was chilly, overcast, and rainy. By the time we caught the ferry out to the island of Inchmurrin, which featured an inn and some Roman ruins, we barely had time for a soggy lunch of fish and chips before we had to get back on the ferry and return to the mainland. We never discovered the ruins, which even the tour guides assured us were "not mach ta see–bit disappointin', reeelly." Do Scottish tour guides even have to pass any sort of test on how to get tourists excited about local landmarks? Or maybe that's just as effusive as Scots get.

Children frolicking in secret garden

The children's moods were as dour as the weather when I suggested we take the footpath alongside the loch to see Balloch Castle, a manor house rebuilt in the early 19th century from the ruins of a 1238 castle. "Do we have to?" was the glum response to my chirpy suggestion. I quickly moved into Fierce Authoritarian Mode: "Yes, you do. Come on." We started off in a grudging, foot-dragging manner, but the mood transformed when, half-way to the castle, we found a walled garden. The kids frolicked (yes, they did, I assert defensively; they also gamboled and frisked. And rolled around on the grass) and then settled onto stone benches to read the books they had bought at Waterstones (sort of a British Barnes & Noble, but much, much better) the day before. It was exceedingly picturesque.

GeekMom in front of Balloch Castle

Nearly an hour later, we proceeded on toward the castle. We never found the ruins of the original castle, which I later read consist only of a grassy mound. Finally, we reached a large meadow studded with boulders in that picturesque Scottish way (I can just picture the Scottish Tourist Board inspectors walking about with clipboards, calling out to each other, "We cuid do with another wee boulder heere, Fergus."), and the disappointingly boxy, austere castle was in sight. My son, who had been looking green for the past half hour or so, suddenly flopped down onto the ground, moaning in agony from stomach pains, caused, no doubt, by the very greasy fish and chips we had had for lunch. We waited under the uncertain sky (kept threatening rain that never came) for him to recover, then walked up to the castle for a closer inspection. It was closed, and dismal up close, where evidence of modernization lay all around: exit signs, tourist pamphlets, vending machines. There was, however, a convenient public toilet, so my son recovered and we headed back to town.

Teens in playground

The day concluded with all three children playing in the local playground, another marvel of Scottish whimsy and total disregard for children's life and limb. then dinner at a pub, where we savored our last real Scottish meal, shepherd's pie for me, followed by sticky toffee pudding. The latter is a sweet, gooey slab of heaven studded with dates and drowning in caramel sauce, which looks like something that has been coughed up by a cow with an unsettled stomach. Never has something that looks so unappetizing tasted so good. And here is where I will end my travelogue of Scotland, with the memory of that warm, achingly sweet confection lingering in my mouth. I feel two weeks was not enough time to see even the tiniest portion of Scotland, but there is the dream that we will go back some day, to traverse the Highlands, to set foot on the Isle of Skye, and to explore the northern reaches of Loch Lomond. "O ye'll tak' the high road and Ah'll tak' the low/ And Ah'll be in Scotlan' afore ye...."

Sticky toffee pudding

On Holiday in Scotland – Edinburgh

[This should have been posted a long time ago, but I've been fretting and worrying at it, so we've now been back from Scotland two full months and more, and not much progress has occurred. So much for my resolve to start posting punctually once a week....]

My romance with Scotland goes back to age 11. Ever since I read Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped in 5th grade, I have wanted to go to Scotland. That Alan Breck! With his annoying attitude of superiority, his bravado, his braggadocio, his fierce pride in being a Highlander, his reckless courage in the face of danger, his deep loyalty to his young friend David Balfour that overcomes even their difference in politics (he's a Jacobite, who supports the claims of the House of Stewart to the throne of Scotland, while David's a Whig who's loyal to King George). I could imagine no one more exciting as a companion for an adventure. And the landscape! All those crags, and promontories, and heaths, and bogs, and barren islands! That landscape was as much a character in the book as all the eccentric figures who put in an appearance. Finally, the Scots dialect! Who couldn't love: "'David,' [Alan] cried, 'David, are ye daft? I cannae draw upon ye, David. It's fair murder.'" Och, it's fair poetry!

Later, I read Sir Walter Scott, and saw Local Hero, and, much later, learned how to do Scottish Country Dancing in New York City. While learning the intricacies of the pas-de-basque or the petronella figure, I would listen to all those Scottish dialects coming out of those Scottish expatriate mouths, and yearn for the Motherland, even though it wasn't my motherland.

So I and the kids and my son's friend are now on holiday in Scotland. It's a dream come true for  me, a long cherished desire. For the first week, we rented a cottage in the Lothians, near the village of West Linton; now we're finishing up in a flat in Glasgow, on the edge of Glasgow Green. Neither of these is the Highlands, but they will certainly do. The cottage was on the property of a larger house, called Slipperfield Cottage, owned by the warm and congenial Kilpatricks, and had its own private woods and loch (I haven't yet figured out how large a body of water has to be to be considered a loch, but this one is the size of a middling pond), and is surrounded by farmland on all sides.

Rock wall near West Linton

Scottish cattle near Slipperfield Cottage

Now, I grew up in the Midwest, so I know farmland. But this farmland is to the farmland of my childhood what Stir- ling Castle is to an East Central Illinois split-level brick ranch house. It is wild. It is craggy and steep. It is framed by heather, and thistle, and wind-blasted trees. There are tumbledown rock walls, and rusted barbed wire, and shaggy cattle placidly chewing the cud. Grey clouds pile up at the top of a hillside, then come boiling down the side, bringing torrential downpours of rain that just as suddenly stop. Sheep fan out on intensely green, impossibly steep hillsides. Craggy men, to match the craggy landscape, stride by in thigh-high olive green wellies, taking their wee dog for a walk (and if you think the word "wee" is cutesy, you haven't heard it coming out of the mouth of red-faced, square-jawed, yellow-toothed Scottish farmer with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth).

Since we arrived during the last week of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,  and I hadn't planned ahead, there were no rental cars available with automatic transmission. In the U.K., it's sort of a mark of ineptitude if you can't drive a standard transmission, so I had to explain over and over, at each subsequent rental counter, with mounting embarrassment, that, as a pathetic American driver, I actually needed a car with automatic transmission. Finally, I found one, but the rental price was nearly one and a half times the rental for my cottage. I gave up, and we decided to throw ourselves on the mercy of public transportation. As it was, this was perfect: we got a tranquil hour-long bus ride into Edinburgh and back each day, with the magnificent scenery unfolding around us, and I was spared the white knuckle experience of driving on steep, impossibly narrow roads at impossibly high speeds, on the left-hand side of the road. All for less than £20 a day.

Singers advertising a musical

My daughter and street magician

The Fringe Festival was so much fun: the streets packed with crowds of people from all over, street performers and musicians on every corner. Street vendors were hawking their wares, caricature artists were drawing people's likenesses, barkers were handing out flyers for shows later that night. The catalog of shows was nearly an inch thick. We tried to figure out how to get tickets at the half-price booth, but the process was so difficult, and you had to know exactly what you wanted to see, so we eventually gave up and picked up a booklet advertising free shows. We eventually managed to find a couple of free comedy shows that were rated PG (by far the most common rating was 18+, as the raunch and profanity factors were high in these shows). My son and his friend were a little dubious: if the shows were free, how could they be good? And if they were PG, how could they not be other than childish?

Chris Turner

Well, the boys were wrong. The two shows we picked at random were both excellent. One was a comic play by an ensemble cast from London performed in the basement of a Mexican restaurant (every possible open space is commandeered as a performance space during the Festival); the other was a set of three English stand-up comedians performing in a tiny room above a bar. We the audience were seated with our knees up against the backs of the people in front of us, the people in the front row nearly toe-to-toe with the comedians. The piece de resistance at the end was a freestyle rap performed by one of the comedians, Chris Turner, who incorporated five random words from the audience into his rap: in our case, Viking, handbag, harpist, jellybean, and utilitarianism. I can't figure out how he managed to think so fast on his feet, find all the rhymes, make sense, make clever jokes, and stay on the beat. In one portion, he used the word "slag" (offensive British slang term for a woman of easy virtue) to rhyme with handbag, all the while apologizing (in rhyme) for his use of the offensive word.

Kids touching the nose of Greyfriars Bobby

In addition to the Fringe, we took in many of the more touristy sights of Edinburgh, including Edinburgh Castle, the Botanical Gardens, Greyfriars Kirk (and the nearby Greyfriars Bobby Pub, with its bronze statue of Greyfriars Bobby outside, the wee faithful terrier that sat patiently on his dead master's grave for fourteen years until dying himself in 1872. That seems a suspiciously long life for a Skye Terrier, but what do I know? The statue is cute, its nose is rubbed shiny by all the tourists, and we had to queue up just to get a chance to take a picture, after a young couple from England, a large tour group of Japanese, and the extended family of some South Americans.

Distorted room at Camera Obscura

We also went into the Camera Obscura, a museum built in 1853 with a real camera obscura on the fifth floor, the pinhole apparatus being attached to the roof with a swivel, and reflecting its picture of the city onto a white wooden bowl in the middle of the room, which we all croweded around while our Swedish (yeah, it's a summer job) guide explained what we were seeing. Unfortunately, the day was overcast, so the picture was dim, but I still got a sense of what those mid-19th-century people must have felt seeing their city in miniature, flags waving, tiny tourists walking across even tinier cobblestones. Downstairs, there were rooms full of holograms, optical illusions, and mirrored mazes. There was a room that looked like a normal room from one central position, but, once you entered it, it was clear that it was terribly distorted. My son and I stood in two corners of the room (see above, and know that my son is taller than I am), and the effect to the onlooker was surreal–we look like we're built to different scales. But both the floor and ceiling are tilted, and those windows along the back wall are not square at all.

Then there was the bridge across the "Spinning Vortex" (spinning tubular walls with lights), which, though absolutely stationary, felt as if it were tilting drunkenly to the side. We staggered across the bridge, clinging to the railing, feeling as if we were in imminent danger of falling, though nothing was moving at all. If you closed your eyes, the sensation of falling vanished instantly. My daughter and son and his friend went across multiple times, laughing with glee; after a second time across, I felt faintly ill, and watched from the sidelines after that. Amazing how suggestible the human brain is.

Old Town Bookshop in Edinburgh

On our last full day in Edinburgh, I insisted that we visit a bookshop specializing in rare and antique books, with a special emphasis on Scottish authors and Scottish history. I found a whole shelf of leather-bound Scott novels printed on tissue-thin paper, and had a choice of a three- or a five-volume set of the collected poems of Robert Burns. I had no idea the man was so prolific. I settled on the three-volume set. While I love Burns, there is a limit to how much I Burns I can take in one sitting.

So now this blog entry has stretched ridiculously long and ridiculously late, so I am cutting it off here and making the Glasgow part of the trip a separate entry. In Burns's famous words, "The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley." Cheers! (Scottish all-purpose word that seems to mean hello, thanks, and good-bye, depending on the situation)