"And I'll be in Scotland before ye..."


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March 31st 2012
Published: March 31st 2012
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Thursday morning, an hour after we left the hostel, we made our first stop at a particularly scenic point in the mountains of the western Scottish Highlands, overlooking a range called "the seven sisters" or something like that.

And I realized I had left my camera in the hostel.

No one who knows me will be surprised by this; its the kind of thing I do all the time. The short version of this story is that my camera and I were eventually reunited in Edinburgh on Sunday around 8pm.

In the meantime, the rest of my pictures had to be taken via Apple product.



Which is why they look a bit like watercolor paintings. And I looked like a massive tool. I told the other people on the tour that they were free to pretend they didn't know me, but mostly they just laughed. Which was fine.

I should mention that the above picture isn't the seven sisters, it's a later stop. No pictures of the seven sisters, as I was busy sitting on the bus frantically and fruitlessly rooting through my dirty laundry. Oh well.

The views at this one were incredible though. Somewhat ironically, this is the majority of what we did on Thursday: stop in pretty places and take pictures. And the weather was amazing.



A view of Ben Nevis: the tallest mountain in all of Britain. Apparently a dangerous one too. An impressive number of tourists die up here each year. Mostly because they decide on a hot day to climb up in shorts and flip flops, then get to the top in the high-speed winds, twist an ankle and die of hypothermia before they can come back down.

Moral of the story: wear hiking gear when you hike.



I don't get this obsession with putting famous important people on pillars. (See my entry on London, in Trafalgar square). Do we do this in the States too? Why? We can't see him, or his face. They SAY the guy was a Jacobite leader, but it could be anyone up there and who would know? Maybe the sculptor put a statue of himself up there, for a laugh. I'm pretty sure that's what I would do.

I also love the above picture, because it doesn't even look like a photograph. It looks like I'm lying to you all about visiting any of these places, when really I just went and robbed an art gallery.

(There's an app for that...)



The Harry Potter bridge! Fans of the movies will know it instantly. People who can't stand the movies because they disembowel I mean wreak havoc with I mean commit character assassination on I mean deviate somewhat from the books, may still be geeky enough to recognize that this bridge was used in several movies to show the Hogwarts Express on the way to school.

I condescended to took a picture of it because I believe that the real book Hogwarts Express could have come through here as well. Also, pretty.



FYI, not that I was ever great at it, but I've completely lost my touch at skipping rocks. Sad. And a bit pathetic. My record was 3, on this glassy surface with perfectly good stones. Shame.



And this is Oban, the town where we spent our fourth and last night. Quite a cute little town, touristy like all the other places we've stayed. Beautiful views of the sea. Except, although Oban is on the coast, there are so many islands that you actually can't get a view of the open ocean. Just these landmasses overlapping each other, which is beautiful in its own right. Especially when the sun sets.



And of course there's a castle.

The hostel we stayed in was just as great as the others have been. Better, actually, because they have a GIGANTIC Jenga game in the lounge. Seriously, the blocks were about a foot long and the setup was five to a layer instead of three. Before the game even began, the tower was about a yard/meter* tall.

*I know they aren't exactly the same, but for the purposes of estimating from memory, they're close enough.

I lost the first game, if any of you are wondering. The jenga tower fell on me. And by fell on me, I mean it was actually taller than I am (it was on a table) by the end of the game and literally collapsed on top of me. Typical.

Our last day in the Highlands, we made a slow trip from Oban to Edinburgh, stopping at a few important places on the way. They included the first capital of Scotland (and by first, I mean ages ago when people were still pagan and burying their important people in cairns, and carving images of boars into rocks). There were some runic carvings and a carved out footprint, for some kind of ceremony for annointing the king. After this, we went to a castle that was only five hundred years old. I mean only. Geez.

It's funny because I'm starting to judge something's age based on whether or not my ancestors were still living in England at the time.

Anyway.



There is a very famous song about this lake, and I'm so glad we stopped here. Even though this picture looks like it belongs in a calendar of rustic New England paintings.


You'll take the high road




and I'll take the low road




and I'll be in Scotland before ye




for me and my true love will never meet again




On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond




I say "famous" but actually no one on the tour had heard this song before, except the guide obviously. The other Scottish guy might have, but he was asleep by this point. I like this song because it's haunting and beautiful, written from the point of view of a Jacobite man who is about to be executed in England, talking to his brother or best friend who's allowed to go home. The "high road" is literally a road into Scotland, and the "low road" is the path his spirit will take when he dies, immediately returning to his homeland so he will beat his comrades there. I had heard this ages ago (except the Jacobite part), and the guide confirmed it.




Except apparently nowadays they sing it at weddings. What? On a morbidity scale of 1-10, I give that about an 8? 9 if most people actually remember what the song is about and sing it anyway.





The William Wallace monument. I didn't care to spend £6 just to see a gigantic sword and climb up a spiral staircase, so I sat outside with a few other people from the tour and enjoyed the view of Stirling and the countryside. We were back in the Low-Lands by this point, but it was still pretty. And nice to relax on something that wasn't a bus.

So there you have it. MacBackpackers. Amazing experience and I'm so glad I did it.

So by this point, I had pretty much covered most of the staples of Scottish culture.

√ Bagpipes

√ A ceilidh

√ The major sights of Edinburgh

√ The birthplace of golf (sorry for my ignorance, dad; the last time I played golf on a course that didn't have a little plastic windmill was...never)

√ Local beer

√ People speaking in thick accents laughing because I couldn't understand them

√ Loch Ness

√ Castles

√ Jacobite history

√ Shortbread

√ Whiskey

√ Ben Nevis

√ Veggie haggis

√ Loch Lomond

√ William Wallace

Aside from Glasgow and the highland games, there was pretty much only one staple of Scottish culture I hadn't yet sampled:



This, for those of you who don't know, is a deep fried Mars Bar. (A Mars Bar is a candy bar in the UK, not all that different from a Milky Way, I think.) I had thought they were famous for being a Scottish thing, but a few of the people on the tour thought they were American. Fair enough, really. Actually, places in New York City apparently deep fry Snickers bars now, but they didn't come up with the original idea.

Julia and I tracked down a chip shop in Edinburgh that did this, and split one. Verdict? Eh. The best part was the chocolate, which you would get even without breading it and boiling it in grease. Not as gross as I had imagined, but pointlessly greasy. The breaded-and-deep-fried bit adds nothing except the knowledge that this is pretty much a whole day's worth of fat and calories, and the chocolate is the most nutritional part.

So that's done.

I hope you all have enjoyed reading these. Scotland is a wonderful place, and I'm glad I found this oppurtunity. London tomorrow, Stonehenge/Bath the next day and Cork, Ireland the day after that. Am officially not bringing my laptop, so the blog will (again) have to wait.

Happy Easter everyone!

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1st April 2012

losing the camera
Skypaday cannot legitimately claim sole responsibility for absentmindedness as in the case of the forgotten camera. Her father and mother are very bright, but her paternal grandfather claims t o be the genetic source of some of her more endearing weaknesses.

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