Edinburgh
My last classes ended Thursday, and before my next major project starts after the bank holiday this weekend, I decided to squeeze in one more journey out of London - perhaps my last before I leave to come home at the end of June. I haven't been to Scotland since I was eighteen and my mother & I spent a week visiting at least two dozen ruinous castles (or was that two dozens every day?!) while my father was otherwise occupied, and I couldn't see being this close and not going up north at all. So Edinburgh it is.
I had a hard time sorting out train schedules online Friday morning - partly because I didn't realize that unlike local trains, there are discounts to be had by booking early, which I had entirely missed out on - so I just hiked myself and a small backpack over to Kings Cross and hoped for the best, realizing all the while that this might end up being a $350 round-trip train ride. That wasn't quite the case, since for reasons that I don't understand, it is about a pound cheaper to go round-trip than one way, so the eventual price was under half that, though still far more than I'd really been expecting (I've flown to other countries for less than that over the past year). With a hotel room booked a credit card, I didn't really have any excuse to back out now, so off I went.
On the train I searched for one of the few unreserved seats (another disadvantage of late booking: no guarantee that there will actually be room on the train), and settled into a backward-facing seat in the middle of a car. I noted a sign on another car that I passed that said "Quiet Coach," but didn't think much of this til later. I alternated between watching the scenery go by and reading a book I'd been meaning to pick up (Notes From A Small Island, travel writer Bill Bryson's memoirs of his farewell tour around Britain after deciding to move back to the US after a couple decades in the UK) until around York, when a gaggle of cowboy hat-clad college-age boys (including one in a pink cap with sparkles I could see shining from my seat 10 yards away) hopped on. They were entirely inebriated when they arrived, and their entrance to the train was accompanied by an overhead announcement through which a female voice asked her male companion if he would marry her. From the hoots that went up from the cowboy hat posse, I assumed that among them was the lucky suitor. This was all rather amusing for about half an hour, but with several cases of beer now under their belts, their shouting only got louder until finally a mother with several small children went and said something stern to them, at which they apologized but didn't quit with the shouting. By this time I had earplugs in and was starting to feel motion-sick from the rear-wards orientation of my seat. From many months aboard various creaky vessels (including weathering one storm that was a couple knots shy of a hurricane aboard a converted barge off the coast of Louisiana), I've long known that hours before I actually get nauseated from motion sickness, I first get a headache that could kill a horse. And that's roughly what happened. By the time I got to Edinburgh every shout from the rear end of the car made me want to take a mallet to those cowboy hats and whoever's head they were perched on. The fresh air of the Edinburgh train station livened me up a bit, though it still took me ten minutes or so to escape that moronic crowd, who were now loudly singing something that appeared to be a version of When the Saints Go Marching In altered into a fight song for some local footballers club.
I got my bearings and made my escape as soon as possible. Waverly Station lies in the heart of the city, with trains arriving beneath the now-benevolent walls of a the town castle, perched high on a bluff above. Most of the downtown looks like another century come alive. I made a couple of wrong turns and finally exited the station out an alley that led out of the downtown section and toward the northern suburbs. At some point I managed to lose the map book that I was carrying; I knew I had had it in my hands not a dozen yards back, but now it was gone. Relying on that as the only means I had of finding the hotel I was booked in at, I searched in every pocket and fold in my pack to no avail. I was just getting ready to resign myself and go buy another one in the train station, when I unbuckled my pack and out fell the map, from where I'll never know.
I finally got going in the right direction, but had to stop a couple of times to add layers of clothing. Scotland seems to run about six weeks behind London in the arrival of spring (although I suspect that with the passing of the solstice in June, the reverse occurs, with winter rushing headlong into Scotland six weeks ahead of its entry into London); with a four-hour train ride, time seems to have reversed. I was glad I had packed a heavier coat than I'd worn since Easter as well as an assortment of fleece accessories - all of which I wore on that journey toward the hotel.
I had booked into a place up where Edinburgh meets the old dock town of Leith, largely because anything I could find in town over this holiday weekend was running about a hundred pounds a night - far out of what I was able to pay out of my ever-diminishing student loan funds. After about twenty minutes on foot through a mist that was just a hair sort of rain, I found the place and rang the bell. The friendly owner gave me a hearty welcome and invited me into the office to complete a bit of paperwork. Amidst friendly conversation about the weather, he ran my debit card and handed me a receipt, which I glanced at briefly and began to sign until something caught my eye that didn't seem right. Where the total was supposed to say "70.50," it actually read "770.50." I stammered out something to the effect that I thought there might be some mistake, and he indeed was horrified at what he had done - largely because the signature was only a formality, and the charge had already been entered against my account. While he hurriedly ran a refund and new a charge, I did some quick math in my head to determine whether there was actually enough in the account to cover an extra seven hundred pounds (roughly $1400 at today's ghastly exchange rate of nearly 2:1). There was, but not with any wide margin. I hoped that Barclays would be kindly enough not to run the first charge then delay the refund while last week's rent check cashed out the account somewhere below zero - though this was the bank that dumped an extra $50 charge onto a wire transfer without telling me, so my confidence in their generosity is fairly minimal. In any case, I figured there was nothing I could do for a couple days until all those charges cleared to see what the final damage was, so I let it be.
I hustled my pack upstairs, re-dressed in a couple further layers of fleece, and headed back in the direction I'd come to see the downtown strip of Princes Street. I must have looked at half a dozen maps before I was finally convinced that Princes Street indeed referred to plural male royalty, as I had guessed on the first map that it was merely a misspelling of the female royal singular. Exiting upwards from the train station via a subterranean mall, I broke out onto the main drag under the sort of sunlight that is made for photographs. A bag-piper in plaid tartan played for tips beneath the skyline of Edinburgh castle, which was lit with a golden swath of sun against the backdrop of a thunderhead-grey sky. The moment passed before I could think to retrieve my camera, but it is etched in my head for long time to come.
I wandered the length of the street and eventually decided to seek out some form of dinner, but with most of the shops closing, there wasn't a whole lot to chose from - odd, on a Friday night nonetheless. I hadn't eaten much for lunch and quickly settled on the ever-reliable option of Starbucks, which in the UK always has a selection of toasted sandwiches which I have - to my great shame - relied on in many a moment when little else was available. It was only when I was in the top-floor cafe inside the walls of a well-known chain bookstore that I realized I was carrying a copy of the Cadogan guide to Edinburgh from a different branch of the same outlet, and I hoped I had remembered to remove the electronic tag I found inserted in it rather than have to explain why I was setting off alarms leaving a bookstore with a volume tagged with the same seller's label. Alas, I was not caught with my contraband purchase, and left the premises after consuming my sandwich without setting off any alarms.
I wandered around Princes Street and down into the park-like ravine that splits the downtown in two. The sun was nowhere near setting and I figured it couldn't be past seven in the evening until I realized that with the journey northward, the days were that much longer and it could be hours before it got dark. Indeed, it was closing in on nine o'clock, and I realized that I had actually been walking for close to six hours, since my train arrived at three, with only a half-hour break at Starbucks. Which would, of course, explain why my feet were aching and why that tickle in my right small toe where I had a left-over healing blister from last weekend's adventures in Lisbon was starting to burn again. I felt silly going to sleep while the sun was still up in the sky, but as it neared ten o'clock I went back to the hotel and called it a night anyhow.
I had a hard time sorting out train schedules online Friday morning - partly because I didn't realize that unlike local trains, there are discounts to be had by booking early, which I had entirely missed out on - so I just hiked myself and a small backpack over to Kings Cross and hoped for the best, realizing all the while that this might end up being a $350 round-trip train ride. That wasn't quite the case, since for reasons that I don't understand, it is about a pound cheaper to go round-trip than one way, so the eventual price was under half that, though still far more than I'd really been expecting (I've flown to other countries for less than that over the past year). With a hotel room booked a credit card, I didn't really have any excuse to back out now, so off I went.
On the train I searched for one of the few unreserved seats (another disadvantage of late booking: no guarantee that there will actually be room on the train), and settled into a backward-facing seat in the middle of a car. I noted a sign on another car that I passed that said "Quiet Coach," but didn't think much of this til later. I alternated between watching the scenery go by and reading a book I'd been meaning to pick up (Notes From A Small Island, travel writer Bill Bryson's memoirs of his farewell tour around Britain after deciding to move back to the US after a couple decades in the UK) until around York, when a gaggle of cowboy hat-clad college-age boys (including one in a pink cap with sparkles I could see shining from my seat 10 yards away) hopped on. They were entirely inebriated when they arrived, and their entrance to the train was accompanied by an overhead announcement through which a female voice asked her male companion if he would marry her. From the hoots that went up from the cowboy hat posse, I assumed that among them was the lucky suitor. This was all rather amusing for about half an hour, but with several cases of beer now under their belts, their shouting only got louder until finally a mother with several small children went and said something stern to them, at which they apologized but didn't quit with the shouting. By this time I had earplugs in and was starting to feel motion-sick from the rear-wards orientation of my seat. From many months aboard various creaky vessels (including weathering one storm that was a couple knots shy of a hurricane aboard a converted barge off the coast of Louisiana), I've long known that hours before I actually get nauseated from motion sickness, I first get a headache that could kill a horse. And that's roughly what happened. By the time I got to Edinburgh every shout from the rear end of the car made me want to take a mallet to those cowboy hats and whoever's head they were perched on. The fresh air of the Edinburgh train station livened me up a bit, though it still took me ten minutes or so to escape that moronic crowd, who were now loudly singing something that appeared to be a version of When the Saints Go Marching In altered into a fight song for some local footballers club.
I got my bearings and made my escape as soon as possible. Waverly Station lies in the heart of the city, with trains arriving beneath the now-benevolent walls of a the town castle, perched high on a bluff above. Most of the downtown looks like another century come alive. I made a couple of wrong turns and finally exited the station out an alley that led out of the downtown section and toward the northern suburbs. At some point I managed to lose the map book that I was carrying; I knew I had had it in my hands not a dozen yards back, but now it was gone. Relying on that as the only means I had of finding the hotel I was booked in at, I searched in every pocket and fold in my pack to no avail. I was just getting ready to resign myself and go buy another one in the train station, when I unbuckled my pack and out fell the map, from where I'll never know.
I finally got going in the right direction, but had to stop a couple of times to add layers of clothing. Scotland seems to run about six weeks behind London in the arrival of spring (although I suspect that with the passing of the solstice in June, the reverse occurs, with winter rushing headlong into Scotland six weeks ahead of its entry into London); with a four-hour train ride, time seems to have reversed. I was glad I had packed a heavier coat than I'd worn since Easter as well as an assortment of fleece accessories - all of which I wore on that journey toward the hotel.
I had booked into a place up where Edinburgh meets the old dock town of Leith, largely because anything I could find in town over this holiday weekend was running about a hundred pounds a night - far out of what I was able to pay out of my ever-diminishing student loan funds. After about twenty minutes on foot through a mist that was just a hair sort of rain, I found the place and rang the bell. The friendly owner gave me a hearty welcome and invited me into the office to complete a bit of paperwork. Amidst friendly conversation about the weather, he ran my debit card and handed me a receipt, which I glanced at briefly and began to sign until something caught my eye that didn't seem right. Where the total was supposed to say "70.50," it actually read "770.50." I stammered out something to the effect that I thought there might be some mistake, and he indeed was horrified at what he had done - largely because the signature was only a formality, and the charge had already been entered against my account. While he hurriedly ran a refund and new a charge, I did some quick math in my head to determine whether there was actually enough in the account to cover an extra seven hundred pounds (roughly $1400 at today's ghastly exchange rate of nearly 2:1). There was, but not with any wide margin. I hoped that Barclays would be kindly enough not to run the first charge then delay the refund while last week's rent check cashed out the account somewhere below zero - though this was the bank that dumped an extra $50 charge onto a wire transfer without telling me, so my confidence in their generosity is fairly minimal. In any case, I figured there was nothing I could do for a couple days until all those charges cleared to see what the final damage was, so I let it be.
I hustled my pack upstairs, re-dressed in a couple further layers of fleece, and headed back in the direction I'd come to see the downtown strip of Princes Street. I must have looked at half a dozen maps before I was finally convinced that Princes Street indeed referred to plural male royalty, as I had guessed on the first map that it was merely a misspelling of the female royal singular. Exiting upwards from the train station via a subterranean mall, I broke out onto the main drag under the sort of sunlight that is made for photographs. A bag-piper in plaid tartan played for tips beneath the skyline of Edinburgh castle, which was lit with a golden swath of sun against the backdrop of a thunderhead-grey sky. The moment passed before I could think to retrieve my camera, but it is etched in my head for long time to come.
I wandered the length of the street and eventually decided to seek out some form of dinner, but with most of the shops closing, there wasn't a whole lot to chose from - odd, on a Friday night nonetheless. I hadn't eaten much for lunch and quickly settled on the ever-reliable option of Starbucks, which in the UK always has a selection of toasted sandwiches which I have - to my great shame - relied on in many a moment when little else was available. It was only when I was in the top-floor cafe inside the walls of a well-known chain bookstore that I realized I was carrying a copy of the Cadogan guide to Edinburgh from a different branch of the same outlet, and I hoped I had remembered to remove the electronic tag I found inserted in it rather than have to explain why I was setting off alarms leaving a bookstore with a volume tagged with the same seller's label. Alas, I was not caught with my contraband purchase, and left the premises after consuming my sandwich without setting off any alarms.
I wandered around Princes Street and down into the park-like ravine that splits the downtown in two. The sun was nowhere near setting and I figured it couldn't be past seven in the evening until I realized that with the journey northward, the days were that much longer and it could be hours before it got dark. Indeed, it was closing in on nine o'clock, and I realized that I had actually been walking for close to six hours, since my train arrived at three, with only a half-hour break at Starbucks. Which would, of course, explain why my feet were aching and why that tickle in my right small toe where I had a left-over healing blister from last weekend's adventures in Lisbon was starting to burn again. I felt silly going to sleep while the sun was still up in the sky, but as it neared ten o'clock I went back to the hotel and called it a night anyhow.
posted by skylanda at 2:56 PM
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