Edinburgh

[osprey_archer]

Back from Edinburgh!





Lovely trip! It rained terribly the first day - not a hard rain, but a hard wind that turned umbrellas inside out and snatched mine away from me, and sent it skittering down the street. However I was nothing daunted (well...a little daunted) by the weather, and went to the National Gallery of Scotland and looked at pictures and had cream tea and met a friend of a friend for dinner, who showed me the cafe where J. K. Rowling wrote large portions of the first Harry Potter books.

!!!!!!!!



Of course I had to try writing some Harry Potter fanfic there. Sadly it didn't quite work out, which I'm sure we can all agree is a Tragic Loss for the Harry Potter fanfic community.

And then we watched West Wing - I should write a post about how West Wing is the Best Show Ever, and possibly the only show where I love every single character to pieces (well, and Criminal Minds; but West Wing doesn't have the drawbacks of Criminal Minds, viz., "Please don't be creative this week. Please let's just have a garden variety serial kil - oh they went and were creative.").

After West Wing I walked back to my hostel...and saw this store:



Brilliant!

It was an interesting walk through Edinburgh, because it's much more an international city. Most of the places I've visited are fairly small and homogenous, and then you walk around Edinburgh and there's a guy behind you chatting on his cell phone in Russian, and the little grocery stores that sell postcards (four for a pound, the same six views of bagpipers and Edinburgh castle peeking out over tulips) all have "Halal meat available here" signs in the windows.

I find those signs comforting. It's kind of funny, because I've never lived anywhere where halal meat is available anywhere; but whenever I see them, I think of my friends from school who eat only halal meat, and think, We could eat here.

And then a fellow at the railway station offers to carry my bag, in such a strong accent that I'm not even sure that's what he's saying; and I realize that, the availability of halal meat aside, I'm in a very different place.

There's a quote, which I think is about religion - that it makes the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. I think it's true of travel as well.

Comments

[ochre54.livejournal.com]

You are making me all nostalgic! Piemaker's is awesome - they have very cheap (but excellent!) dessert and meat pies and I went back about three times.

Did you see the four modernish tapestries in the lower floor of the National? I think they were sequential (about the garden of eden, maybe?) and absolutely gorgeous.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes - at least I saw four tapestries; but they were about a Celtic fellow playing on a harp, who gets saved by an angel when he's about to fall.

The stitching is amazing - it must have taken her ages. (The artist is Phoebe Anna Traquair - I had to look it up - who is just about the only female artist in the entire gallery, which is rather sad, I thought.)

I didn't stop to eat at Piemaker's but I should have done.

[ochre54.livejournal.com]

Right! Those were the ones I meant (I don't know where I got garden of eden). I recognize the artist's name. And for being the only woman in the gallery, she is doing a marvellous job of representing. They were by far my favourite things there.