The Ben

Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the British Isles is just outside the small town of Fort William. In the Gaelic, Ben means mountain. It's unclear where Nevis comes from, although some have speculated that it comes from the Gaelic for venomous. At 1344m, this is not a particularly high mountain in global standards, but it is the highest ascent up a mountain that I have ever undertaken. The one other statistic that is interesting about the Ben is that it has on average 355 days of cloud cover each year.

I started out last Friday, by skipping my last summer school session and heading to the nearest train station to get to Glasgow. My scheduled train was supposed to arrive in Fort William at 10:05pm, but since I had no where to stay I was a little worried about arriving in the dark. At the last minute I noticed that there was a but leaving from Glasgow that arrived at 9pm. I figured that this would give me at least half an hour of light when I got there to find somewhere to sleep.

Well, the bus was the exact same as Canadian buses. Cramped and hard to sleep on. But, it did get me there at 9:05, which includes about 20 minutes waiting at a section of the highway that was closed down to one lane. The only remaining bus of the day that went from Fort William into Glen Nevis and the campground left at 10:05 (seemingly to meet the train), which I sure wasn't going to wait for. The internet had said that it was 2 or 3 miles to the campground, so I started walking.

After about 5 minutes of walking, I saw a sign that said "campground 2 1/2 miles", which disheartened me, since I know that that should take about 35 minutes of walking (without a backpack full of stuff) and it was already raining and getting dark. Well, I started motoring up the road. I considered hitching, but it was late at night and no one was in sight. Luckily, I got to the campground with a little light left and they weren't full for the night. I didn't know what I was going to do if they were full, maybe sleep in a ditch or find an office to sleep in or something (I'm not sure which is worse).

The next morning I set off for the mountain. I had read that it was 14km in horizontal distance and that it should take 6-8 hours. I think it is very difficult for the human brain to comprehend how far up 1344 meters is. When I came down the Grouse Grind, I was only coming down 800 meters, but half way down I just assumed that I was nearly at the bottom. Some wierd psychology goes on. Maybe it has something to do with TV. Nothing can ever take more than an hour or so.

Part way up the Ben, it started to rain. Then, it stopped. Then the fog set in. Now, I'm not an expert on fog, but this fog seemed ridiculously thick. I couldn't see more than 20 meters in front of me or behind me. Very soon after the fog set in, I discovered that they were doing some trail repair (a sign told me). I thought, there must be some rugged people with some shovels and tents, since I had already climbed about 500 meters through somewhat difficult trail conditions. Then, I heard the engines. Somehow, they had gotten a front end loader and a bulldozer up here. There was also a mobile home style building that looked like the foreman's office. I have no idea how they got all that crap up there, since the path was narrow and perched on the side of a very steep hill (steep enough for switchbacks). These things gave me both a sense of relief (if they can get machines up this high, I can't be in danger) and a sense of foreboding (if they can get machines up this high, I have a lot farther to go).

Then, it started to pour. Luckily, I had my rain proof paints and my rain jacket. Still, it was getting cold and it was really windy and now I was wet (on the outside at least). It felt like I was in hell, and I had only been hiking for about 1 1/2 hours. However, I read that more than 100,000 people climb the Ben each year and if they could do it, then I could do it.

It only rained for about 10 minutes, or at least after 10 minutes I walked out of the rain. It was then that I saw the first person that I had seen in about half an hour. I asked him if it got much worse, and he said "just windier and colder". Soon the grass turned to lichen and pretty soon the lichen dissappeared. After about an hour of climbing beyond the lichen line, I reached the summit. It was completely covered in fog. I couldn't see anything. And it was cold and windy and I was a little wet. Still, it was an enormous relief to be on top of the U.K. Also, I knew that the whole way back was downhill.

All the way down I dreamed about taking off my hiking boots, having a warm shower and drinking a cold pint. At some point on the way down, the sun came out and I got some nice views of the valley with the campground and the surrounding mountains. At about this point some guys, who looked like they were having a rough time, asked if they were halfway up the switchbacks (they called them zigzags), as if they were nearly at the top. I said I wasn't sure, but that I figured that they we were probably more than halfway up (since I had been coming down for about 45 minutes). They kinda looked at me like I was crazy, and one of them said, "Oh, we're way more than half way up". I thought this was odd, since I obviously knew how far I had come down and they didn't, but whatever. Later, I looked it up on the map and I think we were at about 750meters in elevation, which was just more than the halfway point. Well, good luck to them.

Ultimately, I would not do this trip again in the fog, although on the train out of town, I got a picture of the summit (the first time I had seen it throughout the whole weekend, except when I was standing on it). I would like to do the other route, and I would like to see it in the sunshine sometime, but since I made it to the top, I have to say that the trip was a success.

Blood and Guts

I knew that my "redeye" flight to Glasgow would be a bit rough, since it would take off at 7pm Toronto time and land in Glasgow at 6am Glasgow time (which is 1am Toronto time). This means that I would be waking up at the equivalent of 1am and taking the train across a country I had never been to before.

Having travelled in China and Mexico, I have learned that if the schedule says 1 hour for the train and you have to take a bus at each end for a few minutes, then you should budget 6 hours for the excursion. I remember now that before China and Mexico, this made no sense to me at all. How could things possibly take that long? Well, it usually has something to do with a broken down bus/train or the fact that there is no bus at that time at all, or the bus driver gets lost, or any number of other things. As it turns out, this is only a third world country thing. In the "civilized" world things don't take so long. It ended up taking me a grand total of 2 hours to get from the airport in Glasgow until I was standing in my dorm room at the University of Edinburgh, which was great since I had a conference to get to. The trains come exactly when they are supposed to. They even have little TV's telling you when the next one is coming and whether it is on time. It's like at the airport, but they're everywhere here.

Now, you may think that I put quotation marks around civilized because I believe that the civilized world is no more civilized than the uncivilized world. Quite on the contrary. Why?

Well, I slept my first night in Scotland and woke up to have a complete breakfast offered by the conference accomodation. I grabbed my plate and got in line and pointed at things that looked like they might be good. There were the usual things: Hash browns, sausages, fried tomatoes. And something called Black Pudding. I thought, I like pudding, how could I not like black pudding? Well, it didn't taste very much like pudding, but it didn't kill me on the spot. Also, I had some haggis, which I knew consisted mostly of sheep guts, but I already knew what was in that.

The next day I was chatting with some British people and I asked them what was in black pudding. They weren't sure exactly, but they knew it consisted mostly of pig's blood and maybe some other bits of pigs that they weren't really sure of. What this means is that my breakfast included: Pig's blood (in the pudding), Sheep's lungs, liver and heart (in the haggis) and some other unknown things (potentially pig guts as well as other sheep guts, and almost certainly a stomach or two). Now, I don't mean to judge, but I find it difficult to refer to a country as civilized when the first food they offer you after you arrive is all the grossest parts of two very gross animals, and they don't even have obvious names. If they had called it pig's blood (mixed with pig guts) then at least I would have been warned (although, admittedly, I may have been even more likely to try it).

Other than that, Scotland has been pretty much what I expected. People talk funny, the public transportation is pretty good, the hills are rolling and all of the food is some version of meat and potatoes. It's like vegetables don't grow here (which having seen the farming, is probably true).

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to see nearly as much of Scotland as I would have liked. I spend my days sitting in classrooms/conference rooms learning some (very interesting) stuff about logic and language and such. Also, the summer school is at a university called Heriot-Watt which if it were in Toronto, would be somewhere just past Canada's Wonderland. There are actually farms between the university and Edinburgh.

I have gone walking in the hills a bit, which is really nice compared to walking in Canada. Not nearly as boring as Ontario, but not nearly as daunting as the mountains in British Columbia. It doesn't look like I'm going to make it to Hadrian's wall, which was just a bit too optimistic. I did make it to Ben Nevis though, which I will save for another post. My plans for the rest of the week are to maybe go into the city a couple more times and hopefuly watch a real live Scottish football game.

Scotland: The land that some of my ancestors thought was crappy enough that they moved all the way across the world to get away from

Yesterday, I handed in the final exam for the course that I am teaching and taught my final lecture. This means that I am more or less finished with that aspect of my life and I must try to finish my thesis and graduate. To that end, I leave for Scotland today to attend a conference and to go to some summer school. I will be there for 17 days. I wish I could stay longer but I have to come back to mark the final exam for the aforementioned course.

There are two things that I really want to do while I am there (other than going to the conference and the school). The first is to climb Ben Nevis, the tallest mountain in the UK. The second is to go to Hadrian's Wall. I want to go to Hadrian's Wall, because it is the wall that, for about 2000 years, has kept one group of my ancestors from ransacking the villages of another group of my ancestors. I want to climb Ben Nevis because I have never climbed a tallest mountain of anything (even if is is just the tallest mountain in the UK, which is still pretty wussy). Both of these things will be difficult, since I am strapped for time, but I think I will be able to do both as long as I don't have any other commitments with the summer school.

I will be updating this blog much more frequently in the future, since I expect more exciting things to be happening to me.

The parking fiasco

A couple of months ago, my Dad left for Indonesia (for the island of Sulawesi). Since he can't take his car to Indonesia, my brother and I were left to fight for it. For the last year or so I have lived in downtown Toronto, where I always considered parking to be far too big a pain to be bothered with. My brother, however, lives in Waterloo, where there are parking spaces every 5 feet. So, usually, my brother gets the car and I am stuck with the bus.

But, this summer my brother is a Don at UW Place and he didn't want the car so that meant that I could use it. The only question was, where was I going to put it. Behind the house where I live, there is a sketchy concrete "garage". Well, we call it a garage, but really it is just three walls made out of concrete blocks with some wood attached to the top. The wood doesn't even pretend to keep the rain out. Because of it's decrepit state, no one ever parks there, which meant that I could keep the car there.

Unfortunately, the landlord parks his truck at the end of the driveway, blocking the entrance to the alley to get behind the house. This means that when the landlord is home, the car can't be moved in or out. I decide that this is acceptable, since the landlord is rarely home, and when he is home, it is always between the hours of 7pm and 4am. Also, I don't need the car much and when I do need it I always have lots of notice. So, the car makes the first trip to Toronto and sleeps behind the house for the first time.

All is well. I take the car to Rosco's Dad's cottage on Lake Muskoka. We drive to Alison and Chris's wedding. Until one weekend I am coming back from Waterloo and it is Sunday at about 10pm. I arrive home and the truck is already in the driveway. I knew that this day was coming but like the ostrich, my head went into the sand. I can't park on the street in front of the house, because there is no parking from 12midnight - 7am without a permit. I figure that there must be somewhere nearby without permit parking and so I set off looking for it.

The parking places that I consider are:

• The supermarket parking lot
• A pay parking lot, approximately 1.5km away
• The street in front of the house
• The sortof sidewalk area beside our driveway where Dave parked his car for a while
  
• On Ossington St. (the major street near our house)

I nix the supermarket when I see the menacing signs about towing unauthorized cars away and the fact that the parking lot is empty. I look at the pay parking lot, but I would have to pay 6 dollars and still get up at 8:30 to move the car somewhere else. The street in front of the house is out, because I know they'll ticket me. The sidewalky area is not so good since it blocks access to our front steps and I hate it when cars park on anything that even looks like a sidewalk. So, I opt for Ossington St. Parking is allowed on Ossington St. by anybody except from 7-9am and 4-6pm from Monday to Friday. This means that I have to get up at 7am to move the car. After I drive around for 1.5 hours, I decide that this is the best option and I set my alarm.

Now, I'm not sure what kind of people run the parking system in Toronto, but for some reason, you can park on Ossington overnight but not on Shaw St. (my street), and you can park on Shaw during the day but not on Ossington. I wonder if they sit around saying, how can we get people to do ridiculous things, just by making silly parking rules. It seems absolutely ridiculous that they would encourage you to park on a major street, but if that's what they want, who am I to disagree. I end up waking up at 5am to go to the bathroom and the landlord's truck is gone, so I move the car.

From this incident on, whenever I ride my bike anywhere in the city, I look for spots where you can park overnight with no permit. I play frisbee, and some of our games are 20 kilometres away from downtown, but even on those bike trips, I find very few places to park.

Except, deep in the heart of the Annex, on Barton St., between Brunswick and Albany St., there are a precious 21 parking spaces (if all of the cars are careful) for parking whenever you feel like it. I check all of the signs on the whole length of the street, and find nothing. I check the cars parked there at 10pm and find that nearly all of them are without parking permits. Could it be? Can I park here? Well, the next time I arrive home late at night, I decide to try and grab one of these spots. As it turns out, you are allowed to park there.

This baffles me even more. It appears that the people who run the parking system want everyone to do ridiculous things to park except for the select few who know about the parking on Barton St. They must know that this section has parking allowed, since otherwise there parking officers would ticket us. Also, it can't possibly be that the residents of this street want you to be able to park there whenever you want, since it means that they can't park there.

In the end, it seems like the parking people are about as organized as the urban planners of the city who built the Allen and organize the bike "routes" in the city.