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.
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.
posted by Timothy Fowler at 8/15/2005 11:24:00 AM
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