The Kingdom of Mist-Filled Valleys

Scotland.

Mmm. Lovely lovely Scotland.

But first: we began our lovely expedition to the North with a trip through Ryanair in Bristol. Due to subway complications, we arrived five minutes late to board, and Ryanair charged us FIFTY POUNDS in fines if we wanted to get on a later flight.

Cheapest air service around Europe my foot.

I had withdrawn most of my stipend to go on this trip as well, and Ken knew I was suffering a dearth of money. When they said fifty pounds per person, he turned to me and said "I'll understand if you don't want to go anymore."

"I don't know. It's up to you," I said, not wanting to be responsible for cancelling our vacation.

"Do you want to go or not?" Ken asked, frustrated.

Quick pause, quick decision: "Yes."

A good decision.

I couldn't tell much about Scotland from the air, but the rides as a whole, both there by air, then the trainride from Prestwick to Glasgow, and my future rides around Scotland, has led me to conclude that Scotland is the Kingdom of Mist-Filled Valleys, because you get all these mountains jutting up (they literally look like they were harshly forced out of the earth) and the valleys that are grey, and wet, but pretty. The hills follow suit with the mountains - sometimes you'll be going along a flat area and see this random hill - square almost, not round, with a plateau on top - just sitting in everyone's way, and you wonder whether it was man-made, or whether it was dropped there, or what. I came to the conclusion that this is what you build castles on.

But, before castles: Glasgow. Glasgow is a very dingy town. But also very eccentric. People have that city chip-on-their-shoulder, and it's certainly not the richest place in the world, but it has a huge mall, HUGE, and the most ecclectic collection of sights I've seen for a while. For instance, some of the first places we visited on our magical trip included the St. Mungo's Cathedral (which includes his tomb), St. Mungo's Musuem of Religious Life, a Necropolis (I knocked on a mosoleum and wished an empty room in another one Merry Christmas), a Science Museum shaped like an armadillo, a FAKE RIP OFF of the Millenium Bridge in London, a kilt store with very high prices, a kilt store with lower prices, a Pizza Hut with amazing prices, a tapas restaurant, and a twelve story movie theater decked with neon escalators. It was pretty sweet.

We stayed at a EuroHostel, and it was very nice. Quickly the joke developed between Ken and I: "You're a hostel!" a la Towely from South Park.

So day one: we got there and ate Pizza Hut. Day two: all the stuff listed above (except Pizza Hut. Though we passed it every time we went by the hostel). Day Three was Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is the better reason to go to Scotland. Glasgow is kind of the weird younger brother to Edinburgh's sheer awesomeness. They were setting up for Hogmannay (spelling?), their version of New Year', so some places were hard to get to or off limits. But we still valiantly explored the town.

(A tangent: Edinburgh is known as one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and also has one of the best New Year's parties in Europe. They sell tickets, £100 each, I think. Ken and I settled for Glasgow Hogmannay.)

You know how I mentioned those hills? Well, Edinburgh has one in the center, except it really is more of a mountain...a cliff I guess is the best word. Crag, actually, I think is the best word. there's a CRAG in the middle of Edinburgh, and there's a CASTLE on top of it, which marks one end of the "Royal Mile," a road going from one part of the center of town to another. From Edinburgh Castle to the Queen's house. Queen of Scotland, that is, I think. Some royal house.

But Edinburgh Castle, maybe it has a name, but it's an incredibly defensible position. Years of Real Time Strategy games, as well as Turn Based Strategy games (from Castles II to Starcraft to Age of Empires II to Civilization II and III to Warcraft III) to appreciate the wonder of its defensibility. You have to go through so many courtyards just to get to the main gate, and that's the only way to get in the castle, unless you want to scale the crag. The ticket was worth the price. Inside we visited a prison where Americans were held during the American Revolution, a series of battlements and cannon-y areas, lots of places with a good view, several gift shops (where I purchased some post cards and a collection of Scottish Folk Tales, and more, later), and the keep, where they had situated not only the Crown Jewels of Scotland, but the Stone of Destiny, by which (or on which?) all Scottish kings had to be annointed. Or something like that. Something that wreaked of awesomeness.

From there we went to a Kilt Weaving museum, right outside the castle gates, which was really a prolonged gift shop. I saw a blue hoodie with Scottish designs on it, zip up and all. I boughted it, and am wearing it, and loveses it.

Down the Royal Mile we stopped at a "The Whiskey Experience," I think that's what it was called, which was a Whiskey Museum/connoseur's (spelling?) shop. They had whiskey ranging from £2.35 (a tiny sampler bottle) to £400 some pounds, which were kept under lock and key and only available on special request. Ken and I both bought a sampler bottle, actually Ken bought two - and of intense whiskey while I got a vial of Teacher's, which I could find in the KeyStore at Exeter - cause we're totally legal. I'm not the biggest whiskey fan, though. In fact that vial of Teacher's is STILL unfinished, there's probably about 90% of the original amount left in it. So that legality gets me nowhere! But I did drink whiskey in Scotland, even though I really don't like the stuff.

We stopped for a packed lunch. Actually, our lunches the entire trip were packed, because Ken had the ingenious idea of buying enough materials to make avocado-tomato-cheese-lettuce sandwiches for the duration of Scotland. So that was always our lunch, made on the spot by us. And now I lurve avacodoes muchly.

Next, we passed by the Scottish parliament, which you wouldn't know from any other hole in the wall on the Royal Mile if it weren't for the engraving nearby the gate, which is easily missable. Ken and I actually argued about which building was REALLY the Parliament. I get the sense that it might not be as high profile as the UK Parliament or the American Congress. Just a little. Which is why I like it.

Behind the Debatable Parliament was another science museum, which was similarly overpriced. And behind this were CRAGS. Big, unspoiled CRAGS, just sitting there with roads turning widely around them like they didn't dare offend the hills. Ken and I took a deep breath, and followed a number of other hikers through paths up the crags, and after about an hour (it seemed like) of walking up sometimes nearly verticle fake stairs, we got to see Edinburgh from above. Edinburgh, and the sea, and the rain clouds in the distance. And a monument on another hill on the other side of town. So off we went.

This turned out to be easier to reach. It was a monument to the Napoleanic Wars, to Nelson, and a fake set of Roman Architecture, for some reason. Also, though, at the top of the hill, not visible from far away, was a cairn set up to commemorate the establishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1998 or 1997 or something. A cairn. I didn't even know what one looked like till then, cairns had always just been a piece of vocabulary from Werewolf: The Apocalypse. They're these little torch burny places. Look one up on google, I guess.

From there we called it quits and went back to Glasgow and saw The Kite Runner. This movie reminded me why I like telling stories. Go see it if you can (I don't know if it's out in America yet). I haven't read the book, but I thought the movie was great.

Then we had New Years, which we spent, at first, tooling around the town doing not much of anything. We tried to see the Petrified Forrest but it was closed for New Years. We went to the Glasgow Art/Science Museum (I don't know the name really) but it kind of was simple. They were having a special exhibit on Kylie, a European pop star neither Ken nor I had ever heard of before, for instance. Then we had dinner and waited around for Hogmannay, watching Scottish TV in our room.

Scottish TV, the stuff not imported from the BBC (and even some of that) is sadly kind of pathetic. First we watched Graham Norton's quiz show about the pop culture stuff of 2007, which was funny at times (Graham Norton's a funny guy, sort of), but it was the worst quiz show ever. No one really paid attention to the buzzer, people kept shouting things out, they'd ring the buzzer without knowing the answer and then flounder once they had the floor, no one that was there actually CARED. Which made me not want to care, and if it weren't for Graham Norton's witty commentary I may have stopped caring. After that we saw a sketch show, which LITERALLY was entirely about football (all Americans, read as: soccer), and not even that, entirely about the Celtics as compared to the Rangers (the Celtics being the Catholic team, the Rangers being the Protestant one), but it looked like it was either a low budget professional production, or a high budget High School production. And the jokes could've been written by ... I'm not even going to continue the metaphor, they purely WEREN'T FUNNY. It wasn't even that I didn't get the source material, it just wasn't funny. Period.

Also, we saw a BBC news report that turned to the Scottish Local Area report, complete with a spinning graphic of Scotland for its title shot. This only proved that no matter how many ways you turn Scotland, it still looks weird.

Anyway, Hogmannay, Ken and I essentially spent it lined up outside of the Glasgow Square behind some iron fences, watching the concert. We didn't even have a clock - some fireworks went off, and we assumed it was 2008. But for that, it was incredibly fun.

The next two days consisted of trying to get to Inverness, Loch Ness, and Loch Lommond. We could get to none of them New Years day, cause most buses were closed, so we tooled around Glasgow and ended up seeing Paranoid Park, a Cannes-Winning film that, I thought, was a little silly.

The next day we went up to Inverness, and on the way got a great look at the Highlands. Remember what I said about the hills/crags? Imagine that, but with even fewer valleys, and that's the Highlands. Lots of sheep, too. Also, they have these cows called Highland Cows that are everywhere in the tourist culture: on postcards, on pins, there are even stuffed animal versions of Highland Cows. They're auburn with lots of shaggy hair, usually which hangs over their eyes. For some reason these cows are symbolic of Scotland. Same with West Highland Terriers, which I now find amazingly cute and adorable. Before I didn't really know about them.

But Inverness. Inverness is the Scottish equivalent of Princeton but without the University. Beautiful. Historic. Not much in the way of economic problems, although as you get ot the outskirts things get kind of sketchy. But it's still beautiful. It's also the site of Macbeth's Castle, although that castle was raized and a new one built in its place - on a crag looking over the river Ness, which runs from Loch Ness.

We couldn't catch a bus to Loch Ness, so we had to content ourselves with Inverness, which wasn't that bad. There're some great walking paths and parks, and we got to stand on the edge of an island on a delta of the river, and we saw these things jumping out of the water. First we thought they were seals, but they seemed to far inland. Then we hoped they were otters, but they didn't quite look it. Ken concluded they were fish, but they were too far away to really tell anything for sure. I've since decided they were Selkies. And no one can sway me otherwise.

Also, I recieved frantic news that my mom had written a frantic email to Wendy and Read, which said that I hadn't been responding to her text messages and so she thought I had lost my phone and was dead in a ditch somewhere. In reality, I had recieved no text messages. Orange and Verizon were being dumb and a bunch of our correspondacnes had been essentially lost in the networks. After my mom and I talked, she called Verizon and they worked it out. For the next few days, I recieved random formerly lost text messages at random times, inlcuding one that said something to the effect of "where are you? I need to talk to you. It's urgent" at five in the morning the night I got back to England.

After Inverness we went back to Glasgow and, the next day, checked out and headed back to Exeter. We spent the whole day traveling, and got back at 1:45 a.m.. The next day, we had to wake up for an 11 a.m. bus to Stratford, where Kenyon-Exeter had paid for tickets to a weekend marathon of Shakespeare's Histories. But, dear readers, more to come on that later.