Soctland - Intro

I'm going to cut the Scotland report into a few different posts for a few reasons. One, Scotland is going to be a pretty long post and I want to be sensitive to those with 4-5 paragraph attention spans. More importantly, I said I'd have something posted Monday morning and want to hold to that. Basically, I would like to condition everyone so that if I say, "I'll put up my first Latvia post Monday at 9am PST," and Monday at 9:01am there's no post from Latvia, I hope your 9:02am thought will be, "Hmm, if I had to, I wonder how I would go about getting Marines dispatched to Riga?"

So very briefly....There's a reason you do not hear travel agents promoting Autumn or Winter trips to Scotland. It's cold, rainy, windy and generally the sort of weather that forces you to head into a warm living room, light a fire and watch the entire season of Arrested Development.

That being said, I need to give the Scots some credit for two things. First, somewhere along the train tracks between Manchester and Edinburgh, common sense comes back into existence. If you missed the point I made a few weeks back about Manchester girls, if you see a picture of 4 or 5 of them together in their "going out clothes" they could be in Hawaii, Greece, Fiji, Northern Alaska, Chicago or Manchester. Tank top, skirt, boots. Doesn't matter how rainy and cold. (In fact I kid you not - I saw a newspaper ad for "Micro skirts" which I assume is the smaller version of it's prudish cousin, the mini-skirt.)

But the Scots see this dreadful weather and say, "It's bloody miserable. I best bring my umbrella and put on a pair of jeans before getting a wee bit snokkered."

Also, for a miserable climate, they are generally a happy bunch. They are stuck in the Arctic end of a country that has spent the better part of human existence conquering and murdering their people. They don't really have their own governement, and I'm sure at least some of their tax dollars go to support a royal family whose ancestors killed theirs. But at the end of the day, they just laugh and say, "Yeah, but we've got Whiskey" and then kind of wander off happily.

Plus, walking up and out from the bowels of the Waverly train station in Edinburgh during the gloom and rain is actually a pretty exciting way to spend an October Morning. It's like the founding fathers said, "Out of all this flat land, let's build the town on the hilliest, most unwalkable part. Surely the English will leave us alone then." (But alas, they did not.) So you come up these stairs to Princes Street, look up about 1,000 feet to the left and see the 1400 year old Edinburgh Castle. And over on the other side is the 1200 year old Edinburgh Cathedral. And just as your standing in the street getting lost looking at the old buildings, a huge red bus honks its horn and forces you off the busy thoroughfare that you now notice is also lined with every modern clothing store on the planet.

So, that's the intro. As I get pieces of homework done throughout the day, I will add some stories of Edinburgh Castle, the Loch Ness Monster Hunt, Edinburgh Nightlife, Hostels, Scottish History and language, and a Glasgow Distillery, along with hundreds of pictures.