y first association with Edinburgh is that it is a city of art and pride in its intellectual history. It has several phenomenal, and free, museums, including the Museum of Writers; there are advertisements all over the city of upcoming theatrical and musical performances; and many of its statues, including some of the very biggest, are devoted to such writers and thinkers as David Hume, Robert Burns, and Adam Smith. It has a world-class university and more recycling bins, in train stations, the streets, and even the hostel in which I am staying, than the whole of France. One museum that I visited even had a recycling bin at its exit for used museum guides.
I do not have anything too interesting to say about my day-to-day activities here. I spent the 28th exploring Edinburgh's old town and nearby hills, and in the evening I met a Russian girl who was staying here for a brief work period and talked to her until midnight. I saw Stirling in the morning on the 29th, after which the Russian girl showed me around Edinburgh's New Town and took me to Scotland's national art gallery, where we saw a few paintings by Titian, some uninspiring Scottish paintings, a few fantastic paintings by the French Impressionists, including three by Monet, a self-portrait by Rembrandt, some Reubens, two Van Goghs, some uninspiring Scottish and religious paintings, and some fascinating landscapes by Italians with impossible last names from the Venetian School. I am convinced that one can trace the history of human thought by looking at paintings: one can see what people valued, how they wanted to present themselves, what kinds of people were painted, and what ideals people strove to replicate in paintings. The very focus of paintings, what people chose to represent, shows us, to some degree, what people considered important and what they experienced from day to day. I am tired and do not know how to further expound this theory. The art gallery in Edinburgh was rich enough that one could very happily have spent hours there.
I got up at 7:30 today and took the bus to the airport only to learn that I had booked my flight for tomorrow. I was not that disappointed or surprised, as mistakes like this always happen on a trip this long and complicated, but I was irked at having checked my booking yesterday and not noticed anything awry. I managed to book another night in the hostel in which I had been staying and, due to confusion over my coming reservations, ended up arranging to spend three nights in a hostel in Belfast, requiring that I cancel the reservation that would have helped me see Dublin.
Again, I was not too disappointed about all of the confusion in my bookings, though I am ready to come home and wish that I had had the acumen to simply return to London from Edinburgh and fly from there. I did not manage, due to fatigue and having stayed up unnecessarily late, to shower on the 28th or 29th, and I had run out of clean clothes. This merely serves to hammer home the lesson to make less grandiose summer plans and not try to cover so much ground on future trips. I caught up on some of my writing in the early afternoon, after which I got groceries for the day, returned to the art gallery, and changed some of my Euros into pounds (I expect to be able to bring some of them back and turn them into dollars.). I am a little tired out now, but I am now ready for my trip to Northern Ireland, and I expect my visit to be interesting and, perhaps, even a little resting. (At least I may be able to avoid the heightened levels of drunkenness to which I would have been exposed in Dublin.)
If I had to sum up my stay of Scotland, I would say that I have been very impressed by it. Edinburgh is a very green city full of creative energy and history, and it is remarkably clean. Even relatively-small railway stations like that of Stirling have signs strictly forbidding smoking and threatening 80-pound fines for smoking or knowingly permitting someone else to smoke in the station, and people seem to obey them. People here drive right through stop signs and crosswalks as though they did not exist, which must be part of their placing independence (from England and other conquering powers) at the very center of their cultural values -- nothing shows independence like trying to run over pedestrians who have the right of way.
The history behind the development of the New Town is interesting and can be condensed easily. In the 18th century, rich people in Edinburgh wanted to find somewhere to live outside of the old town, which was overflowing with offal, cow dung, and other refuse (like many medieval cities, one presumes). Consequently, they founded the New Town, which has some very interesting architecture, including plenty of Georgian homes with their funky chimneys, as does the Haymarket, a part of the town that I only saw thanks to my ride to the airport. I saw a bit of the normal part of Edinburgh on a walk today and quite liked it. Although Edinburgh appears to have an almost homogeneous population, with
no foreign stores or neighborhoods to speak of, it also appears to have a very low rate of homelessness, and people here sometimes stop and talk to bums, putting to shame those of us who habitually walk past them as though they were stones.
I have met some interesting people over the past week or so, including a young man from Hong Kong who claimed that his city was dying due to the Chinese, whose lack of regard for human rights, or "[having] no soul," as the young man put it, was leading massive numbers of residents of Hong Kong to leave the city or to want to leave in the future; he said that people only went to Hong Kong to make money. The Russian girl whom I met was principally interesting because she spoke Russian, while the man who showed me a bit of Liverpool has stuck in my mind, as he told me that people here hate Margaret Thatcher for having closed down a welter of coal mines not out of environmental awareness or worries that coal workers were badly treated, but in order to weaken their unions. He also told me (forgive me if I mentioned this before) that people from the UK are often worried, when they go to the United States, about not being able to buy high-quality produce, which made me laugh about my own impression that there are no fresh fruits or vegetables here.
I tried a bit of Scottish food today on the way to the supermarket, as I was starving and tired of eating unseasoned, homemade food that tasted like shoe leather. A "pasty" is a savory pastry, a sort of turnover, that is filled with mystery meat, bits of vegetables, and thick, rich gravy, a specialty of the area. I have not tried any other food here, and I have not gone to any free music shoes, of which there are many at present due to some festival or other, of which there are also many in Edinburgh. I loved the closed market in Newcastle, and I have enjoyed seeing signs on trains in Welsh and Scots over the past week, as I believe that it enriches the local culture. My only real final point is that I passed over a museum of everyday life, which I would have loved to see if I had had more time, in Lincoln roughly a week ago. I still want to one day visit the open air museum of eighteenth-century life in Stockholm, as I would love to see the actual objects that people used in their day-to-day lives. These objects, the actual, physical implements with which people worked, give us a much better idea of their lives than our abstract sense that life was very difficult, unpleasant, and unfair in the 18th century than it is in much of the world today, just as seeing real paintings gives us a much clearer sense of human artistic achievement than the abstract sense that we have accomplished a great deal in the arts. Just as in much else in life, the devil is in the details when it comes to trying to understand foreign or past societies and civilizations.
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| Edinburgh is culturally rich. |
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