October 25, 2011: Kinneil Estate

“I remember when there used to be a city here.”

With that facetious saying, my brain took off. David and I were in the small town of Bo’Ness, looking out over a field where used to stand a medieval village. The village built up around the Kinneil Estate, the home of the Dukes of Hamilton.

Today, and for the past two and a half centuries, the ruins of the village church and the moss-covered, weathered gravestones are all that remain of Kinneil village. The village was cleared out in the 17th century and the land turned into a park. The church burned down in 1745, during its occupation by Scottish rebellion soldiers, but the wall which does still stand is part of the original church built in the 12th century.

It is odd to think about, backwards even. Today the expression is so overused as to become cliché: “ I remember when this city used to be fields.” Even I even find my self aching to utter the words aloud when I go back to Dubuque, though I was only there less than ten years ago, and hardly qualify as an old-timer in that city.

Standing in a field seeing the results of entropy rather than progress, is a little disconcerting. No, even entropy is expected. The Kinneil village church burned down in 1745, and was left to its own decay. The village itself, however, was torn down. The people forced to move, the buildings razed, and the land turned into a park.

Decay happens, old buildings are torn down to make new ones, trees are levelled in order to accommodate population growth. Yet, rarely do I see a city torn down and recreated into a park. “I remember when there used to be a city here.” The shock of the empty field is, I suspect, because the field is empty. Usually, when history is cleared away, there is a new purpose for the land.

Haweswater Dam, in the Lake District of England, holds back the Mardale Reservoir, so named for the village of Mardale now buried under 18.6 billion gallons of water. The tourist board has stated when reservoirs have had to replace villages, the new lakes were created with special attention to how they would look in relation to the natural beauty people expect of the Lake District. Destruction, but with a new purpose for the land: water for Manchester and scenic beauty for tourists.

Rarely is it possible to stand somewhere completely empty and wonder if this used to be someone’s house, or a road, or am I standing smack dab inside a wall? I stood looking out over the field, wondering what the buildings looked like, how many people lived there, and whether they were glad to leave when it was time to move. Did they bring their children and grandchildren to the empty field? Did they stand in one spot and say, “This is where I was born”?

“I remember when there used to be a city here.”

My friends and family have always joked that I was born a Little Old Lady, but no matter how old I feel, even I am not old enough to remember a 15th century village in Bo’Ness, Scotland.

October 27, 2011: City Tour by Public Bus

The best way to learn about a city is to hop on a city bus. Any bus, going any direction. Buy a day pass, and then ride to the end of the line. When there isn’t a schedule, you can stand at the bus stop and wait for a bus with good seats, you know, the front ones on the top of a double-deck bus.

David and I rode from our stop, already near the edge of town, out to the end of the line. Turns out the bus ends at a university hidden in trees and ponds and fields. The trees were gorgeous, right in the height of their annual makeover. The area was picturesque and quiet, as far from the bustle of Edinburgh as is possible to be. And nestled in one corner of the bus route was the Scotch Whisky Research Institute; that’s a place worth knowing about!

Catching a bus the other direction, we found a new bus, taking a different route from the school, past the grocery stores at which we shop, through City Centre, around neighbourhoods, and finally to the end of the line in the northeast of Edinburgh. Ocean Terminal is the stop -- a three-story shopping mall and the Royal Yacht. A tour of the boat costs more than either David or I care to spend on a tour of a boat, so we wandered out to see if I could get photos of it without paying, but there’s a fence keeping cheapskates like me at a distance. To top it off, we were there late in the afternoon, with both the Royal Brittania and the setting sun to our west. Still not quite knowing how to operate my new camera, it does nonetheless forgive me many faults. Taking pictures of a silhouetted boat straight in front of the setting sun is not one of them.

The mall was...a mall. The highlight of the mall was lunch at Pizza Express. From the name, which have seen all over Scotland, I was not hopeful. It turns out that Pizza Express has delicious pizza. The crust not to thick or thin and not greasy. It makes me wonder why on earth I have seen lines stretching outside Pizza Hut in other places.

It was a fun day: watching Edinburgh pass by the windows, watching for shops with fun names, and learning about the neighbourhoods; pretending I live there, and working out where I would have to buy groceries if I did. The city buses take us to places not in the tourist guidebook: from seedy-looking convenience stores with bars over the windows and graffiti along the walls to the neatly trimmed lawns of detached houses separated by short stone walls. From Pound-Stretcher (like a Dollar General) to Marks and Spencer. From college campus to Royal Yacht.

Visiting museums and historical sites rank among my favourite things to do in any country, but riding a bus, “just to see where it goes” is even better.

October 20, 2011: Arthur’s Seat

This morning dawned - amazingly bright and sunny. Blue sky, sunshine...? It was supposed to begin raining during the night and not stop for the next year. I woke up David and told him we were off to climb a mountain.

We packed up a lunch and took a bus to the Parliament building, and the nearby hill containing Holyrood Park, The summit of the hill is known as Arthur's Seat.

At the bottom of the hill, there were two choices, one looked boring, and one looked exciting. We did not take the road less travelled by, as the exciting path was getting far more traffic, however, being more exciting, we joined in at a fast clip. It only took about thirty steps for my legs to realise what my brain had gotten them into and they immediately went on strike. “No, you don’t! they said, “We are NOT climbing up that thing!” The path was very steep here at the beginning, but I knew once we got to the top it would level out. So brain convinced legs to keep going with the promise of frequent rest breaks to take photographs.

Up and up, steeper, and steeper. It was not very long before the path did, indeed, level out, and I could see a road ahead of us (I say not very long, but it felt like three days). I was sorely disappointed; there was plenty of rock above us yet. All that steep grade, yet this is the end? It couldn’t be!


Then, like a detective in a movie looking for clues, a glint of sunlight caught on someone’s camera high up on the next hill above us. Ah hah! There is a path! Veering off - this time onto the road less travelled - at first down, and then up, we hiked over rocks. Up, down. Gently climbing upward. I could have done this all day. If the weather had decided to stay warm, that is. The clouds started rolling in, the wind picked up, and suddenly we were freezing.

We sat and ate our sandwiches on a rock in a gully. After reading about how seriously the English are about their hill walking - eating their picnic lunches on a hill in the freezing wind and taking sips of tea to keep their fingers from falling off with frostbite, I thought we might just make it in this country after all!

Then the climbing got rough. Nearly twisting ankles on loose rocks and clambering over boulders wasn’t the “rough country” mentioned in the guidebook. Apparently, the path just gets washed out and over the side of the cliff. For a few yards the “path” is a patch of loose gravel with a tell-tale sign of a landslide leading off into the unknown.

When the path returns, it returns with a vengeance. Straight up (who thought that grade at the bottom of the hill was a steep climb??), grabbing rocks and handholds in front of me to keep going and not fall backwards.

At one point, I was convinced that even if by some miracle I made it to the top of the hill, there was absolutely no way I was coming back down -- sliding down a pebbled descent right off the edge? I don’t think so. I figured I could just sit up at the top of the hill forever, becoming part of the attractions, accepting chocolate bars from tourists. They could call me the American on the Hill.

Finally, gasping and terrified, I peered over the edge of a rock into the eyes of a three year old. What? How? The top of the mountain was crowded with teenagers, families, small children, dogs.

The view was fantastic: out across Holyrood Park, the firth, all of Edinburgh. It was certainly worth the climb -- especially after I found the nice easy path the three-year-old took.

October 19: Cable Installation in Edinburgh

October 19, 2011

Today the cable company came and installed both cable and broadband internet -yippee! I am very excited to have real internet again. However, I am here to say that waiting for the cable company in Edinburgh is just like waiting for the cable company in Chicago.

The notice arrives: “We will be at your house between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm.” Someone has to be here to let them in. This week is fall break at every school in Scotland, so our landlady, her kids, and various other family members of theirs are out of town on holiday. Our landlord is at work.

That’s okay, I tell Leanne, our landlady. We can stay here and wait for the cable company, after all, it is for our benefit, and I am looking forward to being able to watch more Pointless shows about potatoes.

So I make sure I am ready by 10:00, in case he comes early. Someone has to be first on the list. I want to know how to make sure I am first on the daily list. When it says, “We will be there between 10:00 and...” who gets the 10:00 slot? It wasn’t us.

At noon, I ate lunch. At 1:30, the phone rang, it was Leanne. She says (to the distant music of screaming children in the background), that the installer is running late, and he’ll be here by.... what did she say? I think she said 2:00. Oh, and she’s having a marvellous time with her kids. What with all the screaming in the background, I am not so sure about them. But she sounded happy enough.

At 2:10, I realise I mis-heard her. Not 2:00 -- that was on a good day. She must’ve said 3:00.

I looked out the window. Sigh. My one sadness for today. It was sunny. Brilliant, blue-sky sunny. The only day all week we are supposed to get sunshine. I had planned to climb Arthur’s Seat today, the hill just outside Edinburgh with views all the way to... well, it doesn’t matter now.

Sometime between 3:00 and 3:30, someone finally showed up, but by then I had stopped looking at the clock. I wasn’t going hiking today.

He spent a few minutes fretting over cords that didn’t make sense and trying to remember our landlady’s instructions, but that didn’t take very long. As it turns out, he was both friendly and knowledgeable. He apologised for being so late and explained the house he had just come from had Tivo installed, which takes forever to do, and is complicated, and please don’t say we’re having it installed also, because he’d really like to go home and eat dinner with his girlfriend, which he hadn’t been able to do yesterday since he worked until 9:30 last night.

Then he started pulling boxes out of boxes and a unrolled a roll of cable and opened a tool bag David was drooling over. And it was all over in a matter of minutes. Our internet is brilliant, and the television now has more channels than I could ever care about.

At 5:15 I turned on Pointless and prayed for potatoes (I’ve been reading up). And then came my other all-time favourite category: Sports commentators and their sports.

Sigh.

October 16, 2011: Potatoes

I have come to love the game show Pointless. It is rather like reverse Family Feud. The announces tells us “We gave 100 people 100 seconds to name as many______ as they could.” The contestants’ job, then, is to find the answer not one person in a hundred could come up with. The team with the lowest score at the end of the game wins. The topics in the first round are nice and easy: measures of weight, types of rock, types of potatoes.

Potatoes?

When I go to the store, I choose between small round red potatoes known as “red potatoes” or large, longer brown potatoes known simply as “potatoes”. Here in Britain, though, they apparently browse through potatoes as though they were apples. I know there are a million and a half different names for apples, mostly from going to the farmer’s market. However, every small child learns that Red Delicious are red, though not delicious. And Granny Smiths are green, though when I was a child, I never knew anyone who ate them.

On the game show Pointless for the first round, contestants get a multiple choice list to work from. There are sixteen answers. Some of the answers are wrong, thrown in to mess people up. There are 10 contestants. Each person chooses a potato from the list, hoping that it is so uncommonly known so as to produce a low score.

The list came up, and no words I knew associated with potatoes was on the list. No “red” nor “Idaho” nor even “baking”was on the list. I was out of the game. However, every single person said, “Well, I see at least three I know for sure are potatoes, but they are so popular... I’ll have to say _______.” And there would be a flurry of activity around names such as King Edward, Charlotte, and Maris Piper.

What? Every single contestant.

I thought this was some kind of miracle, until I read Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island. In it, he chronicled his trip around England, Wales, and Scotland -- his farewell tour before moving back to the United States. He mentions renting a car, and then getting lost. He stops to turn around in the car park of the Potato Marketing Board. The building is four stories tall, and employs a few hundred people.

Ah hah! I all but yelled in triumph: The Potato Marketing Board! I now understand why every single contestant on Pointless could name a Maris Piper at the age of three.

I have since learned that the Potato Marketing Board is now called the Potato Council, which sounds all the more likely to mount a “Name That Potato” Campaign in earnest. Watch out Deriree, here comes British Queen!

October 13, 2011: The Real Mary King’s Close

I know I said I was in Scotland to visit old stuff. Really, really old stuff, from the Roman times and even earlier. And I have enjoyed that very much, for there were many places along the way: a 5,000 year old house in Orkney, a 1,200 year old church marker in Rosemarkie, and in between visiting the leftovers of when Romans and Vikings roamed the countryside.

Today, though, we detoured into the 17 and 18th centuries, travelling underground to Mary King’s Close.

Stand at the top of the Royal Mile in almost any given doorway along the north side of the street. Look down. There will be a narrow path. It is dark, either covered by the wing of a building, or simply because the buildings are so close together. After that come the stairs. Sloping, the ramps and stairs wind their way between buildings and out to Princes Street Gardens. All the way down the side of the cliff upon which sits the castle are other buildings and narrow walkways.

The narrow walkways are called closes. Mary King’s Close is a narrow street that is now several stories underground.

Just a short jaunt down the hill from Edinburgh Castle is a vast structure with Greek columns and a paved courtyard. It was designed in 1765 to house the merchants guild, although once built, the merchants did not use it (I am still not sure why). Today it’s called the Chambers.

In order to build such a grandiose edifice, and in order for it to be level with the street looking grandiose to someone travelling along the Royal Mile, certain construction had to take place.

The buildings along the Royal Miles are, five, six seven stories above street level, and usually extend as far below street level into the side of the hill. To build the Chambers, 3 or 4 buildings were knocked down, just to street level. On top of that, a floor was laid.

Voila! In no time, they had a neo-classical Merchants Chambers, complete with built-in basement vaults and storerooms, those which used to be houses and closes. In the end,the northern end of four closes and their buildings were turned into the basement vaults of the Chambers.

Underneath the Chambers, life continued as usual, As it was built into a hillside, there were still houses and shops even further down, with entrances to the close at the bottom of the hill.

Under the chambers today is still a subterranean world of rooms and passageways. We stopped in the middle of the close, four floors beneath the Chambers. Looking up we could see the floor above us, see where the houses had been cut off the build the Chambers. Before it was built, the tall houses kept going up. The close is narrow, so that one person could almost, with arms outstretched, touch on the walls, and the open sky was at least eight floors above. In the 1500s, it might have been open to the sky, but I am not sure that was beneficial to very many people.

It is an amazing tour to take, and a refreshing glimpse of reality. For one who often reads novels and watches historical movies, the “happy ending” books never mention the nastiness of open sewers and diseases. They never dwell on the prevalence of crime in a neighbourhood without proper light or law enforcement. It can be difficult to convey the overcrowding, the smell, the dankness.

The close was at one time full of people and animals and garbage and sewage, and a dirt (mud) floor. People lived here. People worked here. The poorest of the poor crowded into rooms several families at a time. The richer ones lived at the top, near the sky, the fresh air, and the light. But down here, was the dark and the crime and the muck. Standing underground in a tiny room with twenty other people, an oil lamp the one light in the room... at least the guide didn’t recreate the sewer.

The building of the Chambers inadvertently elevated the status of Mary King’s Close, giving part of the close a roof, and by the 1890s, there was stone pavement and a sewer. Andrew Chesney lived and worked on Mary King’s Close in the late nineteenth century. He was a saw doctor (as in one who repairs saws, not the music group). By the time he lived there, it was a fine address indeed.

Until the Chambers wanted to expand. In 1892, Andrew Chesney became the last resident of the close, forced to leave his home and shop. All entrances to the close were blocked up; the Chambers added onto the back of the building. Except Andrew Chesney’s home was not demolished. It is as he left it in in 1892. Because it is decrepit and dangerous to enter, we were only allowed to see it from the close, looking into the front door.

It is strange to think that this underground still can only be reached by going through the back of the Chambers. These used to be streets and and shops and houses, but now all that’s left are myths and stories and the empty rooms.

October 12: Old and New Towns

We are staying in a place whose “New Town” was designed in 1766. A 22-year old named James Craig won a competition set forth by the city to design new housing for the overcrowded Edinburgh, all piling up on top of itself in the medieval walled city. The plan of New Town was a grid (a grid -- all nicely laid out!) of houses, streets, and public squares, providing for the wealthy a place to move out from the congestion of Old Town.

I can’t imagine the reaction of people moving in to New Town for the first time: The Old Town is as full of warrens and overhanging roofs and narrow passages as the books tell us. In the 1700s, the congestion and dirt, the over-crowded buildings and lack of discreet waste disposal would have made New Town that much more impressive.

Princes Street, Queen Street, Rose Street, Thistle Street: the thoroughfares are broad, allowing the paving stones to bathe in light. Buildings are tall, but not as tall as necessity built them in the medieval city. When the first families moved in, the area would have been quiet, off-limits to many. Even today, the difference between them is striking.

Towns do change, of course. They expand and work always continues. Princes Street has been closed on and off to traffic while a tram is installed. While the stores in New Town have new storefronts, containing fashionable clothing stores and Starbucks, above the awnings and painted windows still stands the the stone designed by James Craig.

Old Town saw itself ricochet back and forth between prosperity and slums, settling into a respectable tourist haven and student housing (I was overcome with envy when I first saw the University of Edinburgh sign on the door of a residence. Staying in a 300-year old dorm, even one that has been remodelled inside, would have been amazing!).

I walk through streets that haven been in place for centuries. I walk through living neighbourhoods, evolving through the seasons. The flagstones beneath my feet witnessed wars, prosperity, sandals, buckle-shoes, bobby socks, and sneakers. The ever-lasting stone buildings housed tenants of every ilk, their stories varied, their names mostly lost to history.
In both Old and New Towns, history lives in its walls while the future seeps out into environs. Together harmonising into the essence that is Edinburgh.

October 7: Cities

In Edinburgh for all of October. I had forgotten just how many people can try to cram themselves into one area. No stranger to some of the world’s most populous places, living in the heart of Tokyo and Chennai and in Chicago (albeit on the fringe of that one) -- every time I return to a city the sheer number of people takes me by surprise. How could I forget? I ask myself. But I do.

I find myself attempting to discern whether I prefer cities or towns? After a blessedly quiet time at Greenbrae Farm B&B, surrounded by (as the name suggests) fields, I find myself in Edinburgh listening to the sirens and the traffic and the shouting and the doors and the car alarms and the neighbour’s oven timer. The sounds are jarring, difficult to ignore. Trains and airplanes fade into the background, but are always there, an incessant buzzing.

Last night around midnight, I was startled from sleep to the sounds of a mob ... singing? A large group from the sound of it, serenading at least our whole block with melody and percussive hands and garbage dumpsters.

I have, in other times and places, heard one or two people, their drunken song alighting on my window for that brief moment they stagger past. But the last time I heard such a forceful refrain was in Antwerp, the night Belgian won a match in the World Cup. Last night, I found myself wondering who had won? And won what?

There were times this week when I longed for the fields, the wind through the (wheat, corn, barley....fill in the blank with crop of your choice). The crickets, the cows, the “silence” of the countryside. Or I longed for the sounds of the ocean’s silky waves, hitting the shore as fabric against fabric. Soft sounds. Even when the waves crash and the wind stirs in the trees, the noises are unobtrusive. When the lightning and the thunder roll earthward from the sky crashing into the air around me, I feel soothed, comforted.

Then I go shopping. In Edinburgh, as in Chicago, Tokyo, and many a major metropolis, the local dishes are only part of the grocery bag. To complement delicious Scottish cheese, biscuits, beef, milk, fruits and vegetables some additional stops take place. Sausage from the Polish deli. Spices from the Indian market. German chocolate spread. Mexican tortillas. How I soon crave the variety when I do not have it.

Stepping out the door into the city is to to hear a dozen languages being spoken. Being a bus ride from the City Centre is to be twenty minutes from free museums and street festivals (Truthfully, I think Tokyo may have the market cornered on summer festivals, but I was not in Edinburgh during festival season).

Look up in Edinburgh and see the ancient and the modern jostling for place among the skyline. History and modernity live side by side. The city does not forget its roots, but proudly displays them.

People flee from country to city. And from city to country. They each have their virtues, each their downsides. Neither better than the other. Each one needed for what they can provide.