23 Jul 2012: Passive-Aggressive Photography

23 Jul 2012: Passive-Aggressive Photography

Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

H: 18 L: 14 Weather: Rain (sometimes heavy)

The 23rd of July was the kind of Scottish day that you hear about all the time: cool, wet, and windy.  Not exactly the most pleasant weather to be traveling in.  But Scottish people tend to not let the weather get to them, and I resolved to mimic their resolve in ignoring the rain.  Plus, I had places I wanted to see that were indoors.

First on the list was visiting the National Museum of Scotland, which was enormous and, most importantly, free, which is one of the best things about the UK.  It's a lovely place - the most random conglomeration of exhibits possible.  There were five wings to it: the natural history wing, the foreign cultures wing, the style and fashion wing, the science and technology wing, and the "LOL SCOTLAND YAY" wing.  The problem is, each wing could have been a perfectly self-respecting museum of its own, so trying to cover it all in a few hours was basically impossible.  I spent most of my time in the "LOL SCOTLAND YAY" wing, because I figured it would be the most unique to the museum, but I also checked out the natural history and science and technology wings, because why not?  It reminded me very much of Alex Smith, because everything was Celtic studies.  Everything.

I also played around with my camera settings a bit, to get the right time and to try to figure out why the camera kept taking awful pictures.  As I discovered, turning the camera to "Aquarium Mode" (which is apparently a mode) is great for museums, because it no longer thinks that the glare from overhead lights is the object I'm trying to take pictures of.  A bit odd.

Next, I met up with my friend Vasco, and we headed down to the Scottish Parliament, another thing we could see despite the rain.  Apparently tours of the Scottish Parliament were all cancelled the day that we went there for some random reason (and besides, the security guard said, we should book a week in advance.  er, yeah, oops, leaving the next day.), but we were able to wander around on our own and see the place.  It's a quite striking building, though one of its best features, its ample windows everywhere, was spoiled by the fact that the views out of the windows were largely of other parts of the building.  I'm not really sure why they did that.  The main chamber, though, is really, really impressive, and seems like it would be rather comfortable to sit in.

While we were ogling the parliament, I decided it would be a good idea to take a picture in front of the Parliament with Vasco and his girlfriend.  However, none of us are particularly straightforward, so, rather than asking someone to take a picture, we ended up saying to each other, repeatedly, "Jee, it would be nice for us to get a picture together here" and speculating whether we should ask someone to take a picture of us rather than, you know, actually following through.  Finally someone took pity on us and offered to take a picture.  Hooray for Minnesota!

After that, our random wanderings up towards the castle took us by a shopping mall, and we went in to avoid the rain.  Inside, we found a place called "Americandy", which sold what it claimed was American candy.  It wasn't entirely - neither all American (lots of British candy) nor all candy (Lucky Charms and other cereals were there in abundance).  Entertainingly, the store had some American flags on the walls, but flags with 55 stars.  I suppose the store was showing solidarity with the statehood movements for DC, Puerto Rico, Guam/the Northern Marianas, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands.  Happily, though, Americandy had Happy Cola, which is THE BEST CANDY EVER OMGZ AM I RIGHT SAM/PETER/JUSTIN???

After hanging out with Vasco for a while, it was time to be off for dinner with Zoe, who's going to be entering a closely-related PhD program (i.e., the Linguistics program) at Maryland this fall.  We decided to go out for fish and chips at the University of Edinburgh student union after she led me on an entertainingly informative tour of some of Edinburgh's historical sites.  Unfortunately for us, the student union was completely closed, and was instead covered in trippy-colored lights that changed quite a bit while we were standing there.  We headed to a different pub instead.

When I got back to the hostel, about to pass out, a pleasant situation awaited me in my dorm: not only was there no one else in my room, but my clothes were freshly cleaned and folded sitting by my bed!  I had dropped them off earlier that day, knowing they'd be cleaned, but I definitely wasn't expecting them to be folded as well.  It was crazy, and all for £3.50.  I definitely recommend Castle Rock if you stay in Edinburgh in the future and want to have a hostel experience!

Instead of heading to bed, though, I had to work on catching up on emails and blog posts, and my plans to get to sleep at a decent time were foiled.  Ah, well!