Up in the Highlands (the Highlands of Scotland)

It has been a completely nuts month (or two), and I have this distinct feeling (in the form of two essays with every-approaching due dates) that it isn't about the calm down any time soon. But nuts=fun (or in Cosette's case asphyxiation and possible death, but you know what I mean), and it was also completely amazing to have my friends come visit me and remind me why I actually do want to go home at the end of this year, instead of abandoning my frigid subzero homeland and adopting a fake accent.

So. Adrienne arrived to visit on January 25th. Cosette arrived on January 29th. Adrienne left on February 5th, Cosette on february 15th. In between those times, many wacky adventures. You can fill in the details yourselves.
All right, kidding. Adrienne and I had a low-key, relaxing visit. She took a yoga instructor course over the summer, so gave Anita and me informal yoga classes in the living room (resulting in a very nasty case of fore-arm carpet burn). She also kicked my ass into healthier living, particularly by throwing away my jumbo back of white pasta and buying about 10 pounds of tofu. We had a couple of dinner parties/potlucks at my flat, which was a nice way to introduce her to my friends; also, we played charades. Seriously. And the best part about a party full of international students is that a whole bunch of them have never even heard of charades, and teaching 20-year-olds to play charades is hilarious. Or painful. Whatever.

Shortly after Cosette's arrival was the weekend of Maya's birthday, which turned out to be a mob of Canadians set loose on Glasgow. There are advantages and disadvantages to travelling in large groups. There were, I think, nine or ten of us there (and about eight of those were Canadians, strangely enough); so on the plus side we brought the party wherever we were going. On the downside, making decisions with that many people is very tricky. There was a lot of getting separated, text messaging, wandering, etc. However, the real reason we were in Glasgow was for two concerts - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on Saturday and the Decemberists on Sunday - and both the concerts were amazing successes. CYHSY was a kind of moshy, sweaty, beer-throwing type of gig (weird British fact #314: at concerts, people line up for ages to get a pint of beer, only to throw it across the crowd, drenching everyone in beer), and at one point Cosette asked a guy in front of us to stop being so tall or something, and he decided that meant we were best friends forever, and kept putting his arms around us, and we were RIGHT at armpit level, and he was totally drenched. So that was... sanitary.

The Decemberists concert was absolutely perfect. The audience was much calmer and more sober, and there was room along the edges, on these raised platforms, to both see the performers and dance. There were even more of us, because my friend Sam (Cosette was amazed that I have any male friends at all) came over Sunday evening. We ended up splitting up, because some of us - me, Maya, Helen, Adrienne, Cosette and Sam - wanted to stay on the sidelines where we had a good view and room to dance, while the rest wanted to get into the thick of things. The Decemberists are totally incredible performers, too, with tons of audience interaction/mocking, which I always love. That was pretty much the best gig I've ever been to, and I think everyone else really enjoyed it - it's always stressful trying to find things to do that everyone will enjoy, and while Cosette is the absolute most laid back person in the universe (except when it comes to sandwhich size) sometimes I really get the impression I'm slowly torturing Adrienne by forcing her to leave the house. But I think she had fun. I hope.

Anyway. Sunday night was all downhill from there, because we just missed the 11:00 bus back to Edinburgh, so we caught the midnight, which got us back to our flat by about 1:30, at which Adrienne spent about an hour and a half cooking various meals, from scratch, to take on the plane with her. We lay down for about an hour, then I walked her to the bus station to catch the shuttlebus to the airport. I ended up going to sleep at around 5 in the morning, half dead. Very traumatizing.

A key advantage to having a friend much cooler than me (i.e. Cosette) visit: everyone likes me more because of her. So Darcy, this lovely girl from London who I'd been hanging out with a bit, started hanging out with us way more, and Anita also went from shy and evasive to completely extroverted and fun. I'm drawing a total blank on the events of Tuesday through Thursday here. I know we walked around the city and explored a bit more, climbed Arthur's Seat about a thousand times because Cosette was SO pleased with this big seat in my backyard, and of course I went to the dreaded class. Cosette came along to my art history class a couple of times, and was thus proof positive that it is the absolute worst class ever.

But the real adventure, of course, was our wacky advenuture in the Highlands (of Scotland - not Tibet). It was me, Cosette, Darcy and Helen. We left Thursday night on a bus to Inverness, the capital of the Highlands (meaning the only place in the Highlands with tofu and an H&M, quite the cultural mecca). We spent the night there in this cool hostel, made cool by its astonishing proximity to the bus station, and its really huge and well-equipped kitchen that allowed us to go buy the makings of real food instead of choking our arteries up with pub lunches all weekend. We went that night to this great bar/pub called Hootenany, which is amazing because it has live music every night. There's trad (Scottish folk music - I swear this will catch on) on the first floor, and then something for the younger crowd, like blues or jazz or rock, on the second floor. As those who know me well will anticipate, we spent most of our time on the first floor. I just really like fiddlers. And the local organic beer was amazing.

Friday morning was all travel. We took the bus from Inverness to Ullapool, a little fishing town on the West coast, where we had a quick breakfast at a totally charming little cafe, then caught the ferry out to the Isle of Lewis. It was a length ferry ride, almost four hours in good weather, but a gorgeous view, with the ocean and all the craggy islands and snow-capped mountains in the distance. We arrived in Stornoway, the only real city on the Island, a little after one. We'd been debating renting a car all the way over, because freedom like that on a scarcely populated island is invaluable, but we were worried about price, and about our driving-on-the-wrong-side skill. Also the availability of automatics, because everyone in the UK seems to drive standard, which is dead to me. It turned out to be completely easy. The rental guy was even in town when we called him, and picked us up at the bus station and drove us to the airport, and it was £30 for two days, which is how much the bus would have cost the four of us anyway, so the only additional expenditure was gas, and this is the longest sentence in the world. Yeesh. Anyway. Cosette opted to drive first, and then turned out to adore driving our snazzy little french car down the winding, empty Scottish roads, so she did all the driving - which was fine with me, because I really don't want to be responsible for the deaths of anyone, let alone my friends. Or some innocent sheep.

So, in brief, the Isle of Lewis is incredible. And incredibly empty. There are these incredible sights, like the most intact standing stones in the UK, which are more impressive than Stonehenge but never visited because they're so hard to get to, and a great old Bronze Age tower that you can climb like a jungle gym. Lack of tourists means these incredible things are just open to visit whenever you feel like, and they don't have to worry about damage as much so you can really just climb all over them if you want. Lack of tourists also means there isn't really an established youth hostel; instead there's this thing called the Hebridean Trust, where basically the community chooses a building and a local person to be the warden, and that's the hostel. In this case it was in a reconstructed Black House village, black houses being stone cottages sunk into the ground to keep the wind out, with no windows and thatched rooves. We arrived before dark along winding roads that led us right to the edge of the Atlantic, and there was the little squat collection of black houses amid craggy hills, wandering sheep, and the ocean right there in the background - so beautiful. Of course, we had to wander around knocking on doors to find the warden (or in Cosette's case, just ask ANYONE who happened to be driving down the road if he was the warden... oh that Cosette...). During this knocking exercise we also managed to find out where the shop was - referred to as "the shop" because there is one on the entire West coast of the island, and it was really great that we had a car because it was about two towns over. Question: what makes these clusters of houses count as towns if they have neither shop nor pub? Don't ask me. We drove down to the Butt View Shop (possibly the other reason she called it "the shop" was the super-embarrassing name), where we bought carrots and potatoes and barley and made a huge vat of soup in the surprisingly well-equipped black house kitchen. I added the entire bag of barley, and it gradually absorbed all the water throughout the evening, until our soup was actually a pot of barley with a couple of carrots if you knew where to look. Still living that one down. The only downside of our incredibly cheap, beautiful and atmospheric hostel was its shocking level of coldness. We spent the evening drinking pot after pot of tea and doing vodka shots in between to keep warm - and when we went to bed we stole all the comforts off all the other beds (we were, shockingly, the only youth visiting the Isle of Lewis in February - who knew?) and made ourselves giant cocoons, and then wept softly whenever we had to get out to evactuate some of that tea. Fucking tea.

The theme of our trip was actually things being surprisingly convenient. All of the travel went smoothly, the car rental was almost too easy... on our way back from the Isle of Lewis on Saturday, the weather was really bad, so the ferry ride took way longer, but the bus connecting from Ullapool back to Inverness waited for us. Also, besides that choppy crossing, the weather was great, chilly but clear; it rained for maybe five seconds in Inverness, but it was while we were having lunch. Saturday night we got back to Inverness, made ourselves another health-tastic dinner (tofu stirfry and rice this time), then went out to (where else?) Hootenany to hear an incredible Scottish fiddler.

Sunday continued the theme of astonishing convenience. We slept in a bit, and when we woke up realized we'd missed the only convenient bus out to Loch Ness, which was really disappointing. So we had breakfast and went to the bus station to double check; the second we walked in, an old man named Jim walked up to us and asked if we were trying to get to Loch Ness. When we said we were, he said he was a tour bus driver and they were about to leave but there was still room for us. So we hopped onto Jim's tour bus, which took us along the shore of Loch Ness to a dock, where we got onto a boat that took as down the length of the lake right up to the remains of Urquhart Castle; then Jim picked us up again, took us to the Loch Ness 2000 exhibit (complete with videos, cool thematic rooms, and a gift shop with every imagineable representation of Nessie, stuffed), then back to Inverness. My (and possibly everyone's) favourite part of Jim's tour was his running monologue. Jim, you see, is about 100 years old, and has lived near Loch Ness his entire life, so his commentary was mainly about his wacky youthful adventures, like going across the loch to get drunk at the new Hotel and then rowing back across pissed. Oh, Jim. Once again, travelling in low season proved fruitful, because Loch Ness is usually packed with tourists, but there were maybe six other people on the tour with us. No luck finding the monster, but we faked it plenty, and caught THAT on camera, which is close enough.

The rest of our day in Inverness was very indulgent. We had lunch at the poshest place in town, where the servers were very unimpressed with the fact that we only ordered water and kept asking for refills of the bread basket, but the food was delicious. Then we went to Primark (the cheapest shop in the universe, where you can buy shirts for, like, £2, and where I got a fantastically piratical belt that everyone else in the UK has but I really don't care, it's SO piratical, and sidenote I was just invited to a pirate-themed party, so yay me!) and then walked around town a bit. Inverness is a really lovely place, with the River Ness cutting right through the middle, and lots of churches and great old pubs. There was a lot of talk about going to some obscure little pub and drinking with salty old men, but of course when it came down to it we went right back to Hootenany, where four old men were singing traditional Scottish ballads, and we got totally trashed on red wine.

Monday morning we caught the bus back, and then pretty much spent the next couple of days recovering from how much shere geographical distance we'd just covered in four days. Cosette and my final adventure together involved an evening climb of Arthur's Seat. We'd decided we wanted to see the sun set over it, which as it turns out is a terrible idea because you see the sun set (in our case, covered by clouds), and then have to climb back in the dark. And just to add bad decisions to bad decisions, we took a route we'd never taken before, which turned out to be very tricky, especially in the increasing dusk. However, we would have been just fine, Cosette being tough and me pretending to be tough so as not to embarrass her, but a family of tourists had followed us down, and got stuck on one of the trickier parts, and the mother started freaking right out. Like, shrieking uncontrollably. Then when we got out of their range of vision, they called us back and asked us to help them. So then, not only did we have to find our way down, but we were also responsible for the welfare of this family; and because we had to wake for them to inch along, it got completely, pitch black before we managed to get down. We did manage it, though, in one piece, with a very grateful family, and much bitterness on our part. Then we went to Darcy's and ate a chocolate cake I'd made and watched Muriel's Wedding, and that made everything better.

The excitement level in my life has gone WAY down since. For one thing, the excursions up Arthur's Seat have been waylaid by all the rain. The whole time Adrienne and Cosette were here, the weather was perfect, with blue skies and mild temperatures - but of course the second Cosette left it turned back to typical Scottish weather, which occasional patches of blue broken up by much grayness and rain. It's raining right now, and I'm supposed to do my laundry today, but I really don't want to go out in that rain. Yech. My main source of excitement now is essay-writing. And looking forward to Easter break at the end of March, because Darcy is going to take me on a mini-tour of England (I think London, Bath, and possibly Brighton).

Oh yeah, I also have new flatmates, and I'm getting along pretty well with them. Last night we made fajitas together and then played card games all night, and had a blast. They're both very sweet, definitely not the partying types, but for an evening in they're a blast. So, in conclusion, the Canadians took all the excitement back home with them, and life is back to normal. The end!