Last week I walked into my professor's office. Without exaggeration, it literally looks like this. When we walked in he turned to me and chuckled in apology, saying that he's been meaning to organize his office but hasn't gotten around to it yet. I'm fairly certain he's been saying that for 20 years. And writing this now I see how when you don't write down your thoughts for a while, your mind begins to feel like a professor's cluttered office. What do you toss out, and what do you save? A lot occurred this week and I'll do my best to organize it below.
Getting to Edinburgh (pronounced like Edin-brah, or like Edin-burrow among Americans) was quite a feat, and I don't really know how I was really able to get there. I've been telling people that I "wandered" from Dublin to Edinburgh rather than traveled, using whatever street smarts I have, trusting random Good Samaritans with their directions. The journey began in my friend's Dublin apartment Wednesday night when we had a little too much cider. After that we went out and after purging once realized it was time to go home. After getting home, it happened a second time on the front of our apartment and I ended up falling asleep at my kitchen table. I woke up two hours later with Brad's help and with a sizable red mark on my forehead. Still feeling awful, I eventually got on the Ryanair jet. Because the tickets don't cost much, they try to charge you for whatever they can, whether by convincing you to purchase their brand name luggage, scratch lotto cards, cigarettes, or a 6 euro cup of coffee that you assume is free but isn't from the drink cart moving down the aisle. I fell asleep on the plane and before I knew it I was in Scotland and with a massive headache.
I was a little nervous about the prospect of having to answer the custom agent's questions, and was delighted when I found out you don't need to pass through customs when traveling from one EU country to the next. I then left the airport and bought a cheap ticket to the city center. I sat on the second level of the bus at the front window and got a look at this city for the first time. It's really marvelous and now that I have a camera I was even able to take pictures!
At this point it was 8 in the morning and I got off the bus at the city center and somehow, without a phone or directions, was able to find my friend Jenny's flat. Though we thought we'd try to get more sleep, after 10 minutes of talking she decided we weren't going to fall asleep so we left her place and got breakfast. After breakfast I got an immediate tour of some of the city. We went back to the city center, walked around the National Gallery art museum, and explored a church. After a while it was getting too difficult for me to walk straight, so we went back and took a 2 hour, much needed nap.
She had class that afternoon so I decided to go on one of my random, directionless adventures around the city. I walked around for about three hours and got as far as the opposite side of Edinburgh before I decided to find my way back. This is a really beautiful city with many old and narrow buildings peopling the inclining cobblestone streets. It was a workout getting around all the hills and well worth it. That night I met some of Jenny's friends and we went pub crawling.
The next day three more people traveling from Paris came to Edinburgh and stayed in the same flat. Two of them were from WashU who I hadn't met before. We ended up hanging out as one big group the entire weekend and it was a lot of fun. We started off that night by taking a ghost tour of old Edinburgh. This was meant to be scary, but wasn't really. What was actually frightening though were the descriptions of how they used to torture people back a few hundred years ago. The tour guide was very good in describing what they used to do, and had no problem painting extremely graphic pictures in our heads. I don't understand how people were able to come up with the ritualistic ways in which they tortured people, but humankind surely has quite a lot of evil blood on its hands. It's shameful how societies would murder and torture people without a trial or proper evidence. To get executed by the government someone simply had to be accused of witchcraft, and what would follow for them would be the most brutal, humiliating forms of torture up until the final point of execution. I was considering writing down some of the anecdotes the tour guide told us regarding what they would do to people, but I don't want it on this blog.
Heaviness aside, we had a great night after that. One of the WashU students from Paris is training for the Olympic ski team and has connections through his sponsors, so we got into a club called Bongo that night without having to pay the 8 pound cover since one of his sponsors was also sponsoring the club. One of the best DJ's in Europe supposedly was there that night, and the place became a mini-rave. The beer, vomit, sweat, and whatever other questionable substances on the floor of the place are still crusted to my brown shoes.
We slept late the next day, and I went off and explored Edinburgh a little more. For those Harry Potter fans out there, you'll appreciate this. We went to a cool cafe called Elephant House where J.K. Rowling was discovered. This place is a pilgrimage spot for Harry Potter fans everywhere, and tells a story all by itself. J.K. Rowling is now one of the richest women in the U.K. (supposedly richer than the Queen, though if you take a walk through Buckingham Palace that place is so loaded with so many priceless gems that it's hard to say what the monetary values are based on) and has written the most widely sold series in history, and she started out on welfare checks, writing away in a cafe.
Saturday was definitely the most memorable (and entertaining) night. There was a long pre-game that turned into a party with abroad students and some Scotsmen. We went out after that, but by the end of the night, multiple people had gotten sick and someone had even gone to the bathroom on one of the girl's bedroom floor in the middle of the night, sleepwalk style.
My favorite experience in Edinburgh was definitely climbing Arthur's Seat. This may have been the most beautiful place I've ever climbed. The mountain itself is covered with grass, boulders and cliffs. It formed about 250 million years ago as an active volcano, but has been dormant for epochs, and as it sits in its current location, Edinburgh expands around it. It's a good thing I've been running three times a week, because the mountain trek upwards is mostly on a 50 degree incline. But people are like dangling puppets on the fringes. Like me, many people walked up this mountain holding onto their coats, sweating through there shirts (maybe that's just me), stopping at different points for a rest or to take pictures, but then ultimately keep climbing. At the top, for those like me who looked like this was their first time at the top, there was silence. When I reached the top I couldn't help but laugh a little. It was so brilliant I'd never seen anything like it before. I think I was up there for an hour, and was sad when the sun was settling and I had to go back down. But like Connemara near Galway, this is the kind of place that can't be described in words or pictures. It reminded me of a painting in a Contemporary Art gallery I wandered into two days before the climb. There was a big canvas on the wall painted with thick oils in three or four basic colors that constructed a landscape. I've had a lot of conversations with people about what makes contemporary art so respectable (shout out Joe Winograd) and I am starting to understand it. Looking at the painting in that gallery, I had to imagine what the artist was looking at when he was painting, and what he left out: birds, small towns, clouds, bland colors. By doing this I start to imagine my own landscape based on the painter's. When I was in Connemara, at the Ross Errilly Friary (see "Weekend Trip to Galway"), the guide said that the building's strength is in the fact that it's in ruins, which allows the viewer to reconstruct a more powerful picture than what the preservation team can reconstruct for you. No one would be able to adequately paint what they see at the top of Arthur's Seat, though there are many wonderful attempts, and in that regard I think the simple, minimalist techniques of modern art are more appropriate for this. This is where I stop trying to sound like I know anything about art criticism.
I left the next day from Edinburgh on an 8 am flight back to Dublin. I then went to three classes throughout the day, and called it a night at 8:30 by watching Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and then going to sleep. I got a much needed 10 hours in bed and feel much better today with the memories of Edinburgh still on my mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment