Weekend update

Written October 17

It’s Monday morning and I’m sitting in the living room at 7:55 waiting for the electrical guy to come and do an inspection. The gas guy came last week and the letting agency is sending this guy today too. Brandon didn’t sleep well so I’m up and waiting for a phone call to let him in the building since we don’t know which buzzer outside is ours!

We had a really great weekend. On Saturday we slept in and after a breakfast of loaded scrambled eggs that would’ve made my dad proud, we headed over to the internet café to get caught up. Sent a few emails, Facebook’d a bit and I uploaded my resume to a placement company to see if they can do anything for me. It’s the same company that Brandon had a meeting with on Friday and he said the guy he talked to was really helpful and confident that he would have companies for Brandon to interview with early this week.

After getting our little internet fix, we headed towards Princes Street. We went to Jenners which is the oldest department store in the UK. It’s kind of like Harrod’s in London – five stories of designer goods and apparently just about anything you can imagine. We stuck to the basement floor though for the toy department. Not nearly as good as Hamley’s, but still pretty great.

We walked across the street then and after a slight detour to find a cash machine, we attacked the Scott Monument. There are 287 steps and we climbed them all right to the top. There are four viewing areas and the view just got better and better on each level. But the steps were small and very cramped spirals, especially up to the last level where it got so small that my shoulders were touching both sides of the stairwell. Brandon had to duck and go sideways through part of it. I don’t have evidence of our ascent because I forgot to bring the camera with me, but we do have little certificates that they gave us to put our name on to say we did it.

We made our way to the Royal Mile through a steep close which deposited us on the castle side of the bridges. We stopped for a quick beverage and then crossed over to find the John Knox House. It`s Edinburgh`s oldest surviving tenement building, apparently built around 1490. Knox lived here in the mid 1500`s. On the way there though, Brandon ducked down another close and found a great little shop called Celtic Craft (or something like that). They make kilts by hand and do a great job of it too. One of the proprietors was also a piper so we stood and chatted with them for quite a while. They recommended a couple of pubs to us too where we could find pipers. We did finally find the Knox House, but it was a bit of a disappointment. It was expensive to get in when the only really interesting thing was the painted ceiling in one large room. I’m sure for someone interested in the Presbyterian faith it holds a lot of history, and the information provided was very good. Most notably I learned that Knox was instrumental in forcing Mary Queen of Scots to abdicate the throne in favour of her baby son James. Oh the mess religious fighting has made of things over the years!

Our next stop was into a free museum about life in Edinburgh. It had displaces of how various individuals would have spent their days throughout different ages. I found it a bit creepy because of all the mannequins but it was interesting to learn about life during and after the wars.

Another stop before home at the grocery store and then finally we were done walking for a while. We made a quick supper and then relaxed a bit before getting ready to go out again, this time with pipes on Brandon’s back. We headed back up to the Royal Mile, but this time from the other end, past Holyrood as Brandon has figured out a bit of a shortcut from our place to there. It’s not really faster as it’s still uphill most of the way, but then everywhere you go in this city is mostly uphill! Our first stop was Canon’s Gate Pub where Brandon had stopped in on Thursday while he was handing out resumes. They have live folk music on Saturday nights and though there weren’t many other musicians there yet, they were very welcoming and urged Brandon to play once more people arrived. The pub was pretty much empty for the first half hour but then all of a sudden a huge group came in and it got louder. The guy who seemed to be kind of the leader of the music table sang one song and then Brandon played to much cheering. There were a couple more songs and then as it turned out, that large group was a choir who was in the pub to celebrate the concert they’d just performed. It didn’t take very much convincing to get them to sing holy crap that was an experience. The voices were coming from every direction around us and the harmonies were perfect. I don’t know what they were singing, I’m pretty sure it was Latin, but it was absolutely incredible. They sang again later on and it was just as stunning. Someone commented that who’s ever been to church while in a pub before?!

Brandon played twice more there and then we decided to try a place the kilt maker guy had told us about, but it was not as much fun. It is supposedly the place pipe bands go when they’re in town and judging by all the photos of bands from around the world on the walls, I believe that’s true. But there was an odd sounding duo singing in the corner, no pipes to be seen, and the crowd was far from what we were expecting. Brandon talked to the bar tender and one other guy who had pipes there and I guess we just caught it on a bad night. We’ll have to try again. We caught a cab home after being flirted with by a man dressed in a mini-kilt, heals and a blond wig and called the evening a grand success.

Sunday we woke up late-ish again, made breakfast and Brandon played a few games of chess on the computer. It was sunny and mostly clear so we were just getting ready to head out to climb Arthur’s Seat when Jesse called and invited us to spend the day with him and Katie. We met them up on Leith Walk and we headed to the seaside in the neighbourhood of Portobello to have lunch, and then we drove out of town to what they were calling our surprise location. We ended up in a tiny little village and parked beside a house with a rather wooded backyard. We headed out into the woods a bit till we came to what looked like a pile of sticks with a few leaves on top. “Go in!” they told us so we crouched down and walked into the pile, which is actually a yew tree. A roughly two-thousand-year-old yew tree, that is. It was beautiful and somehow it didn`t seem possible that what we were standing in the middle of was all the same tree. We were completely surrounded by branches that twisted and dipped and dove underground only to come back up ten feet away creating what looked like a whole new tree. The light was coming in at the perfect angle to make everything seem rather ethereal and standing there felt a little like being in a magical, fairy tale place. The photos I took don`t do it justice, but at least they give an idea of what we saw.

The drive back into Edinburgh was an adventure too. The roads are twisty and windy and though nothing like in Canada, the scenery did feel a little like home. This part of the country has very rich farmland and though it was odd to see, there were still many fields full of crops. There are rolling hills and stone fences and small wooded areas along the way which could almost make someone forget they`re in one of the rainiest countries in the world. But as we were coming through a little town called Haddington the car started making a rather awful noise and it smelled hot. Katie pulled over, the boys jumped out, and it was determined that the calliper on one of the front brakes was seized up. Katie called AA (AMA back home) and a super nice guy came out to rescue us. He couldn`t fix it so Brandon and I rode with him in his van while Katie and Jesse stayed in the car to steer as he pulled the car on a tow bar. He chatted to us the whole way into the city and told us all about how Scottish hospitality has changed since he was a boy. Jesse and Katie were so sorry that our day ended like that and that we had to take the bus home from their part of the city, but we were honestly just so happy to have spent the day out.

We made soup and sandwiches for supper and then watched a DVD on the computer. There`s a little video store about a block away that sells old movies for 2 pounds or so and in the absence of tv, that and playing cards have been our entertainment lately. Movie over, we played a couple hands of 31, had a good long talk about religion of all things, and then put ourselves to bed. A great weekend I think!