Subject: Scotland part 6 of 10 Date: Wed, 07 Jun 95 09:25:48 -0700 The morning was madcap. Robert knocked on the door a couple of times and then poked his head in to tell us that it was 8am. both of us usually sleep pretty much naked and 'twas rather startling to have him do that. But it definitely woke me up. John and I dressed and meandered down to find the family in the early morning chaos of 'getting ready to go'. A swirl of action all around me, and I was feeling sleepy enough as it was. It was fun to watch in a lot of ways, 'cause the interactions that that family has is really cool. We said our good-byes and thanks, then. Much thanks for the care they'd given us and all the time they'd managed to find to take care of us. That was really neat. After they left I showered, we packed, and then hauled everything back down to the car. I take back everything I've ever said about British showers. The shower that the Glovers had in the kids' bathroom was a very, very nice shower, though it did have the difference in controls in that one knob was for the volume of water and the other knob was for the temperature. It was so very, very nice, though, to just shower and get completely awake. I'm still *not* a morning person, and a shower is exactly what I need to get my brain in gear. So we headed out of Edinburgh, got to the toll bridge that was north of Edinburgh and got off the freeway at a service stop and tried to call Mel, whom we'd tried to call in Edinburgh, but the phone had been busy. This time we got through, but weren't able to give him a number to call us back, so we found another pay phone and called him from there. That worked. He called us back, and then gave us good instructions on how to get to the Dundee railroad station, which was pretty central to town and had fairly cheap parking besides. We got there pretty easily. After learning what we wanted to eat, he took us of to an Indian restaurant which wasn't going to be open for another five minutes. On the way there we'd seen a toy store, and John wanted to wander through it to see if there were any Land Rover toys he could get for home. There weren't, but then Mel had the coolest idea of taking us into a Virgin Megastore. Virgin is a recording label, and a megastore is kinda like our Tower Records in that they have not only music but videos and other such things as well. I was *very* envious. On a display case in the front of the store were the 'new' anime selections, which included anime I hadn't even *heard* of as well as the first four episodes of Dominion and a Akira stapes. it was astonishing to see them displayed that prominently in the store. Furthermore there were shelves and shelves of anime in one of the back corners to the store!!! I WANT this kind of SELECTION IN THE US!!! Mel then took us to a magazine store where we got a magazine on anime. They also had Flakes, 5 for a pound, and apple Tango, which is an apple based carbonated soft drink, three for the price of two. Yum. So I bought three of those as well. THEN we left for the restaurant. The food was inexpensive and absolutely excellent. We each had an appetizer (paktori?), a plate full of rice, a curry and then coffee, tea, or ice cream. As usual, I had the lamb, while John had the chicken and Mel had the beef. Mel also ordered a nan (a giant flat bread with butter on top ) that went really well with the meal and we talked about land rovers, football, and other things. It was fun getting to interact with him in real time compared to the fun and silly stuff that we wrote each other just for the fun of it in email. Mel also told us that we should try an 'Aberdeen butt'ry' sometime, so we'll have to do that. He also said that there would, most likely be some football on, if late at night, as the cup playoffs were to be this weekend. We'd come at the end of the season, sadly, so we probably wouldn't see much more after the weekend; but we might get to see some things before then. So off we went again, up north, following the signs to Inverness, getting off the road just south of the city to go to the tourist board shop and reserve our room for the night with an idea of going further north, so to be closer to the ferry docks 'cause we had to get there by eleven the next day in order to keep our reservations. The ferry wouldn't leave until noon, but best to be there early. So the lady there booked us a room in a B&B that was just an hour from the ferry. She also gave us detailed instructions as to how to find a coin-op launderette in Inverness' downtown, including parking in the Testco supermarket parking lot instead of anywhere else. The instructions were exact and we got there easily and spent about an hour in the launderette listening to a couple of American tourists with a guided tour talking about home and about how the woman was going to Paris, next and was already so tired of traveling she didn't care. She left fairly soon after I'd started my load and John went soon after, with camera and pounds for change in hand. He loves wandering about a completely new town and seeing what there is to see, I was content to just sit and type and watch the laundry through the window. I don't usually get to *see* the machine do the washing, and it was fun watching it through the cycles. John came back to give me an apple pop and some crisps and then run off again. Yum. Tea. When it was nearly done, the rain outside turned into hail, bigger than BB's and smaller than marbles... weird, cold weather. The locals have been saying that it's unseasonably cold, while John runs around in shorts and T-shirts. When the hail started down John came back into the shop and helped me transfer the stuff from the washer to the dryer and then ran off again. Nearly 60p later, it still wasn't dry, so we swapped dryers and another 20p later it was dry, but one of my bright yellow socks went missing. Drat. The laundry lady undid the drier front to look underneath the beast, as it had a habit of eating socks... just that one dryer, no others. We didn't find it, sadly, so we've left a sock as a sacrifice to the laundry troll for our safe journeying. The trip up to the B&B was utterly beautiful. The sky was crowded with individual clouds, some of which were dark and just dumping rain in curtains as they came by, some were just white and fluffy and some few were missing and only had blue sky to follow. The sunshine was lovely. It was patchy like that all the way up, and the rain clouds in all directions to the horizon looked almost surreal to me. I knew that I could easily do the visual affect of those clouds with water colors, but I'd never *seen* that phenomenon in nature before, where the rain is coming down so thickly under a cloud that it was a *dark* gray curtain. The B&B was marvelous, and old farm house and there were two rooms available as we were the only people that were staying, one had a shower, and a very small bathroom, the other had a lovely bathtub and a very large, spacious bathroom with a large skylight. It also had a bottle of foam bath on the ledge. I choose the one with the bathtub, fully intending to have a bath before going to sleep. The lady that ran the place had pulled a section from the paper just the weekend before on the Orkney Islands and the chair in our room that we'd picked was from Orkney, a basket woven chair, it was beautiful. She also pulled out a stack of information on the Orkneys and when we asked about dinner she told us of the three restaurants in town and the relative merits of the owners and cooks of each of the three establishments. She said that the Bridges restaurant in the Bridges Hotel was 'plain but good' and said various comments about the other places that had us deciding, fairly quickly that we wanted something 'plain but good.' She also said that it would close fairly soon, so we should get there quickly. So we piled back into the car without bothering to unload it and drove through the clear twilight along the directions she'd given us. The sky still had those rafts of clouds, but also large clear spaces. The only waiter was the barman, and he said that we could sit in the bar, and it'd be faster to order. So we sat in the very smoky bar, decided on what we wanted to drink, what we wanted to eat, and then ordered. I wanted the lamb chops with boiled potatoes (No Chips! ) and a lemonade while John wanted the grilled salmon steak with a pint of Theakston bitter, with deep fried mushrooms with garlic mayonnaise as a starter. The waiter stared at us as if he'd seen a ghost. "This is spooky," he said, "the couple that sat at this table just yesterday ordered exactly the same things, except that she had a bitter lemon instead of a lemonade." We sipped our drinks and I thought dire thoughts at the smokers, and then the bartender came to us to ask us to 'go through to our dinners.' I looked at him kind of blankly and he asked us if we wanted to eat in the dinning room instead of the bar. Yes. Please. We sat with my back to the fire, where it was warm and wonderful, and the food came nearly immediately. The mushrooms were crisply shelled, and cooked just long enough to cook them through, but not so long they'd shriveled. The food was excellent. There were actually fresh cucumber and tomato on each plate along with onion rings on my chops, a cooked tomato and some brussel sprouts that were still green. The potatoes were brought in a bowl with their skins still on, and were fairly small, so we could pick and choose as we liked. That was really neat. I also asked for butter, and that worked out well. I love lamb chops, and these were very tender and very well done, though I'd asked for medium rare. They were quite good, though, anyway. After dinner I still had some room for dessert and the waitress had to go back and ask about all the desserts 'cause she couldn't remember them all. The first was a sherry trifle, the second was 'Eve's Pudding'... and she went on with chocolate cake and a few other things, but then I asked what an Eve's Pudding was. She said it was an apricot pudding with apple and cream... so I got that. The 'pudding' was a dense, rich egg cake set in hot apple sauce with cream poured along one side. It was really, really good. John's trifle was a lot better than the one that I'd had at the other place, filled with a variety of fruit, the same dense cake that I had in my 'pudding' crumbled up and well sherried and creamed. Oooof and Yum. We were really full by the time we finished. We paid, complimented the waitress on the excellence of the meal and then went outside to find that the sky was just *pouring* down rain. Why doesn't the sky empty when it rains all day? We ran to the car, and then drove back to the B&B, hauled out all our letter writing and postcard stuff and sat down in the livingroom with the TV on and John constantly changing the channels to find what he could about soccer and we sat down and wrote quietly. As we were in the middle of all that, the lady brought in a tea tray with a full tea set and what looked like homemade butter shortbread, and a few tinned biscuits as well, one pair of digestives, one pair of coconut based biscuits. All of which were slowly enjoyed as they were packed in on top of the huge dinner. It was thoroughly luxurious. I can't imagine anything that could be an American equivalent... having a full double room with a lovely bath, the use of a livingroom, full tea plus a breakfast one simply can't *get* in the U.S. all for two people and it's all for about $50 US. No way, anywhere else. After tea and nearly eight postcards later, we went up to the room and I drew myself a bath. She'd warned us, but it was interesting to find that the water was very much brown. We'd seen a river earlier in the day of driving, and the water was clear as clear could be but dark brown in color, which really surprised me. Turns out that it picks up that color simply by running through the peat. The water is perfectly safe and perfectly fine, it's just brown. My bath was brown and sudsy... I poured a good measure of the bubble bath that had been sitting by the bathtub into the bath and after getting ready for bed, I gently lower myself into the bath and sighed. Deeply. Reminded me of the hot tub, in some ways, but it felt so good to just close my eyes and relax and not have to think... Of course I thought. Since we'd lost the sock, I was thinking about other 'Urban fairy tales'... things that need explaining 'cause they only happen in the modern world and wondered what kinds of stories could come of things like 'what keep the refrigerator light on when you open it?' 'why does the last half the gas in the gas tank always go much faster than the first half?' Also contemplating that in old times people put roses on their clothes in order to protect the people that wore them. Since rose thorns protected roses, they sough to invoke some sympathetic magic to protect their loved ones. But as a result of their popularity roses are now cultivated to be without thorns and when cultivated simply to get lopped off, so the magic clearly no longer works and I wondered what the modern equivalent was... and realized that U.S. Social Security numbers were rather equivalent. They used to symbolize security into old age, and so people invoked 'sympathetic magic' by using the very same number for other transactions that they wanted secure, sympathetic magic, but that magic was already breaking down, again due to the popularity... but after finding myself jerking back awake I decided that it was time to get out of the bath. So I got out and went to John and asked him about the 'Just So' questions he might think of, and had fun talking about them with him until I went to sleep, warm and relaxed. If any of you who are reading this have good ideas, I'd love to hear them, and I bet some of 'em will turn into stories, someday. ------ end part 6 of 10 ----- Copyright 1995 by Phyllis L. Rostykus. All rights reserved.