Scotland, Disorientation

"Venezuela 70" is a strange beast.  It's an album-length sampling of so-called cosmic music, a mix of jazz fusion and chirpy, bellowing, primitive early synthesizers.  The movement had about 15 minutes of fame in Venezuela, and almost no airplay outside their home country.  But I trust the boutique record label Soul Jazz, and so I purchased it in August.  I played it about 4 times and gave up - it was impenetrable.

Then I went to Scotland.  As we rushed past the slate-grey countryside on the train from Edinburgh to Inverness, I popped it in one more time.  Not only did Venezuela 70 make perfect sense, I fell in love with it.  

WTF?  Scotland is as far away from Venezuela in every sense of the word.  Before we left, I made a mix of modern Scottish music: Rod Stewart, Big Country, Average White Band, Mark Knopfler.  But when I got to the actual country of origin, it didn't seem to fit.  What did fit?

• "Love is a Hurtin Thing" by Gloria Ann Taylor.  
• "Jade Visions" by Bill Evans.  
• "Oh What a Beautiful City" by Reverend Gary Davis
• "Spring" by Vivaldi
• "Watch Out" by Dr. Blue 
• And Venezuela 70.

This is the not the first time it's happened to me while travelling.  When I first hit Memphis in 2007, I brought along a pretty wide mix of Memphis-bred music: Chuck Berry, Memphis Minnie, B.B. King.  But I ended up listening to the Charlatans UK, a band so entangled in 90's Britpop and dance music that they'd never fill the smallest bar on Beale Street.   To this day, I cannot listen to them without thinking of Memphis (and I do often!)

There's this great book This is Your Brain on Music that describes the tight relationship between memory and songs.  Perhaps a new landscape disrupts the brain so badly that the memory adheres to the closest tune.  You can no longer separate the two.

Driving on the Left

When we got off the train to Inverness, I admitted to Amy, "I'm kinda apprehensive about driving." Sometimes apprehension is spot on.

I have never, ever, EVER been as disoriented as I was driving in Scotland.  Having driven for 35 years, it has been driven so far into my "muscle memory" that it was almost impossible to unlearn.  Just a few tidbits:

• Left turns are easy.  Right turns are hard and require attention.
• The rear view mirror is to your left
• Cars come at you on the right.  You can't help but swerve a little (in some random direction)
• When you make a right turn and go across the opposite lane, you make a quick glance to your right, even though no car would ever being going that way.  The cars in the opposite lane always come toward you.

Then add the peculiarities of Scotland:

• There is no shoulder.  Anywhere.
• The lane is not wide enough to hold your car .. or at least it seems so
• There's a garbage truck on your ass.  Blinking his lights.
• The double-lane road turns into a single lane with passing places.  And just ahead of the passing place is a curve, so you have a split second to avoid a collision.
• What the ????  There's a SHEEP in the road ?????  A whole friggin' herd!

So here I was, responsible for two lives in the car, plus the lives of a garbage truck driver and a herd of sheep.  Was I terrified?  Let's just say, it required a crowbar to get my hands off the steering wheel.  

Thanks for the reminder, guys!  And yes, this is a stock photo.  Amy was too busy praying to take pictures.

So If It Was So Disorienting,  Would You Ever Go Back Again?

Give me ten minutes and my bags are packed, kemo sabee!  Because here's the thing about being human - you don't need to be oriented all the time.  If the natives are friendly, if your jacket is waterproof, and you got some sort of granola bar in your pocket, you'll do fine.  Stressors are good for the growth of any biological being.   

Cheap whisky doesn't hurt either!   

Scotland, Vittles and The Water of Life

In Johnny Foxes, a pub near the river in the central town of Inverness, a chalkboard on the wall says:

• Soup of the Day, £5.00
• Dram 15 yr old Dalwhinnie, £4.50

Now this country has its priorities straight!  To put this in perspective, at the time we were there, £1.00 is $1.30.  That makes a dram of Dalwhinnie about $5.85.  In the states, at the bar it will go for $15, and an entire bottle for around $75.

But like I said, the Scots are imminently practical.  The development of Single Malt Whisky (don't call it Scotch!  We don't call bourbon American now, do we?) was a matter of survival.  When you mostly live on meat, and that meat has been hanging around awhile, it gets sorta ... well, pungent.  And the critters are eating more of it than you are.  The Scots found this fantastic substance kills 99.9% of these critters when poured on meat.  Hence it's called The Water of Life.  

But like other things Scottish, they were not content to leave it just at a practical level.  They spun it into an art.  At the Scotch Whiskey Experience in Edinburgh, we learned how arty this can be.  The four Whisky-producing regions of Scotland each bring a different flavor.  My favorite is the Islay region that produces smoky, peaty whisky that's almost clear in color.    Below is their collection of whiskies going back 100 years or more.  

In some cases, even though the stopper is still on the bottle, all the whisky in it has evaporated.  They call that portion the Angels Share and ... well, I hope they're happy. 

Breakfast

The Scots have a love-hate relationship with the English, as you might have guessed.  Like the Irish, they borrow the notion of the Full English Breakfast and tinker with it.  The Scottish breakfast is:

• Eggs
• Tom-ah-toes, small and poached until the skin just slides off
• Bacon
• Haggis or Bangers
• Baked Beans.  And I can't stress this enough - they must be canned Heinz beans of the lowest, blandest quality. 
• Toast - white or brown (there is no such thing as wheat toast.  All toast is wheat, muh friend!  Do you want white wheat or brown wheat)

Meh.  I'm not a fan.  It helps to smoosh everything onto your fork before shovelling into your gullet.  Remember as kids how we used to religiously keep food from touching each other?  That won't work in Scotland.  And you wouldn't want it to.  

Alternatively you can get a bowl of porridge.  I opted for that most days.  The Scots, like all Brits, are fond of their Runny Honey, and use that as their sole porridge topping.  I added lemon marmalade because ... well, it's my vacation!  

Porridge is just oatmeal that's been mashed and pulverized beyond recognition.  This is a very British cooking technique, the equivalent of sauce-making in France.  Mushy Peas are the greatest expression of this.  But even the bangers have a very finely ground meat in them that is so unlike the coarse grind of American sausages.  Bleh.  

Which brings me to Haggis.  The less said on this subject the better.  Suffice it to say, I ate it once accidentally.  Amy got Venison for dinner and pushed over a deep fat fried ball over to me.  "Try that." she ordered.  It was black inside, cinammony, and well, nondescript.  That was enough for me.  When in Rome, do as the Romans and all that.  But if the Romans are all jumping off a bridge (or eating something yucky), I won't follow.  Sorry.   

Dinner

On the other hand if someone offers you Cullen Skink, say yes, yes, OMIGOD yes!   

Cullen Skink is potato and onion chowder with chunks of smoked haddock.   As you expect from the Scots, it comes from practicality - you preserve fish, abundant in the many coastal waters, the same way you do bacon ... with lots of smoke and salt.  Many of our dinners in Scotland riffed off that concept.  The best fish I had was Smoked Hake at a fish bistro called The Cafe Royale.  An Inverness, Restaurant 27 served smoked haddock in a cream sauce with Pappardelle pasta.  It was perfect with a dry Spanish red wine (yeah I know, it's supposed to be white wine with fish ... but smoked fish is different).  

The smoke nails it.  It gets into your veins, inoculating you against the chilly, windy evening.  It's the equivalent of porridge in the nighttime.  But really, there was no bad seafood in Scotland, no matter what it was.  We got an order of the hugest mussels we'd ever seen, each the size of two marbles, swimming in a nice Thai cream sauce.  And even the Fish and Chips were pretty spectacular, even if not served in authentic newspaper.  (And I like Mushy Peas - sorry!)

Amy went on a quest for the perfect dinner pie.  She had chicken and rosemary pie at Mum's Comfort Foods in Edinburgh, and Steak and Ale pie at Johnny Foxes.  My personal quest was for Bangers and Mash, and there Mum's Comfort Food nailed it with Chilpotle Cheese mash, caramelized onion gravy, and spicy sausages.  

For dessert?  Amy went for the fruit crisps, which were uniformly excellent.  Me, I was partial to Eton Mess and Sticky Toffee Pudding.  But for me, the quintessential Scottish dessert was Cranachan, a masterpiece of flavor:

The raspberries are marinated in whisky.  The cream is vanilla double cream.  On the bottom and bottom are toasted porridge flakes with honey.   In a way it's quite humble, the opposite of Italian or French desserts.  But it all turns on the quality of the raspberries, which were the best I'd ever tasted. 

I know, I know.  You don't think of Scotland for their cuisine.  But you should.  Because in many ways, it's the highest expression of local cuisine, which is so highly regarded these days.  They eat what's around them, and what they concoct helps them appreciate (and survive) the climate.  It takes more than a fad to do that properly - it takes hundreds of years.  

Scotland, The Landscape

Any description of Scotland boils down to two things:

• It's old
• It's weird

It's also very beautiful, but beauty is just an outgrowth of its oldness and weirdness.  

Amy and I spent 8 days in Scotland, but I'll walk you through it thematically rather than chronologically.  

You basically start with the poorest, rockiest terrain on Earth.  You can't even grow potatoes here, the soil is so bad.  And the weather - oy vay - is windy and rainy.  Eventually you get to something like this:

The natural state of Scotland is weatherbeaten, scrubish and barren, and it is not flat pretty much anywhere. The clouds rain down, and the water from them pours unabated down hillsides until it flows into some deep channel like Loch Ness.  

Every once in awhile, like the beautiful Glen Affric, you get a bog.  A bog is like a midget forest, where the trees and brush are the same ones that grow on hillsides, and grow for a long time, but they never make it past a certain very small height.  Eventually they die and become peat.  And a long time after that, they become Scotch!  But more on that later.

Unlike America, the grown-up trees here are very old - you can see the pretty-near-fossilized moss on them above.  But they're not big around like the redwoods.  And the colors are strange - it's not the universal green you might see in Ireland, but a palette of orange, yellow and purple mixed into the green.  It's similar to the colorful Adirondack autumn, but it never lets up.

My favorite movie is Local Hero, a 1983 movie with Burt Lancaster and Peter Reigert.  Central to the movie is this almost surrealistic pull that Scottish nature exerts on people.  It's not what you normally think of as majestic (like the Grand Canyon) or pristine (like the waters of the Caribbean).  But it sucks you in.

The Scots have learned to live within its parameters.  They're practical if nothing else.  So below is Edinburgh Castle, built nicely on the tallest hill of the city.  The natural cliffs are so steep that nothing is going to get up it, much less up the walls that seem to grow out of it.

This is actually our view from the Waldorf Astoria, where we got to spend a free night in Edinburgh.  In the morning I woke up at 5:30, and there was one lone room lit up in the Castle ... I imagine someone was there fixing porridge for themselves before the tourists arrive at 8 AM.

The castle was an endless source of jokes.  "Have fun storming the castle!" I'd quote from The Princess Bride every five minutes.  Or "there's the boiling oil bucket, also for French Fries."  We had respect for Edinburgh Castle, was it was just so big and bulky that it was too damn funny.

And the animals are weird too - case in point:

(Looks like he's auditioning for The Beatles or something.)  This guy inadvertently caused us much grief in U.S. Customs.   The tour guide let us off the bus and gave us some mixture to feed them from our hands.  No prob.  But then there was a question on the customs form "Did you touch or handle cattle while in the country?"  Amy answered yes, and that got us detained at the border, where we basically had to swear-on-the-bible we weren't bringing back Mad Cow Disease.  

Ah well.  There's a question on the Red Cross Blood Donation form, "Have you spent 5 years in the UK?"  Well nope, but now I want to.  More on food, driving on the left side of the road, and more later!

Honeymoon Quebec City

Quebec is the oldest US or Canadian walled city whose walls still exist.  Sad to say, they are no longer effective keeping the invaders out.  The streets are full of gawking, iphone-snapping non-Quebecois tourists ... I guess we were part of that contingent.

We spent the first day making fun of the Chateau Frontenac - bellowing "Frawnt-en-nawc" in our snootiest accent.  It'll set you back 500 Clams a night (500 US clams?  Canadian?  Does it matter?).  It's a big gawdy castle, and I'm sure it was drafty in there.  There are 600 rooms over 18 floors, and there's an ice cream place on the boardwalk next to it.  In other words, it's a place you brag about staying, without necessarily enjoying your stay there.

Walkin'

If there's a common theme to what vacation spots attract Amy and I, they are places you can walk in.  You don't need a car to go across 7 lanes of traffic to get ... well, across the street.  But some stair climbing might be involved - see left.  Part of the walled city is actually a giant hill.  Very convenient, if you're a wall builder.  You'll be building this wall down and - blammo - there's this giant cliff and you get the day off!

We stayed at a B&B in the neighborhood outside the walled city.  The only things missing are a big moose head and a six pack of Molson.  But dig those stone walls - they're actually from the 1700's!  The TV set is a bit newer.

Our host is a native Quebecois whose husband is from Morocco.  On both mornings, our breakfast table is bilingual, and there's almost no clues as to who will speak what.  There are couples from New Jersey, Toronto, Ottawa and close by ... the guy from New Jersey speaks very fluent French, but his wife none at all.  A few Quebecois speak both, and they switch between them.  I catch bits and pieces of the French portion.

But here's the thing.  When you try to jump in with survival-French, a bilingual will just switch to English.  I might not sure why - it may be for comfort, but it may also be a cliquey sort of "we are a closed club" and they don't want you to join.  (Parisians will speak to you in French patiently, even if yours is crummy.)  There is a strained, long history of Franco-English relations ... and it feels like I've stepped in a flaming bag of dog poo.

Speaking of dog poo, we spent a day with modern art.  OK, cheap shot.  The Musee National des Beaux Arts de Quebec had once been the home to ancient art masterpieces, which Montreal slowly pilched over the years.  Left with beautiful museum buildings (actually their former prisons, but whatever), Quebec filled them with 20th century modern art, which Amy and I both adore.  The ant sculpture to the left is a quote from one of the paintings, and the color is weird and wonderful.  They had a great exhibit of Paul a Quebec, the semi-autobiographical comic strip that's very richly emotional.  Our favorite artist was Jean Paul Lemieux, who in a certain sense, is the most classic of the modernists there.  His images are stark and there doesn't seem to be a lot of detail until you look really closely.  He is very fond of human beings, but he doesn't let them off the hook.

The third day, we visited the Museum of Civilization - very thoughtful, but all over the map.  There are native exhibits mixed with the history of Quebec.  The carriage exhibit was a real hoot.  You think that designers put a lot of thought into cars, but carriages were beautiful and sweeping in their own right, and will probably last longer.

Vegetables?

OK, if you're a vegetarian, you'll starve in Quebec.   It's survival of the fittest.  If you've got snow six months of the year, and an Elk is staring you down for that last potato ... you gotta do what you gotta do.   Still, a Canadian carnivore doesn't eat the volume of a meat as, say, a Texan.  It's respectable - more European.

We ate at Le Hobbit the first night.  No lembas here - the owner just named it that because Hobbits love food and drink.  Understandable.  I had duck duo - a nice filet on one side of the plate and confit encrusted in pistachios and deep-fat fried.  Oh so good!  Duck is not quite the dense delicacy it is in France, but it comes close.

The second night we ate at Restaurant La Guelle De Bois, which means "Hangover" in French.  The walls were filled with strangely cobbled-together art, and the menu was very small, "but everything is good," said our waiter.  Indeed!  We started with Elk Carpaccio mixed with radish coins in a mustard sauce.  Then a fresh yellow beet salad ... wait, we didn't order that.  But mmmm it tasted so good!  About 5 minutes later the waiter came out and said, "Ooops, that was for another table.  But enjoy!"  For the entree, Amy had duck and I had venison.  Lemme tell you - if the deer hanging out in our backyard could taste as good as my entree, I'd be out wrestling them to the ground.

Butchering the Language

So Amy had booked us his-and-her massages at a Spa in the walled city  Very cool.  I changed into my bathrobe and figured ... well, we had 15 minutes, so I decided to relax by the pool.  I figured Amy would come in.  But after while, no one had arrived.  I picked up my towel and to show off my French, I said to the pool attendant - "J'ai oubliee ma marie" - I lost my wife.  She laughed.

Two days later we were in the car going back to the Adirondacks.  Amy was practicing her French.  "Wow, this is interesting," she says.  "The word femme means both woman and wife, but the two words for man and husband are separate - l'homme and le mari."

"Oh crap," I said.  "I told the pool attendant 'I lost my husband.' "   Oh well.   I guess it was funny either way.  I reached into a bag of poutine Ruffles and thought "C'est la vie."