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!