- 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!
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!
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