Aberdeen First Impressions

Nearly three weeks in Aberdeen, and I have first impressions to share!

(This is going to be quite long and scattershot, since it's a jumble of impressions from these entire first three weeks. I still can't promise I'll have much time to write anything during the semester, but if I do, future posts should be a bit more coordinated than this first one!)


ABERDEEN: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I arrived in the city under relentless rain, which I sense will become a theme. I've lived in a lot of changeable-weather places, a lot of places that take a perverse pride in saying things like "If you don't like the weather – just wait five minutes!" But I've never experienced anything quite like this.

Aberdeen goes from bright sun to pouring rain with whiplash speed, so many times in one afternoon that I lose count. I went on a walking tour of Aberdeen street art (more on that later) and in that hour or so I can't tell you how many times I went...Oh wait, is it raining all of a sudden? Better put my umbrella up. Wait, it's not raining anymore, why am I holding this umbrella? Wait, is it raining AGAIN?

Here's the view out my window, in a rare moment of sun:

Aberdeen is known as the "granite city" and it is indeed a sea of granite grey. It doesn't quite have that "seriously every single building looks like a castle" vibe of Edinburgh, but it's definitely got a bit of that.

It's a maritime city, centered around the offshore North Sea oil industry, which has apparently made it very international. (Someone told me that there is or at least used to be a French school, an American school, even a Dutch school, because so many people come through here for the oil industry.)

I accidentally went to the Maritime Museum (I was actually only trying to find a bathroom, but a museum employee handed me a brochure the moment I walked in the door, and everyone was so nice that I felt I really ought to look at their museum) and got this view over the harbor:

 

I'm still laughing at myself because long before I'd done the more necessary things like setting up a bank account or even a phone, I'd already gone and gotten a public library card. And accidentally checked out eight books the very first day I had the card. You can take the girl out of the library, but, well, you know the rest!

(One of my flatmates also made the mistake of asking me for book recommendations, and I wrote her out a whole page of titles... I hadn't had a chance to do "reader's advisory" – as it's called within the library field – in a while, and I got enthused.)

Both the central library and the little library in my neighborhood are quite charming. Among many other things, it made me grin that they'd made their own display signs for various genres. Here's a sign for "romance" with their own made-up titles incorporating specifically Aberdeen things:

("Claimed by the Oil Tycoon" (self-explanatory); "One Night at the Thistle Hotel" (thistles = a Scottish symbol); "Dalliance in the Duthie Park" (a big local park in Aberdeen))


Ah, so many quirky British things I could talk about! Most of them are things I knew before, from previous trips here, but it's fun digging into what it's like to live with them.

Hot and cold water from separate taps in every sink. So you can have cold water, or hot water, but not a mix of both. (Unless you're willing to plug the sink and fill it with your own custom blend of water from both the hot and cold taps, but who actually does that? Every time you wash your hands?)

Also: THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OBSESSION IS REAL. On/off switches on every electrical outlet. (Yes, you have to plug your appliance into the outlet, and turn on the outlet itself.) On/of switch for the shower. (Yes, the shower only works when you turn it on if you also previously turned on a specific switch outside the bathroom.) And no electrical outlets in bathrooms, no, no no!

And at our "inductions" (basically just information sessions) at the university, each lecture started with a little mini-lecture about where to go in event of fire, where to find the first aid kit in the lecture hall, etc. Bless, as the British would say. (As in: Aw, aren't they sweet.)

Also, though, here's health and safety gone off the rails: In my building (a university residential hall), they regularly check that the fire alarms still work. And by regularly, I mean: every week. So every Thursday around noon-ish, they set off the fire alarm. We're not supposed to react to this as if it were an actual fire drill; we're suppose to know that it's not a real fire alarm going off...unless it keeps going for a long time, and then we should think that it's a real fire and leave the building. So in their zeal to test that the system is "working," they're essentially creating a system where they've trained us not to react to the fire alarm when we hear it. ???

The UK, man. So many things that make delightfully no sense at all.

And so many turns of phrase that make me grin. Like this surprisingly existential street sign:

More things that delight me:

The price of food! It's actually affordable! I mean, I arrived here straight from Iceland, so I nearly swooned with delight the first time I went to the supermarket and found a block of cheese for £2 instead of $17. But compared to the US, too, this feels like being back in a reasonable place where the cost of living is bearable. (Like Germany. And definitely not like the US.)

Postcodes! I still can't quite fathom how they've made this work, but British postcodes (zip codes) are incredibly specific – as in, pinpointed to one particular building level of specific. So unlike in the US (or Germany), where a zip code applies to a whole town or a big section of a city, in the UK someone can tell you their postcode and you know exactly what building it is. (As far as I can tell, the first half of the code is for the city as a whole, and the second half is building-specific.)

And the whole driving-on-the-left thing is, of course, an adjustment, no matter how much you know it in theory. This is less because of the actual driving on the left, and more because of all the other things that are subtly different because of it.

Like: When I as a pedestrian am standing at a corner, waiting to see if that approaching car is going to turn into my path or if it's safe to cross, the turning car takes a different arc than my brain is expecting, because it's turning into a different part of the road, the left side instead of the right. So it takes real concentration to follow those little cues that are usually automatic. ("Car hasn't started to turn yet, so it's clearly not going to come this way. Safe to cross. NO WAIT, it's turning after all! Why did it turn later than I was expecting it to turn!")

Anyway, mostly I've just been moving in and getting set up in a new country and figuring out how to do this whole university thing again after so long (though lectures have barely started – things should get properly going this week) but here are a few fun things I've also done:

Castle visit! The university arranged a bunch of outings for new students, so my flatmates and I went on a trip to Dunnottar Castle, a nearby one of Scotland's approximately 50 billion castles. I was surprised that my Scottish flatmate came along, given that she'd just been saying how many castles she went to as a kid on innumerable class trips. But Scotland has so many castles that she still hadn't been to this one.

If you're going to build a castle, do choose a dramatic cliff-top location like this:

Street art tour! Aberdeen hosts an international street art festival, and I went on a guided tour of some of the amazing art created by this year's participants, from whole-side-of-a-building murals to little sketches and figurines hidden in unlikely places. Or, in the mid-range, this delightful picture of a girl and her baby unicorn:

(Yes, the unicorn is Scotland's national animal. No, I don't know, either.)


Biking the Deeside Way! The university has a bike hire (rental) program, where you can have a bicycle for the whole semester, which makes me deliriously happy. I went out for a first exploratory foray along the Deeside Way, a lovely long-distance path that stretches all the way from Aberdeen at the coast into Cairngorms National Park, 41 miles inland. I only went as far as Drumoak (about 19 miles round trip), but I can't wait to explore more. Oooh, idyllic Scottish countryside:

And: first house dinner! My residential hall is pretty small, only about 25 people, and it felt strange that I'd seen the others coming in and out but nobody had really introduced themselves. So I suggested to our RAs that we have some kind of get-to-know-you event... It was a success, and everyone brought a ton of food!

And I'll leave you with a note about the river, because I'm in love with the River Dee already. The campus sits directly on its bank, and I've discovered there's a footpath that runs all along the river: not just here by the campus, where we're a bit outside of town, but along its whole length, even closer to the city center.

My Scottish flatmate was unimpressed, when I mentioned how excited I am by this footpath ("in Glasgow, the footpath by the river would be where the junkies hang out") but for an American, used to the ultra-possessive nature of US property laws that so often leave no public access at all to lakes and rivers, I think the fact that anyone can walk anywhere along this river is downright amazing.

Here's a shot of my beloved river, on an unusually beautiful September day in Aberdeen: