Edinburgh EDGE

This conference – the EDGE Conference hosted by Edinburgh City Libraries, to be specific – has been unforgettable.

For the past two days, I’ve been hearing speakers from around the world (Scotland, England, New Zealand, Netherlands, Canada, US, Belgium…) talk about ways libraries can help people combat the inequalities of poverty and the social exclusion of homelessness. It's inspiring, thought-provoking and I'm so, so grateful to have been offered a student spot to come here. Another one of those opportunities I can't believe there weren't dozens (or hundreds?) of people fighting me for!

I also got to meet so many inspiring professionals in this, my newly chosen field. I met the woman who's going to be my supervisor when I do my professional fieldwork placement in Orkney. I chatted a bunch with the head of Scotland's national librarians' organization (CILIPS, the equivalent of the ALA in the US). Had a fascinating conversation with the head of library services in the Western Isles (Outer Hebrides). Got all kinds of great ideas from conversations with a professor of library science from the Netherlands.

My mind is swimming with it and surely has a lot still to process, but I can't believe how many wonderful things I've gotten to see and do in just two days.

And, at dinner last night – since this is, after all, Edinburgh – the tables were themed for various Harry Potter characters. Truly, what's not to love?

Please Do Not Travel

They're serious about it, you guys. This is the website of Scotland's train service:

I also heard an announcer on the radio this morning utter precisely these words: “Don’t even think about going out. Seriously. Not good.”

(The announcers have also been using words like "treacherous," and of course that phrase "do not travel.")

All transport in and out is shut down; I haven't even seen any city buses within Edinburgh running all day. People everywhere are struggling to drive their cars out of parking spots or up hills, because they don't have snow tires here (and none of the roads have been cleared). I've seen a lot of people helping each other push cars up hills. Everything is draped in snow, and the wind is so strong that when it comes down, first it blows sideways! A lot of people either couldn't get here for the conference, or got here but now are stuck here.

I feel really, really fortunate that I love snow. (I was walking around today with snow blowing into my face so hard I couldn't see, and still I was just grinning. Because it was winter! Proper, beautiful winter!) And also that I'm perfectly content to be exactly where I am. I definitely do recognize that this is not as nice an experience for most people as it is for me.

But if you'll excuse me, I'm now going to curl up in my nice warm bed in beautiful Edinburgh, and watch the snow swirl down.

Castletown

I'm back in Edinburgh! The city where everything is a castle, or at least looks like one.

It's snowing, and the whole country is FLIPPING OUT. Seriously, the UK cracks me up about this. It's snowing, yes, but does that really require the entire country to shut down? Public transportation is in chaos, sidewalks are a mess because nobody clears/grits/salts them, and just about everything is closed.

Schools are closed. My university lecture this morning was cancelled. When I arrived in Edinburgh this afternoon, I found the tourist info center closed. Museums are closed. I passed a bookshop that had preemptively closed for both today and tomorrow. The National Library is not only closed, but has a sign outside that reads, "We will update you when our buildings re-open. In the meantime, please do not attempt to visit us." Even the play I was going to attend tonight is cancelled! My room at the hostel where I'm staying is three young German women and me (common language German, yay!) and we had a laugh together about how funny it is to us that everyone in the UK is panicking about this. (There's even a hashtag for this storm: #beastfromtheeast)

Good thing I like snow, and Edinburgh could not possibly be more picturesque. And strangely my train down from Aberdeen wasn't affected at all – even arrived on time. I'm here for a library conference and am waaaaay excited about it. Two days of hearing exciting and inspiring stuff from public librarians from around the world!

I'll have pictures of Edinburgh, eventually. Also pictures of Iceland, from January – I'm behind on everything.

Greeting from the world of castles!

Yogurt World

Okay, the current comic at Scandinavia and the World (a comic in which anthropomorphized versions of various countries interact with each other in ways typical of each country) totally cracked me up: it's about the ubiquity of yogurt in Scandinavia. 

Because, truly, I had a moment on my last day in Iceland where I was at the airport, looking around for something to take as snack on the plane, and I was in a shop and I looked at the rows and rows and rows of yogurt (and skyr and other yogurt-like products), and I had this brief but visceral moment of, NO! I can NOT eat any more YOGURT!

...því ég er kominn heim

...And now I'm in Iceland.

I know, I've become so predictable! So ridiculously predictable! When in doubt, I suppose just assume I'm traveling to Iceland.

But all this semester (after I also visited Iceland on my way to Scotland, in August/September) I've been longing for Iceland, always thinking, "Oh, if only I could be in Iceland..." And I have two weeks off between first and second semester, and it was very clear I really needed to take that time as an absolute, true break away from everything, so I could come back to second semester refreshed and ready to dive into it all again, after the exhaustion of first semester. And besides, you know, I'd been pining for Iceland. So Friday my last piece of coursework was handed in, Saturday I sat down to write all my friends in Iceland and book flights and make plans, I traveled on Tuesday, and here I am.

(I realized when I arrived in Reykavík last night that in total I'd taken: a bus to a train to a tram to a plane to another bus. If only I'd been picked up by car from the airport instead of taking the city bus, or if I'd had cause to get on a boat for some reason, then I'd have hit nearly every kind of standard transport in one day!)

Beautiful afternoon sun in Reykjavík:

I'm staying with my friend S. and his wife and their two little kids. It is so amazing to have this life in Iceland I can drop back into, these friends who enthusiastically invite me into their homes. S. keeps saying how happy he is that I chose to come and stay with them, and I keep saying how happy and grateful I am to be there.

The first part of the day we spent lazing around, eating breakfast and chatting. There are some renovations being done on their apartment building, so there was some banging and hammering happening somewhere in the background as we talked.

Then S. went into the kitchen and I heard him say to someone in Icelandic, "Do you want some coffee?" So I assumed his wife must be somewhere in the apartment, though I hadn't seen her.

Nope – I went into the kitchen and saw that one of the workmen doing the renovations was directly outside the kitchen window – the third-floor kitchen window – on a bit of scaffolding. That's who S. was talking to. And the worker was opening up the window from the outside, and S. was handing a steaming cup of coffee out into the cold to him. So S. and I stood there inside the kitchen and drank coffee and chatted with the worker standing outside the kitchen, perched in the air three floors off the ground, drinking coffee from a dainty cup.

I thought maybe they were friends, or at least knew each other a bit from the course of these renovations, but no – my friend asked the guy his name at some point in the conversation. It's just that S. is that friendly. It was so Icelandic: the kindness, the hospitality – and of course the coffee. Iceland runs on coffee.

Here's me by the ocean in Reykjavík at dusk, in the snow, happier than the happiest clam in the world:

Ceilidh-ing

I went to a ceilidh!

A ceilidh (pronounced "kay-lee") is a Scottish party centered around traditional dance and music. It's a very, very Scottish thing, so people have been telling me since my very first days here that I have to go to at least one. (Even the friendly bank employee who opened my bank account told me that...)

And then a great opportunity came up: the same friend in Stonehaven, who invited a couple of us from my master's course for Hogmanay (New Year's), invited the same two of us (both Americans) to come back again two weeks later for a ceilidh her running club was hosting as their big yearly fundraiser.

It was so much fun! I truly can't give adequate words to how much fun it was. Watching the dances, participating in the dances (only a little bit, though – unfortunately all the spinning makes me way too dizzy), chatting with everyone. People in Stonehaven have been so friendly and welcoming, both times I've been there. My friend who lives there told a bunch of her friends beforehand that they had to ask us to dance, but I'm sure they would have done it even without her prompting, because everyone is just so nice!

 

(Sorry, these are all horrendous, blurry cell phone photos, because I didn't think to bring my camera.)

When I first moved here to Aberdeen, four months ago now – it's hard to explain, but I often had this odd feeling that I just didn't feel very much like I was...in Scotland? Generic UK, yes, sure – the shops and the street signs and everything were different from what I was used to, and were clearly British. But much of the time I felt vaguely that I could be anywhere urban and British, because things around me didn't feel specifically, particularly Scottish.

Which is unfair, of course! What, do I expect everybody to act like a walking Scottish cliché all the time? But, I don't know, the other places I've been in Scotland have had such a specific atmosphere of their own – Edinburgh, the Highlands, the Western Isles. Aberdeen is nice, but I don't feel I've discovered its own specific culture yet. (This is probably the fault of spending most of my time at a university, which is very international – so I'm indeed not in a particularly Scottish context much of the time.)

Anyway, at that ceilidh in Stonehaven I felt more like I was really, truly in Scotland than at any other point so far. It wasn't just that there was Scottish music playing, and almost all the men were wearing kilts, and at half-time they served stovies and sticky toffee pudding. It was more that I was in a big room surrounded by Scottish folks, a community of friends hanging out together and just doing the stuff they like to do anyway (chatting, having a beer, dancing dances they all learned growing up). And, again, they were all so friendly and cheerful and welcoming. I really appreciate how international the university is (my 6 flatmates alone are from 5 different countries!), but when living in a country, it's nice to get a chance at least sometimes to be truly, deeply immersed in that country.

It makes me really glad, too, to see people still embracing and living their own traditions.

In addition to the dancing, there was also a ceremony of awards and prizes (since this was a running club event, so they recognized various people's achievements in running). And then, as a fundraiser, there was a bottle slide. A what? Two bottles of gin were set on the floor at the front of the room, and people rolled £1 coins towards them, and whoever landed their coin closest won the bottle. Hilarious, and apparently raises a lot of funds for the club, too!

After the ceilidh, I caught the next-to-last train back to Aberdeen, then hurried to catch the night bus that would take me back home, so I wouldn't have to walk the whole way (about an hour). But it turned out the night bus I got on was...the wrong night bus. (Even though it was the right route number, which I'd looked up beforehand.) So the driver of my wrong bus caught up to the right bus, and pulled up in front of it so I could run off of his bus and onto the other one.

Take away of the evening as a whole: Scottish people are so nice!

Burnieboozled

I do believe I may have found the greatest Scottish street name, out of some very stiff competition of great Scottish street names:

(This one had competition right there in the same neighborhood – it was directly next to Monymusk Terrace, as well as some quite normal-Scottish sounding names, like Craigiebuckler Avenue. A lot of street names here are named after other places in Scotland, which are generally long mash-ups of syllables that are never pronounced quite the way you'd think they would be...)

Great Balls of Fire! (...sorry, I couldn't resist)

Happy new year!

There's an idea I've heard somewhere or another, that how you spend your New Year's Eve and/or Day is indicative of the whole year to come. It's not the sort of thing I would usually think about, and I'm certainly not thinking about it in a predictive way (not like, "You must do X on New Year's Eve, otherwise your entire year is doomed to be Y").

But there's something nice about thinking of a particularly lovely New Year's as setting a precedent, starting out the year as you mean to go on. In this case, I was in a new (and beautiful place), experiencing a new-to-me (and very Scottish) tradition, staying with friends and also meeting new people. Those seem to me very much the sorts of things I'd wish for my coming year.

(Along with a WHOLE LOT of global, political and societal change...but let's not even start talking about that. About five minutes before midnight, my other, American friend and I caught ourselves talking passionately about everything that was wrong with 2017 and realized that, while true and real, bemoaning it wasn't how we wanted to spend the final minutes of our year.)

Hogmanay! That's the Scottish word for New Year's Eve.

One of my grad school classmates (coursemates?) invited me and another friend from our program to spend New Year's in her town, Stonehaven, not far from Aberdeen.

Stonehaven is a picturesque little harbor town, which happens to have a longstanding and internationally famous New Year's tradition: at the stroke of midnight, 40 or 50 adults walk up and down the main street, swinging over their heads ENORMOUS FIREBALLS. They make the fireballs themselves, some of the fireball swingers have participated for years or decades, and my friend and her husband are among them.

It was SO COOL. First there was a drumming group, then a bagpipe band (playing clearly-beloved Scottish songs that the entire crowd sang along with), then came the fireball swingers. My wimpy point-and-shoot camera can't begin to do it justice, but here they are, processing up and down the street, swinging fire:

 

The tradition has been going on for well over 100 years at least, and probably a lot longer than that. It appears to stem from ancient fire ceremonies of burning the old and bad and things that are worn out or broken, making way for the new.

The fireballs are huge, and heavy. At the end, once the material inside the wire frame of the fireballs has burned away, they fling them into the harbor.

Rounding out the evening there were fireworks, right under the full moon:

In the morning we got up for...a 5k run in the park. (I didn't run, just watched.) My friend and her husband are super intense runners. Like, ultramarathon, think-nothing-of-a-race-that-takes-32-hours-to-complete runners. So doing a 5k first thing after staying up late for New Year's really was a walk in the park for them.

 

Then, we were just in time to catch a glimpse of the "Nippy Dip," where masses of people run into the cold water of the harbor. (Like a polar bear plunge...except that Scotland is comparatively not so very cold...)

 

We also walked up the brae (hill), for a beautiful view over the town. (Stonehaven is also right next to Dunnottar Castle, where I went before classes started, but we didn't walk that far this time.) Here's cozy Stonehaven, and its beautiful bay:

 We walked as far as the war memorial, perched atop Black Hill. The view from there is wonderful. Exactly, exactly my kind of landscape. I could look at this endlessly:

When we came back into town, we stopped by my friend's parents' house – I'd asked earlier if they do "first footing" and indeed they do! For good luck, the first person to enter your house in the new year should be a dark-haired man, bearing gifts. My friend's husband has dark hair, so he went into the house first, and gave his in-laws a bit of coal for their fire and some shortbread. 

While we were there, my friend's mother gave us fruitcake (actually referred to as Christmas cake, but it was what I would think of as "fruitcake"), and my friend's father gave us a dram of whisky. It was a very Scottish New Year's!

The Year's Deep Midnight

When I was in London – back at the beginning of November – one of the friends I met up with there asked me if the days were noticeably shorter up north in Scotland. (I don't think of the UK as being particularly big, but what size it does have is all in its north–south length, so there actually is a significant latitude difference between southern England and northern Scotland.)

I said I hadn't noticed it yet, but I expected I would once the clocks changed. And indeed, as soon as we returned from daylight saving to normal/winter time, it was suddenly very noticeable how short the days were growing, with the sun setting in the afternoon.

At the solstice, the very shortest day, Aberdeen had only about 6 hours and 40 minutes of daylight (compared to, for example, New York City's 9 hours and 15 minutes), with sunrise at 8:46 am and sunset at 3:26 pm.

3:26 pm!

I didn't think to take any pictures on the solstice itself (I was holed up in the library, working on a huge assignment...as always) but here for example is the tail end of sunset colors, well after sunset itself, a little before 4:30 pm in mid-December:

And a winter morning sky, a little after 8 a.m., twilit but still half an hour away from sunrise:

I'd experienced the short-ish winter days in Berlin and I knew Aberdeen was further north than that (though I didn't realize at first just how much further). What I also didn't realize until recently is that Aberdeen is further north than Copenhagen! Yes, we've got a (very small) part of Scandinavia beat. And for someone who loves both Scandinavia and the strange, fascinating extremes of the seasons, that's rather exciting.

This time of year, I like to share John Donne's poem "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," which is so wonderfully dramatic about this darkest part of the year. I'm too late with it now, since the solstice is past (as well as St. Lucy's Day, which used to fall on the solstice before calendar adjustments), so I won't quote it all, just link it: "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day."

London Weekend

I went to London! (Almost a month ago now, but this is the first chance I've had to write about it.)

It's funny that this was my first proper outing since moving to the UK, because I didn't have any particular urge towards London. I've been there before, but I haven't been there often. So I'm in that in-between place where I've been a couple times, so I don't feel a need to go see the tourist sights, but I haven't been there enough to have favorite haunts to visit back to. London? I'd rather go somewhere new, where I've never been at all!

But. There's this writer I really admire, John Finnemore. One (among many) of his projects is a radio sketch comedy show on BBC Radio 4. BBC radio shows are recorded in front of a live audience, for which the BBC holds a random ticket drawing. The tickets are free, but you only get one if your name comes up in the lottery. So when I heard that John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme was going to be recording a new series now, now that I too live here in the UK, of course I put my name in. (Frankly, this is one of the most exciting thing about living in the UK – suddenly having such proximity to the people who write and create so much of the cultural stuff I read and listen to.) John Finnemore is massively popular, though, so of course I didn't expect to get a ticket.

I GOT A TICKET.

Time to plan a London weekend!

I figured I would make a whole cultural weekend out of it and see some theater as well. I have a friend who knows the London theater scene inside and out, so I got a bunch of recommendations from her; another friend who used to live in London got excited and gave me more restaurant suggestions than I could go to in probably several weeks.

And you know what? As much as I'd thought I was uninterested in London, as soon I started planning the weekend, I got super excited for it. Oh, right, this is why people go to London: because there's SO MUCH there.

I took the night train from Aberdeen: the Caledonian Sleeper. I hadn't been on a night train in a while, I guess since I took one back to Berlin from Budapest in 2014 – so, not since I moved away from Europe, in other words. I love trains, I love night trains, and letting me on a night train is one of the best ways to get me to run around like a fool, taking giddy pictures. Night train!

The next morning, I woke as the train was pulling into Euston Station. (Usually I wake up before arrival, especially since in mainland Europe, conductors generally come around beforehand announcing the approaching station. But not here, apparently.)

I stumbled off with my backpack (so nice to travel light again, after last summer's 2 1/2 months of schlepping several climates' worth of gear all over Europe!) It was 7 a.m. on a workday, and Euston Station was a-bustle. I've rarely seen such a frenetic public space. In New York, maybe.

London is great but the Tube is a nightmare – hot, stuffy, so crowded. A major reason why I would never consider living in London. (Well...along with the cost of living.) If I had to ride the Tube even occasionally, I would hate the world and everything in it.

But then I came up out of the Tube, and...I was in London! People getting coffees and striding purposefully off to work, on a gloriously sunny, mild November day. Sunshine in London, who would have thought?

I spent the day wandering around central London, mostly by foot, taking it all in. The Thames, which is indeed an impressive river. The bustle of Fleet Street, the Strand, Soho, Covent Garden. London in all its big-city bustle. I don't generally think of myself as a city person, but there was something invigorating about being among so many different people, all going about their different lives.

(Link to the full album of photos will be at the bottom of this post.)

THEN IT WAS TIME FOR JOHN FINNEMORE. i.e., time to head over to the BBC Broadcasting House and join the queue.

I'd debated how early I should get there: the BBC gives away somewhat more tickets than there are seats, on the assumption that since the tickets are free, some people will request them but then not bother to show up. This system breaks down, though, when it's a super popular show for which everyone shows up. So being early is important.

In the end I got there a little before 5 pm (for an 8:30 show). And found that the queue was already down the block and around the corner! Oh no!! But it turned out they were queuing for the first of the evening's two Souvenir Programme recordings, whereas I was there for the second one. So in fact I ended up being number eleven in the queue for my show. As in, the eleventh person to arrive, out of everyone, which meant I would be in the first group allowed in when the studio doors opened. Yes, I was proud enough to take a picture of my number sticker:

The recording itself was fantastic, so worth it. Seeing John Finnemore in person, after following his works all these years. Putting faces to the voices, of a cast that's so familiar after listening to six series of this show (many times over!). Getting to see all the "behind the scenes" details of how a radio show is made. I found myself wondering why I'd never thought (after years of doing stage managing in theater) of trying out something similar in radio. It looked like fun.

And then, because I am a dork, if I've maybe not mentioned that lately, I took pictures with the (model of the) TARDIS in the lobby. Being in London, at the BBC Broadcasting House, with the TARDIS. Pretty great.

The rest of my time in London was no slouch either, though. The next day I figured out the bus system (rather proud of that – I find even the largest subway and tram systems a piece of cake, but the intricate tangles of bus routes daunt me) and rode down to Camberwell, to try out a small fraction of the restaurants my friend in Aberdeen had recommended.

She'd said Camberwell was a great place to get good food cheaply, and oh boy was it ever. Even more, though, I loved the atmosphere of the neighborhood. The main streets felt very urban and incredibly international (visually, it reminded me of Neukölln, for anyone who knows Berlin), brimming over with shops and restaurants and produce markets from every imaginable corner of the world. An immigrant place, not fancy, but vibrant. So many cultures coming together. So many cuisines on offer: Turkish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Mongolian, Portuguese, a French bakery, a traditional English pub, a West African health-food-vegan-crêpes café, falafel, fish and chips...that was just a section of one street.

I was intrigued, too, by the striking contrast: from the gritty-urban-international vibe of the main streets, I only had to turn a single corner into the side streets to suddenly be in the most placid, leafy, residential neighborhood imaginable, lined with stately brick rowhouses. Fascinating.

Here was my breakfast, at the Yucca Garden Café in Camberwell. (I swear I'm not generally someone who takes pictures of my food, but this was just too excellent. I went in looking for a simple, even diner-style breakfast, and at the same price a diner breakfast would have been, I somehow ended up with this gorgeousness.)

That afternoon, I met my friends Pete and Nína (friends from Reykjavík!) They showed me the Seven Dials area of quirky shops and classy cafés (plus, the place they said has London's best coffee, which is quite a claim). We went to the Nordic Bakery (but of course), and a wine bar, and wandered Denmark Street, which is an entire street of guitar shops. An entire street of guitar shops! (Basses and ukeleles also allowed.)

Then I went to the theater. I hadn't been able to get tickets to the shows I'd looked into at the National Theatre or the Donmar Warehouse, but I was equally excited for what I did get, which was the Young Vic. The play was called "Wings," by Arthur Kopit. It's actually a play from 1978 (I did think the use of a tape recorder seemed a bit anachronistic...) but the Young Vic did this extraordinary adaptation where the main character – a woman recovering from a stroke and struggling to regain language – spends the entire time hooked into a harness and being whizzed about the air over the stage by wires, to represent her disorientation. The actress did an amazing job.

Also, can I just say: £10 for an excellent seat at top-quality professional theater? Now I see why people go to London especially for theater!

On my last day, I actually went to Camberwell again, because I liked it so much, then continued on over to Brixton. Like Camberwell, it was a wealth of cultures. So many produce shops, African groceries, Halal shops... In short order I saw a poster advertising a Basque brunch, then walked past an Eritrean restaurant. Brixton!

Then I stumbled across Pop Brixton and fell immediately in love. 

Pop Brixton is "a community initiative that has transformed a disused plot of land into a pioneering space that showcases the most exciting independent businesses from Brixton and Lambeth." The place is built out of old shipping crates. They provide space for local businesses, community gatherings, even little garden spaces. There's a free fridge where anyone suffering from hunger can take what they need. Yeah, I fell in love. 

The last bit of the afternoon, I just wandered, wending my way through the city to eventually end up at St Pancras Station, to head to Luton Airport. I flew back to Aberdeen (boo, such a poor substitute for a train, but it's how the timing worked out), but it happened I was traveling on Bonfire Night (Guy Fawkes Night), so I got to watch fireworks going off all over the country, from above. I don't think I'd ever seen fireworks from above before!

All in all, it was a perfect "mini-break" before diving back into the intense demands of grad school. (I worked like mad on my assignments beforehand, and I worked like mad after, but I let those three days be purely for London and discovering new things, no stress about deadlines allowed.) It also powerfully reminded me how much I need that jolt of newness and excitement that travel gives me, letting my brain step out of my daily life and soak up something new.


Here's my album of photos from the trip, if you want to see more:


IN LONDON TOWN


(Just a reminder that in Google Photos – and I am still not over them replacing the supremely smooth-functioning Picasa with this nonsense – the photos appear not to have captions. Which is a frustration, since writing the captions is where I have the most fun! But there's a little "i" (for info) symbol near the top right, and if you click on that, an information box expands that lets you see each picture's caption.)