Starting in Scotland

This is my travel journal of my time here in Oxford and in the U.K. in general. With all of my reading, traveling, theater-going, lecture-attending, paper-writing mania, I find I don't have time to write emails. But here I'll try to take down some impressions to remember.

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June 17, 2006

I am sitting in a hostel in Oxford, listening to the World Cup in the background. The passport arrived Friday morning and I headed up to Phoenix right away. Flight, bus, dropping off luggage at the porter's lodge at Lincoln College, all went pretty smoothly, although I was surprised at how hot it is in England - must be in the 80s, with humidity. Lugging baggage up and down the streets of Oxford, I sweat right through my tshirt and jeans. One funny story: Our plane couldn't land in London and had to circle for 10 minutes because today is Her Royal Majesty's birthday. The Royal Airforce was doing a fly-by of Buckingham Palace and hogging all the airspace, which led to a traffic jam at the airport. Happy Birthday, Queenie!

Edinburgh

June 18, 2006

This morning I boarded a train in Oxford; six hours later I jumped off in the center of Edinburgh. I had to pull my sweater and raincoat out immediately. Edinburgh is an incredibly beautiful city. The old town is built on an extinct volcano, a high ridge with a sheer drop to a river, perfect for a defensive castle on the top, and quite picturesque as well. The High Street runs along the ridge from the castle down to where there is a palace, inhabited by Queen Elizabeth II on her summer Scottish vacation; the street is now referred to as the Royal Mile, stretching between these two majestic structures.

Walking up to the High Street from the train station.


I went on a ghost tour that took me beneath the streets, where the former residents of Edinburgh had dug into the rock to make homes and storage spaces when they ran out of room on the mountain. These dark caverns saw tragedy when Edinburgh burned, and residents sought shelter there, thinking rock doesn't burn - but it does get very hot, especially porous volcanic rock.


Arthur's Seat, from an opposite vantage point in Edinburgh.

I stayed at a hostel right off of High Street, sixteen people in a dorm-style room. I didn't mind the people as much as the fact that my bed was right above/next to some sort of motor that shook the bed every few minutes all night. Immediately upon checking in, I met two Americans from Pennsylvania, Rachel and Jen. They were starting off a summer of backpacking through Europe, but had fallen in love with Edinburgh and ended up spening two weeks in Scotland. We climbed Arthur's Seat together, and got great (if windy) views of Edinburgh.

View from Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh

Culloden

From Edinburgh I took a small-bus tour that brought me and fifteen other tourists many places, including Glencoe, Bannockburn (where Robert the Bruce won his battle against the English), up to the Isle of Skye - an enchanted place if ever there was one - Loch Ness, Inverness, Culloden. That place is strange for the highlands: relatively flat, open, no place for shelter, or for the traditional "highland charge" of large men running downhill. The gravestones here mark entire clans whose bodies were desecrated so badly by the British that their families couldn't identify them. The leader of the British troops hired actual butchers to mutilate the bodies to send a message to the highland clans about the consequences of rebellion. The gravestones say "Mixed Clans" or "Clan Fraser," "Clan Stewart," and so on, when there was some identifying item.

Lincoln College, Grove Quad, Oxford
England took some adjusting, because it is relatively tame in comparison! Somehow Oxford doesn't hold the same mystery or romance for me; I've been in Europe before, so I'm not bowled over by the antiquity of the architechture or the quaintness of the pubs. But I'm trying to carve a space for myself here. I wasn't happy with my Romanticism class; I felt that I was not learning anything I hadn't already learned when I taught the 10th grade the Romantic poets this spring. So, I switched over to an intense Chaucer class, taught by John Fyler. I will spend most of this weekend curled up reading the Riverside Chaucer in the middle English, though I'm taking a break for the England-Portugal world cup game!

p.s. England lost, after two rounds of overtime, in a shoot-out. There was dead silence in the pubs and the streets that afternoon.