Skip to main content

yum, yum, and stuffed birds


Oh my. It's been over a week since I've written anything, and that was not very interesting. So perhaps my life has been drab. Perhaps I have done little but read read read for the past two weeks. Who can blame me? That's what I'm here for, after all.

I have done one lovely thing, though. Yesterday. I went to the Tea Room on the east end of the Royal Mile and had cream tea.
(photo above, provided by www.edinburgh-royalmile.com) Heaven, your name is clotted cream. Next to ceilidh dancing, one of the favoriter things I've done in Scotland. Although I must admit a certain sense of self-consciousness, being there with an actual British person who apparently hails from the cream tea capital of England. And I should have been self-conscious. I earned such tension the moment I licked a spot of cream off my finger. Proper people don't do that! ah... but who can let such beauty go to waste?

Another thing I have done: wandered for an hour or so in the National Museum of Scotland, which is free, which has amazing architecture, and which contains a variety of stuffed beetles. It also hold some representative figurines of extinct birds, a guillotine named "the Maiden", and a treasure chest (empty) from long ago (obviously) with a hidden lock system comprised of 15 spring bolts. Oh yes, and I cannot fail to mention the creepy mask that a dissenting Protestant preacher wore on his Gospel tours back in the days of zeal. It looked like that scarecrow mask from Batman Begins.
Mask photo (view only if you possess a strong constitution): http://imdb.com/gallery/ss/0372784/BBFC27.jpg.html
NMS website:
http://www.nms.ac.uk/nationalmuseumhomepage.aspx.
Website exerpt: 'Have you ever asked, “What is a Bird?”. This is the ideal place to find out! Learn about their flight. Explore their feeding and nesting. Look into courtship and mating. Many of the specimens in our collection are displayed in characteristic poses - look out for the vulture!'

I have also tasted haggis, though I can take little credit for the experience. Flatmate Jess gains all the glory, as she scarfed an entire meal of the stuff, minus the slight tastes that Flatmate Liesl and myself took from that portion. I didn't mind it! I don't think I could eat a whole meal of it, because sometimes the mind takes over the gag reflex... but I could manage more than one taste now and again. It tasted like a sausage, only more... grainy. To try this at home: http://www.smart.net/~tak/haggis.html

So I suppose I have been doing more than reading. Though I have a lot more of that still to do. You will find me in the same spot for the next four days, plowing through Thomas Pynchon (http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/v/index.html) and Henry Mackenzie (http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2858). And maybe, just maybe, a bit of Alastair Gray (only unrelated websites available. Google it yourself).

Comments

  1. Wonder Jens20 November, 2006 10:08

    I told you Haggis wasn't bad.

    But who believes Jenny?

    No one.

    Ever.

    Eventhough I'm right at least 82% of the time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lil_Flip20 November, 2006 16:33

    Wait... what happened to the Loch Ness? When is that? Oh my... I am embarassed. I don't know what's going on in your life anymore! And I thought I did!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown20 November, 2006 16:46

    okay, well, we were going to go to Loch Ness, but it turns out that it's much farther away than we thought and much more expensive than we thought. So we skipped it. We'll go after Christmas.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lil_Flip21 November, 2006 08:40

    Ok good... so I wasn't going crazy!! At least you didn't get eaten by the Loch Ness Monster, which is always a good thing. But I lied to the Shawn (the hair guy) on Saturday morning 'cause I told him you were there and he thought that was awesome. But I think he has a girlfriend now... oh well.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can someone please explain why my Quicktime isn't working? Anyone with prophetic awareness of my little Atlas, none so old but recently behaving so?
8 comments
Read more
because you were all wondering what I'm writing my dissertation on, here's a brief synopsis of my 'research context': When James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760, he went to great lengths to make the Fragments appear to be authentic remains of an ancient, heroic oral tradition. His reasons for this were largely political, and as such, influenced the content of the epics themselves. As an attempt to establish a particularly Scottish identity, the poems were quite effective. However, to do so required both a simplification and a manipulation of traditional mythology. Stripped of anagogical significance, the Ossian epics more or less represented an Enlightenment version of history, tradition, and mythic heritage. The stories themselves were changed by their very purpose and in turn changed the manner of representing myth in future narratives. Moreover, the emphasis on the Ossian epics as authentic tales from the past, as ‘fragments,’ served...
6 comments
Read more
Rounding out my year of dwelling in the Athens of the North, as Edinburgh was called during the Enlightenment, I have experienced the shortest night of my memory. Around eleven o'clock last night, I closed the curtains to a sky streaked with the dark blue of a finally setting sun. I fully intended to drop off to sleep immediately after, but as I usually do, found myself still putting around after two in the morning. Between the curtains, which I had not closed as well as I should have, I noticed something unusual. There was unnaturally natural light streaming through. I opened them wide only to find the sky streaked with the same blue they had been filled with but three hours before. Had there been any night at all? If so, I had closed my curtains to it, only to find morning rising just as sleep found me - morning in the middle of the night. Long live Scotland.
5 comments
Read more