Monday
Monday we were in Edinburgh, after a long and really fairly hideous train ride. I don't have any pictures of the train ride, and it's just as well, because, well, fairly hideous. Only Axl was wise enough to splash out the extra $50 or so to get a sleeper car; the rest of us were too cheap. Plus, the HLP said "Sure you can sleep in the seats! I did it all the time when I was last here!"
Well, maybe they changed the seats. Or maybe it was that they didn't TURN OFF THE HIDEOUS YELLOW-ORANGE OVERHEAD LIGHTS. (Why not do this? Why not? Of all the many things I saw in the British Isles, this might have been the strangest.) Or maybe it was the fact that first the car temperature was arctic, and then it was sweltering, and it never seemed to find a happy medium. I went out at one point into the diner car, which is supposed to be for first-class passengers, I suppose, and was much cooler than where we were sitting (or sprawling, or lying, or hunching up in the fetal position, depending on what seemed like it might provide a little comfort at the moment). The attendant was asleep, so I hung out there for a little while.
On returning to the seat car I discovered it was still too hot to sleep, so I tried to go back to the diner care, only to be rebuffed by the attendant! "First class passengers only," he said, and would not be moved, despite the fact that it was THREE IN THE MORNING, and the car was empty. Surely class no longer exists at three in the morning? I was tempted to comment on the class sensitivity of English culture, but the guy was Pakistani (at least, he was from the Indian subcontinent and spoke with an accent--I guess he could've been Indian) and I figured, he probably gets way too much class warfare in his daily life, why make it worse? So I retreated into the double-boiler--I mean,the seat car--and made the best of it. Between the OPC, the HLP, and the ME we got about eight hours of sleep that night.
Long story short: it was a miserable experience.
...What? Edinburgh? Yeah, we got there in the end. I'll tell you about it in the next post.
Well, maybe they changed the seats. Or maybe it was that they didn't TURN OFF THE HIDEOUS YELLOW-ORANGE OVERHEAD LIGHTS. (Why not do this? Why not? Of all the many things I saw in the British Isles, this might have been the strangest.) Or maybe it was the fact that first the car temperature was arctic, and then it was sweltering, and it never seemed to find a happy medium. I went out at one point into the diner car, which is supposed to be for first-class passengers, I suppose, and was much cooler than where we were sitting (or sprawling, or lying, or hunching up in the fetal position, depending on what seemed like it might provide a little comfort at the moment). The attendant was asleep, so I hung out there for a little while.
On returning to the seat car I discovered it was still too hot to sleep, so I tried to go back to the diner care, only to be rebuffed by the attendant! "First class passengers only," he said, and would not be moved, despite the fact that it was THREE IN THE MORNING, and the car was empty. Surely class no longer exists at three in the morning? I was tempted to comment on the class sensitivity of English culture, but the guy was Pakistani (at least, he was from the Indian subcontinent and spoke with an accent--I guess he could've been Indian) and I figured, he probably gets way too much class warfare in his daily life, why make it worse? So I retreated into the double-boiler--I mean,the seat car--and made the best of it. Between the OPC, the HLP, and the ME we got about eight hours of sleep that night.
Long story short: it was a miserable experience.
...What? Edinburgh? Yeah, we got there in the end. I'll tell you about it in the next post.