Sealion II

No pictures for this part, really. It's too bad, but sometimes your vacation goes undocumented visually.

After our visit to Glasgow Castle we went and got a tour of a haunted house, which was wasted money cuz the ghosts failed to make a timely appearance, and then we got on the train and went to Glasgow to stay with Mads, the woman who was making the whole thing possible (we were staying with her employer in London because he's the nicest guy in Creation and the only man to ever out-generous the HLP in my presence). So the HLP had a suitcase full of things she had requested from America as her present for having been so nice to us. Plus, we got to see her pad and Glasgow.

We ended up seeing a lot more of the first than the second, which was too bad; after our train ride (and an exceedingly unfortunate interval in which my ATM card was devoured by an intransigent Scots ATM (they call them something else in Great Britain, but darned if I can remember what it is)) we went to dinner at an Indian restaurant and had haggis curry, which isn't any better than it sounds, and then went back to Mads' flat and watched part of 28 Days on the television, then sacked out.

And since the windows were all closed (with shutters, mind you) and Mads didn't have to get up and go to work and we had had about two hours of sleep the night before and we were all kinda jet-lagged anyway, we didn't even wake up until 11:30 AM, and we didn't get out of the house until something like one o'clock, which meant that we had just enough time to eat lunch and get on the train. So that's what we did.

One note will suffice for lunch--please, be aware of what you're getting into with the Scots soft drinks. Their ginger ale is not a polite ginger-inflected beverage like Canada Dry; it is like ginger amphibious commandos assaulting your taste buds, by which I mean you would get a similar experience by dousing your tongue with concentrated essence of ginger, by which I mean, BEWARE!

They also drink Iron-Bru, which is like Frescolita, if you've ever had that, and if you haven't lived in Venezuela you probably haven't. It's sorta like creme soda; if you could make liquid carbonated caramels it would taste a lot like it.

So that was Glasgow. And by the time we got back to London, it was late, so we just went out and observed the restaurants and had a fairly forgettable meal at a pizza restaurant (don't go to London for the pizza).

But Wednesday...a lot happened on Wednesday.

I was telling you about this a few months ago...thought I'd try again.

So. Edinburgh! We got there in the end, and this is what we saw:





These pictures pretty much entirely fail to do it justice, especially since we got some exquisite views from Edinburgh Castle which were underdocumented (and would have been hard to capture without a snazzy panoramic camera anyway). Edinburgh is one of those cities that's exquisite when you can actually see it (much like San Francisco)--its setting is actually quite similar to San Francisco's, since it's built on the Firth of Forth. Of all the cities we went to this is the one that I think about most.



This rather uncanny-looking building is a World War I memorial; I'm not sure you can tell from the picture, but it was more reminiscent of an attenuated pagoda than any Western building I've seen. It's almost the first thing you see leaving the train station, and in the early morning half-light it was very impressive (and not easy to get a good photograph of, in the dim light).

Is that all the family members' experiences are so much the same, and yet, so different.

My sister Lady Grey (maybe you wonder, why all the cute psuedonyms? Well, cuz it's fun...and why put the name all over the Internets for it to be fished out by horrible spambots and other ill-inclined persons and demipersons?) has a post up about a conversation among my sisters with a family story I have never heard before. And, y'know, there have got to be more where that came from. Especially because I have all kinds of memories that seem to have escaped everyone else...like the family vacation interlude in which my sisters barged into the hotel room shouting "Beer and skittles! Beer and skittles!" and promptly set to drinking root beer and pounding Skittles like there was no tomorrow, to drown their sorrows. I never figured out what the sorrows were, but it was quite an amusing interlude. And, as best I can tell, no-one but me remembers it now.

But I bequeath it to you, Internets, and now it will never die so long as Google maintains its Cache.

SPQR stands for "Senatus Populus Que Romanus", "Senate and Populace of Rome". It was put on the standards of the Roman legions, and some classically inclined person made it a cement graffito in the sidewalk over by the UCSF Parnassus campus, which I thought was rather clever.