I am sure, faithful readers, that you noticed the absence of posts last week. You probably shook your heads like you always do and thought "David's too busy off having fun to write us even a few measly words this week... he probably spent all his time on Facebook chatting with those exchange girls he always talks about and forgot completely to write us poor people back home a few measly words to brighten our lives..." But this week you would only be half correct. True, I was too busy to write anything for your enjoyment, but I wouldn't have been able to post it anyway, because I was in the wilds of darkest Scotland, and didn't have any internet access. So here's how the week went:
Monday:
I got to Köln/Bonn Flughafen at 9 Monday morning. The airport brings to mind a Douglas Adams quote: "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, ‘as pretty as an airport'." It does its job efficiently, though, and in a couple of hours we were on a plane to Edinburgh. I didn't even have to take off my shoes! In Edinburgh, as a non-EU-citizen I had to jump trough a couple of extra hoops: they didn't give out the card with trip length and other information that travelers are supposed to fill out on the plane, because there's barely anyone on a flight from Germany to England that needs one! Germans don't even need a passport to travel in the EU; the Personalausweis that everyone is issued at 16 is enough ID for just about anything.
I have dubbed Edinburgh the City of Chimneys. Everywhere you look, the old stone buildings sprout cylindrical smokestacks, relics of a day when the heating source was coal. the skies of the city must have been disgusting then; but now everything's nice and pretty; the old storefronts are well-preserved and painted brightly, and the only sign of pollution is in the dirty black stone of the old buildings.
My first meal in Scotland was also a memorable one. We were given free time to wander the Old Town, and I looking for something typically Scottish and/or delicious to eat, I saw a pig head in a shop window. The rest of the pig was there too, and available to eat! The shop, cleverly called "Oink", was selling "Scottish hog roast rolls", essentially pulled pork with delicious thyme seasoning in a bun with a piece of "crackling" on top. 
Crackling is the glazed skin of said pig, a little crunchy square of fatty goodness which, if you are lucky, still has a few bristles sticking out of it! Combined with a ginger beer, it really hit the spot. England may be renowned for its bad food, but its colonies produce some pretty good stuff!
The rest of Monday was a walking tour of Edinburgh and, perhaps the smartest move of the trip, a stop in a used bookstore (I have never seen a German used bookstore. I wonder why...) where I bought for £2 a paperback by Larry Niven that was my primary entertainment for the rest of the trip. I have been starved for science fiction this year, so it was good to sink my nose into a really good work of genre fiction.
Tuesday:
We got up bright and early on Tuesday and met the other class from my school that had decided to come to Edinburgh over breakfast. They had elected to come with a ferry from Holland, and were quite a bit the worse for wear. There was apparently a bar on this ferry, with beer at tax-free prices, and quite a few of them had apparently been keen to exploit the bargain. Pleasantries exchanged, we went our separate ways. Our first stop of the day was Edinburgh Castle, perched on top of an old volcano in the middle of the Old Town. To get there, though, we had to walk a gauntlet of bagpiping tourist shops, selling all varieties of tartan- and kilt-based tourist junk.
While we are on the subject of commerce, let me say right up front that the English pound makes NO SENSE. To start with, there isn't even a common pound note! Some of my classmates, wanting to exchange money before we arrived, were confused when they were presented with a choice between English and Scottish pounds. Apparently there are some from the Bank of England, some from the Bank of Scotland, and a few from something called the Clydesdale Bank, which makes me think of racehorses and wonder what the UK's monetary policy is really based on. All of these notes have different designs. The Clydesdale Bank's look nothing like the other two, don't have the Queen on them, and are far more colorful. The Scottish notes have more Scottish things on them; castles and lochs and stuff, and the whole system is extremely confusing.
Fortunately, there is, as far as I could tell, only one set of coins in the UK. This doesn't mean that things make sense, though. The sizes of the coins seem to have been chosen seemingly at random. The one pence coin is tiny, but the two pence (why do the euro and the pound seem to think that both a one and a two cent coin are necessary?) is the largest coin they have. The one pound coin is really thick and heavy, and the 20 pence and 50 pence coins are not round, but a strange rounded septagon shape. It's pretty much a madhouse trying to figure out what all the coins are all valued.
After our view of the castle, (we didn't get to go in, because it cost money and Germans sometimes out-Scotch the Scotch) we walked down the Royal Mile, back through all the tourist shops, to a museum called The People's Story, which was free. There I learned that, in medieval Edinburgh, there was a guild for everything. Butchers bakers, candlestick makers, even beggars had to be registered, for heaven's sake! We also visited an old churchyard, which was something very special to my teacher; apparent Germany doesn't have any truly old graveyards anymore, because after a few generations they just put new graves over the old ones. Very space-saving, I guess...
From there we walked back up the Royal Mile, provisioned ourselves, and boarded our bus, highland bound! Scotland is renowned for many things, but one of them is definitely not it's efficient road system. It took us three hours to cover the 100-odd kilometers between Edinburgh and our hostel in Aviemore, a tiny little place known as a ski village in winter, and more or less a ghost town in summer.
The next thing on the agenda was to hike a short way though the highlands. I had worked with some of my friends to plan the hike, looking through directories of Scottish hiking paths to try to find one that would be pretty but not try the endurance or patience of my classmates. I had decided on one that appeared good, but upon consultation with the locals, another one was suggested, and we went off in a completely different direction to hike around a small loch. It was a nice flat hike, and pretty, but the only distinguishing feature of the loch was a small island, upon which some crazy Scots had at one point built a mini-castle.
After out highland hike, we went to a nearby pub/restaurant to eat. Here I, with no small amount of trepidation, decided to order haggis. I didn't know anything about the renowned dish, not even what animal was involved in its preparation, but it was archetypically Scottish, and I was in Scotland, and I wasn't going to leave without trying it, dammit! A few minutes later, the waiter brought me a plate of brown ground-up... meat? yes, meat, and it tastes... Hey! it tastes great! Haggis will never win any beauty contests, but, like Scotland, it's simple and hearty, the sort of food that shepherds crave after a cold day in the Highlands.
Wednesday:
On Wednesday's agenda was a visit to Inverness, Callodon battlefield, and a driveby of Loch ness. In Inverness, all the signs were bilingual: in addition to English, Inverness has a small and proud community of Gaelic speakers. This surprised me; I had only associated Gaelic with Ireland, but it makes sense that it didn't stay there.
I spent too long in the museum in Inverness and lost the rest of the group. This wasn't a problem; afterwards was free time anyway, but it meant I was on my own to find lunch. This was also no problem. The Scottish have good specials: I lunched on haggis and mashed potatoes (they seem to call them "tatties" or something) and washed it down with a dram of sherry for just £5. While eating, I heard the table across from me speaking German. No, it wasn't more of my group. German tourists are everywhere!
Callodon Battlefield was a wide flat field; I've never really understood the fascination with and pilgrimage to battlefields; of all the sites of history, they are the ones that show the fewest signs of what took place. Nor was I able to really grasp what this battle was about. Some war of succession or something, I believe. That or a war of Scottish liberation.
I don't have much to say to Loch Ness. We stopped once, to take some pictures. There is a famously ruined castle on one bank. But they want money for it. The owners planted a high hedge to block the view from the parking lot. So we just walked further up the road, to where the view was unobstructed. Take that, hedge.
This evening, we decided to cook for ourselves in the hostel's kitchen in order to save money. This was at first a massive stressful mess, with no one sure how many wanted to or how much to make or who should front the money for ingredients. But once we got back and the cooks got cooking, it turned into quite a delicious pot of spaghetti with tomato sauce, and even though we made way too much, it cost only a fraction of eating out, as well. Our aspirations towards a room party, though, were foiled by the fact that the hostelers kept coming around and telling us that no boys were allowed in the girls room, and by the simple physical fact that a small one-window room containing ten people can quickly become a bit tropical. But a pleasant night was had by all.
Thursday:
There was one thing on Thursday's agenda: whiskey. We went to the Glenlivet distillery, where they showed off the various stills, and, best of all, the aging room. I do not think there is a better smell than that which comes from hundreds of casks of whiskey in one building. I'd wear it as perfume, but then people would think I was a drunkard.
After touring and tasting, we piled back in the bus, and took a very long scenic detour back to Edinburgh, through some very beautiful highlands. I don't think we saw a tree for hours; just low-growing bushes that covered everything, and the occasional sheep. It's an absolutely beautiful country, and I would love to see it from something other than a bus; perhaps a bike or hiking tour across Scotland, one of these years...
Nonetheless, everyone was happy to get back to Edinburgh, and we headed out. I went with a group in a pub nearby to eat some student-price burgers and watch the World cup: France against Mexico. As we came in, we noticed a table in the corner being held down by one girl about our age; we went up to her and asked if we could possibly sher the table. She said sure, but her friends were going to come soon as well, and as we would not then have comfortably fit, we demurred. But the incident stuck in my mind. She seemed friendly, I thought, and I had been in Scotland for a week without actually having a conversation with anyone native. That's no way to see a country, I thought, and at halftime, went over to the three girls and asked if there was room.
As it turned out, they weren't from Edinburgh, but from Paris, students at the Sorbonne up for a weekend. We watched and talked as France played miserably and lost, and then had a round to drown our sorrows and talked some more. In one of those wonderful little coincidences, one of them, Julie, had been in Boston for a semester or so and was also a red sox fan! After a while a band came in and covered a lot of songs we liked, and then we walked home and talked, and all in all it was the best evening of the trip. And before this year, it never would have happened. I would have never gone up to three strangers and said "hey, can I sit with you?" And that is the best thing to come from this exchange; not a new language, not a better understanding of two cultures, but the confidence to jump into perhaps precarious social situations with both feet. It just makes life a blast.
