The Time it Snowed, and the Time I Found My Home Here

Since it’s been a little while since I last posted, I have a few stories for you today, and something interesting to start out with: I am writing this blog from The Elephant House café, which is (allegedly) the café where J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter. Pretty amazing, and it just adds to the surreal feeling when I think about the fact that I am living in Edinburgh. Oh, and I updated the '33 Hours' blog post with the airport photo, so you should check that out. Be well.

I realize that I haven’t yet told you about my classes, so I shall do that first. I am taking three classes (a full load for the Scottish) this semester, and they are: Meta-Ethics, Philosophy and the Environment, and Celtic Civilisation. The first two are third-level Philosophy ‘honours’ (as they call it) courses. The lattermost is a first-level Celtic culture class, which I took because I wanted to learn about the culture from the people who lived there (and, of course, it is always important to get a break from Philosophy). Meta-Ethics deals with the theory of ethics itself, the metaphysic of ethics in a sense. It looks at questions such as possession of moral knowledge, existence of moral facts, and objectivity vs. relativity of ethics. Philosophy and the Environment is much more of an applied ethics course, dealing with Environmental Ethics from all sorts of perspectives and angles. Celtic Civilisation is turning out to be a bit of a historical course, with suitable amounts of culture mixed in. I like them all so far, actually, and I am especially enjoying Celtic Civilisation, because all of the information is new to me, and so different from the popular beliefs I subscribed to regarding Celtics and their civilisation. All of the work is done independently, which I am really enjoying thus far, as it allows for a great deal of freedom, and it also shows an unusual kind of trust in the student. Altogether it is going pretty well. Here’s a picture to break up the text a bit, a mysterious nightly one:


Last Monday, I took a walk to Holyrood, as I have decided to do every Monday morning, and it happened to be raining, as it is oft fond to do in Scotland, but I decided that if I let the rain get the best of me I wouldn’t make it far here. So I suited up and went out to visit the mountain. As I walked, I noticed that there was snow intermixed with the rain, which was quite surprising, noting that it was 30℉ outside. I continued on the main paved path that slopes around the mountain until I found a stairway cut into the mountainside, going straight up a rather steep slope. I decided to climb up and investigate, and upon doing so reached the top, which turned out to be little more than a crevice in the mountain, with no access to the top, unless I scrambled up about 20 feet of steep, wet stone. Yet this crevice was three sided, so I could stand there and look up at the top of the crag I was on, at the tufts of grass, so green in January, and behind me was an excellent view of the countryside below, as Holyrood so well provides. Just as I was standing there, appreciating the beauty of it all, the mixed precipitation turned entirely to snow and intensified, all rather quickly. And suddenly there I was, standing in the same place, but now surrounded by an endless sweeping current of snow. I watched as it flew over the town, and turned to see it playing in the crevice, falling into the grass or missing that and touching the stone, only for the rest of it to sweep up again, and I looked up to see the current with its gray backdrop and it seemed to go on forever. I stayed there for quite some time, until my clothes were covered by a veritable blanket of snow. I went back in eventually, and took a picture of the mountain from my room to remember the experience. It's at the top.

Oh, and I should mention that I watched Obama’s inauguration from Aspen, an American bar in Edinburgh, with all of my American friends, and had a ‘Red Roosevelt’, a themed cocktail for the occasion. It was fantastic. I loved the song John Williams composed, and I especially loved Obama’s speech, of course. Oh, and my friend Yannick is playing on the University of Edinburgh’s basketball team (the Snow Sharks) and last night they beat the University of Glasgow in the finals of Scotland. So... we won Scotland. The game was played in the University’s gym, and they had to divide the gym so that the trampoline society could practice on the other side. So many hilarious cultural observations... And here's another Holyrood picture for your enjoyment:

Last Tuesday night, I decided to attend the University of Edinburgh Folk Society meeting for the first time, which I had read about on the Student Association site, which I was exploring for chances to meet more native students, and more my age. I settled on this one (though it was the same night as the Chocolate Society meeting, a tough choice) and I couldn’t be happier with that choice. I went to the meeting place, a permanent room the Society has amongst some student flats, about ten minutes early, and I was greeted by one man in the expansive room with its old hardwood floors and plentiful, assorted worn furniture. The man was the treasurer of the Society, and I talked to him for a little while about the society and how it worked - it turns out the society has been around for 50 years (hence the permanent room). We talked for about fifteen minutes, and in that time two more people walked in, one as new as myself, and the other a regular member. The conversations were a bit awkward (helped in no small part by the characters of the two regulars involved) until the people finally started to enter in a seemingly endless stream. The room filled quickly (and for me unexpectedly so) with about 30-40 people each bearing either a fiddle, a guitar, a mandolin, a whistle, or even an instrument I didn’t recognize. There was even one particularly elderly man who came in with a small bagpipe. The crowd was unruly for a short time with all of the greetings and tunings and laughter that resonated throughout the room, until one person just started playing a song.

It was a fiddle player, and it was a song that four or five other people knew, and they then joined in and performed an excellent Celtic-sounding song. This happened a couple more times before someone introduced the Folk Society and explained that this is how it functions - spontaneous songs that people bring to the group and perform, either ones that multiple people know (they have a song book) or a solo song. The night then continued with people either introducing their song or just breaking out into it, always met with applause afterwards, followed by banter until the next song came about. A friend of mine from my study abroad program came in and sat next to me (through coincidence, not planning), which helped me work up the courage to stand and sing one of the shanties I know, and it was very well received. People there actually joined me in the chorus a couple of verses in. I stayed there until midnight, and I was overjoyed to do so. There were many very talented musicians there, and I enjoyed each and every song, whether it was a crooning Scottish song, a lamenting song, an instrumental, or even a Japanese folk song. There was a short song played by the man with the bagpipes, which was quite loud, but enjoyable. There was even a man who was president of the society in the ‘60s, and he sang two songs in a reminiscent fashion. I sang another shanty at the end of the night, and they actually ended up closing the session with it. Afterwards, I got a chance to talk to the Italian man next to me who is doing his Masters here, and he sang ‘Bella Ciao’, an upbeat and lovely Italian song about love and war (I believe - it was, after all, in Italian). I couldn’t stop smiling the entire night, and for the first time since I have been here, I felt a little sense of home.