You Take The High Road, or: I Would Walk 500 Miles

Well I’ll do anything to procrastinate… even hoover (they don’t vacuum here, they hoover), and of course, blog. So my flat is sparkly clean, but surely I’ll have to tidy up again before the dreaded flat inspections on Thursday, ick. Now I’m updating this blog, but progress on my work for Scottish History remains to be seen.

Last week was a delight as usual. Tuesday two friends here had birthdays, so we held a celebration at our flat. I was all set on baking a cake, and decided that since it was Mardi Gras that I was going to make a King Cake (this is one of those times where I blame my mother for giving me her overachiever gene). So it was a pretty basic recipe… eggs milk flour sugar etc etc, but little did I know it was going to become an adventure in MacGyver Home Cooking.

Besides the fact that I had to change all of the measurements to metric, first of all, there is no such thing as cream cheese here, but they do sell a suscpicious substance called “soft cheese;” also, powdered sugar is referred to as “icing sugar;” third, nutmeg is only sold in combination with ginger, coriander, cinnamon, and cloves. Yeast is not sold in packets in normal grocery stores. In normal stores you have to buy it pre-combined with the flour. If you want a packet, you have to go to the specialty health food store. Sprinkles only come in the non-pareil variety, and can only be located at the fancy grocery store. Finally, I scoured the grocery stores of the Glasgow City Centre and nobody sells food coloring, but I did find that combining icing (powdered) sugar with the juice of yellow, green, and purple unfrozen Fla-Vor-Ice packets makes quite a nice substitute.

Whip it all together with the help of a paperclip, Swiss Army knife, and some duct tape, and you get something like this…

Traditionally the baker puts a small plastic baby inside of the cake and the cake-eater who gets the slice with the baby gets to bring the King Cake next year. Well I didn’t have a plastic baby…but I had gumdrops, and wouldn’t you know it I cut myself a slice not ¼ inch thick and lo and behold, there was the gumdrop. Doesn’t that figure…

Thursday night we (me, Natalie, Stephanie) went to our 3^rd Ceilidh (kay-lee) of the semester, held by the Strathclyde Mountaineering Club. For those of you who missed the explanation of a ceilidh earlier, I will recap… A Ceilidh is the name of a Scottish folk dance party, its kin to American square dancing. From what I’ve heard, this is what Scottish kids used to do in barns on Friday nights. Kilts, bagpipes, fiddles, copious amounts of alcohol, the whole thing. So this Ceilidh was way better than either we had been to before, first of all because we finally know what we are doing, second because there was about a 1:1, male:female ratio (good work Mountaineering Club) The band was great because they explained the dances really thoroughly and made everyone switch partners frequently so you didn’t get stuck with one partner the whole night (this proved to be either a God-send or terribly disappointing, depending on the partner). We met some other international kids (two Austrian, two German, two French, and three American) and two of them invited us over for an after-ceilidh party at their flat.

Our hosts were Julien (French) and Taylor (American). We were just hanging around and chatting when Julien shouts, “WAIT! I will go get the magic carpet!!” It turns out the “magic carpet” is a Dance, Dance Revolution board. So we played some Dance, Dance Revolution and then it was time to go. It had been raining earlier so I had my umbrella, but when I was outside their flat saying goodbye to Natalie I realized that I no longer had my trusty umbrella!

So I buzzed their flat, no answer. I ran around to the back of the flat where I knew the kitchen windows were open. I got Julien’s attention and he insisted that he would throw it down for me. So he tosses it out the window into a thicket of thorn bushes. Taylor comes to the window and I shout up to him that I was in a skirt and there was no way I was crawling in there to get my umbrella. Taylor tells me not to move and he will be right down. Suddenly it seemed like I better just go in there and get it myself, so I climbed into the thorn bushes, got the umbrella, and then realized that I didn’t remember my path in, and couldn’t get out. Taylor comes down (in his socks mind you) and talked me right out of there, what a guy. I had my umbrella, several thorny marks on my legs, and I was very glad to head back to my flat.

Saturday it was off to Edinburgh again for the Six Nations Rugby match, Scotland v. Italy. Scotland and Italy are both really terrible at rugby this year, so this match was to determine who was the worst. Scotland smoked them 26-6, so determine what you will from that.

Oh what to say about rugby… From my limited experience with the sport, I have observed rugby to be a frightening spectacle of masculinity and testosterone. It’s like soccer + football + gymnastics + wrestling + crazy. Play does not stop until someone breaks a rule or a bone. Scottish rugby is great because men young and old all attend the game in kilts, and there is at least one guy in the every stand who has brought his bagpipes. When Scotland scores a try they triumphantly play I’m Gonna Be by The Proclaimers or a punk rock version of The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond. Classy. At the end of the match a guy clad only in a kilt, against all odds and in the presence of several hundred security guards, rushed the field and was promptly led off the pitch in cuffs. Ultra classy.

Reason to Love it: You could go to a ceilidh a week if you wanted to.
Reason to Leave it: Not only do they drive on the left, they also walk on the left. Sidewalk collisions occur daily.

Cheers,
J