Skye Trip Day Two

Here's a map of my trip this day.

I had stopped overnight at Loch Ness with Tina, and I left the hostel at about 9am in the morning. I drove down to Invernmoriston where I took the road toward Kyle of Lochalsh. It first passed by Loch Cluanie, which is held back on one end by a big dam.


The road then passes through Glen Shiel. It's absolutely stunning, though pictures don't convey it so well due to the mistiness. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road!

Once on to Skye, stopped in Kyleakin when the weather was back to absolutlely miserable. Had a look at the old closed up hostel, popped into the shop for a snack and then drove on up the island.

Passing through Broadford got stopped by roadworks. Had a convoy van to lead you through, something I've not seen before. I sang/hummed "Convoy" to myself whilst waiting for the cars ahead of me to move.

Drove down single track road to Elgol to get a nice view of the Cuillin. Single track roads are my kind of driving; you have to be courteous or you will run into someone. One car has to pull into a passing place to allow another to go by. It's just the logistics of the situation. And then you give a little wave to each other when you pass. There are the mad folks who want to drive super fast and try to run you off the road, that happens even on the main roads (there seems to be more of those people over here than in Canada), but they're fortunately not the majority.

I might have gone for a walk on the beach at Elgol another day, but the wind was so strong I had trouble standing in one place just to take photos without being blown off balance.




After coming back up from Elgol, I drove up the west of Skye toward Dunvegan.

Skye Trip Day One: Hitting the road

I picked up the hire car after finishing work. I booked an automatic because I figured it would be good to take things step-by-step and get used to driving on the opposite side before having to get used to a manual transmission. I booked the smallest car possible (i.e. the cheapest) but was told when I picked it up that I was being given a larger car due to availability. They gave me a Peugot 407, about an average-size car to me, similar in size to Chevy's like the Corsica and the Malibu or the Pontiac GrandAm (I'm just naming cars I've driven around that size).

Driving on the wrong side of the road isn't the biggest problem for me, it's sitting on the wrong side of the car. I've realized that when it comes to driving, I've developped my spatial sense on my right side, because that's where the rest of the car always have been, and on my left side I've not had to develop the distance judging quite so well. It probably doesn't help that my right eye is my better one. Anyway, it's made me paranoid about the whereabouts of the left-hand side of the car.


Had some moments of confusion involving roundabouts in Inverness itself (I've mentioned the preponderance of roundabouts over here as compared to Canada before). Stopped at the supermarket and discovered the parking spaces are smaller; what is a small-medium sized car in Canada is on the larger size here. I can't imagine how the people with pick-up trucks over here park them. The car park spaces are also designated by a complete rectangle, there isn't one open side.

Then when getting out on the A82 heading down along Loch Ness, it was getting used to the narrowness of roads and the twistiness.

The key for the car is really cool; it folds away into the plastic bit, and there's a button that caused is to swing open again. It's immensely fun to play with as you carry the keys about.

Sheep can eat pickles and die

This sign is posted along the road along Loch Ness's northern shore. Oddly enough, for the two miles after this sign, I saw no sheep, whereas I've seen them on every other rural walk I've ever taken in this country. I'm not sure where the sheep are meant to be - the loch is on one side of the road, and a forrested mountain is on the other side. There is a sign indicating falling rocks for 2 miles as well. I think the sheep must be at the top of the mountains, throwing the rocks.

The post title is a quote from Alysha. She likes neither sheep nor pickles and so combined them into one expression.

At Loch Ness Hostel

On Thursday, my hostel group was out for the day, so I headed out for a walk myself. I walked from Alltsigh (where the hostel is) southwest-ward, along the roadside, hoping to find a path up to the Great Glen Way footpath so that I wouldn't have to walk on the road. I didn't find one before arriving at Invermoriston (about 3 miles down the road), the village in Glen Moriston at the junction of the road from Inverness, the road to Fort William, and the road to Kyle of Lochalsh. The village consists of a shop/post office, a hotel with restaurant/bar, a craft shop (that didn't appear to be open yet), a coffee shop/tea room (opening in a week), a village hall, a school, and some houses.

I bought some chocolate at the shop to supplement my packed lunch, then walked in the direction of the waterfall. Along the way I stopped at Columba's Well, as it was marked - it's a not-so-spring-like (i.e. some still water surrounded by a hole in rock) spring that legend says was poisonous until St. Columba made a stop there in the late 500's and blessed it, giving the water curing properties. I guess if you're a Columba fan then it would be a highlight.

The waterfall was actually pretty neat - no Niagra, but quite fast moving water none-the-less. The bank above the river was high and dropped off sharply.

To go back to the hostel, I joined the Great Glen Way where it came out in Invermoriston. It took a seemly circuituitous route up a hill, but did provide a good view point before heading back down the hill, nearer to the road. I walked along, drinking an Irn-Bru to give me the strength to get up the hill (I'd lost my water bottle from my backpack when I'd take a bit of a fall into a hole along the riverbank), then had my lunch on the hill-top with my back turned to the rain blown by the wind. Later on, the sun broke through the clouds as the rain stopped.

I found a path down about a mile from the hostel (it had appeared to be a gated driveway from the road), and a map indicates there must be one closer to the hostel, so I shall endeavour to find that one next time (I think I'm back here in a week to cover another Rent-a-Hostel).

Finally, here's a few photos of the Loch Ness Hostel. It's a bit old, but it's got a great location right on the lochside.

Ok, so I'm getting server errors from Google when I try to upload today (from two seperate computers), so for the photos I was going to put up and more, please see my web album. It's disorganized at the moment, and shows my fascination with trees growing in unusual ways, but I'll fix it up and label it sometime soon. And add to this post with photos.

Heading to the Loch sans locks

That post title is terrible, really.

I'm going down to the Loch Ness hostel this week to cover a "Rent-a-Hostel". This is where a group pays to have an out-of-season hostel all to themselves. It's a few hundred pounds for the entire place, so if you have a group that will fill it (in the case of Loch Ness, about 38 beds), then it's a good deal.

Anyway, tomorrow several of us from the Inverness hostel are going down to tidy up the place, then I'll be going down again Wednesday and staying there overnight and Thursday night, coming back on Friday after cleaning the place up. So that'll be another hostel under my belt.

Not too much else new with me, other than I got my haircut. I had it lopped off to what you'd call a bob cut, I guess - not quite shoulder length and layered. I'm happy with it; it's made a nice change from the ol' long hair.

Quiz comedy

A type of show that exists in the UK but not in Canada is what I've heard called "quiz comedies" (or "quizcoms" as one channel, Dave, has abbreviated it as). Essentially, these quiz shows are as much quiz shows as Who's Line Is It Anyway? was a game show - they follow vaguely the format by having contestants who answer questions, but the focus is really on comedy and not on the contest (as Drew Carey put it in the American-version of Who's Line Is It Anyway?, "the points don't matter"). In fact, some of the quiz comedies were created by Dan Patterson, the same guy responsible for Who's Line.

Why I mention this is that many of these shows are quite funny, becoming some of my favourite shows over here.

The shows that I'll describe below are orignally produced by BBC and Channel Four, but I've been watching them in re-runs on the afore-mentioned channel Dave ("the home of witty banter" according to their slogan), which was running them every week night all in one go. There's video clips at the websites of most of these shows, so you can check them out if you so wish (and since writing about comedy is sort of fruitless and impossible, I really suggest the clips over my descriptions).

QI (Quite Interesting) is a quiz show hosted by Stephen Fry that has 4 contestants, generally comedic personalities. Alan Davis seems to be on it perpetually as as contestant, generally losing. The questions are quite difficult and obscure, so giving a wrong but interesting answer is encouraged, or just discussing the question. Points are deducted for giving incorrect answers that are commonly believed to be true (for example, answering that "Ring Around the Rosie" is about the Black Death was one of them). It basically ends up being a reasonably intelligent conversation peppered by jokes, so it's quite enjoyable (and unusual for television).

Have I Got News For You has a celebrity host who cracks jokes about the news of the week, and quizzes two teams on the news. The captain of each team is constant from week-to-week (being Ian Hislop and Paul Merton) and is joined by a celebrity guest, generally a comedian. Like QI, questions result in panelists satarizing the news.

Mock The Week is sort of a spin-off from Have I Got News For You, but is more improvisational political sketch comedy than quiz show. The host is Dara O Briain (that's Irish, being pronounced something like "dahra oh-bree-an"), and there's 3-4 regulars and comedian guests to add up to two teams of three each. A few of the sketches aren't hilariously funny, but the banter between regulars and the rapid-fire segments makes up for it. I particularly enjoy the aforementioned host O Briain, Frankie Boyle, and Hugh Dennis.

Never Mind The Buzzcocks (doesn't seem to have its own page so that's the Wikipedia one) is a quiz about the music industry, with varying hosts over the years and two regular team captains, Phil Jupitus and Bill Bailey, who each have two music-industry guests on their teams. There are quiz rounds that involve music itself, like finishing-off lyrics and guessing songs based on versions performed by team members, but some of the questions are almost designed as ways to make fun of pop musicians, like asking what strange items stars demand to have backstage, or who flew his hat first-class across Europe to a charity concert. Bascially, they just mock pop music.


Watching these shows has introduced me to many new comedians and allowed me to see more of comedians I'd only caught snippets of back in Canada. The two news-oriented programs have also had the benefit of teaching me about the politics and recent history of the UK. I first learned about politics by listening to the Royal Canadian Air Farce on the radio with Dad when I was a kid, and I've learned much about US politics from watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, so I've just carried on that method over here. It's more fun learning that way.


I'm branching out in my comedy viewings now, having started watching Chewin' The Fat, a Glaswegian sketch comedy, on DVD and so far it's very funny. The DVD actually comes with subtitles as an option for those who can't understand the patter, but so far I'm getting on right enough without them.

"Chips, glorious chips!"

McCain Food, the New Brunswick company that sells frozen fries and the like, also sells food in the UK, which I never imagined that they did. Although looking them up online, I discover that they're a very large company.

Anyway, over here their fries are known as McCain chips, and they have an elaborate song composed for their advertisement in which people who appear as though they're in a stage musical sing about sunflower oil making the chips have only 5% fat. It's quite catchy in its own way. I found a video version of it online here; there's probably others out there as well, like on YouTube.

And just because it's on the same website, here's the Christmas Irn-Bru advert that parodies a UK-well-known song called "Walking in the Air" from a Christmas special show called "The Snowman" (based on a book). Even not knowing the original song I like the ad. It's serene and amusing at once, and I have often had it stuck in my head, especially the final line of "He nicked my Irn-Bru and let go of my hand."

If you watch the video, you can see the boy and the snowman fly by famous Scottish places: the Falkirk Wheel, some sheep, the Forth Bridge, Edinburgh Princes Street Gardens (ice rink and can see the castle briefly), Loch Ness (with monster), deer, the Glenfinnan Viaduct (now famous from the Harry Potter films), Eilean Donan Castle, the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, and then the boy falls into Glasgow's George Square. It's a pretty animation; I'd like to see the original sometime.

Out to Loch Ness/Rights of way

This is Urquhart Castle, on Loch Ness.I went out on the bus to the castle on Tuesday, a day off, figuring that since hostel guests are always asking me about Loch Ness, I should finally see it for myself (that I can recall - I saw it in 2002 briefly).

Just because I discovered Google Maps the other week, I'm including a link to the map I made of my little trip, just to test it out. I always like to have a map to look at anyway when someone's talking about places, so perhaps you do as well (check out the terrain and satellite modes as well for a better view of the area). I've tried putting the HTML for the map into this post so that you can see it and click on it, but it has crashed this browser several times already.

It was a nice sunny day, as you can see from the photo, so it made for a good day to walk about. I strolled around the ruined castle at its excellent vantage point on a head of land that allows one to see both ways down the loch. The modern visitor centre is nicely hidden in the bank of the hill between the castle and the road, so it doesn't spoil one's attempts to imagine the castle as it was.

I later walked down the road to the village of Drumnadrochit, in the valley known as Glen Urquhart (the lands of which the castle protected and where all the cattle that the MacDonalds stole away back to the isles at one point were presumably pasturing). I spent a few hours wandering around in the woods and then into the farmland before catching the bus back to Inverness.

On Monday, I walked over the Kessock Bridge to North Kessock where I climbed up Ord Hill which is on Forestry Commission land. It was a hazy day so the light wasn't great for photos, but here's one of Inverness and surroundings as viewed from the north (the hill in the middle is Craig Phadraig that I climbed before).

The public rights of way around this country are neat. There's old paths and stairways between streets, paths through fields and woods and up hills. In Inverness, because it's hilly, there are stairs in the town centre to take you between streets, allowing you to save time on foot as compared to following the car routes. There's also paths between houses that are public as well. When I first lived anywhere "urban" it was in Kyleakin, and I wasn't used to all the idea of between garden paths (garden = yard). I saw the paths, but with my Canadian land mindset I figured I would be walking on to someone's lawn. It wasn't until I was walking through the village with a village resident who took some of those paths as shortcuts that I realized it was alright. Since most houses have gardens that are enclosed by low walls, hedges, or fences, with gates to enter them, if a path is between those walls and isn't gated then it's ok to walk down as far as I can tell.

The paths in the "wild" so to speak, are often accessed via kissing gates, so that is how I generally figure out that it's a public path if there's no sign (since I don't tend to plan where I go well enough to have a map). I found one of the paths near Drumnadrochit because someone had kindly put up a big red sign that said "Public Footpath" and a stile (stairs, basically) over the roadside wall to what I would have assumed to be just a farm lane. I wouldn't have walked down it otherwise, and when I did I found some forest trails.

In Scotland, you basically have the right to access most land in the countryside for recreational purposes if you're reponsible according to the Scottish Outdoor Access Code. As it was first put to me, there's no such thing as tresspassing. So there's doesn't need to be a public footpath for you to go walking on land (whereas in England they have the public rights of way and then there's other land). I still stick to paths if I'm near houses, just because I'm uncomfortable walking through what might be the farm of someone I don't know. I tend to follow the rule I always used at home: if they cut the grass, I don't walk on it because it's a lawn.

Transport and diversions from that

So a few word differences relating to roads today. Firstly, the title, "transport". I rarely hear the word "transportation" used, it's always transport - Ministry of Transport, transport issues, etc.

Walking through the town centre the other day (not the "downtown" as I would call it), I saw a road sign saying "Diversion". In Canada, the sign would read "Detour". I find the Diversion signs amusing still; to me it's like the road works people don't want you to notice that they've closed some streets, saying "Look! Over there!" Either that, or if you follow the diversion you'll end up having a pleasant day occupied by doing things that you hadn't intended to do at the start.

Another sign I saw on my walk: "Humps". Those are speed bumps.

Yield signs look the same, but have "Give way" written on them.

The curb on the side of the road is written "kerb". The "pavement" is the sidewalk, sometimes referred to as the path. What I would call pavement, i.e. the surface that the road is made up of, I've generally heard called tarmac.

When I was in Argyll, pretty much all the guys would refer to their cars as their "motors" (and said with the accent of the region where the "t" is barely said in the back of the throat (a glottal stop?), it comes out like "mo-er"). It then seems logical that the highways are always referred to as "motorways".

If you have a motorway that is divided, i.e. some barrier between opposing directions of traffic, then it becomes a "dual carriageway". The carriage bit seems to me to be old-fashioned sounding, and I imagine carriages and horses zooming along at 70mph. Or horseless carriages, as those new fangled things are these days.

Another old-fashioned word - the electrical or telephone poles along the side of the road I've heard called "telegraph poles". This was by young people who would not mind the days of the telgraph either. "Pylons" gets used as well, they're not the little orange cones. Towers for cell phones get called "masts".

Continuing on the old-fashioned note, and completely unrelated to the road, is saying you're "going to the pictures" for going to the movies. I heard that first from a fellow my age and was teasing him about whether it was a "talkie" or not.

Grammie

My grandmother, Jessie MacKinnon or "Grammie" to me, died Monday night. This doesn't quite seem entirely like the place to write about it, but it doesn't seem right to not mention it, so I'll write something, maybe more for myself than for anyone else.

All the while I've been away, I've written about what I've been up to on this site, but I've also written letters to Grammie. She wasn't online obviously, so I kept her updated with letters every week or so, and postcards from all the places I travelled to. I liked the fact that I couldn't communicate with her online - it may be quick and easy, but it was nice having something that forced me to write the old-fashioned way. All my family said that she really appreciated the letters (she'd saved them all), so that was good encouragement to keep writing.

So when my aunt Marlene called me Monday night, at what was 1am here, one of the first thoughts that entered my half-asleep mind was that I wouldn't be writing a letter to Grammie while work was quiet Tuesday morning as I'd planned. I've never travelled without sending Grammie a postcard every day or two. The first postcard I ever received, when I was about 8 years old, was from her when she made a trip to Edmonton to visit her cousins.

Grammie was 94 years old and the last of my grandparents living. It was only in the last few years that she slowed down and had to go into a nursing home, just down the road from the house where she and my grandfather raised 6 kids in Eldon. She was still sharp as a tack when I saw her last in December, although having trouble hearing me speak and having to use a hearing aid.

I won't presume to sum up her entire life, but here's a few tidbits. Grammie grew up on a family farm as Jessie Nicholson, the eldest of the six kids. She told me that her grandparents spoke Gaelic when they didn't want her overhearing what they were saying, and because of that connection to Scotland she had a life-long interest in the country and her roots. She married quite late for a woman of her time, in her late 20's, having occupied herself in the typical way of the time by caring for elderly women. I'm not sure how she met my grandfather; I always meant to ask but never did. She was the last telephone operator for the Belfast area (switched to automatic in the 70's) and my cousins and I used to play with the switchboard when we were kids. She moved into town when my grandfather went into a nursing home, and he died in 1985.

Like any grandmother, she knitted and I still have the afghan she made for me when I was young. She travelled in her old age more than the rest of her life: she was on one of the first passenger flights out of Charlottetown airport (they served champagne) and she did a European coach tour when in her 80's, finally getting to Scotland after so many years. She was active well into her 80's; I remember staying overnight with her and going shopping around town. She did the crossword and the cryptoquote in The Guardian newspaper everyday and was very pleased whenever a visiting family member could fill in a tricky word she was stuck on. She wouldn't let me leave her presence without giving me food, money, a book, or some other thing.

Most of all, Grammie loved her family - having visits and arranging get-togethers. From her six children, there are 15 grandchildren, 9 great-granchildren so far, and what with spouses and boy/girl-friends, there's about 40 people if everyone's together at once. Here's everyone that made it down to visit Grammie just after Christmas, and that's not the entire family.

I discovered when I went to The Guardian website today to check the death announcement that funeral homes now have online death notices (here's Grammie's) and guest books, so that you can send condolences online and make the traditional donations to charity. Grammie said that she'd never heard of what a radio was until she was about five years old. That's a lot of change in a lifetime.

A social week

Well, this week I spent my days off visiting friends. I had Wednesday evening off, took a nap and then came down to make my supper and learned that Jamie had come up from Cairngorm to get a haircut and was staying overnight. So we watched Torchwood on television and then went out to Hootenanny's where a terrible bagpiper was playing loudly indoors.

Thurdsay morning I caught the train to Aberdeen where Alysha, back from B.C., is staying for a week. It was really good to see Alysha again and I had fun with her as always. We just hung around the hostel in the afternoon, having tea together again and dinner shared with Katie who was working desk and Gareth who was painting. We went to a few bars in the evening, one called Slain Castle that looked to be in a huge old church and had a sort of haunted theme going one, where we had dessert to top off our dinner.

Friday involved more hanging around, went walking around the town and then back to the hostel in the evening to wait around for the supposed-to-be-arriving Rob. We spent a few hours playing a card game called Quao that Alysha had been given by a friend with two hostel guests, CJ from England and Scott from the US. I then had to catch a train at 10pm to get back to Inverness for work Saturday morning.

At dinner last night, I ate with Zoltan, Amy a Chinese tour guide (she had a group staying with us), and Anthony from England (a secret physics graduate like myself). Alistair, who worked here before and will be again next week when Hardy moves back to Germany, showed up and we all went down to the nearby hotel to play some pool and chat. So my promise to myself on Saturday morning that I would either take a nap or got to bed early (I have to make promises like that frequently in order to get out of bed in the morning) was broken, but I was able to sleep in this morning and thus able to have the best of both worlds as far as fun and sleep were concerned.

Not Standard

Living over here has shown me that many things in modern society that I have been accustomed to all my life, specifically in the operation of mechanical and electrical devices, are not standard worldwide. Not knowing that things operate differently can often make a person (or me, at least) feel like an idiot when I'm unable to operate some simple thing. I'll list some specific differences here and it'll hopefully make more sense.

One first thing that's different is plugs for AC current on electrical devices. They are bigger, about 1-3/4 inches square, and always have 3 prongs. Of course, the voltage supplied over here is different as well (and different from countries in Europe as well), it's 220V I believe.

(Source: http://www.wikipedia.org)

The sockets on the walls have switches on them, so that you can turn the current off. This means you can leave something plugged in, but switch off any power to it at the socket itself. It also means that occasionally you plug something in, like a vacuum cleaner, go to use the vacuum cleaner, and realize that you forgot to switch on the power at the wall so you have to go back and do that. Or if you don't know there's a switch at all, you end up asking the person at hostel reception how to plug something in.

Light bulbs tend to have bayonet bases instead of screw ones. The first time I needed to change a light bulb over here was when the light in the laundry room at the Coylet burned out. Because it was dark I couldn't see what I was doing, and it was hanging from the ceiling where I had trouble reaching it, so I had trouble getting the old bulb out to look at what type it was so I could even find a replacement. I quickly deduced that it wasn't a screw-in one like I'm accustomed to, and I suspected bayonet but I had no idea if I had to pull or push in, and twist while doing that or what. I eventually had to get my co-worker to take it out for me, which he did in one twisting motion and made me feel completely inept.

Light switches for residential bathrooms seem to vary - they're sometimes a pull cord from the ceiling inside the bathroom. If there is a wall light switch, it is usually outside of the bathroom. I was told that this was so you don't get your wet hands on the switch and risk electrocuting yourself, but seeing as we have switches inside bathrooms in Canada and manage to survive it I don't know if there's a big risk.

On the topic of light switches - I can't recall seeing a toggle switch like the ones that were standard in Canada for most of my life. Light switches are rocker switches, but much smaller switch size than the rocker ones that have come to be used in Canada in more recent years. I don't know why the switch itself is so small, because as you can see in the picture below, the plastic pannel is a lot larger than it.

(Source: http://www.topmanservices.co.uk)

Showers are very often electric, and have to be turned on to either operate at all or to get hot water. The switch mechanism is either a pull-cord from the ceiling, or outside the bathroom, as with bathroom lights. When I first started living at the Coylet, I couldn't find the switch for the shower that I presumed to be electric, and had to take a cold shower the first time. I then found it outside the door, looking all red and dangerous like something that I shouldn't mess with.

Of course, when switches are outside the bathroom, that means that people can play tricks on you by turning off the lights and the hot water while you're in the shower.

Toilets in older homes are sometimes flushed via a pull cord or chain, as the toilet tank is mounted high up along the wall. I think this is where the expression "pull the chain" for flushing must come from.

A differenc in bathrooms that doesn't make one incapable to operate them (like not knowing how to flush the toilet or turn on a light) but that is just plain annoying is the two taps phenomenon. Many wash basins have a hot water tap and a cold water tap. A lot of kitchen sinks have this as well. So to get warm water you have to plug the sink and mix it from both taps, unlike at home where you adjust your hot and cold taps and nice warm water comes flowing out of the one tap. I can't really see why you'd want two taps - for starters, it costs more to have to taps I would think.

Gas stoves and ovens seem to be far more common then electric over here as well, and I've had to help numerous guests from other countries to light the burners. In all fairness, they vary in how you get a spark - on some, you turn on the gas and then press another button to get a spark, on some you hold in the gas control knob at some point until it sparks, and I'm sure there's other variations as well.

Televisions have a stand-by setting, so if you press the power switch on the TV set, a little red light generally comes on, but the picture does not, because the TV is now on stand-by. To get the TV fully on, you have to do something like press a channel change button. That's all I'll say about TV here, as I'll write some more another time.

Video and audio input to televisions from devices such as VCR's and DVD players is connected via SCART leads.

(Source: http://www.toolstation.com/ )

In Canada we use RCA cables, with the familiar red, yellow, and white coloured plugs. The standard over here is the SCART, although I have seen video game systems (a Nintendo Wii) that had RCA output, so an RCA-to-SCART adaptor was necessary to hook the game system up to the television.

More snow at Cairngorm

I went down to Cairngorm Lodge on Wednesday (a week ago) with the idea of learning to snowboard at the mountain on Thursday. There was a bunch of wet snow overnight, continuing in the morning with a good wind, so the hill was closed for the morning to clear roads. So I just went for a walk around in the snow, had a snowball fight with Jamie and the one hostel guest, Willa-Lee from B.C., and did some "sledging" (sledding) on a little hill with them as well. The Thursday night there was more snow, coating all the trees once again, so Friday morning found Jamie and Rob trying to clear out the car park of snow in preparation for their guests arriving that evening.


The rest are just photos I took wandering around on Thursday morning.

Loch Morlich, and you can see a hint of Cairngorm Mountain through the white sky.
Loch water was choppy due to the wind.

Glenmore is a largely Scots Pine forest.

I took a bunch of other photos (it's mostly trees, then some snowball fight and shovelling) and they can be found, as always, in my Picasaweb photos.

A few Invernesian photos

The other week I took a walk north through Inverness and up the hill called Craig Phadraig. I took these photos looking out over the Firth (as you can see, the trees at the top were getting in my way):

Wandering back toward the hostel, I took these two from the castle site along the river. The hill with trees in the middle is Craig Phadraig.

This is the opposite side of the river from the town centre, and from where I stay.

Blackcurrant and Squash

A common fruit used for flavouring over here (that I can't recall seeing at home) is blackcurrant. You see it in drinks and in candy. Where in Canada we'd have a purpley-red coloured candy that would be called "grape" flavour in the mix with strawberry, orange, lemon/lime, etc., in the UK you wouldn't have a grape candy but a "blackcurrant" one (and it'd be called a "sweet" instead of a candy).

The taste of blackcurrant is something like cranberry without the tang, but more full tasting, like a bit of grape juice was thrown in as well. It's a sweet, reddish-berry tasting flavour, but it's a distinct flavour of it's own, so hard to compare.

The drink Ribena is blackcurrant flavoured and readily available, sold in tetra packs and plastic bottles in fridges at convenience stores ("newsagents"). My first encounter with blackcurrant was through drinks, as a "squash" flavour. To make sugary, fruit-flavoured drinks over here, you buy a concentrated liquid, known as "squash" or "cordial" and then mix one part of the concentrate with four to five parts of water and the resulting drink is also called squash or cordial. The resultant drinks are much like what we get in Canada from using powdered drink crystals to produce things like Kool-Aid.

Squash as a drink on its own is popular with young kids, but bars also use squash/cordial concentrate to add to alchoholic drinks. For example, "lager and lime" is popular with some, that is lager beer with a dash of lime cordial on the top to cut down on the bitterness of the beer. Some people drink Guiness with a dash of blackcurrant, also to cut down on the bitterness. The three standards of squash/cordial - orange, blackcurrant, and lime - also get used to add flavour to mixed alcoholic drinks.

Children's songs

In the UK, the kids' song "The Hokey Pokey" is known as "The Hokey Cokey", and has some different variations on the lyrics. The Wikipedia article outlines the differences world-wide, so it's a good reference to check out.

The main difference between the version over here and the one that I grew up with is that limbs are put in and out more than once, and more quickly. So, a Hokey Pokey verse would go like:

You put your right leg in,

You put your right leg out,

You put your right leg in

And you shake it all about.

You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around.

And that's what it's all about.

All at a pretty mellow pace.

The versions I've heard over here go:

You put your right leg in,

Your right leg out,

In, out, in, out

Shake it all about

You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around

That's what it's all about.

That "in, out, in, out" bit makes you move faster, so if you're on one leg it would take better balance.

There's also a variation on the chorus in some parts of the UK as well that I've only seen on TV and you can read about in the Wikipedia article (see The Dance in the UK section). The article also mentions later a German parody of the song done by comedian Bill Bailey that's pretty funny (and links to a YouTube video) and it was in viewing this version and translating it back to English that I first realized that the song was different over here and then asked my friends about it.

Another kid's song that is sped up in its UK incarnation is the old "Head and shoulders, knees and toes" one. The words are the same for the first "verse", but done faster - at least twice as fast, if not three times. The last bit, which I know as "eyes, ears, mouth and nose" is changed slightly, I think there's maybe a chin mentioned instead of ears, but I'm not sure. Since the song involves bending to touch your knees and toes and is done faster, it is more exercise over here than the lazily-done Canadian one.

Culloden Battlefield

This is fairly verbatim from a letter that I wrote to my grandmother, so it'll be a slightly different style than my usual posts, but I'm too lazy to recompose it entirely. I didn't have my camera with me, so some pictures can be found at Undiscovered Scotland.

I had Wednesday off, so I went out to the Culloden Battlefield in the morning. The battle took place at Culloden Moor, which is a couple miles out of Culloden, which is east of Inverness by a few miles itself. I took a bus out that left Inverness at 9am and got out there at 9:20am, leaving me some time to wander around the battlefield before going into the musuem which is in a new building (with a new exhibition) that opened up in the last month.

It was really windy, but I think the moor is probably one of those places that are always somewhat windy. The only trees around the battlefield were on the side opposite where the wind was coming from, so there was nothing to block it. The ground is uneven and boggy; there's clumps of grass on the bumps of land, and heather and some other short green plant mixed in, with the occasional gorse bush. The holes between the bumps of land were filled with water and often concealed from sight by plants. I've encountered this sort of bogginess elsewhere in the Highlands; the hills behind Kyleakin were like that. The only place I've ever experienced walking on ground like that was back home where there was boggy ground that had once been plowed and then lots of bushes and grasses grew over it. There the holes were in regular intervals; on the moor it was like someone had plowed it in an eratic fashion, but it's just the natural state of it.

There's a path around the battlefield these days, flags to mark the Hanoverian and Jacobite lines, and stones to mark the places where different clans and military divisions lined up. The path was flooded in one section, which is when I started cutting across the moorland and experienced the joy of sinking into concealed holes. Even watching my footing carefully, trying to step from tuft of grass to tuft of grass, I would still occasionally fall through spongey layers of plants into wet ground. It was slow going, and I can't imagine trying to charge across to fight a battle. When I was in the museum later, it made mention of the difficulty the Jacobites had in implementing their "Highland charge" due to the poor ground, and that the clansmen were slowed down. I'm amazed that loads of them didn't go down with twisted or broken ankles trying to run across that.

At 10am I headed into the exhibition, which started at events leading up to the 1745 uprising, then battles throughout 1745-1745 and then the Culloden battle itself in April 1746. I actually found a mistake in the first bit of the exhibition - it was a world map showing wars that Britain was involved in during 1745, and one was the siege on the fortress of Louisbourg. In addition to Louisbourg being mispelled as "Louisberg", the map indicated Louisbourg as being somewhere around Truro, at the head of the Minas Basin, instead of being on the Atlantic coast of Cape Breton (the map also showed Cape Breton as two islands because the Bras D'or Lakes were made too big). I pointed this out to the woman at the desk, and she grabbed the in-costume historical interpreter on his way by who asked me to explain the mistake and made a note of it.

The exhibit was pretty good, having the usual articfacts in cases and posters on walls, but also some audio-visual stuff like film recreations and audio recordings of actors reading from letters and diaries of the period. What I appreciated most was an animation projected on to a large table that showed the battle from overhead, showing troop movements with individual people represented and a voice-over explaining the tactical decisions made. I've always had trouble imagining battles just from written descriptions and static diagrams, so that was really helpful.

The same historical interpreter I'd spoken to earlier did a presentation on weapons later on, and as one of the weapons he had was a replica basket-hilted broadsword, I asked him afterward if I could hold it just to feel the weight and balance of it (here's an image for you). It surprised me by how light the sword was - it's shorter than my fencing sabre would be, the blade is much wider of course (a couple inches), but the balance of it was so good I didn't find it hard to hold, even though it's heavier than what I'm used to holding (but not too much heavier than an epee I'd say).

I was told by the historian that many of the broadswords that had been found from the 18th century have basket guards that are quite small, implying that the men of the time had smaller hands than the average man today - it's thought that the Highland men were short and stocky. Since we always hear that people are taller nowadays than years ago, that seems sensible.

Is that a sabre in your rucksack...?

This post isn't going to have a lot of continuity to it.

I was down to Edinburgh on the weekend to do a Level 1 Sabre Coaching course. The weather was pretty wild, with high winds and rain from Inverness down to Edinburgh. I took the bus, a 3.5 hour trip during which I was in a state between wakefulness and sleep for much of it and couldn't wait to get off the super-heated bus at the end of it. When I came back Sunday night, I heard that the rail line had been closed due to flooding in some parts, so if I had taken the train I would have ended up on a bus anyway.

The course was challenging for me, but I definitely learned some things about coaching fencing, in particular in giving individual lessons which is not something I've done before and lacked confidence in doing. I also learned that if you walk around with a large backpack with two sabre blades sticking out of the top of it (at least a foot in length) that you will attract a lot of curious/fearful/strange looks, but will never be asked what it is that you have in your backpack.

On a related note to that: last Tuesday when I was returning from fencing with the afore-mentioned two sabres in my hand, I boarded the bus to find that the supervising bus driver (she was training the driver) was eyeing me quite closely. I thought to myself that she was not going to allow me on, and that I was going to have to argue through the whole deal about sabres being sports equipment and no more dangerous than a hockey stick or a cricket bat. As it turned out, she used to fence way-back-when in school and had always been looking for a fencing club to join. So I gave her the coach's contact information and I answered her fencing questions for most of the ride back to Inverness.

I've had some visits with friends as well in the last week or so. Jamie was up to Inverness from Cairngorm Lodge (where he's working with Rob now) on his birthday (the 16) at my invitation, and we went out to celebrate. Then Rob and Tina were here the middle of last week due to interviews and courses being held at our hostel, so I got to hang out with them some as well. I tried to meet up with some buddies in Edinburgh, but their work schedules didn't mesh with my course schedule, so it'll have to be another time.

I also learned last week that various levels of management have read my blog, since it pops up on Google if you search "Inverness Youth Hostel" and "blog" (usually when looking for reviews of the place - hey, we're great!). So the readership is growing!

Taxi's in Inverness have the most easy-to-remember phone numbers that I've ever seen. One is 222 555. Another is 222 900. And, for the immensely drunk, all you have to do is go to a payphone and mash the 2 key until it starts ringing, and you'll get the company who's number is 222 222.

Pedestrian crossings in Inverness make people wait for a minimum of what seems like 5 minutes before crossing. The closer you get to the city centre, the longer the wait. Traffic seems to flow twice in each direction before the pedestrians get to cross. Which is why no one waits for the lights in the city - I certainly don't, and I've basically given up on pushing the button in order to get the little green man (the walk symbol - the don't walk symbol is a red, stationary man) to eventually come up.

I see a lot of BBC news these days since we often have the reception TV at the hostel set to that channel. A regular feature of the news programming is a segment when they look at the day's newspapers to see what the headlines and pictures on the front pages are. Now, I don't know about you, but I find this extremely odd. Here we have the medium of television, in which moving pictures (they call them videos, I believe) and sound are available to convey information. And what do the news anchors do with that medium? Let's all take a look at some typeface and still-pictures printed on poor quality paper. Also, they've become journalists once-removed. They're reporting on what other journalists have already reported on. Strange.

Money

I've been planning to write about the money over here for quite some time now, as it's different in more ways than you'd think. So let's get cracking.

The basics, you probably already know. The currency in all of the UK is the pound sterling (£). It's divided into 100 pence (p). For coinage, there's 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, 1£, and 2£ coins. See picture here. Just like in Canada, you get different pictures on the coins on occasion, although this doesn't occur with the frequency that quarters get done over back home (i.e. every year). Mostly, I see different versions of the pound coin - ones with a coat of arms, with 3 lions, with a thistle, with a dragon, with a rose and cross.

The 1p coin is called a penny, and collectively with the 2p coins they're referred to as "coppers". All the other coins are called by their value: i.e. "a 20p". I know some people that refer to the silver coins - 5p, 10p, 20p, and 50p - as shrapnel, but I would not say that's universal.

It's not the coinage that's quite different over here, but the banknotes, or what we would call "bills" in Canada. Firstly: they're different sizes. The £10 note is about the size of a Canadian bill of any denomination; I compared when I was home and found the £10 is a bit shorter and a touch wider. However, the £5 note is smaller than the £10, and the £20 note is bigger than both, so that the edges of it always stuck out of my old, Canadian wallet and got bent. I've only seen £50 notes on occasion, but they're bigger still. So I figure if I ever get my hands on a £100 note, I'll have to fold it two times just to get it into my wallet.

If you just went to England, you probably wouldn't find anything other than the sizes out of the ordinary - you'd have the coins, and then notes issued by the Bank of England for £5, £10, and £20, etc. If you went to Wales, it'd just be the same. However, it's a different ball game when you go to Scotland or Northern Ireland.

In Scotland, there are three banks that issue banknotes, so for every denomination, there are three different notes. Now, these banks aren't like the Bank of England (or the Bank of Canada) - the Scottish banks are actual banks, as in you could go to a branch and open up an account with them. For example, my bank over here is the Royal Bank of Scotland, and it's one of the banks that prints notes. The other banks are Bank of Scotland and Clydesdale Bank.

So in day-to-day life in Scotland, it's common to come across 4 different versions of banknotes. Here's some pictures I took of my own money (you can find pictures of all the UK possibilities on this site, where they want to sell you signed notes):

£20 notes: Clydesdale on top left (Robert the Bruce pictured), Bank of Scotland on top right (Walter Scott pictured on all their notes), Royal Bank of Scotland on bottom left (Lord Lay, First Governor on all their notes), Bank of England on bottom right (with the ol' Queen).Reverse side of the notes above.
£10 pound notes ("tenners"): same bank order as above. That's Mary Slessor on the Clydesdale note; I'm guessing she has something to do with the African missionary work shown on the reverse.

Reverse side of the above notes - that's Charles Darwin on the back of the English note.

£5 notes ("fivers"): I commonly only see these two versions, and when I took these pictures ages ago I actually thought that they were the only two. But there are fivers made by Bank of Scotland - I've only seen the "new" ones (more about that in a minute). Robert Burns is on the Clydesdale note. Reverse of the fivers. That mouse is in reference to Burns' poem to a mouse.

There's also one pound notes in Scotland, but I haven't seen any of them since I worked at the Coylet Inn, where customers would have them and I'd get them in my change when shopping once in a while.

Also, there's now new Bank of Scotland notes that are much more colourful then before (looking more like the new Canadian notes, so I assume the added colour is for security reasons).

As I mentioned, Northern Ireland has different notes as well - I've occasionally seen banknotes from Ulster Bank and Northern Bank when I get customers who've been there recently. Wales doesn't have its own notes any more since the last bank that issued them there folded. And English provincial banks used to issue their own notes up until the 1800's, I've gathered.

It gets more complicated. I hear frequently of how businesses in England won't accept Scottish banknotes, either because they don't think it's legal tender in England or because they're not confident they can spot counterfeit since they don't see the money often (then there's the theory that they do it as just another way to oppress the Scots).

The Wikipedia article on banknotes states that Scottish notes aren't legal tender even in Scotland, because they are promissory notes (this is based on a very strict economic/accounting definition of legal tender that I won't pretend to entirely understand, not the common usage definition of legal tender). Indeed, all the Scottish notes bear some statement that the bank "promises to pay the bearer on demand X pounds sterling". However, the banknotes are as good in England as they are in Scotland in terms of legality; the Scottish banks have to back up their banknotes with that actual amount of currency to the Bank of England.

Anyway, there's a lot of information out there on it and I'm not going to regurgitate it all, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to research more if desired.

The Old New Year

On Saturday, Inverness marked the "Old New Year" (an t-Seann Bhliadhn’ Ùr in Gaelic) - that is, the date that was January 1st until the adoption of the Georgian calendar system. By the time Scotland adopted the calendar (in 1751 according to my internet research), the calendars were 11 days apart. The Highland Scots, stubborn lot that they can be, kept their celebrations to the old calendar (11 days late) for several centuries more.

Since 2007 was the Year of Highland Culture in Scotland, in keeping with Highland tradition they started the year on January 12, 2007, and had its finale on January 12, 2008. So the city put on a few events for that, including a big fireworks display from the Kessock Bridge, accompanied by music. It was a pretty good little fireworks show, although it was so cold that the smoke hung in the air, partially obscuring later fireworks but also being lit up by them.

There was a shinty match scheduled earlier in the day which I wanted to see, but when I went down to the park there didn't seem to be any match on, and I heard tell that it might have been cancelled on account of the freezing conditions (frozen ground makes a hard surface to play on). So I've yet to see a shinty match, but I'll be keeping my eyes open for one.

Photos around Inverness

There are now photos up on my post about Cairngorm.

I've had pure maple syrup for the second time in my life. David my manager saw me eating pancakes (termed "Scottish crumpets" by the supermarket - I bought them pre-cooked) with Golden Syrup (pretty much tastes like corn syrup), and offered me some maple syrup that his friend in Waterloo, ON had sent him. I guess he has a large jug. So I finished off my crumpet packet with maple syrup instead of Golden.

Below is the view from my room at the hostel. That's a school being constructed in the foreground, but the interesting bit is in the back. That's the Moray Firth and Fort George is the point of land, I believe. I can also see a bit of the Black Isle through the trees (to the left of this picture but not shown). My camera's zoom isn't good enough to avoid the building though.

I've taken a walk along the Caledonian Canal a few times; it's about 1 km north of the River Ness. I walked out to where the canal joins up to the sea at the Beauly Firth (which then becomes the Moray Firth once it flows past Inverness and under the Kessock Bridge, to the best of my understanding). From there I took this picture - that's some mountain covered in snow, in behind the hills of the Black Isle.

I commented last year on the "furry" trees in Ireland; well they exist in Scotland as well and here's an example:

Finally, a swan in action on the canal. Doesn't look quite so graceful when it's wiggling its arse in the air.

Fencing!

Well, I finally got out to the fencing club last night - it had been not meeting over the holidays. The club's in Culloden, and handily-enough there's a bus that goes straight by there, and even better one that comes back.

There was probably about 20 people there, of whom 6 to 7 were adults, so good numbers. I fenced all three weapons in the one night, and had good fun, won some bouts and lost some as well. Today I'm sporting some good épée bruises for not parrying well enough (on my upper right arm). I've requested to have Tuesday evenings off from work each week, so I'll be able to keep it up. It'll be something to liven up the mid-week (I got excited about going yesterday, was doing my dog-waiting-to-go-for-a-walk bouncing around at times).

Just sitting at work now, eating a Cadbury Dairy Milk with Caramel bar. I had thought that it would be like a Cadbury Cara-milk bar, but it's not as good - there's less caramel. It seems the secret is confined to Cadbury's North American operations. Or it's been stolen by Galaxy's Caramel bar - they're good and caramely.

Hogmanay and Down to Cairngorm Park

It's January 7th already! Time's flying by - I've been in Inverness over a month already, and it's already a week into 2008. I've had to write '09 on the backs of SYHA membership cards that I've sold in the last week (they last a year), and that's even weirder.

I last updated here on the 30th, so since then has been Hogmanay. I took some German fellows who were staying at the hostel out that night (they'd been very nice to me by feeding me several times in the course of the week before that) for a few hours. They took some photos on their camera phone that are on their blog - it's written in German, but you can see the photos, including a scary one of me at the start. "Sylvester" is German for New Year's Eve - never knew that the cat was named for that.

On my days off this week I went and worked at another hostel. Rob, of Uig and Aberdeen fame, is managing Cairngorm Lodge, and has been the only full-time staff member there since just before New Year's (he had a part-time cleaner). So that he could have a day off to go about his own business, I went down to fill in for him for a day-and-a-half.

Le hostel Cairngorm Lodge (Loch Morlich):

The hostel from another angle:
I took the train south to Aviemore Wednesday evening, just a 30-minute trip. Then, owing to there being no buses after 5pm, I took a taxi the 7 miles to Glenmore, where the youth hostel is. It's in a nice location, and looks like a huge house - apparently it was an old shooting lodge before its youth hostel days. There's a conservatory off of the dining hall that lets you see the mountains (when the clouds aren't blocking them), and I liked sitting in it to look at the surroundings. The hostel has 78 beds, and attracts the outdoor types for hiking, climbing, and skiing, given its proximity to Cairn Gorm mountain. It was reasonably busy with groups of climbers while I was there. It's also right near Loch Morlich, and in the midst of a forest park of Scotch pine.

I hung out with Rob on Wednesday night and got orientated to the hostel. Starting 7am Thursday morning I was on duty since Rob was away. It had snowed overnight, so there was several inches of wet snow on the ground - the first time that I've walked through snow in this country. I spent a lot of time on the phone listening to messages about the road to Cairngorm Mountain being shut due to the plow needing to clear the road (a feat that took hours). Due to white out conditions later in the day the mountain was evacuated. Sections of the A9 highway through the region were also closed down due to the weather in the evening, causing a delay in the arrival of some of my guests. It was quite gusty around the hostel, and with the temperature going up the car park was getting a big slippy so I had to due some salt spreading and path clearing.

The slippy lane:Snowman made by one of the guests (English fellow):
The weather cleared up Friday, and was a few degrees above freezing by midday, but in the morning the car park was like a skating rink. Some guests were worried about driving up the lane, complaining that it was really slippery. To me, it didn't seem too bad - hard to walk on, but in a car you have better traction what with tire treads and weighing a lot more. I think a lot of it had to due with cars not having all-season tires as standard over, plus people aren't accustomed to driving on snow and ice.

I could really see how quickly the weather in the moutains can change - I watched masses of clouds move across the hills, obscuring them from my view (and annoying me as I wanted to take some pictures). Then within 15 minutes the hill-tops were cloud free and the sun was beating down on them. Rob was back around 2pm Friday, so after that I just rested, went for a bit of a walk, hung out and played pool, cards, and watched TV. It was a lot of work for a couple of days, but I had fun overall - just being in a different place, cleaning a different layout added enough of an element of interest to keep me going. The guests were all quite good, although some of the climbers had that clique-ishness about them where they were only interersted in talking shop to people who hiked, and one girl just walked away from me when I told her that I didn't get to go hiking often because I was generally busy with work.

I'll probably head down to the region again so I can do some walks in the forest and the hills, especially since it's so close. There's also reindeer nearby which would be neat to see in real life, since I've been looking at them on my money all my life without knowing it - I only realized while looking it up the other day that caribou is just a word for wild reindeer. I always thought that it was elk and caribou that were the same, but there you go. I suppose if I'm going to make a point of viewing things from Canadian coins, then in addition to a reindeer, I still need to see the Bluenose, a loon, and a polar bear (I've seen the maple leaves and a beaver). Oh, and the Queen.