Living room window

Saving the best for last... The best view, of course!

The living room window has a superb view over Arthur's Seat. For those who never visited Edinburgh (shame on you), Arthur's Seat is a pick in Holyrood Park. From it, the visitor can have a superb view over the city. In this photo, Arthur's Seat is the one on the right.

This window gets a lot of sun in the morning. When there is sun, of course. Which clearly was not the case when I took this photo... It also leads to the street, overlooking one of the main streets of Edinburgh: Clerk Street (locals read Clark).

Even though this is the window with the best view, I don't have a funny story to tell, like the bedroom window's nor did I ever took long to contemplate the people outside, like I did with the kitchen window. Maybe people who say that beauty isn't all that important are right. Or maybe not...

The bedroom window

I know that yesterday I wrote that the kitchen window was a bit plain and without much of a view. Still, compared to the one in my bedroom, that view is amazing. This is due to the simple fact that my bedroom has no view. I mean, if there's a window, there's a view, but the only thing I see is the next building on the other side of a narrow alley. 

Now this seems boring, right? And for more than one month from the time I moved into this new house, I thought that was the most boring window in the world. But this changed on a night a couple of weeks ago... Now it's the time for those of you who think that only perverts peep at their neighbours to stop reading this post so you don't think of me as a pervert.

So, this was the night from Saturday to Sunday. I woke up a bit after 4 am in need of a visit to the loo. When I went back to bed, I could hear house music from the street. Now, there is no bar or club near my house, so I thought it strange and went to the window to check what it was. As soon as I opened the window, I realized where the music was coming from: the neighbour from across the alley. 

The neighbour was a 20-30 years old guy wearing nothing but black boxer briefs and dancing in his room. Dancing a sort of strip-tease dancer or something. Politically correctness would advise me to call it exotic dance but I didn't find it exotic, just absolutely hilarious! So I, who wanted to go back to sleep, laughed so much that lost all the sleep I had and spent the rest of the night watching episodes of "how I met your mother". 

Well, to be fair to my neighbour, I laughed because I thought it completely crazy for a guy to be dancing alone in his room at 4 am on a Saturday night (they invented disco-clubs for that). But when I was laughing, I realized that there was a girl with him in the room and I stopped laughing... Somehow this seemed less funny and more of a national geographic sort of thing: "the male human dances to show his physical prowess and attract the female." This means that my neighbour is not completely crazy. He just deserves to be part of some human life documentary by Sir David Attenborough.

Well, one good thing came out of the rest of the night watching "how I met your mother". I stopped thinking that my bedroom window was the most boring window on the face of the earth. But now I will certainly never open it again when I hear music in the middle of the night. After all, a PhD student needs more to sleep than to watch American TV shows. 

The Kitchen window

So, the first window in this series of post on the windows of my house is the kitchen window.

The kitchen window does not have an amazing view: it faces a plain, normal street like so many streets in the centre of Edinburgh. However it's the window through which I look the most. The reason for this is simple: when I eat alone, it's this window I'm facing. When I'm somewhere else, I'm usually doing something that prevents me from staring outside the window. So, that's it: this is the window I 'use' the most.

From using this window so much, I realized something. During my breakfast time, 95% of the people passing in that street take the same direction. That is the direction of many buildings of the university, so you can see all the students going to class or the Uni staff going to work. Of all these people walking in the same direction, some 95% of those walk at the same pace. A fast pace, much faster than the normal pace in Southern Europe. I guess that people in this country don't face that concern we face down South of not wanting to arrive somewhere all sweaty... And walking quickly makes them warmer.

Now: imagine a reasonable crowd of people walking in the same direction at the same pace. From the distance, as I am, one kind of gets the feeling that they're a human mass. They're not a student of business who dreams of being a Steve Jobs, a professor of philosophy thinking of some metaphysical problem, a shopkeeper who feels more like flying to some paradise beach in the Caribbean than to face the customers one more day... They're just a faceless, indistinct mass of people with no feelings or dreams just walking in the same direction.

After I got used to see these people as a mass, the other day I decided, between mouthfuls of cornflakes and toasts with cheese to imagine what these people might be thinking, feeling or dreaming. From one moment to the other 'my crowd' became so much more interesting and diverse! I even began to like the kitchen window much more than I do!