Swimming British Lakes

In the last few weeks I decided to swim in some British lakes. Well, it wasn't really a premeditated decision but I ended up doing so.

During a very good and special week, I was down in England in the Lake District. The Lake District corresponds very much to what we, foreigners, imagine the English countryside to be like. Lots of lawns, green hills, cows everywhere, friendly people... And a nice strong rain every now and then. There I swam in the largest natural lake in England, the Lake Windermere. The weather was great and really inviting us in, as can be seen in the picture of me facing the dangerous swans.

Not so inviting was the weather today in Loch Lomond, described by wikipedia as "the largest inland stretch of water in Great Britain by surface area" (whatever that means). I camped in a camping site by the lake and it was a truly amazing place! With one minor problem: no showers. Actually, for any average Mediterranean person, this is not a minor problem, it's a major one as we are generally restless until we take our daily shower. As such, despite the not very inviting weather, after breakfast I went to swim in the lake. Not more than one minute, just enough time to feel like there had been water in me that day. The problem was that in the afternoon, while canoeing with friends, our canoe capsized and there I was back in the lake, this time for more than one minute... 

Don't worry, dear reader (the one that comes here once a month), my health will not deteriorate to the point of stop writing here. Major problem for this blog was that my wee camera was in my pocket. I still didn't turn it on as I'm waiting for it to be completely dry (five days in rice). It would be a shame if I had no way to photograph my British adventures for the blog. Let's hope the rice trick works! If it does, I'll have amazing photos of my climb to Ben Lomond to show here.

Loch Ness

Beautiful one day trip the most famous of Scottish lakes. And no, I didn't spot Nessie.

Portobelo on a sunny Sunday

Swimming in Scotland

Who said the Northern Sea in Scotland is too cold for a nice swim session?

This is me yesterday in Portobelo beach.

Life outside facebook

One week without facebook! Yes, it was precisely one week ago that I decided to check if there was still life outside facebook. I was surprised to realize that there is. Well, clearly there are advantages and disadvantages to it. 

The major disadvantage is that all the events are now organized using facebook. Now I understand the complaints of my facebookless friends who kept complaining they weren't told about events. It's just so easy to create an event, disseminate it around your friends and forget about those rare, exotic, loony people who are not on the most popular social network in the world. People like me, now!

The major advantage is to gain time to procrastinate in some other way. I wonder if that is an advantage... I closed my account considering that I was stealing too much time from work but until now I don't think there was a surplus of work. There is merely a more diverse procrastinating time.

Hummm... Given the lack of clear advantages and the existence of clear disadvantages, maybe it should be time to go back in. But I keep thinking that I'm probably still in that phase that quitting smokers experience after one week of stop smoking. They still don't feel better but feel in a terrible mood... So I'll need to give at least two months to life outside facebook to really experience how it's like.

Stone's, inches...

Every now and then, the locals like to say things like 'I'm x inches tall', or 'I've put on x stones and need a diet', etc.. Now, it's obvious by my looks and accents that I'm not a local. They actually know that I'm not a local! They actually know that no non-local ever understands what they're blabering about inches and stones. And they know that all of the non-locals do not plan to learn about inches and stones. Still, they say it!

I started to consider this inch and stone thing like a bit of a good colonizer - bad colonized relationship. Locals (aka British, aka the good colonizers) are convinced of the superiority of their measure systems. Therefore, they nicely want to teach them to those natives of lands with inferior measure systems. Now these natives (us, the foreigners) are stubborn and refuse to learn! (the bad colonized part) The reasons for this stubbornness are that 1) it's impossible to understand such strange systems; 2) we consider it an eccentricity of the locals (aka good colonizers); 3) we consider that accepting such systems is beyond our inferior capacities as natives from the metric-system lands.

As such, we just adopt the innocent style of the colonized by nodding to what the colonizers are saying with a meek smile. After that, we try to calculate how many cms the locals measures or just assume that those stones the local put on is a few kgs more than desirable. That makes the locals rejoice thinking 'here's a once uncivilized human being who has risen to our inch-stone statute... oh, the British civilizing the world'! And we, the supposedly now civilized creatures, are thinking: 'these British are so funny and eccentric! I'll have to tell my friends back home about them!' Oh harmony in the colonized-colonizer relation!

Wee Kilts

Today the children were having their first communion in my Parish church. Until here, nothing out of normal of what you can find in Catholic churches around the world. The cool thing was that all the boys were wearing little kilts! Not the boring grey shorts or trousers everyone wears all around the world...

And that's Scotland!

Twilight

With a title like this, someone might expect me to write about a bad quality teenage saga. But no. I want to write about those two hours or so, from around 10pm to around midnight in which there is still some light here in Edinburgh. Basically, Edinburgh is so far North that in Summer days become really long. Even at that time of night in which it was suppose to be pitch black, we can still see shades of blue in the sky. It's very beautiful!

Blind checks

A couple of months ago, after passing in the X-ray in Edinburgh airport, I was asked to show my ID in a random check. 

I thought that was strange. I have to admit that my idea was "why on earth would they ask me, a white, light-haired, blue-eyed guy wearing a suit and with no criminal record?" I know this thought sounds quite racist. It sounds like I consider to be above suspicion... How politically incorrect can it be? 

As such, while showing my ID, I decided to ask the officer the reason for that random check. The answer came while he was trying to choose which of my names to put on his records: "it's just a routine check!" 

Now, this wasn't a satisfying answer for me. I would guess that in a routine check they should be asking the ID to those individuals with a more suspicious look. Risking continuing to be politically incorrect, I have to admit that my thought was that a light-haired, blue-eyed guy in a suit and tie and Oxford shoes  was not the first guy one would usually consider suspicious. So the next question was: "routine checks are good and necessary, but why me?!" This was said in a tone that also expressed a little bit of a "look at me! do I look like trouble?"

The officer had to control the smirk on his face while answering my politically incorrect question. He said something like "the choice was perfectly random, anyone could be chosen", etc.. Even though he said this in a matter-of-fact tone, he kind of stressed the "anyone" part.

I remembered this today while reading a letter of a guy from Muslim background to the Minister for Justice in Sweden. He was complaining how he always felt surveillance to tight whenever he went into a shop. Or how police always looks at him more suspiciously than they do at "traditional Swedes" (read the light-haired, blue-eyed ones). And even how once he was taken to a police car for no reason and kept waiting for 20 minutes before being dismissed without an apology.

Next time I'm asked for my ID, I promise not to complain. I promise not to ask "why me?" I promise I will be happy that I may even consider such control to be strange.

Holidays

Coming to Scotland was a bit of a cultural shock! Not because of the weather, one only needs to wear more clothes. Also not the food: dumplings and noodles might be awesome, but haggis is no second to them (I do miss a good weekend yam cha, though).

What is really shocking here is the lack of public holidays!

Before I moved to the UK I was living in what is perhaps the most “holidayed” territory in the world, Macau. I guess the reason for this is that Macau was for 450 years ruled by two of the peoples who enjoy having public holidays the most: the Portuguese and the Chinese.

So, basically, nowadays there are many kinds of holidays in that small territory. There are Chinese political holidays, like the day of the establishment of the PRC but also religious holidays that were abolished in China with the Socialism, such as the birthday of Buddha. There are Chinese traditional holidays such as the day to sweep the graves, the moon cake festival or Chinese New Year. There are also the Catholic holidays, inherited from the Portuguese, such as Christmas, Easter, Our Lady of Conception or the day of the faithful departed (which is actually not a public holiday in Portugal because the day before is, the all saints day).

With all these holidays and with low cost flights to so many places in Asia departing from Macau, one of the main hobbies in the city is to plan trips. To me, this trip planning was already natural: browsing the calendar for the next holiday, check how many days off I needed to take to “bridge” it to the closest weekend, check promotions of low cost companies, look for friends who hadn't gone to that destination (an increasingly challenging task, as everyone was doing the same) and finally, book the trip and buy the fake lonely planet guide across the border, in Zhuhai, world’s capital of fake stuff.

The United Kingdom could not be more different! In this country most holidays are just in the calendar, they aren't for real. In the 1^st of May, for example, no one would notice there was a holiday going on. In St. Andrew’s day, the Patron Saint of Scotland, everyone was working. A lot of other holidays appear in my calendar but they’re just another day with no difference whatsoever to working days…

Well, this is actually good, because now my financial situation would not allow me to travel as much as in Macau and I would feel miserable if everyone but me was doing it!