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...

How many days?

In the post office, after posting a registered letter to Singapore the lad behind the counter tells me:

- Forty five days to arrive.

I, obviously surprised, answered with shock in my voice:

- Forty five days to arrive!!!

The lad replies:

- Forty five days to arrive.

No wanting to believe this outrageous number, I reply:

- One month and half for a letter to arrive in a city that has daily flights from London! In that case I don't want to send it from here! Give me back the letter!

Given that tomorrow I'm flying home, I intended to send the letter from there. I'm sure our postal service would be more efficient than 45 days with the royal mail. The lad decided to speak really slowly:

- T h e - l e t t e r - w i l l - t a k e - f o u r - t o - f i v e - d a y s - t o - a r r i v e.

- Ahhhh! - I replied with relief - Why didn't you say: "the letter will take between four and five days to arrive" in the first place then? Are you afraid of using extra words? It wouldn't stress your vocal cords too much, you know?

Mental note: I won't use that post again!

Polish adventures

Next to my house I have a wee Polish food shop. Sometimes I go there to buy bread and I end up being adventurous and buying something else. Why adventurous? Because everything is written in Polish and I can only vaguely imagine what I'm buying.

Today I decided to buy something that looked like a pate. At least it was certainly something to put in the bread because there was a picture of the thing spread over a loaf of bread. The thing was called Smalec z ogorkiem malosolnym. This sounded like an innocent enough name, right? Well, not really... The thing is almost pure lard! That exotic people from across the iron wall spreads lard in the bread!

Now, I can't exactly say that I loved it at first bite. However, I'm not the sort of person who throws away food which means that by the end of the jar, I will probably be a fan of spreading lard in bread. And I will have gained a few extra kilos as well...

Joys of being adventurous!

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!

My windows - the begining

I decided to start writing about my windows. No, this is not a philosophical expression of some sort to refer to the windows of my soul or something like that. I would love to be more of a poet that I am, but, unfortunately I don't have much of a poet soul.

When I mean windows I literally mean windows. Today I realized that I love windows. I like to stare outside a window and see people passing by. I like to see the people and imagine something about them. Try to understand by their mere passing what they are thinking

I know, this sounds kind of creepy. But, hey, am I a Mediterranean or not? (yes, I am) And could you imagine wandering around any country in the Mediterranean and not see people sitting at the window staring outside? Staring at you... I am not going to they to explain why they (us) do it. You (British? Chinese? Northern European?) may just consider us nosy... So, this nosy person will start to describe some of the windows of his life. Staring from tomorrow because today I already procrastinated too much. I need to leave some procrastination for tomorrow.

Feta with the Queen

Those who know the fringe of Edinburgh well, also know that it's difficult to find good free shows. Sometimes they're terrible (I already had to leave one after 15 minutes), sometimes they're ok but when you find a good one you have to share it. I went to a very funny one, Feta with the Queen, reason why I'm sharing it here.

Katerina, the comedienne, is from Greece but has been living in the UK for a long time. The entire gig is about the stereotypes of British and Greeks. However, in this last point, I have to stress that the stereotypes of the Greeks can be easily applicable to most Mediterranean peoples: the equally bankrupted Italians, Spanish and Portuguese; the Bulgarians, Romanians and the Balkan Slavs enjoying their first steps in the EU (welcome to the club); Turks, Egyptians, Maghrebians... If someone comes from around the Mediterranean, it is very possible that they will feel that Katerina is talking about their own people.

Watching this gig made me think about other characteristics of the Mediterraneans. We build strong relations with our families, friends and neighbors but very week ties with the rest of the society. The state, that abstract entity that connects us all, belongs to all and, consequently, belongs to no one. And if something belongs to no one, as our Roman ancestors taught us: quod nullius est, id ratione naturali occupanti conceditur. Which means, things that belong to no one, belong to those who find them. 

This leads to avoid paying taxes, celebrating contracts that are disadvantageous to the state and advantageous to our family or friends, using public money for private reasons... All that is not as strongly condemned as it is, for example, cheating your family and friends or, God forbid, not call your parents with regularity. People may turn a blind eye to hiring a unqualified relative to a public position (actually, they'll even expect it) but they won't forgive easily if you don't spend the most relevant holidays at home (Christmas or Eid Al-Fitr, depending if you're in the North or in the South of the Mediterranean).

I imagine that for British (and Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, etc.), the Mare Nostrum may seem a bit like the geographic basis for a big Cosa Nostra. But do indulge with us, please! Indulge with our strange relation with the state as we indulge with your strange relation with alcohol.

The challenge

So this is the famous Ben Lomond. Doesn't look so high in the photo but I can tell you is no piece of cake to climb it all!

Views from Ben Lomond

Loch Lomond

Unfortunately my camera is really kaput... The rice trick didn't work!
Still, I got the photos from my trip to Loch and Ben Lomond.

 The mist over the lake..

View over Loch Lomond from Ben Lomond.