When I was younger, I had a toy that sparkled. Like with any loose-glittered thing, its little flakes fell off en masse, and they latched to my sticky little-kid hands and stuck to my clothing and drifted to the floor and wheedled their way into (perhaps) every couch cushion and strand of hair in the greater Seattle area. After The Great Shed, my toy was different.
I’ve travelled to new places before, and I greeted them with spontaneous and unbridled excitement, and then I quickly left because Winter Break was ending or the swim season was beginning again. As my dad likes to say, I feel as though I’ve left some fragment of my heart in almost all the places I’ve been: my fleeting moments away from home induced some awe-struck-week-long state where I marveled at the new architecture and descended upon the foreign cafes and gratefully rolled around in all the novel-ness of it all. I greeted Edinburgh no differently, but I haven’t left it like I always have before, and now, a month in, I feel as though I’ve scrubbed all of its glitter off, and its shiny-new façade has been stripped away revealing this thing that I thought I knew, but which is somehow different.
I don’t mean to suggest that after a harrowing month, I’ve pried an entire city open and I’ve peered into its elusive soul (although I like to think I’ve caught glimpses.) Instead, I’d like to prosaically acknowledge that I’ve learned something here I didn’t know existed: I’m beginning to know Edinburgh for something beyond its exotic-ness. I lumber across the street so as to dodge a taxi (which I’m inclined to say, given many brushes with death, would have been content to barrel on over me,) and I pass people who lean on the doorframes of their apartments, which alternate red, blue, green, red, blue, green, and they chat with each other. It’s taken me a while to realize something I’ve always “known” but that I’m just beginning to know (if you catch my drift:) all of these people are real, not just shadows I pass while trucking through some foreign place. We are probably very similar, and very different, and we probably have common interests, and we probably could be friends. Scotland isn’t glittering and new to them, but its their home, perhaps the only home they’ve ever known, and they love it (or hate it, or neither) for reasons beyond what I, as just a visitor, can’t understand.
Since we last spoke (~two weeks, or 100 blog years,) a lot has changed (see previous three paragraphs,) and in other ways, much has stayed the same. Spare a trip up to the Highlands, I’ve stayed in the city and classes have begun, which means I’ve been busy homeworking and jumping from lecture to lecture and establishing ye olde routine. Classes are different here than at Pomona, but I enjoy them in a different way and my professors are enthusiastic and seem happy (enough) to put up with my serial office-houring. A couple of my courses focus on areas of Philosophy that aren’t specifically offered at Pomona, and I find them concurrently interesting and difficult. On Saturday, Johnny and I set off to find a bird sanctuary, and ultimately ended up jumping in the North Sea. I learned that, near the end of my stay here, the sun will set at about 3:30 in the afternoon, and that Edinburgh is nestled at a higher latitude than the Aleutian Islands. I have a romantic image in my mind of stumbling into a warm café, the wind at my heels, and peeling my huge scarf off before settling over a steaming cup of tea beneath a dim lamp. However, by principle, I can’t handle the notion of paying three Pounds for a three pence tea bag, so I usually enact this process in my own room, and have developed a willing tea dependency, and an even stronger tea biscuit addiction. Although it consistently rains for a moment each day, I’ve overwhelmingly experienced sunny weather here, and it feels as though the sun is much more intense than it is in Claremont; it often beats upon Arthur’s Seat as I walk to my apartment, and the rocks look brilliant and red against the backdrop of a darker sky.