We woke up around 10am today. It was so nice not to wake up to an alarm!! Finally a good nights sleep! We even made it to breakfast! All thanks to the Hilton keeping breakfast open til 11am on Saturday. I had porridge (oatmeal) with brown sugar for breakfast. There was quite a selection of food. Pretty much all the usual English breakfast items, plus all the continental breakfast fare. Davin insisted that we try haggis and scones as well. The haggis was okay, and the scones were actually pretty good.
We checked out at noon. (What a nice late check out time!) It was a thirty minute drive to New Lanark. New Lanark is yet another World Heritage sight. It is the location of a cotton mill that was established in the late 1700s. The unique quality of cotton mill is that it was owned by Robert Owen, a man who believed that the exploitation of workers that was rampant during the Industrial Revolution was unnecessary, even counterproductive, to Capitalist enterprise. So the 2,000 or so people who lived and worked at New Lanark had better working conditions than most workers of the time. Owen considered the mill to be a kind of Utopian experiment. The workers worked fewer hours (only 10.5 hours a day!), parents could make use of the first nursery in the world for their ‘wee bairns’, children were also provided with free education until the age of 12, and attendance was mandatory until age 10. The workers were also provided with free healthcare, and Owen also opened up a village store that offered high quality goods at low prices.
The mill had a working Spinning Mule like at the National Woolen Mill in Wales. It’s really cool to see those machines in action. There was also another impressive multimedia exhibit (of course!). There was a ride of sorts which we rode through a diorama or life in New Lanark for a family of workers at the mill. Our ‘guide’ was the ghost of a girl named Annie Mcleod. Later, we saw a movie in the school house where our guide was a girl named Harmony who traveled back in time to learn about the life of Annie because she was one of her descendants. Anyway, we enjoyed our visit.
We also saw a bagpipe player who was part of a wedding reception that was going on today. It was amusing to see the bride and groom. The bride in a beautiful white silk dress, and the groom in his dress jacket and kilt. Scottish formal wear!
I’m also much happier now that we’re in Scotland because FINALLY we’ve reached a land which actually has a cool English accent. English accents suck! But Scottish ones are f*#king awesome. :) I probably wouldn’t want to hear it ALL the time though.
Davin and I raced each other back up the hill path to the car. It was pretty funny because Davin wasn’t able to run as fast as me even though he is so much taller. I noticed that he looked really funny when he ran too. Later when we walked to the grocery store in the evening, we figured out that it was because his steps were too small. He says that it has been so long since he had to run that he forgot how! We had some good laughs about that.
When we finished visiting New Lanark, we drove to our B&B in Edinburgh. It was an hour drive, followed by an hour trying to find our way through town while continually getting stuck in traffic. First our problem was not having a city map, and only shitty Google map directions to guide us. Google instructions are good for main routes, but once it starts telling you to turn on ‘such-and-such’ street, you are completely f*&ked. At least you are here in Britain. Apparently, the people here have no use for labeling their streets in any easily identifiable way. Rather, they find it more important to not ruin the aesthetic look of their cities. So road signs (WHEN they even have them) are hidden discreetly on corner buildings. They aren’t very large either! So Davin and I now fully appreciate the easy to read street name signs that we have in San Diego. We can at least solve our Google map problem by zooming in on the route map at the very end so that we have some kind of visual representation to follow. Then we simply have to contend with the ‘lack of street signs’ problem.
Further driving annoyances are as follows. First, there is no right on red in Europe, at least not in Germany or Britain. This results in complete wastes of time when you are stuck at a red light with no traffic in sight. A safe turn is completely possible, but no, you simply must wait at the light grinding your teeth in annoyance until the light FINALLY changes. The lights are the next problem. As far as we can tell, NONE of the lights use sensors to control traffic. They are all on specific timers. This results in even more waiting at red lights when there is no traffic in sight in any other direction.
Anyway, with a bit of trial and error combined with blind luck we found our B&B. Then we walked to the local grocery store for a baguette and cash to pay the B&B owner. (We walked because we were sick of driving and the traffic problems!) Plus, walking is good for us, although I would have been happier with walking if it hadn’t been only 55 degrees out! When we got money out of the ATM it gave us a bit of a shock at first because it didn’t look like any kind of British currency we’d ever seen before. It turns out that Scotland prints its own money with completely different look and pictures than the rest of England! How funny! We like the Scottish currency better though because the pictures are more interesting and the stupid Queen of England isn’t on every bill!
Back at the B&B, we paid the lady, and she kindly gave us change for the bus which we can take into town tomorrow. We surreptitiously made spaghetti carbonara for dinner. We added ham and tomatoes to the sauce that came in a jar. Davin was so concerned about our cooking setting off the smoke detector that he used the B&B supplied hair dryer to blow the steam out the window. I thought he was being a bit paranoid myself. I’m not sure if steam can set off a smoke alarm but it certainly couldn’t in such small quantities. The food was decent, although nothing to write home about (cheap though!). Our ham and tomato additions definitely made it better. While we ate we watched three episodes of Voyager. I also worked on the blog updates at the same time. We finally went to bed around 12:30pm.
...and just for your information, this last photo was NOT staged. Davin always eats spaghetti lefthanded...*cough*...yea...
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