Our GPS says it will take us one hour and ten minutes to get from Glasgow to our vacation rental in Edinburgh. Come again? That's 55 miles, or about the way the crow flies, right? Does the GPS assume our rental has a go-kart engine? Or is that the actual time it takes a for a crow to fly there?
It turns out that estimate was conservative, and in the end, it takes us, minus a stop at a supermarket, an hour and twenty minutes. Chalk that up to the sluggish traffic from Glasgow to Edinburgh and something called speed limits. At least the drivers are well behaved and polite. There are plenty of kamikazes on the German autobahn, and I'm sure there are a few in these parts, but I have yet to meet them.
Edinburgh's planning of their city is suspect, to be polite. There are streets crossing at the wrong angles, traffic circles where they don't belong and intersections where there should be t-intersections or simple two-way roads. I picture the city's engineers mulling over the infrastructure projects. It probably looks like this, says McGregor. No, says McDonald shaking his head. More like this. Wrong, McIntyre (or you're welcome to pick your Scottish stereotypical name of choice here) chimes in, your numbers are off. How to solve it? Throw the dice, may the luckiest engineer win. Even so, we arrive in Scotland's capital with our sanity in tact and anxious to see what a British supermarket, Morrison's in this case, has to offer. Plenty, as it turns out. Quantity and quality are more than adequate. We buy plenty of groceries, and the price is right, too.
In Edinburgh, we see the rows and rows of sandstone buildings, a lot of them with that tell-tale dark tint. I plead ignorance here. Why are they in this drab, depressing, may I say, even filthy gray? Is it the weather? Pollution? Carbon debris from the stone's components? As somebody who's lived in U.S. cities for such a long time, I'll be the last person to question any European country's environmental policies, but just why the drab color? And shouldn't Germany still have it too, being that they still burn coal as well? Even so, there is no doubt that Edinburgh is still a marvelous city. There are fleets of double deck buses cruising down the streets, the parks and gardens all seem to have a prominent part as well.
Next, we locate our apartment in Bonnington, a nice neighborhood about 10-15 minutes from the city center. There's actually a pub a half a block away from us. Wonderful. The first crisis occurs when the car alarm just won't stop going off. Turns out that one person in our party didn't shut the door properly, I'm thinking. Or maybe not. The car alarm goes off about 12 times before I finally shut it off. I certainly didn't envision dying this way, by a marauding army of kilt-wearing Scots trampling down my door and butchering me and my family while the bagpipes (and the car alarm) are droning in the background. But a faulty car alarm is sufficient to disturb the peace amongst a group of Buddhist monks, let alone a first world civilization that supposedly prides itself on efficiency. Here, even I consider scouring the market for a commercially available hand grenade before I manage to shut off the alarm.
For those who have kept score: Rental car company thugs 2, us 0.
But we're in Edinburgh, so that's all that matters for now.
It turns out that estimate was conservative, and in the end, it takes us, minus a stop at a supermarket, an hour and twenty minutes. Chalk that up to the sluggish traffic from Glasgow to Edinburgh and something called speed limits. At least the drivers are well behaved and polite. There are plenty of kamikazes on the German autobahn, and I'm sure there are a few in these parts, but I have yet to meet them.
Edinburgh's planning of their city is suspect, to be polite. There are streets crossing at the wrong angles, traffic circles where they don't belong and intersections where there should be t-intersections or simple two-way roads. I picture the city's engineers mulling over the infrastructure projects. It probably looks like this, says McGregor. No, says McDonald shaking his head. More like this. Wrong, McIntyre (or you're welcome to pick your Scottish stereotypical name of choice here) chimes in, your numbers are off. How to solve it? Throw the dice, may the luckiest engineer win. Even so, we arrive in Scotland's capital with our sanity in tact and anxious to see what a British supermarket, Morrison's in this case, has to offer. Plenty, as it turns out. Quantity and quality are more than adequate. We buy plenty of groceries, and the price is right, too.
In Edinburgh, we see the rows and rows of sandstone buildings, a lot of them with that tell-tale dark tint. I plead ignorance here. Why are they in this drab, depressing, may I say, even filthy gray? Is it the weather? Pollution? Carbon debris from the stone's components? As somebody who's lived in U.S. cities for such a long time, I'll be the last person to question any European country's environmental policies, but just why the drab color? And shouldn't Germany still have it too, being that they still burn coal as well? Even so, there is no doubt that Edinburgh is still a marvelous city. There are fleets of double deck buses cruising down the streets, the parks and gardens all seem to have a prominent part as well.
Next, we locate our apartment in Bonnington, a nice neighborhood about 10-15 minutes from the city center. There's actually a pub a half a block away from us. Wonderful. The first crisis occurs when the car alarm just won't stop going off. Turns out that one person in our party didn't shut the door properly, I'm thinking. Or maybe not. The car alarm goes off about 12 times before I finally shut it off. I certainly didn't envision dying this way, by a marauding army of kilt-wearing Scots trampling down my door and butchering me and my family while the bagpipes (and the car alarm) are droning in the background. But a faulty car alarm is sufficient to disturb the peace amongst a group of Buddhist monks, let alone a first world civilization that supposedly prides itself on efficiency. Here, even I consider scouring the market for a commercially available hand grenade before I manage to shut off the alarm.
For those who have kept score: Rental car company thugs 2, us 0.
But we're in Edinburgh, so that's all that matters for now.
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