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switzerscotland

Thursday, November 15, 2001 9:06 AM
we got on the internet that evening (where we sent the last update from) and as we sat there we developed an intense desire to see northern scotland, so we purchased plane tickets online and the next day we flew out. we actually landed at the liverpool john lennon airport and bought train tickets to our destination, only to find out there was only one train a day that went that far north, and we had missed it for that day. so we settled down in chairs and began to make ourselves comfortable, reading. then after a little while, i began to go in search of a WC while patrick guarded the packs.

i was still wandering when i came by our spot again, and i noticed patrick noticing two boys who were noticing our packs, and then they noticed me noticing and did a double-take (me and patrick were dressed alike again: black toques, glasses, beards, yellow coats, khaki cargo pants, hiking shoes) and then they got up and wandered away looking very suspicious. i stood by the bags and patrick began to tail them but was behind a pillar and so couldn't fully see when one of them lunged at this woman and grabbed something from her, so i was there torn between guarding the packs and running after him, and i called to patrick, " 'git him!"and so patrick took off down the underground tunnel.

it wasn't long before the suspect dodged back up to the top, darting around like a scared rabbit, and started towards the exit behind me, so i moved in front to intercept. as he came near me he jumped an obstacle and i became aerially horizontal in a grasping dive which failed to yield the desired results (couldn't grip the jacket) but did conclude in a magnificent crash landing, if i may say so; i bloodied my elbow and bruised my hand. pat came rushing past shortly after and chased the guy into the street where he (the guy) almost got hit by a taxi but got away. it turned out to be the lady's cell phone that was taken, but she had insurance on it (what is the world coming to?) and in the scuffle the guy lost the battery from the phone, so it wasn't going to be much use to him anyway.

after this we returned to our spot, imagining that everyone was beginning to think we were some sort of canadian special forces unit, with our uniforms and all, and so we did kung fu moves into thin air every once in a while to build on this concept. people would come up to us respectfully every now and then and inquire about what had been taken, and whether we had caught the guy. we started to get lonely in the middle of the night, when there weren't too many people around as we huddled against the cold undercurrent of air that ran through the station, but the homeless men came by every now and then and helped us put a dent in the 1 kilogram box of cookies we bought, and our banana stash. we caught the train in the a.m. (resigned to the fact that we had grossly miscalculated the train time--we estimated 2, maybe 3, hours--but we settled in for the estimated 12 hour journey.

one hour into it, we found out thhat our next connection was late and so we would miss the next connection after that, and hence, we began to wonder, with one train a day, would we have to wait in the station again tonight? so we marched into the customer service center and gruffly explained we had just spent all night in a train station, and now after 1 hour of travel we found that we would miss our connection to the north. i don't know if it was the sight or sound or smell of us, but they re-piped us as far north as we could get and then hired a taxi for the remaining 170 km of the trip. to make a long story short, we arrived in wick, scotland that evening and were a little unsure of how to get to our planned end-point, which was a castle where a friend called monique was staying, so i tried to call and pretend i was sending a delivery to her and needed to give the deliveryman the directions, but kind of blew the surprise, in some degree, because she suspected.

but we taxi'd out to the castle and maybe surprised her a little bit yet. the time in scotland was great: cold wind, snow flurries (that didn't stay), coastal cliffs and jagged rock teeth off the shore--the duncansby stacks, hikes, ruins which are not marked in any way so it feels like your own new discovery (we found Pict-issh or Norse foundation stones and an old castle and the grave markers from where an old lady brained seven sailors as they climbed the cliff from their boat wreck because she thought they were trying to steal her cow...all without any markings a'tall, not even "danger"for the entry to the castle with sheer drop on either side of the thin path; we found out some of these details by talking to a local farmer that we met); and the locals here actually use words like "bonney" and "lassy" and "OCCCHHH!" in their everyday talk.

after our time there, we trained back towards liverpool with a short stop in edinburgh and then we broke down and got the cheapest beds we could find in liverpool (our plane left the next day but before the train would have arrived if we had left wick that day), and we had time enough to walk around liverpool and one of the galleries there in the morning before flying back to geneva.

we kind of had this notion of going to vienna for a little while from there, but found out that we had missed the night train by about 5 minutes, so we took a look at some of the tickets that were still available, and bought a ticket on a night train to somewhere else.

on this train before we went to sleep in the bunk we began to look at our finances, which led pat to say at one point, "this might be how bankruptcy starts." can you believe it's middle november already?

laryn and patrick. -----------------------------------------------------

[new vocab]

"Roll with the punches" -- make a new plan when the old one goes kaput.

"BUDGET!"-- used as an interruption when the other person is starting to make plans that are potentially very costly (e.g. [person#1]"....and then we'll go here, and catch a train to there, and then do this and that, and then--" [person#2]"BUDGET!")